Erik Jivmark - Sleep Cycle: 85 Million Downloads, 15 Years of Data, Zero Wearables

[00:00:02] Hey friends, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top rated fitness and wellness industry podcast for over five years and running. I'm your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the honor of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting edge technology experts within the extremely fast paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. If you like the show, we'd love it if you took three minutes of your day to leave us a nice supportive review wherever you consume your podcasts. If you're interested in staying up to date with the future of fitness, go to

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[00:02:31] They've invested a ton into this platform and now they're bringing that European engineering excellence to America. And migration experts have arrived. Check out perfectgym.com where enterprise-level sophistication meets operator freedom. All right, here we go. Eric Jibmark, welcome to the Future of Fitness, my friend. How are we doing? I'm great. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Black t-shirt, check. Love it. Both looking sharp.

[00:03:01] That's like fundamentally important to podcast. Yeah. I'm glad we checked some boxes early. Yeah. Man, I've been looking forward to this interview since I met you months ago at the Connected Health and Fitness Summit. And, you know, to get people an idea of where we're going with this, you know, Apple Watch needs about 30 nights and 30 sensors to detect sleep apnea risk. You guys at Sleep Cycle are working on doing it in one night with just a phone. No device, no sensors, pending FDA approval. But we're going to get into that quite a bit.

[00:03:30] But I want to know, you know, getting back to Connected Health and Fitness, like, you know, you're sitting on probably the world's largest sleep data set. Not probably what you are. You have a technology that beats the best hardware on the market. But when you walked into a summit like the Connected Health and Fitness Summit, no one really knew who you were. You and I were in one of the first meetings I think you had. So was that shocking to you? Like, how did that feel when you walked in there? Like, how does the industry not really understand or know who you guys are yet?

[00:03:55] Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think that the industry has maybe been underestimating, you know, sleep for a very long time. I think there have been a lot of competition about hardware or, you know, louder hardware, more sensors. And I think we have basically spent the last 15 years building up the world's largest data set. And we've done that with some of the most advanced passive technology just using breathing as a signal.

[00:04:23] So to me, the important thing is we haven't done that in a lab. We've done that with millions of daily users through the Sleep Cycle app. And that's what I'm so excited about, that we can now move into new areas and new products. And what you alluded to in the beginning, you know, looking into solving sleep apnea risk detection with only one night pending the approval from FDA. Yeah, it's incredible.

[00:04:47] And, you know, the more so within the industry, I feel like I'm still introducing you guys to people for the first time. But when I talk to, like, friends, like just normal consumers walking around, a lot of people know the app, right? My team is trying out the app. I've tried out the app. And I don't know what maybe you can explain the sorcery that you guys do. But, like, how a couple of things. One thing actually scared me. I was like, I'm shocked my phone has such a good microphone that it can pick up all these things, like these subtle little breathing patterns.

[00:05:14] But you can also know, like, it's not my wife, right? It's me. Although sometimes I feel like it obviously must be her snoring. It can't be me, right? It's just, it's really, so a lot of consumers obviously use this. You have all these data sets and all these users, right? Maybe explain to, like, how this whole thing started. It's a really interesting story about, you know, an iPhone being taped to a bed and all that. Let's start with that origin story. And then we'll get into, like, how you guys have built to where you are over so many years. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's really fascinating.

[00:05:40] So the founder of the company is still around, is on the board, very engaged, very smart engineering kind of guy. He had some challenges with sleep connected to stress and so forth. And he got this new device, the iPhone. And this is back in 2009. And he read that the iPhone could pick up movement. And then he also read about that sleep is very related to how you move. So when you're in deep sleep, you move less. When you're in light sleep, you move more.

[00:06:08] So what he did back then was he actually put the bed, taped it onto the bed in itself, and started to see how his sleep patterns correlated with the movement of his body using the iPhone for it. And that was the instant success of Sleep Cycle. You know, it's one of the original apps on App Store. And it immediately caught on a big following and has since.

