They should have leaned more into the journaling / gratitude /overall mental health aspect - at least that's kind of a differentiating feature.
I think the market already answered your question, given that some of the most popular video games from the past few years have been based around gardening and farming.
It's a weird ball of everything you need to know about us as a species right now.
And as others have pointed out, Meditating should be rewarding in and of itself, if done right.
Solution 1: Try meditation!
Problem 2: My friends and family aren't following through with their meditation.
Solution 2: Let's gameify meditation!
GOTO Problem 1.
Your entire concept is points and badges, so trying to make it sound like something completely different comes across as disingenuous and somewhat antithetical to the actual purpose of the app. You're probably not going to attract users with that strategy.
More importantly, I think you're missing a huge part of the marketing picture. You're banking on paying for influencer placement and random TikTok luck, and then saying you'll make your own content "sometime down the road" and "when you can afford to." But if you can afford to pay influencers, you can definitely afford to make content, at which point you'd be making additional revenue while also promoting your app to a captive and targeted audience.
And since you need to at least be producing a minimal amount of social media content as standard business practice, it's not exactly a huge leap to be producing longer form content. In fact, it would make far more sense to focus on producing videos that serve as their own content and marketing, but can also be cut up into social media posts.
The most obvious example would be to start your own ASMR YouTube or Twitch channel based around the garden concept. Perhaps even integrating it, so that watching the ASMR videos will grow your garden. The material startup cost for a market-competitive ASMR channel is roughly $1,750 worth of equipment, and that includes a capable computer, monitor, camera, video capture device, lighting, audio interface, mics and all of the necessary cables. For the same amount of money you spend on influencer placements, you could pay two people to produce and edit videos, and at that point you are simultaneously creating highly reusable content, generating additional revenue, marketing and legitimizing your brand, and creating a dedicated community around your product -- all while avoiding paying some influencer to get 1/100 the results.
That's just one of countless methods that don't involve sinking your entire budget and available time into hoping something goes viral on TikTok. Content is king. If you're not the one creating it, you're paying a heavy price to the people who are.
Content such as blog posts take months to years for anything to come into fruition. A single 15 second tik tok talking about the app can get millions of hits within a 24 hour window. Not saying this will happen, but it has the highest risk/reward ratio and bang for buck. Almost sounds like I'm playing at a casino, but will keep you updated on this
I also have an instagram and pinterest which are doing pretty well, so it's not like I'm making no content. But I don't want to be posting crappy articles I spent a couple of hours writing, good articles they a lot of effort and the meditation space is very competitive on google. I've dabbled with SEO but am no expert by any means.
I'm also on a time constraint, have to get traction before and hit certain MMR before I graduate which is in a couple of months. But will definitely dig more into it.
And I still think you're putting way too much emphasis on virality as a marketing strategy. Product placements are almost universally NOT the Toks that go massively viral, and even when they do, it's not as big of a payoff as you're hoping. One million views will result in 100-300 people actually trying the app, and at least half of those users will drop off within a matter of days. So, your entire strategy is to pay other people lots of money in hopes of an extremely rare event that gives a marginal bump in users (if you're lucky).
Even traditional paid advertising is far, far more effective than that, and you'd only be paying ~$2 per customer acquisition.
Unfortunately, I think your idea will easily succeed because people can't delay gratification, which is exactly what meditation requires for success and exactly what gamification discourages with its incremental rewards.
Good luck on your endeavor. I hope you find a pattern that maintains the spirit of meditation rather than undermining it.
If you measure success by active users I doubt it will become popular but the meditation habit can absolutely be families until it becomes natural.
