Today, I’m joined by Alexandra Zatarain, co-founder and VP of Brand & Marketing at Eight Sleep.
Eight Sleep is the first sleep fitness company. Through first-of-its-kind smart mattresses, Eight Sleep leverages innovation, technology, and personal biometrics to restore individuals to their peak energy levels and achieve overall wellness.
In this episode, we talk about the company’s Pod Pro mattress that tracks sleep, regulates temperature, and much more. We discuss the concept of sleep fitness and the company’s plan to improve sleep performance. Alexandra also shares Eight Sleep’s moonshots, like the possibility of compressing a full night’s rest to under six hours.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Tips for leveraging social proof to build trust with your customers
- How Eight Sleep grew from a crowdfunded startup to a nearly $500M company
- Important things to consider when partnering with other brands
- The challenges & benefits of building a mission-driven company
Links & Resources
- Subscribe to the Fitt Insider newsletter
- Visit the Fitt Insider jobs board
- View current Fitt Insider investment and get in touch
Alexandra’s Links
- Eight Sleep’s website
- Follow Eight Sleep on Facebook
- Eight Sleep is on Instagram
- Follow Eight Sleep on Twitter
- Follow Alexandra on Twitter
- Barry’s Bootcamp
Episode Transcript
This is a machine-generated transcript. Please excuse any errors.
[00:00:00] Alexandra:
People don’t want to have a great night’s sleep for the sake of it. You want to sleep great because of how you feel in the morning, because of what it propels you to do during the day, the energy, the productivity, the mind, the clarity, and the mood.
You need to know how you’re sleeping in order to improve your sleep. You need to prioritize it. There’s a lot of habit building, and there’s the understanding of why sleep matters. Then you optimize it through your habits, or through products, or through many other things that you could do. Treating it that way really defines why we call it sleep fitness, and not something else.
[00:00:37] Joe:
Welcome back to the Fitt Insider podcast. I’m your host, Joe Vennare.
Today I’m joined by Alexandra Zatarain, Co-Founder and VP of Brand and Marketing at Eight Sleep. In this episode we talk about the company’s smart mattress that tracks sleep, regulates temperature, and much more. We discuss the concept of sleep fitness, and the company’s plan to improve sleep performance.
Alex also shares Eight Sleep’s moonshots, like the possibility of compressing sleep to under six hours.
Let’s get into it.
Hi Alex, welcome to Fitt Insider. Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:03] Alexandra:
Yeah, thank you for having me.
[00:01:06] Joe:
I’ve talked to Mateo on the podcast. It’s been maybe two years now, at least a year-and-a-half ago. Quite a lot, I’m sure, has been going on since then at Eight Sleep. For folks who aren’t familiar with your brand, maybe give us a quick intro about you and what you’re up to at Eight Sleep?
[00:01:24] Alexandra:
I’m one of the co-founders of Eight Sleep. I lead our brand and marketing team. Eight Sleep is a health and wellness company focused on sleep fitness. We develop technology to help people sleep better.
My part in all this is helping sell all these amazing products that we make, and also ensuring that what we’re building is really a company that is driven by a mission, and that we are able to bring actual benefits to people who buy our products.
It’s not just about selling your product, but making sure that your lifestyle is changing, and you’re seeing a lot of benefits in your health.
[00:01:57] Joe:
For sure. Maybe as a jumping off point—in terms of positioning that mission, what you’re working on, and how it improves lives—let’s talk about the decisions or strategy behind calling it “sleep fitness.” There are so many other people talking about all these various aspects of sleep, sleep aids, and sleep trackers. Can you talk about the inception or the idea behind sleep fitness, and then how you actually define it?
[00:02:26] Alexandra:
Yeah. sleep fitness came about a few years into the company, actually. So it wasn’t how we were defining ourselves initially. what happened is we realized that there was a gap, even in the language that we have to be able to speak about sleep in a state of health. There was no way to describe what it meant to be.
Sleep-healthy that’s where sleep fitness comes in. You can be sleep-fit we’re all very familiar with physical fitness and even now mental fitness is something we talk about, but what does it mean to be healthy in your sleep? So we wanted to create that language and the reason why the language is important is because we need to give people the tools to be able to speak about this, right?