[00:06:35] I mean, we have more than 85 million downloads since we started. And monthly active users are a couple of millions across the world. U.S. is the largest market. But, you know, top 10 markets, we have Brazil, we have Japan, and also, you know, Germany, UK, etc. So we're solving a global problem. I think one key thing that happened was we understood that, you know, it's good to have the phone tied to your bed,

[00:07:00] but it's also a little bit cumbersome and not maybe everyone feel great about having the phone under their mattress. So I think the first decision that the company did, which was smart, was to see, okay, can we use sound instead? So can we listen for movement? So, you know, the sound of the bedsheets or, you know, someone turning or tossing. If the microphone can pick that up, we could basically understand where you are in your sleep staging. So that's what we trained the algorithms for.

[00:07:29] And you have to remember, this is like way before AI was like a thing. I used to joke with my CTO that he's probably much more, you know, popular now than he was like five, six years ago when he started here, which, you know, he's a PhD in machine learning. So obviously, you know, this is what he's done in his entire career. So I think that was the first thing that we did. So we started to train the algorithm on sounds of movement.

[00:07:52] But after a while, we realized that, hey, breathing is probably the strongest signal we can use because breathing. And I mean, I don't think it's a coincidence that a, you know, a doctor symbols around the world is usually a stethoscope. And that is because breathing is so tight to your overall health, but also sleep. So we started to train the algorithm for breathing to understand sleep staging. But what turned out is that, well, now we're really good at using breath as a signal.

[00:08:22] And it also turns out that breath as a signal unlocks so many other things than sleep. And the first thing is sleep apnea. But I mean, you probably know this yourself, Eric, you know, when you have fever or something, you know, your breath increases. So breathing is such a strong signal for other things as well. But it started with an iPhone taped to a bed. And now I would say that we are, you know, the most advanced in using smartphones for identifying, you know, breathing and the breathing signal.

[00:08:52] Well, the fact that you guys don't need hardware other than a phone is monumental. I mean, when you told me that when we first met, I'm like, same thing. I'm like, how did I not know about this? Right. I mean, I collect too much data. I have my aura. I have my eight sleep. I have, it's just too much in my Garmin. It's just, it's a lot. And, but I think that's not abnormal too. Like, I feel like a lot of consumers now are getting data fatigue, right? They just maybe don't want to wear it. And there's, you know, there's always been the wrist real estate and the form function issues of wearables.

[00:09:21] But sleep is probably what most people get a wearable for. Like when I talk to people who are kind of new, right? Into, you know, self-actualization of their own data. Like they want the sleep. That's the most critical and important thing that they can do. So is there trade-offs to what you guys from NYC? Yeah. Well, you have to have your phone next to your bed. Some people don't want to do that anymore. Right. But that's not that big of a deal. Most people do it anyway. Right. And I think it's also, sorry, I think it's also this part that, you know, all your data and all the processing stays on your phone.

[00:09:50] I mean, we just, all the analyzing is happening on your phone. You don't upload it to the cloud. It's your data. It's very private, preserved. So we don't, it's not like we're listening to your live audio stream of your eight hours sleep. That's not how it works. It's processed on your phone. So I think that is a big change. Well, you know, in a period of time when, and these are my words, no one else's, like when longevity is kind of getting shoved down our throats and optimization is really just all over the place. Right.

[00:10:19] People are getting protocol to death with what they need to do to optimize everything in their life. Like still the most fundamental piece that's been around forever is sleep. And what I, what broke down to me when I was talking to you guys was like, okay, this is a huge opportunity for anyone who's building an app, right? Anyone who, I don't know, has any kind of consumer technology that they're trying to put out there, or they just want data to understand more information about sleep.

[00:10:45] Not having any additional hardware and a simple SDK that can line up with most platforms or, you know, adjusted to the needs of tech companies. Like that's huge. Like that reduces so much friction for companies to get this one critical layer of, of health data into their systems. How does that work? I think honestly, we have overcomplicated, you know, health tracking. I think you said you don't want to charge five different devices.

[00:11:14] I think that the future basically belongs to this passive technology. I think that the best health technology is probably where you don't notice it, where you don't need to think about it. And most people around the world, in fact, you know, 9 billion people have a phone. It's already there. So I think that helps a lot. So if you want longitudinal data that matters, then I think convenience makes a big difference.

