Q&A: Gratitude app gets new name, new audience

Carla White's "gratitude journaling" app has helped users count more than 7 million blessings since 2008. The self-proclaimed farmer's daughter and computer programmer from Salem, S.D., used the Oprah-approved habit a decade ago to recover from depression in the wake of a failed business and her father's death.

The app is designed to help people take a few minutes each day to think about the positive things in their lives. White recently relaunched the app with a new name, Mojo, and new features. It's finding a new audience, too, among productivity-minded young professionals drawn to the app's "brain fitness" elements.

What is the power of gratitude journaling?

“It's retraining your brain. It’s getting you back into your own power that I think you're naturally born with. Children naturally wake up joyful. It's just bringing you back to that natural space that we were all born with, that intuition we are all born with before we were trained out of it through schools and religion and whatever else. It’s naturally who we are, and when we're naturally gravitating back to who we are, we are more joyful and we have more influence over what we're doing in each moment than if we’re in a negative space.”

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How has the audience for this type of thing changed since you started the app?

“At first, the uptake on the app surprised me because I thought it was a bit of an airy-fairy kind of concept. The people who did take it up were mainly recovering from a loss or getting through a divorce or recovering from alcohol addiction or drug addiction. Now, in the past few years I see more people taking this up who are younger. The crowd is evolving from being in their late 30s to 50 year olds to now being in their 20s; much more diverse. It’s still much more female but I do see a lot more guys picking it up. I think it is thanks to [meditation app] Headspace and other apps and books that are making all of this much more approachable to the mainstream.”

Why did you rename and rebrand the app?

“It went from Gratitude to Mojo, and I think I might be going back to Gratitude. Mojo is short for ‘more than a journal,’ but I’m not sure we’re there yet. It’s capturing what I plan to do with the app in the future months. Gratitude is a word that doesn’t quite encapsulate the feeling of what it is to appreciate what is around you. Gratitude seems to be like a ‘thank God I got that.’ There’s still some negativity in that word, whereas if you just had appreciation; appreciation is like you expected it to come. It was supposed to be there, and that's the attitude I would like people to have about what is occurring in their life each day. They expected the goodness to come.”

►Related: Physical, mental, social benefits of gratitude

What other changes do you have planned?

“Much like Headspace, you’ll be able to pick a specific area that you can work on, whether it’s relationships or career, money, creativity, and there’ll be different activities that you can partake in that would help you focus more in that area. If writing doesn’t come naturally, there are different games and challenges that you can partake in that will trigger some thoughts and ideas to get you writing more and noticing more about what's happening in your world.”

Carla White
Founder, Gratitude Labs
Hometown: Salem
Work: App producer, writer, public speaker, coach
Family: husband two kids (6, 2)
Twitter: @themojoapp@carlawhite