If you’re aspiring to achieve a certain milestone, or to live a certain lifestyle, you want to be able to define what that. is we did this exercise and we came up with the concept of sleep fitness what it embodies as a concept, is it really connected to what we always believed about sleep, even as we founded Eight Sleep.
Before the term sleep fitness existed, we did, cement and in part of our values as a company that we believe sleep is a means to an end. People don’t just want to have like a great night sleep for the sake of it. You want to sleep great because of how you feel in the morning and because of how, what it propels you to do during the day, the energy, the productivity, the mind, the clarity, and the mood.
So it is a means to an end it is something that should be measured, prioritized and optimized. that’s a unique perspective. We have. in this Market. And in this space, a lot of other companies may tell you to go to sleep, like spend a lazy Sunday in bed, or like, you know, mottos is a lot like eat waffles and bad, but like for us, that’s not what sleep is.
Our perspective is about measuring. You need to know how you’re sleeping in order to improve it. you need to prioritize it. So there’s a lot of habit-building and there’s the understanding of why sleep matters and the space I should make for during my day. then you optimize it, whether it is through your habits or through products or through many other things that you could do. but treating it that way, really defines why we call it sleep fitness and not something else.
[00:04:28] Joe:
Yeah, I think it’s hugely important. And really like well-timed with this evolution of not only the health wellness and fitness consumer, but also. Sleep optimization, health optimization in general, and even people being willing to, or, the education around how important sleep is it’s shifting from hustle culture and pulling all-nighters to like, even as you say it, we need to invest in our sleep so we can, you know, go harder the next day and improve our performance and outputs on so many different levels When you think about how that kind of industry and even the approach has shifted from wrist-worn devices to rings headbands, and all sorts of apps, where do you see fitting into that ecosystem?
[00:05:21] Alexandra:
It starts from what we saw when we started the company, actually. what we saw in the space was that–this was many years ago–there were companies building products for sleep, mainly in three dimensions. There is a comfort. So mattresses, pillows, and bedding. A Lot of these companies are amazing in what they do, but that doesn’t necessarily solve your problems wearables or trackers at the time they were in their infancy. And some of the trackers that were doing fitness tracking started to do sleep tracking, or there were a lot of mobile applications that you could use for tracking. your sleep And so that, you know, even today, those products can give you data and some of them are starting to give you more of the behavioral coaching, but that’s it, that’s where their influence in better sleep ends.
Most of those companies actually are not really built for sleep. Like they start somewhere else then they realize people want to track their sleep and they jump that chasm. that’s very important, Because your mission needs to be aligned with the purpose and why you’re building.
These products then the third category was pharma companies that make sleep aids and pills, basically, that aren’t good for you. They’re not giving you real sleep and they’re actually bad for your health. So beyond addiction, like they’re actually bad for you. we’re like, wait a second. why are these companies dominating the sleep aids?
This is, as you were describing, right. And work, why are these the companies that people go to for solutions in their sleep when they’re actually not solutions, some of them may be partial solutions or they may help but They’re not solving problems. That was the aha for us, the idea that there has to be an, a a company that is actually mission-driven that measures their success and their ability to help people sleep better, not in selling products like our success is tied to am I actually helping people sleep better?
And there has to be a company that is using real innovation to solve the. problems Not to just sell you products because it’s what people want right now. It’s like, you know, everyone wants to track, let’s build more trackers. No, what is actually the need? What can we solve? that That means we built a company that is very fricking hard to build.
I’m not saying that this is the easiest thing in the world, even though everyone in the world sleeps and everyone has sleep problems, it’s really complicated to be a mission-driven company. and. it takes Time to bring a lot of these innovations to market because you’re trying to solve things that a little bit differently So that’s what we saw. And then from there it’s been a journey to actually define, what are the problems? What are the technologies we can use? What are all the things in the future we can solve, et cetera.