[00:11:44] So in our case, I mean, we achieve in our test the same kind of precision as the best wearables out there. So we always compare with this PSG machine, you know, where you collect yourself, you hook you up, your brainwaves, etc., do all the metrics. And we receive a Cohen's kappa, which is a statistical way of measuring it, of 0.6, which is on par with the best hardware out there. But you don't need any hardware.

[00:12:13] And I think that changes the adoption completely. And that's also why it's so interesting now, because we only use this for our own sake before. We only use this for our app, for our millions of users that use and love Sleep Cycle around the world. But, you know, just a couple of months ago, half year ago, we said, why don't we allow others to use this?

[00:12:34] So if you want to build an app or if you want to build a, you know, anything, basically that where you need sleep data or breathing data or coughing data, you should be able to use our technology. And that's what we decided to do. So we opened it up a couple of months ago. I mean, there's some obvious categories here, right? There's like the, an AI health coach, which is starting to pop up everywhere. It's ubiquitous. I mean, I get, I get pitched these things all the time for the podcast and a lot of them are still in development. Like they're not even out there yet.

[00:13:02] I'm like, well, hey, get out in the market first and then show me. But besides that, like what are some of the other applications for integration and SDKs that maybe aren't as obvious to people? Yeah. I mean, one obvious is to me, it's like, so if you're a wearable, for instance, I think that's great. You probably have some sleep tracking functionality in there. I'm not going to sit here and say that ours is better or not. I can just, you know, conclude that we are on par with, with the best ones. So I don't think that will be your use case necessarily.

[00:13:29] But what you don't have in a wearable is you don't have sound, you don't have audio. And it turns out that a lot of people are actually interesting in what's happening during night. So what about that snoring? You know, that battle you talked about your wife. I have the same problem. I mean, but you can, you can settle the battle of who's snoring or not. But snoring is also an indicator of other things like breathing rate, et cetera.

[00:13:50] And that's why we're going into the more serious stuff in medtech with our ambition in sleep apnea screening or the risk detector that we're doing right now. So for wearables, you know, it could be all of those respiratory rate, et cetera, that they don't necessarily get today. For the apps, I mean, honestly, it doesn't really matter what you want to do. It usually starts with sleep. So if you're, if you want to get pregnant, you know, sleep matters.

[00:14:18] And if you're in premenopause or menopause, you know, it turns out sleep is a strong indicator. And if you fix your sleep, that will help you as well. So if you're a product or an app that wants to speak to that audience, I think, you know, the SDK, the technology that we make available is very powerful for you to do that with your audience in your own ecosystem. And it also turns out that sleep as a function, it's very sticky.

[00:14:47] I mean, our DAO mouse or our daily active users and monthly active user ratio is like through the roof compared to any other app because, you know, people engage with it and they engage a lot with it. But it's also IoT companies. So we have this smart home provider that we haven't announced yet. And I didn't, maybe we didn't mention this, Eric, but we're a listed company. And that makes sometimes this conversation a little bit more complicated. But we have this IoT company that is doing something in the smart home environment.

[00:15:14] They're not even going to use a iPhone or an Android phone. They're going to use their own speakers and their own microphones to track certain signals using our SDK. So it doesn't have to be an app. It could also live outside. But I think if you want to lose weight, you know, if you want to, you know, improve your chances of getting recovery from your fitness, etc., you know, sleep is the thing you should start with.

[00:15:43] It's, you know, my mom is going to be 88. And she lives in an assisted living center now, right down the road. And, you know, they say that when life starts to slip away from you, the first, the biggest thing is you start losing sleep. Like that's the indicator of when things really start to come down. And I think, you know, it really starts to roll downhill quickly. And that's like, I saw, you know, with my father passing away and you and I talked about this. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:09] At the conference, but it, I think it hits home for so many people on like how critical sleep is, especially sleep apnea. We're going to talk about that in a second because it's so undiagnosed and it's such a monumental pain in the ass to go into a sleep center, right? And spend the night. I've done it, right? You get wired up. You got to sleep in this bed. Someone's literally watching you through a window. At least that was my experience, right? You're not going to sleep well. There's no freaking way you're going to sleep well. But then you get, you know, a report and then it's alarming, right?

