Nick,
I heard you on Dyl & Friends in February 2022, back when I was still playing footy and a long way from any of this. It became one of my favourite listens, and it has sat in the back of my mind for four years. I trained as a civil and architectural engineer and never worked a day as one; episodes like yours are part of the reason I went and built instead.
I put Tero through Blackbird’s form yesterday. I wanted to send it to you personally as well, because four years felt long enough. I know how many of these cross your desk, so this page is short and mostly visual, and everything on it is real.
Three things to take from it. The market is turning, from cold to warm and from the quick fix to the long form. Most of the world Tero needs is already built, without a dollar of outside capital. And the business stands on three legs that feed one another, sequenced so the risk stays low while the ambition stays whole.
Everything here is pre-launch. Where a number is a target rather than a result, it says so.
Keelan Laube, founder
There is an old room in every house. The oldest one, with a door that locks from the inside. You run the water hot, and the day stays on the other side of it.
Most people don’t stay in it long. Not for want of loving a bath. For want of a reason to stay.
Tero is the reason. A studio for the bath: sound, stories, breath and spoken word, composed to be heard in warm water and nowhere else. Released the way records are, named and dated, only when there’s something to say.
We call the category warm immersion. Nobody owns it yet. A studio for the bath sounds strange at first hearing. Open categories always do: there is nothing to compare it to, and that is the point. The tub is already installed in hundreds of millions of homes, and no one has built the premium house for what happens inside it. This page is the case for building it, and for taking it to the world.
For a decade the culture ran cold. Ice baths, trackers, streaks, the shortest effective version of everything. That decade is turning, at both ends of the market at once.
The ice bath is the case study, and the caution. It went from no market at all to one analysts now size at roughly US$400 million a year, with forecasts crossing a billion within the decade, and the first movers, Plunge among them, were rewarded precisely for creating the category. Then the copies arrived: a cold tub is a cold tub, the manufacturers flooded in, and the edge commoditised. Both lessons hold. The prize for naming a category early is real, and it only lasts if the moat is more than the object. Warm immersion is at its zero moment now, and Tero’s moat is the part that cannot be tooled up in a factory: the register, the catalogue, the world around the water.
Warm immersion can be a category of one, and the way it stays one is the brand. Foundations built too well to chase, a content cycle with a register no one else can hold, one obvious house and no obvious second. That is where the early money went, deliberately: the identity, the film, the catalogue, the world. The cold tub had no such wall, and the copies proved it. Taste equity compounds, and it cannot be copied quickly.
You can watch the convergence from the street. Australia is in a full bathhouse boom: Nimbus Co is at seven sites, Soak is rolling out nationally across three cities, Sense of Self is building Sydney’s largest house at a thousand square metres for 2026, and new rooms keep opening across Melbourne and Sydney, with the same wave running through New York and Toronto. They are not competitors; they are the market forming, and the clearest insight into it: people paying for warm water an evening at a time.
The contrast with the cold end is the point. In survey data, more than four in five people never get past a cold shower, and barely one in twenty keeps a regular cold practice. Warm water has no tolerance barrier at all, which is what makes warm immersion installable in practically every home, studio and hotel the vessel will one day sit in. The language is converging too: Sony’s current headphone campaign sells “the art of immersion”. The premium world is reaching for the word. Tero filed TERO IMMERSION™ early, for the place where the word is literal.
At one end, the quick fix is wearing out. The apps that sold a three-minute reset are shrinking, and the science has begun questioning the cold-shock claims in public. At the other end, depth is growing faster than anything else in media: people are paying for essays and staying inside three-hour conversations. The middle is emptying. Audiences are choosing the fifteen-second scroll or the long way in, and the money is moving to the long way.
Before building the brand, we spent months in structured research on the person Tero is for: the taste-led creative, female-leaning, 25 to 45, the Aesop and MUBI shelf. Pre-launch, so every finding stays a hypothesis until strangers pay in October. But the pattern was consistent, and it matches the market data above.
Tero is not positioned as a meditation app, and is not priced like one. That shelf is a crowded discount war over a shrinking habit, and the numbers above show where it is heading. Tero sits on a different shelf, beside MUBI, Ffern and the record labels: houses that publish deliberately and charge properly.
It behaves like a label. Releases, not a library. Members, not users. The catalogue runs in five families, SOUND, BREATH, WORDS, ATTENTION and STILLNESS, releases numbered within each, the way a label runs imprints. A membership of about A$30 a month or A$267 a year. The audio is made for warm water and does not pretend to work anywhere else: the phone is down, the door is locked, multitasking is physically over. The constraint is the ritual, and it is the one mechanism no general-purpose app can copy without giving up being general-purpose.
There’s the quick rinse and there’s the long bath. We only make things for the long bath.