[00:07:55] Joe:
Yeah. Speaking to that journey and bringing this product to market I think it was 2014 that you guys started the company. So it has been quite a while. It was Y Combinator and then a Kickstarter or some, type of crowdfunding. and now obviously more recently getting to this growth stage and really, you know, really trying to expand and in not only in terms of sleep, but health overall get the product out there in the market and continue to grow it, what has it been like making that transition from, Hey, we’re just getting this thing and trying to make sure that the technology actually works to like, okay, now let’s get to the growth stage and really ramp it up.
[00:08:34] Alexandra:
It’s been crazy. So it’s definitely, a a very crazy journey, but what makes it rewarding is the measure of success that we have. I think that that is what all in all, makes you look back and say, wow, there’s actually been tremendous progress because we don’t measure that progress again. in how many units we sold which are inaudible That is important, running a business or a venturebacked company, of course, that needs to exist. But what we’re able to say today about the impact our products are having in people’s lives. We were not able to say 7 years ago, 6 years ago, even probably 4 years ago. that is part of building innovation that you put to market.
You refine, you improve, you learn, then you test and you validate the claims. Right. but I think that’s what makes it all worth it. And it’s the big difference between the early stage versus the growth stage for a company like.us
[00:09:26] Joe:
And I think for anyone who’s not familiar, or hasn’t done this. I think I’m obviously super tuned into this world. So I see it pretty much constantly, but in terms of that validation of. Go search eight, sleep on Twitter, basically, you see all the people that are sharing screenshots of, you know, their sleep fitness or talking about their bed or a pod that just got delivered.
And what that experience has been like. how do you think about that? Almost? What is built-in word-of-mouth and then how you leverage that and use that in terms of a marketing strategy or, you know, is it something that is just more organic and you you love to see it, but you let it go.
So how do you think about that?
[00:10:10] Alexandra:
You obviously have to use it. I think anyone who leads marketing in a company that has such love from the community would be just really dumb not to leverage all of these amazing commentaries. So we find ways to use it and and it varies. It’s it’s about how. do you Surface it in the moments when other people may be considering a purchase, or it may be used for awareness.
We’ve actually had some pretty successful campaigns that even went on television, national television with some of our real members. They’re recording themselves, talking about what they love about the pod? And how it improves their sleep. you can use it in so many ways, but it really has to come from authentic.
Real testimonials. That’s the only way that it works. Like you cannot hack your way into positive word-of-mouth This doesn’t mean it’s always positive. There’s going to be people for whom the Pod is not the problem-solver or they don’t like it. Or they have an issue that happens across any industry in any product.
But when you see such an inflection of positive commentary particularly for us the most valuable piece is when we see. In third-party data. So people who use wearables Whoop Oura or an apple watch, are men, whatever it is that they’re using. And they see in their third-party device, that the pod actually improved their sleep, their HRV, heart rate variability their recovery, their or score, like whatever it is.
There’s nothing like it because that’s not the pod telling you you’re sleeping better. And that’s our own ecosystem. That’s someone else’s product telling you that they’re seeing a difference in what this temperature regulation and this automated temperature regulation is for your sleep.
So that’s the big aha that, we, we love to see and we are always seeing organically. So we’re constantly thinking of ways, like how can that become. more of Something, we invite people to experiment with and discover if they see those patterns in their data, so that maybe it excites other members to share their stories.
[00:12:01] Joe:
Yeah, it’s a huge boost. Like you said to see, basically third-parties validating that, maybe down that path of marketing, there’s been a number of kind of partnerships announced in terms of, F1 teams, CrossFitters. Putting, some Eight Sleep products in Airbnbs. I think even, I can’t remember if it was this year, last year, but A partnership with, Barry’s the boutique fitness studio. how are you thinking about these partnerships when they come up?
How are you then executing them and, have you seen, or what type of results have you seen from the partnerships?