[00:16:37] And it's like, so they're like, they told me, hey, you have mild sleep apnea. And it was like, it wasn't that bad except for the fact that I think I told you I was like holding my breath for upwards of two minutes at one point. I'm like, well, that's not good. And then what do they do? They're like, okay, well, off you go. I'm like, well, what now? They're like, well, here's a prescription for a CPAP if you want that. I'm like, I don't want that either. So it's like, it's just, and I saw my dad going through it too as later in life, like a man just couldn't sleep. Like he just couldn't sleep. And he was, you know, horrible CPAP night. You know, the CPAP, he hated it.

[00:17:07] And it was just, so it's this huge problem where I feel like maybe the solutions are improving, right? The interventions are improving. But the first thing we can do is get people screened earlier, right? And more often and with higher, you know, higher certainty that this is the actual case. And by doing this and just opening it up to anyone who has a phone and doing it in 24 hours, that's incredible, man. I don't think that can be overstated of what you guys are looking to do here.

[00:17:35] So maybe walk me through that journey. Like what is the process of getting this all done? And, you know, what's the grand vision you have for the sleep apnea? Yeah. First of all, like I remember when you told me that, you know, when we met the first time, I mean, it was a real moment because it's like, this is real. And sleep apnea is such a technical term. But what it means is basically you suffocate yourself when you sleep. But at least that's how I like to describe it.

[00:18:03] So like you said, you're holding your breath or you don't take enough breath. And that means that, I mean, it's not good for your brain. There are so many other diseases that are correlated to this. If it's obesity or Alzheimer's or just, you know, daytime fatigue.

[00:18:20] And most people, the reason that they get to know that they have it is because they have someone who they sleep next to, who is like, like either like giving you the elbow or like wake you up in the morning and say like, hey, Eric, it was super scary this night. It sounded like you didn't breathe for like a couple of seconds or a half, you know, that, that made me really, you really need to look up that. That's how most people, what I've been told, find out.

[00:18:47] And part of the reason is because there is no easy way to find out. And again, since, since we, we trained the algorithm on, on breathing to get to sleep staging and we do that very well. But we also started to train the algorithm on picking up snoring and coughing, et cetera. And somewhere along the road, we started to learn about sleep apnea. And we have a lot of users that self-report.

[00:19:16] So some of them share what they report with us. So they have these sleep notes in the app. And you have to remember, we have millions of people using this. And those millions of people, some of them have decided that we can see what they share. Not on an individual basis, not like Eric Marzone is sharing this, but on an aggregated level, we can see what they have been writing. And it turns out that a lot of people have put in that they have sleep apnea or they think they have sleep apnea. We don't have medical classification today.

[00:19:45] So I cannot say that we can do the detection of risk if you have it or not. But we decided in the team, like, hey, guys, if we can crack snoring. I mean, we have a patent for dual snoring, like separating people in the room. If this person or if that person is snoring, we have the patent for that. No, nothing needed, just an iPhone. We said, wouldn't we be able to crack sleep apnea and make it accessible for more people to find out if they have it?

[00:20:15] And that's the journey that we started. And it started with, you know, collecting a lot of development data. So anything from the data that we had to hooking people up in sleep labs with PSG machines, having the phone next to them, recording it, training the algorithm, doing it over and over again, training the algorithm. And the last internal test we did, we are on par, if not even better than the approved devices out there requiring hardware.

[00:20:44] And that's when we said, hey, I think we cracked it. So now let's go for the approval. So what you need to do is we need to do a clinical validation study. We're doing that in the U.S. right now. It's going to be completed by end of September. And then we will submit it for FDA. And then it's going to be class 2A. And I think that the good thing here, Eric, is that we will use it in our own application. But again, I mean, if we want to reach the billion people, I think it's a bit naive to believe that everyone will download the sleep cycle app.