The product shows her nothing to keep up with. No streaks, no stats, no push, no greeting that knows her name. Every mechanic the category uses to manufacture recurrence is deliberately absent, because the category’s own numbers show what those mechanics earn: one user in twenty still there after a month.
Recurrence is built on cadence and identity instead. Releases arrive like records, named, numbered and dated, so anticipation does the work reminders used to do; she comes back for release day, not because a streak would break. And the membership is built to sit on the identity ledger: through the storytelling, the film work and the production standard, funding the studio becomes part of who she is, and that belief survives the nights she never runs the bath. Building that identity in the taste-led customer is one of the central aims of the business.
The company itself will be measured hard, second sessions, retention, conversion, the targets in the plan below. She just never sees the machinery.
The precedent for the ambition is not an app. It is the taste-led houses that started narrow, held their register, and reached global scale because of it.
One house, three legs, in sequence.
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The studiophase one · recurring
A membership of audio made for warm water, released like records, at about A$30 a month or A$267 a year. Near-zero marginal cost, global from day one on the App Store, web billing already built. This leg funds the house.
The first release in every series is free. Payment comes at conviction, not at the door. -
The consumablesphase two · repeat
FATHOM first, a mineral soak of Zechstein magnesium and Australian pink lake salt. A fathom is the old measure of depth, six feet of water, taken from the span of two outstretched arms; to fathom something is to understand it properly. The manufacturing partnership is confirmed with an established Australian skincare maker, and the first formula is in work. A standing shelf product, no drops, carrying the margin structure of prestige beauty rather than grocery: the global houses run gross margins around seventy per cent, approximate.
The line grows the way the bath asks: bath and body oils, candles, and in time natural perfume. The scent work is designed, not improvised. A shortlist of Australian natural perfumers is already built, and a named nose will be commissioned to compose the house’s scents, credited the way the artists are credited on releases, so the combinations hold together and the stories deepen. Every object is also distribution: the pack sits on the edge of the bath, in the exact minute the studio is made for.
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The hardwarephase three · the horizon
BASALT, a bath for one with sound engineered into the vessel, felt through the body as much as heard. Basalt is the stone lava becomes when it meets water, dense and dark, the floor of every ocean: the right name for a vessel formed where heat and water meet. For high-end homes and commercial spaces, a one-off object in the region of A$30,000 to 40,000, approximate, with the membership attached. The acoustic groundwork is already done, quietly: the felt-and-heard system worked through with specialist acoustics engineering, bench-tested and feasible, with a working technical specification. The work has now moved to mechanical integration, in selection across three Melbourne engineering houses: Cobalt Design, D+I, now part of Capgemini, and Whistle Design. TERO IMMERSION™ is the umbrella above it: hardware, spatial, hospitality. The debut ambition is cultural rather than retail: BASALT shown at the design weeks, Melbourne, Sydney, Paris, entering the world as a design object the way the furniture houses launch. This is the venture-scale leg, deliberately sequenced last, after the audience and the proof exist.
A concept render, made in the studio. The design is indicative, to be resolved with the industrial-design partner.
The studio funds the house. The consumables carry it into homes. The vessel is the horizon.
For a company that hasn’t launched, most of it already exists. All of it paid for out of the founder’s pocket, without a dollar of outside capital.
The rule the whole plan runs on: narrow the message, widen the distribution. Softening the register to reach more people would dissolve the one moat that matters, so growth comes from putting the same sharp thing in more places.
September. The brand goes live on socials, and the world starts arriving before the door opens. October 2026, Melbourne. The launch: the app, FATHOM and the film, released together as one moment. The single job of launch is proof that strangers pay. The targets we hold ourselves to, stated before the fact: a quarter of new members back for a second full session within a fortnight, day-30 paid retention around 70 per cent, and a free-to-member conversion we publish to ourselves honestly, whatever it is.
Then outward. The studio is global the day it ships; the register travels the way Aesop’s did. Consumables follow the audience. The vessel opens the spatial and hospitality world under TERO IMMERSION™.
The end state, one home. All three legs living in a single household: the vessel outside, under the open sky, FATHOM on its edge. A release playing through the shell, from the studio her membership funds. Every object tied to a story, and every story made in the same house. That home is the whole company in one frame, and we walk there slowly, on purpose: each leg stable before the next one stands on it. We believe warm immersion mints a billion-dollar company within the decade, and that the patient build is what wins it. A belief, not a forecast. October begins the proof.
On capital, plainly. The studio and consumables legs are designed to fund themselves: near-zero marginal cost, one founder, no office. The vessel is the capital conversation, and it happens after October, when conversion and retention are facts rather than claims. We would rather price that conversation off proof than off promise. This page exists so the right people are already inside the world when the proof lands.
The studio is all but finished. The identity is done. The film is shot. FATHOM is in development. The billing rails are tested. The bath moves quietly behind it all.
Melbourne. The first release to the world, October 2026.