[00:12:40] Alexandra:
I’d start by saying that we, as a company go about building our brand in a way that is like a movement So as a mission-driven company, it’s not just about selling the products, but we need to be ambassadors of what it means to be sleep-fit How do you achieve it? How do you achieve it? Even if you don’t have our products, That’s most important to us than anything else. then when you think about the marketing, the marketing needs to take on a similar path where, The education of sleep fitness, making that, even something that you discover, you learn about, you understand you desire and you aspire to be sleep-fit That is goal number one And a great way to achieve that for us has been through these partnerships that you were describing. whether that is becoming the official sleep fitness partner for Barry’s it’s a brand that we love. It is a brand that made sense because their customer base is definitely very similar to the customer we’re speaking to today.
Seeing that. Mutual respect and potential integration for telling the story of how you can be fit by going Barry’s but you can also go sleep-fit by something on the pod just made so much sense. a lot of their trainers are sleeping on the product their CEO and founders. They own the product and talking about it, So the authenticity needs to be there, but then also saying, how do we use this For marketing. so that was the idea behind some of the partnerships there with Barry’s Mercedes their Formula 1 team is the same. It is a sport that is growing really fast. it is a sport that I myself have followed for over 10 years.
Mateo is my co-founder and my husband and he has followed F1 for all his life. we always admired and saw the parallels of the sport in which innovation is really essential. there is this play of the men and the machine happening every day when they go on the track. when you think about it, that there is also that play with the pod when you go and sleep on it every night, the men and the machines are going to become one and make the men better and more powerful in their recovery.
We always thought like this would be such an amazing story to tell. in addition to that, it’s actually very grueling. People are traveling across. Many times zones throughout the year, this season particularly is even longer. And so there’s an opportunity to say, can our products help a team perform better?
That was the impetus for the partnership with the Mercedes team. It was them looking to actually bring on board brands that could be their suppliers. It’s not just a sponsor. It’s like, how do you supply me with your innovations in the health and wellness space to make my team perform better
[00:15:19] Joe:
Yeah, it makes a ton of sense. One thing we were talking about that, that, you know, I hadn’t thought about, I’ve thought about it as it relates to other aspects of my lifestyle and a healthy lifestyle in general, but traveling. when you think about, you know, if you have invest in the pod for your house, but then you’re on the, road a bunch, obviously, maybe that’s where the Airbnb kind of partnership comes in.
But how do you think about kind of breaking into that market and continuing to serve people as they do travel, maybe when they’re not in their house?
[00:15:48] Alexandra:
Yes. Or our goal is that one day everyone should sleep on pod. Right. And the challenge is on us. How do we make it so great that everyone wants it? And how do we make it affordable enough? How do we find other ways maybe that the purchase can be done? So the, the, the burden of the price is not just all the consumer rights.
That’s things we think about all the time. Again, mission-driven you want to get to everyone? This is not just about being an exclusive product for athletes, right? Athletes are just inspiring figures that are helping us tell the story of why this matters, but we want to get every single bed in the world.
And as you mentioned, hotels makes so much sense. And the idea for a hospitality presence came about because our members on Twitter started saying, well, I hate traveling because I miss my pot and that’s actually one of the first aha moments that people have. In addition to the, my wearables are showing that my sleep is improving.
When people travel for the first time, people sleep in, the pod will show forth for some of those eight. Wow. I miss my. And so that aha, we thought, well, that’s great because then they’ll share and it’ll be like, yeah, I miss my pod. But that is also an opportunity. And the more you think about it, whether you are a hotel and Airbnb of your video, whatever other place you are, certain people are paying you to stay there.
The reason why people pay you to stay there is because they need a place to sleep. That’s their main purpose. So why are all these places not optimizing firstly, that’s what people are paying for. And it’s just to me, it just makes no sense that hotels aren’t investing in the absolutely best place where people.
Everything needs to be optimized for every single thing. And most hotels are not probably, I would say 95% of them are not, there are some that are definitely waking up to that idea and they’re starting to make some investments. but there’s a huge opportunity there even just for hotels, whether they do with Eight Sleep or not to bring about a change and say, well, this is why people pay us.
What are we doing? In this regard and actually something that we just launched this week was a traveler sleep guide. So what we saw is that there’s very little transparency on the quality of sleep that you get in any given hotel and Airbnb your, all these things, right. We should be rating these places based on the quality of sleep that you’re getting and travelers should be able to find.