[00:21:13] So we early on decided, let's make this and package this so anyone can integrate it into their experience. So if it's a running app that want to help their users to better understand why they're running is not improving, it could be that you have sleep apnea. So, I mean, I would suggest that you offer this test for your audience in your own application. But you can also think about the respiratory, the CPAP manufacturers of the world, the sleep clinics of the world.

[00:21:42] And I mean, there's a lot of people who want to help the people that have this challenge right now. And hopefully we will make it easier because you don't need to send home a hardware to them. You can basically use this, which a lot of people happens to have already. Yeah. Yeah. And you guys aren't going to get into like interventions, right? You're going to leave that up to someone else, like the actual solution for sleep apnea. You're just going to detect it and provide the information and data on it. Yeah.

[00:22:09] So we want to start where, how do we think we can make the largest impact? And I think since 80% is undiagnosed, let's try to make people more aware of it. Yeah. 80%. It's crazy. So let's start to make those people aware of it. And then, you know, we can help them further down in the value chain. But I don't think there is technology wise. I mean, let's start with this now.

[00:22:36] But I mean, I also have a team of quite brilliant engineers here and we have all of these millions of nights of data. So I think this will be the first medical approved product that we do. In fact, that's the plan. So this will be the first one of many because breathing is, it's such a strong signal. You know, so there's probably people out there and they're skeptics with every technology, right? Especially in wearable. But I imagine there's some people out there thinking like, this guy's full of it.

[00:23:04] There's no way you can get all that from a phone, right? But I know you guys have had a lot of research on this too. So maybe give us, give us a scientific back and give us an outline of like, you know, not necessarily, I know you guys are still working on FDA approval for the sleep apnea screen or risk assessment. But overall, like all of your data, like you guys have backed this up. Yeah.

[00:23:21] I mean, so there is a reason why the Cambridge and the Harvard of the world, when they want to do a study on sleep, they come to us either for the data that we have, but sometimes even to use technology that we have. That's a fact. So right now we're doing studies on Alzheimer's connected to sleep. We're doing a study on simple things like snooze behavior and sleep.

[00:23:47] So like very serious things and very novel things, I would say, but still important because these are new phenomena. We don't know how that impacts overall health. We're also doing right now with coughing, for instance. So we have this coughing throughout the world, live stream of coughing every night. We get a refresh. I mean, I mapped it out. I was like, can we just put this on a map, like a little dot everywhere in the world? And it becomes a world map.

[00:24:17] You can even see where the boats are going around the world because we have users pretty much everywhere. And so right now we're validating that data with UK HSA, where they are looking for a early risk detection to understand basically in our early warning system for upcoming influenza waves, et cetera. And that should be completed in the next month or so that we will release with them. But yeah, we're taking this very seriously and we have done so from the start.

[00:24:44] And that's always been my approach when I joined the company three years ago, roughly. My first feeling was like, hey, great that we have this app. I mean, I'm super proud of it. And there is some revenue from some subscribers. But the real value has to be the technology and the data because we own the technology. It's ours. We even have some patents on it. And we have this live stream of data. I mean, we're processing a millennia of sleep every night, a millennia of sleep.

[00:25:12] It's just the insane amount of sleep that we process in one night. It's very impressive. Maybe I don't know how you want to talk about competition, but some of the other major ones out there, like how does your data, your data quality, like how does it compare to the rest of the competition when it comes to sleep monitoring?

[00:25:34] I mean, we're on par with the best wearables, but the only thing you need is an app. You don't need to purchase or commit to hardware for, you know, several hundred of dollars. And I think for a consumer, that makes a big difference. But it also makes a big difference when we talk to partners who wants to use this technology because it's a big barrier if you need to.

[00:25:59] Okay, so, you know, we want to use this technology to do sleep apnea risk detection, or we want to use this technology to integrate it in our app. So the first thing you need to do is go out and buy this hardware. That's a big hurdle. So we are on par with the best, and I can say that with confidence. And I don't necessarily view it as competition, to be honest.

