Max Reck, co-founder of the Berlin-based meditation and journaling app SYLO, joins Sunny Ray to explain why he believes there is still room in a market dominated by Calm and Headspace. Drawing on a background in finance, Reck explains how SYLO uses LLMs to connect journaling and meditation, generating personalized sessions from a reflection chat built with input from three psychologists rather than pulling from a static library. He describes the app's three layers: a guided journaling conversation, meditations generated from that reflection, and routine-building tools including milestones and wearable integration with Apple Watch. Reck also discusses SYLO's B2B push into German corporate wellness through health insurers and a browser-based team breathing tool called Circle, built with co-founder Noa. He talks candidly about staying close to users through constant interviews rather than a build-it-and-they-will-come approach, the regulatory hurdles of launching in Germany, and the retention metrics the team obsesses over. The conversation closes with his three-year vision for SYLO and what he thinks could stop it from getting there.
A Berlin founder explains why AI-personalized journaling and meditation can still break into Calm and Headspace's territory.
What is SYLO, and why should people care?
Journaling and meditation are two brilliant ways to work on yourself and improve your health and decision-making. Because we now have LLMs, we can properly connect those two tools as well as possible, and that is what we do. We combine a reflection journaling chat with meditations generated specifically for that moment, rather than treating them as separate practices.
Why is meditation important?
I would compare it to a gym for your brain, not a Sudoku thing. We put so much effort into our health through food and fitness, and meditation is just a practice to have more control over your mind and emotions. One of the clearest effects is having a bit of a time frame between having an emotion, like a negative one, and reacting to it.
Meditation apps are essentially a graveyard, with Calm and Headspace owning the shelf. What made you think there was still a door in?
The market is still big and growing, Calm and Headspace do hundreds of millions in revenue, and stress-related issues are one of the biggest reasons people fall out of work here in Germany, based on health insurer data. I came from finance and always wanted to build something myself, and journaling and meditation had helped me a lot personally, so that was the motivation.
SYLO isn't just a library of recordings, it listens and then generates. Why is that the right shape, and when did you realize it?
My co-founder and I used Calm and Headspace for years, but you have to search a library for what fits your day. We skip that by combining generation with a reflection journaling chat we built with three psychologists, because many people do trauma dumping into ChatGPT without realizing how careless the advice can be, so we built in emergency and safety agents around it.
Can you walk me through what happens between me speaking and a meditation coming back?
There are three levels. First, the journaling chat leads you with questions so you're not starting from zero, and that becomes the base for the meditation. Second, the more you use it individually and the more users we have collectively, the deeper the chat and meditations get. Third, we help build the routine itself, with milestone gameplay and wearable integration so you can see your body's reaction, not just feel it.
Where's the line between listening to users and being led by them?
We're not Steve Jobs saying I know what people want and I'll build it and they'll like it. We do the hell out of interviewing and improve the product constantly, asking people what sucks, what wasn't good, what looked wrong. We have a collective learning effect from our AI, but we can never come away from just asking people directly.
You're pitching German health insurers for corporate wellness. That sounds like a slow, brutal channel. Why is it worth it?
In the DACH region right now there's a lot of cost cutting, and employee benefits aren't the budget priority. But there are tweaks with health insurance where corporates can use tax money they'd have paid anyway, so it doesn't feel like an extra purchase. We're trying many different angles to make the tool as easy as possible for corporate clients to adopt.
Where is SYLO in three years if this all works, and what's the single thing most likely to stop it?
If everyone meditated, the world would be a better place, especially given the global political situation right now. I'd love it if in three years people said 'you're a diva, make a SYLO session,' like the old Snickers ad. What could stop us is the go-to-market part. If we're not able to make meditation a cool thing, that could actually stop us.
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