All of that information and say, well, in this hotel, I’ve got a great matches, but terrible light. There’s a lot of light coming in. Maybe sometimes even through the door, through the hallway, right. Or through emergency signs inside of the room. Like we should know because we’re, all of us are trying to be sleep or investing in these things at home.
We want to know what is it going to be like when I go to that hotel room and am I going to be able to at least have an environment that is conducive to.
[00:18:31] Joe:
So how long until it’s the Eight Sleep hotel, right.
You see different companies, right. Investing in different fitness products, investing in different, you know, spa like features, Equinox, for example, has like an Equinox hotel built around that kind of lifestyle. is that somewhere on the roadmap or maybe you can kind of strong arm, some folks into, partnering to create that experience.
[00:18:56] Alexandra:
I think it would be awesome. Right? I mean, we never say no to two ideas in the future. Obviously there’s a journey of a company and there’s like a time for it. And when it could make sense, but for now our focus focuses on, you were mentioned that the partnership earlier with Airbnb hosts is how do we bring it to people’s environments? Airbnb places are already renting or hotels. There’s a lot of partnerships going on with hotels and a lot of things we’ll be announcing in that space. So, that’s the focus for now? And we are already starting to see people who try it in these hotels where we’re piloting programs, and then they go ahead and buy it.
So, that’s just even better for us. The awareness is being built through this program, but then also it becomes a place of discussion.
[00:19:38] Joe:
Sure. Maybe zooming out a little bit and thinking about the ecosystem. So, you know, the mattress cover the mattress, the app. When you think about building this ecosystem and being mission-driven and enhancing sleep fitness. Is it that you know, Eight Sleep is going to go ahead and continue to build versus where you choose to integrate maybe with other partners providers, or I think you’ve even done this at this point, like, or maybe sell different products right on the Eight Sleep website.
So how do you think about partnering versus building and how that ecosystem continues to expand?
[00:20:17] Alexandra:
There’s a few dimensions in it first. Is it something that we, we, as a company believe we to, we should be. So there’s an expertise. We may just have to develop in-house versus selling someone else’s products. and so that’s, some of the framing that we use, for example, we can partner with brands that we admire and love, like thorn for supplements or hyperized from one of these recovery tools.
Because we don’t believe that that’s our lane right now. That’s not something that we want to be great at right now that we believe we have to be great at in order to achieve that. and so that’s, that’s how we think of those types of partnerships on the other side. And in instances, for example, the recent acquisitions that we made of, of the company called span health was more thinking, well, there’s expertise that some has someone else builds a certain expertise.
And by joining forces to, we think we can go with that. And, launch new products faster or achieve a certain milestone faster. That’s important for the business. And I think that’s a great way to analyze it if it makes sense to partner or if it makes sense to acquire a company. and I think it, it sort of applies the same when you’re deciding to even start a new project within the company and hire a team, right?
Like you want to know. No. Does it make sense now? What is this going to mean for the business? How long is it going to take and are there ways to like speed up that process and startups are always a race against time. and so if it can help you get there faster, a lot of times the answer will be well.
Yes. Why don’t we go that route?
[00:21:43] Joe:
For sure. And then from a kind of business-model perspective, you mentioned the span health acquisition, and the opportunity to get into, at least the way it’s messaged is this, sleep-coaching and thinking about how that fits in, you know, a one-time pod or mattress purchase. Being able to do a personalized or subscription-based premium product or coaching and enhancing that, you know, the revenue opportunities.
How are you thinking about that. ecosystem overall and including this acquisition in terms of how that enables you to continue to grow revenue streams and enhance the business model?
[00:22:21] Alexandra:
The north star is we need to be able to solve the world’s sleep problems. That’s the first thing. So what are the products that we need to build in order to achieve? that Then the list is long. There are probably a lot of products that we will have to build over time to achieve that. so, you know, with the pod, that is why we’re talking about the pod matches the pod cover the technology that the pod offers is tackling the biggest environmental factor that can affect your sleep, which is temperature and especially the temperature in your.
