By Jodie Cook,Senior Contributor

Copyright forbes

5 Lessons From Eight Sleep Founder’s Journey To $1 Billion
Eight Sleep

One in three US adults report not getting enough sleep and only 26% of Americans say they get at least eight hours of sleep. Between hustle culture, overstimulation and subpar bedroom conditions, we’re going to bed just to lay awake. That frustration lit the spark for an Italian founder, who set out to reinvent sleep the way Tesla reimagined cars and Peloton reframed workouts.

“Elon Musk is taking me to Mars and I’m still spending a third of my life on a piece of dumb foam.” Matteo Franceschetti didn’t understand why there was no technology in a third of his life. But he had a vision.

In 2014, Franceschetti started Eight Sleep, with the simple goal to “improve your sleep and save your life.” After admittedly not understanding branding at first, his team positioned Eight Sleep not alongside other mattresses and bed-based furniture, but as a sleep fitness company. Bringing you the hardware that would give you, “the energy, the stamina and the drive to achieve your wildest dreams,” he said in a recent interview.

11 years on, Eight Sleep has raised over $260 million in funding, generated over $500 million in Pod sales since 2019, been valued close to $1 billion and collected insights from more than a billion hours of recorded sleep data while expanding into 35 countries. Famous customers include Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Cruise, Halle Berry, Elon Musk, Ivanka Trump, Joe Rogan, and countless sports stars including Charles Leclerc, Taylor Fritz and Sidney Crosby.

I asked Franceschetti to share the key lessons from his journey from an unknown European startup to a global leader in sleep fitness. Here’s what he said.

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Building the global sleep fitness brand: 5 founder lessons from Matteo Franceschetti

Live in the end

Franceschetti knew what he was doing from the very start. “I planned it all out,” he said. In a memo he still has, he scribbled “The future of sleep” and outlined everything that Eight Sleep now does, plus everything it will do in the future. The Pod, the temperature control, the analytics. The feature that raises your head slightly to stop you snoring. Franceschetti is building the reality he visualized a long time ago.

Stop right now and close your eyes. Imagine where your business could be in ten years from now. The problem it solves, the people it serves, and how you do it on a global scale. Live in the end, feel it coming true, then work back from there. If that future is inevitable, what’s on today’s to-do list? Most people play too small. Founders who make it get intentional about going big.

Go where the people are

Raising investment is a serious endeavour, and Franceschetti and his team have done it 11 times. During an early round, Franceschetti couldn’t meet with a potential investor because of a double booking. The investor couldn’t reschedule because he was going on vacation. What would you do?

Franceschetti got tactical. He asked the investor’s assistant where he holidayed, and found out. He booked a flight to the city on the basis that he could grab 15 minutes of his time. The meeting lasted four hours. The investor signed and became a significant person in the Eight Sleep journey. Go where the people are. Sometimes it pays to connect on their terms and their schedule.

Do what you gotta do

“I’m going to China,” Franceschetti said to Alex Zatarain, his wife and cofounder, who looks after brand, marketing and culture for Eight Sleep and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2017 in the Consumer Technology category. “I have to sort manufacturing out.”

“When will you be back?” she said. “When I’ve sorted manufacturing out!” Franceschetti went to live in China for four months. “But I did sort manufacturing out!” he said. He visited the factories, organized the production lines, and scrutinized every element of the process so it could work at the scale he knew was coming. Where is your bottleneck? What problem are you overlooking? How could you get right in and sort it out?

Sell the vision to investors

“I didn’t have to convince them it was happening,” said Franceschetti, talking about the sleep revolution. “I had to convince them I was the person to make it happen.” Once potential investors are bought into the vision, the rest is easy. They want to support someone to deliver it. So why couldn’t that someone be you?

Not only were investors bought into the vision, but Eight Sleep was making progress. They had demand, expertise, and a specific plan for the future. That kind of momentum is hard to ignore. No one wants to join a sinking ship. Everyone wants to back the winning horse. Align with a rising tide and get yourself in a position of strength before you go out for money.

Let them underestimate you

“Y-Combinator rejected me twice, then asked me to apply again,” said Franceschetti. “I said I didn’t want to apply just to be rejected, but they said it would be different.” Franceschetti joined Y-Combinator’s 2015 cohort and raised $6million in one hour at their deal flow event, then went on to become one of their most successful hardware investments of all time.

But as a hardware company, Eight Sleep was a risk. Previous Y-Combinator-backed hardware companies hadn’t been a success. Plus, as a lesser-known European founder, Franceschetti “didn’t have data points.” His reputation didn’t precede him, which meant everything was riding on the strength of the product. When you’re starting from zero, you have more opportunity to surprise. Let them underestimate you. Let excellence become your brand.

Eight Sleep founder’s journey to becoming the global sleep fitness brand

Spend all day doing work you love and playing your sport and rest for eight hours in the optimal bed. Let sleep be your recovery when you get the right hardware in place. Learn from Matteo Franceschetti’s lessons to build a global brand when you live in the end, go where the people are, and do what you gotta do to prepare for growth. Find investors who believe in the vision then show you’re the one to deliver it, but don’t worry if you’re underestimated at first. Sleep soundly at night knowing you set your business up for success.

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