[00:26:22] I'm a firm believer in that anyone that can do anything to improve the awareness, and I know this is going to sound like, you know, a lot of, yeah, I was about to swear, so I'm not going to do that. But, you know, it sounds like something a guy like me would say, but I honestly believe the more people that speak about sleep and the importance of it, you know, I don't think that's a problem to me. I think there's enough people out there for all of us to be able to thrive, to be honest.

[00:26:53] Well, you know, I think in the U.S. political climate right now, which is always dynamic, I guess would be a good word. You know, RFK Jr. being the head of, you know, the health department is, it's a huge opportunity. While this administration is still in, he's still there. You know, he's been talking, last time I checked, he's been really saying like, hey, they want to somehow get wearables on every American, right? So we can start tracking health metrics and sleep and all these things. So this conversation is shifting so rapidly for mass adoption.

[00:27:22] And you're right, like one of the biggest things, I mean, you ask someone who, you know, right now in this country who's struggling to put enough gas in their car so they could get to work, right? You go like, hey, well, we recommend you go get a $400 wearable, you know, so you can model. Like, no, not on my list of concerns at this point. But if you make it easy, super cost effective, or, you know, you can subsidize things like that somehow. And this is just a dream world that I live in. Like, imagine what we could do for our public health because a lot of people walk around on five hours of shitty sleep, right? Yeah.

[00:27:51] And they just don't know how that's actually affecting them because they've never been able to get seven or they just don't understand why it's important, right? Or this rise and grind culture that we have in the United States as well. So, you know, there's a lot of socioeconomic factors to that, but I think having the accessibility is really critical. Yeah. And I think to your point is this sleep depth. I mean, some people think about it as a bank account, you know, like you withdraw a little bit and then you deposit on the weekends. Unfortunately, that's not how it works with sleep.

[00:28:20] You cannot just, you know, borrow sleep hours during the week and then you sleep for 12 hours during the weekend. You're actually not doing yourself a favor. I mean, regularity is probably the key to better sleep. So, you know, social jet lag on the weekends, you know, when you stay up longer and you sleep in also for longer, it's not necessarily good for you. You should try to keep your routine.

[00:28:42] So I'm totally with you and anything that we can do to be able to reach more people, that's what I'm open to. I'm a firm believer in that collaborators win. And I don't think that everyone wants to necessarily experience our product in our app. A lot of people want to do that. And I'm very thankful for that. And there are millions of them that do that. Tens of thousands that download our app every day.

[00:29:07] But the point is, if we want to make impact at scale, then we need to be where, you know, those customers already are and those people already are. And now we're doing that with the sleep SDK that we're opening up. With, you know, data is something I talk about a lot. A lot. I never thought. Like when I started this podcast nine years ago, I didn't think I'd be talking about data all the time. I thought I'd be talking about training and, I don't know, nutritional experts and things like that for the industry. But I talk about data all the time. Because I think we're going into a golden age, right?

[00:29:37] I mean, one of the big promises of artificial intelligence is being able to make sense of all the data and make it usable. And I'm curious, like as you look at AI applications for sleep and consumer health data, like what's the vision? Where do you think we can be in three years? Like how can we democratize health better using, leveraging all this data for not just, you know, the people who are all in optimization, but just, you know, the general population. The Future of Fitness podcast is proudly brought to you by eGym.

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[00:30:33] and communities. Now, what really excites me is how eGym brings this ecosystem together with WellPass, their corporate wellness platform. By combining their strength equipment with AI-powered software and their corporate wellness platform, WellPass, they're leading the shift to proactive, preventative health. Isn't that what we all want? That's why we're here. The result? Members feel more confident and motivated. Trainers have better tools to support people. Operators see stronger retention and growth.

[00:31:02] And employers benefit from healthier, more engaged teams. This isn't innovation for show. It's progress you can see, measure, and repeat. To learn more, please visit eGym.com. Yeah. I think there is a lot of, in AI and health right now, I think there's a lot of, it's pretty shallow, to be honest. It's done without a lot of context.

[00:31:29] It's just an AI coach that is like contextless. For me, it's what makes AI and health powerful is the longitudinal part of it, where you have the behavioral understanding, basically. And sleep is one of the richest signals. And it also happens to be something that we do every day, every night.