Bed So we said, well, we’ll we’ll build that We’ll build that in a way that is smart. You can personalize the temperature for each side of the bed. It can cool and can heat. It knows when you’re sleeping. It knows when you’re awake and it’ll manage it for you. Right. we’re seeing the influence of all of that. The relation to people’s sleep. We know that close to 50% of our members within 7 days of sleeping on the Pod see an increase in their HRV. heart rate variability So that means the pod is actually helping them recover better and we’re starting to run a lot of other validation, studies that will be coming up soon on what does it mean? Not just for HRV but for quality of sleep and things like that.
So it’s really fascinating to see that what science had already proven for many decades, that temperature was important for sleep and that cooling down in order to achieve sleep was important. Then you’ve made the technology and then you actually see it happening in, in, in real life. So that’s pretty cool, but there was another side that’s still missing in a way. And that was a bit of what drove this thinking on the acquisition of a company like span and the expertise they have built, which is you can adjust the environment as much as you want. And there are a lot of other products we’re working on for that, but you also need to. help people build better. habits that is another lane we’re working on. Because again, if the north star is build all the products, people need to sleep better while we eventually will have to talk about the behavioral side anyways. So, it felt like this was a really good time to do it. There’s a huge demand in the market from people who want to make sense out of all the data out there.
We’ve always been the type of company that thinks, put this data in the hands of people, let people gather their data, let people analyze their data. There’s no reason why you need to be. Just in your own world and closed off, give the users their own information. They gave it to you as a company, and then let them try to make sense of it through any service that they decide to go to.
That’s what we hope that they, the users will do with the service that we’re, working on is that we can help them in that journey to make sense out of it, with, with a digital first platform that will make it sort of easier. And over time, you know, like any startup will Erin and we’ll try to book the best solution.
[00:24:51] Joe:
Yeah, I think down that path, one of the more interesting things that you all have talks about as a company is this idea of compressing sleep. maybe sleeping less than whatever the number is 6 hours or less, but feeling like you slept 8 hours or more. How realistic is that? And how close are we to doing something like that?
[00:25:13] Alexandra:
That is when you think, can we colonize Mars, I think any company that is a mission-driven should have a really big. Idea of what the world could look like if we become successful because the bar should always go higher and higher. and so, yeah, as I was describing before we want to be in every bed.
Well great what happens after you’re in every bed? what happens is that we want to find a way to optimize sleep, to perfection, to the point where hopefully we can give you the same level of recovery. You get in 8 hours today, but you could get it in 6 hours. so that’s the big moon shot how feasible is it? It probably is more than we think. the reality is first, everything we’ve learned about sleep today has been studied only with a few subjects at a time or in environments that are not ideal. So there are still a lot of things we need to comprehend about sleep and what drives the need for these 8 hours that we’ve been told we should sleep.
Is that really optimal? Is that what everyone needs is that what you need every night? We don’t know. There are a lot more Questions than answers right now. so it could be more feasible than we believe today. The second part of it, which you have probably heard Matteo My co-founder talk about is the fact that sleep nowadays is pretty inefficient.
You know, there’s a lot of time spent in light sleep and interruptions. so what would happen just for a first-principle perspective we were thinking about optimizing all of those minutes to perfection Could it be possible that you would need fewer minutes because the minutes you do get are actually perfect sleep versus getting more minutes of which maybe 30, to 40% of them are sort of crappy sleep or unoptimized sleep, where they don’t really make a difference.
That’s where the idea came from from Matteo And he’s really obsessed with this concept and it’s something that eventually his company will want to figure out if it’s possible. if it’s healthy and the implications of that, long-term.too
[00:27:03] Joe:
Yeah, it’s super interesting. And certainly a, a, a cool mission and goal to strive towards nonetheless, the idea of flipping a switch, going right to sleep, getting the best possible sleep, and then being able to basically snap out of it. I’ll certainly subscribe to that as it, as it comes about, maybe another one and you can talk.
