(Ep 30) EIGHT SLEEP -> It's time to upgrade your sleep 🛌

Matteo Franceschetti | Co-Founder & CEO

Nov 10, 2020

Hey friends,

Back again with another edition of The Founder Newsletter - this is Episode 30. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.

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Mission control:

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And who am I?

I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.

Let’s get it.

This Week’s Episode (Ep 30) 🛌

Guest -> Matteo Franceschetti, Co-Founder and CEO of Eight Sleep

Mission -> Eight Sleep is obsessed with helping people get sleep fit. Sleep, just like fitness, can be measured and improved. High quality sleep enables peak health and wellness, giving you energy and confidence to take on the day

Discount -> Use code “Kallaway” for 15% off all Eight Sleep products

Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Website

In this episode we talk with Matteo about…

😴 Sleep fitness and the important metrics that matter

🙅‍♂️ Why 50% of adults have a sleeping problem and how to fix it

🔮 Eight Sleep’s vision to compress your sleep into 6 hours/night

🆒 Thermoregulation and how Eight Sleep’s Pod uses it to enhance your sleep

✈️ How to maximize your sleep while traveling

Summary 🔍

What is Eight Sleep and how did Matteo get started?

Matteo has always been an athlete and obsessed with recovery and performance.

Growing up in Italy, he spent time as a competitive ski racer, tennis player and race car driver before jumping into the corporate world as a securities lawyer. After launching and exiting a couple of companies in the renewable energy space, his professional focus came full circle as he rediscovered his passion for optimizing performance.

He explored the recovery space and realized the massive opportunity for smarter sleep products to support the rapidly growing quantified self movement. It was at this moment that Eight Sleep was born.

Today at Eight Sleep, Matteo and his team are the pioneers of sleep fitness. Their tech enabled mattress, the Pod, has taken the industry by storm as it significantly enhances your sleep quality through thermoregulation.

Over the course of the night, the Pod detects your changing body temperature via sensors built into the mattress.

Then, the Hub, an external water tank connected to the Pod, uses warm and cool water to constantly adjust the temperature of the bed to keep your internal body temperature at the optimal level.

This reduces disruptions throughout the night and enables more restful, higher quality sleep.

Eight Sleep also has a killer app that you can use to track your vitals, sleep cycles and overall sleep performance overtime.

In the last few weeks, they also launched the Pod Pro Cover, which adds their patented thermoregulation technology to your existing mattress.

While they’ve made incredible strides already, Eight Sleep is still in the early innings of what’s possible in the smart sleep space.

Remember, if you want to support Matteo and level up your sleep, using code “Kallaway” will get you 15% off!

Matteo’s Startup Manifesto 📜

What’s a Startup Manifesto?

At the end of every episode, I ask all of my founder guests the same question:

If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?

Here’s what Matteo had to say:

Pick your co-founders well because it will be a marriage that will probably last for 10 years.
Pick the founding team well for the same ^ reasons.
Focus on 10-xers - these are opportunities that can add a zero to your business.
Be intense.
Don’t be discouraged when things go bad because eventually they will start picking up again.

What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔

After reflecting on my conversation with Matteo, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:

Traction is undefeated 🤯

For those who know me, they know I am obsessed with the quantified self movement and the future of health and wellness.

For that reason and so many of the lessons shared during the interview, I loved this conversation with Matteo.

One aspect that really struck me was the perseverance Matteo and the team exhibited when trying to get into Y Combinator.

The Eight Sleep team was rejected twice before finally getting admitted on their third go-round in 2015. This is the same company that to date has raised $65M and is emerging as a predominant force in the sleep category.

When I asked Matteo what separated their application the third time from the first two, it was a simple answer: traction.

To me, traction is the great equalizer. If you have traction, it doesn’t matter how old you are, where you went to college or how much money you’ve raised.

Traction is the market telling you that there is something you’re offering that they can’t get elsewhere.

The first two times Matteo and his team applied for YC, they were working on the product but had no real way to quantify traction. By the time the third application process rolled around, they had launched the Pod V1 on Indiegogo and had hundreds of thousands of dollars in pre-orders.

The reality is that every single founder and company you’ve ever looked up to started at square one with zero traction.

They all went through the process of trying to figure out what was going to move the needle and drive adoption for their business.

The other side of the equation that Matteo noted was having the perseverance to keep fighting until you find that traction.

A lot of companies don’t ever find it. They give up after a few failed launches and never make it to the point where the curve starts to steepen.

Most entrepreneurs will tell you that if you just keep going, keep listening to customers and keep iterating, you will eventually find some form of product market fit. Your business may look completely different than when you started, but you will eventually find it.

Matteo said that going through the YC program changed the trajectory of the company. And it wouldn’t have happened with perseverance and traction.

Don’t give up and keep going.

Wrapping it Up 📕

I hope you found this interesting and inspiring! If so and you want to help support my journey to bring The Founder to millions of people across the world, here’s a couple things that would be really valuable to me and the show:

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Till next time ✌️

Kallaway