[00:31:52] So, any data layer that doesn't have sleep built into it, I think it's a pretty shallow experience. So, for me, what AI is doing is, because I also get that question. And again, we're a listed company. So, people ask, okay, but now with AI, like why would you even be relevant with your product? And I think then you missed the whole point. Because, yes, it's very easy to build an app right now with AI.

[00:32:18] But, you know, to have a live global sensor network with millions of people that produce a millennia of sleep every night, that's the real power. That's what we harness. So, I think that's my view of this whole AI game and health. Well, as a non-technologist, right? I think, you know, like I said, like to your point, with AI, you can develop apps and platforms faster than ever.

[00:32:47] On the same side, you can develop apps and platforms faster than ever, which means there's just more of them, right? So, the AI noise, I was talking to another company the other day. I'm like, the challenge you guys have is number one, breaking through all the noise. Because it is freaking noisy, man. Like I'm getting pitched all the time. Everybody has an AI solution specific to this. And I'm like, well, here's the thing. Like, are you going to compete with ChatGPT, Grok, and, you know, Claude? Because they already have the users, right?

[00:33:17] People are already paying for that. So, would they go pay additionally for the specialty app? Like there was one, you know, famous author who's doing one on self-improvement, right? It's a self-improvement AI-driven app, which will hold you accountable. I'm like, okay. So, I'm sure it's much better than Claude slash Grok slash ChatGPT in that particular area. But how long until those other apps are just as good as that, right? And I think that's the competition is like everybody's putting all these, trying to do all these specialty ones.

[00:33:42] I personally just don't see how many can be successful in this area, right? Because there's just so many. Consumers are going to get utterly fatigued from it all. But having the data that you guys have, that's the huge differentiator is like you've been doing this for many, what is it, 11 years this company's been around? Yeah, 15 years. I mean- 15 years. It's the fuel. I mean, it's the fuel of AI. And we have that fuel. We have it from 15 years ago, but we also capture it every day, every day.

[00:34:12] And we're not talking about like contextual language processing. We're talking about audio, breathing signal. That's a very, very strong signal. And it's across the globe. It's not in the US. It's not in England or where I'm at in Sweden. It's across the globe. And that makes it also very interesting from, you know, if you take a step back and you see the whole world's breathing and coughing patterns, and then you start to put like an innovation mind on that.

[00:34:42] I mean, yes, you can go the public surveillance path and we're doing that. But, you know, if you put your innovation mind on that, I mean, what could you do with it? And I think that is what I'm curious to find out. What could people do with that? I mean, we know what we have done, but what could others do with it, either in their existing experience or just like someone listening to this podcast right now? I mean. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. You don't know what you don't know. Right. And there's a lot of people who are like, oh, my God, this is perfect for this application I've been thinking about.

[00:35:11] And we wouldn't even like have put two to two together. And that's why I love doing podcasts like this is I hope there's people listening right now are like, dude, I got to get in touch with Eric. And, you know, it's funny just on a personal note, too. I was talking to my team about this and one of the young ladies on my team had was trying out sleep cycle. She's in Brazil. And we were joking. I'm like, isn't it kind of weird to hear like the actual noises that you make when you sleep? Like, you know, like because it records it. I don't know if people haven't used it. Actually record. You can hear the sounds of use of like, you know, like, whoa, like that's, oh, God, I don't know.

[00:35:42] It's. Yeah. It's eye opening. That's a mystery. I mean, we sleep a third of our lives. I mean, a lot of people are curious. Like, what do I do? Like, what do I sleep talk? Like, what's happening? Like, am I snoring? Am I a snorer or not? Like, I think there are a lot of like curiosity around it. And I think if you think evolution wise, like think about it as humans have everything else we managed to perfect in a way, but sleep.

[00:36:09] Like we're, we're, we just, you know, in one third of our lives, we were like not doing anything. We're just sleeping. That's how powerful sleep is for us as humans. And I think that's why, why it's, that's why any company that is serious within health. I mean, they don't need to use our product. I'm happy if they do so, but that's not the point. But if you don't take sleep serious, I don't understand how you could really take anything serious. Because I think like the evolution has shown us that that's so strong. So we still have to spend a third.