How you think about it and how realistic it might be is this idea of like the smart home basically it’s been talked about for years and years, and we’re moving more in that direction. You have remote patient monitoring and smart toilets and sensors and all these different things, but the idea of being able to tackle other aspects of.While you sleep. I don’t remember maybe where I read it or saw it initially, but it was this idea of how aids sleep then intersects with healthcare. Right. And detecting and sensing some of these things that are going on with your body. how do you think about that? And is it, is it kind of also this idea that’s on the roadmap somewhere that you hope to get to and when you do then you’ll, you’ll kind of cross that bridge.
[00:28:06] Alexandra:
Yeah, we’re actually probably much closer to those things. And you think there’s a lot of things that team’s already working on in that direction and the reasoning for that. We started when we started the company, we brought sensors, non wearable sensors into the bed, and those sensors are basically functioning like a stethoscope.
They’re able to tell when you’re sleeping, when you’re not, but also your partner in your breast, your heart rate, variability, respiratory rates. So varying from biometrics that can signal a lot of things happening in your body. and so we thought, well, what if there was the opportunity to put more. Are there more things that would be able to track over time and the beauty of, of Eight Sleeping and specifically the pod product that we have is that you’re sleeping on it for years.
And so it sort of sees patterns in what is normal for you, what is the regular trend? and it tell you when something’s changing, like we’ve actually had multiple cases of people who have they DM Matone Twitter and they’ll say, well, your product saved my life because. You know, or your product told me I had Kobe or, and a lot of these things we don’t diagnose, we’re not diagnostics device, but people will do their own conclusions out of the patterns that they built over months and months.
And some people years sleeping on the pod and they’re able to see, wow, like when the pod alerted me that my HRV was really low or that my resting heart rate was really high. something just seemed off and like, I went to the hospital and I needed an intervention. Like we’ve had cases like that. So. It means there’s a lot of potential to put more sensors, probably some imaging, interesting things that could detect early signals of things, developing in your body and warn you about them.
So part of this moonshot is, well, can your pod save your life? It can’t, there’s no reason why I can’t. And the only thing that sounds off to people right now is that we’re just not used to thinking that our beds to be. But there’s no reason why they cannot. Someone at some point is going to make this happen.
It makes so much sense. You go to sleep for seven, to not, hopefully for seven to nine hours every night. And it’s like getting a health checkup. And there is absolutely no reason why you should go to bed on a dumb mattress that is not able to tell you all of these things. And it’s just a matter of time before someone builds this technology and is able to redefine the expectation that each of us has.
[00:30:27] Joe:
Yeah, the, the vision and the mission driven aspect is certainly coming through. When you talk about, you know, putting this bed into everybody’s home, making sure they’re sleeping on it, thinking about how it fits in with healthcare, thinking about the idea of. You know, compressing sleep, all these things are super powerful and it’s exciting to, to know and see that somebody is working on that.
Right. And to your point that it’s not just, I don’t want to say wasted time because it’s it’s necessary. Right. You need it to be able to live and perform and all those things, but putting it to better use maybe than, than just this, this seven to nine hours that we’re, we’re laying there. you’re getting towards the end of the conversation.
As we wrap up let’s talk about how you plot the course to continue down that path. We talked about the Span acquisition. Last year you raised some new funding, something like $86 million. You’re continuing to get into this growth stage and really ramp up. What is on the roadmap for the rest of this year? What are you looking forward to? Or maybe we should look out for as you continue down that path?
[00:31:37] Alexandra:
A lot of innovation, new hardware, new software. That is where people should definitely stay tuned. That’s probably where most of the energy is going on the team right now. More exciting things on the brand side, too; how we’ll continue to build this movement, tell the story, and show the value of our products through these partnerships.
[00:31:56] Joe:
Awesome. Well, we’ll get you outta here on this.
For people who are listening and want to check Eight Sleep out and learn more, where would you point them? What’s the best way to get the full download on Eight Sleep?
[00:32:07] Alexandra:
Eightsleep.com. Go there and check out our products and our stories. Or find us on Twitter. We’re pretty active there.
[00:32:13] Joe:
Awesome. Thanks so much for making time today, and I’m definitely excited to share the conversation.
[00:32:19] Alexandra:
Yes. Thank you.