[00:36:38] We cannot, we cannot do anything else. We just, you know, we cannot eat. We cannot protect ourself. I mean, we can because we, we live in a modern society. So we can, but, you know, evolution wise, it's such a waste of time in one way, but that's how powerful it is for your recovery. Yeah. You know, so I want to circle back to the moment where we met, right? So we kind of started with that. So you're, you're at this conference, you're meeting people, right? So I guess what was, what was the goal of that?

[00:37:05] Like you guys are going to, it sounds like you guys are making a big push into North America for partnerships. And, and just, like you said, looking for innovators to talk to you. So what is the strategy right now for the remainder of the year going into next year as you release this, the sleep apnea assessment as well? Like what, what are you, what are you hoping to get? And the majority of my audience is North America, of course. Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, listen, we, we have built this, the worst largest sleep app that has been ours. It's proprietary, it's contactless.

[00:37:34] And what we have spent the previous year on was to break it out. So we use the same technology now that anyone can license. We use it to power our application. So sleep cycle. We also have ultra human who's using it to power their smart ring. We have another, a couple of others coming up that has built experiences, you know, across different products and ecosystems. So what we want to do is basically to allow others to, to use the signals that we do.

[00:38:02] So if, if you have a product that you think would benefit from either, you know, having, you know, leading sleep staging, contactless, you know, wake up. We have a patent on smart alarm, for instance, you know, where you wake up when you're in light sleep. So you have a wake up window, or if you want to have coughing because, you know, maybe that matters to you and you want to have coughing. I mean, you can zoom down even on like a block level in the major cities in the U.S.

[00:38:29] We cover most of the U.S. because, you know, we cover where people are located. We have that data. You can use that now. And I think that is opening up a lot of different opportunities. And we're talking to health apps. We're talking to, you know, a range of companies across the, you know, telemedicine providers. We talk to a lot of them. So I think that's why we're sitting here. And that was why we met in the U.S. because that was the starting point for us.

[00:38:55] And I'm surprised how, maybe not surprised is maybe the wrong word, but I'm positive about how big the interest is. And I think even though at that specific conference, I know, you know, I told you it feels a bit weird to walk into a room, you know, and people don't really know who we are. I was very open with that. But I think it also turns out that, you know, we have a big brand also in the U.S. with SleepCycle. It is by far our largest market.

[00:39:24] So it turns out now, maybe I was unlucky in the conference. Maybe I was not doing the right thing mingling, Eric. I don't know. But it turns out that we were having more success now than we had when we just met. That's great. That's great to hear. And, you know, the one that made me scratch my head a little bit when you told me was UltraHuman. I'm like, well, why would UltraHuman, seemingly a competitor, partner with you guys? So, and then you explained it. I'm like, okay, that actually makes a shit ton of sense. So maybe explain that.

[00:39:50] Like, why would someone like that, you know, hardware company like UltraHuman want to use your guys' software? Yeah. So usually when we talk to hardware companies, usually what they want to do, sometimes they have sleep. Maybe they are at the level where they feel they are good enough. Others that we talk to right now, they want to improve their sleep capability. So that's a shortcut for them to do that. In UltraHuman's case, it was about respiratory rate and respiratory and breathing and using breath.

[00:40:19] And, you know, a wearable, you don't have that. And of course, with that comes snoring, all of the things we talked about already, and that they wanted to open up for their users. And it's also a way for, and I'm not talking about UltraHuman now specifically, but in general, what I hear with these wearables is that they also recognize that, you know, there is a situation sometimes where the user doesn't necessarily want to have the wearable for one reason or another. Maybe they are charging it or maybe they forgot it at home or whatever, but they still want to track the data.

[00:40:48] And then, you know, usually you don't forget your phone. That's not a common use case. The phone is usually with you. So that's also a way to keep the engagement while you don't have your wearable around for some reason. Yeah. Yeah, it's super interesting. And I hope people, if you have creative ideas, obviously reach out to Eric. Yeah. We'll talk about how to do that at the end of the podcast, but reach out to me too. I would love to hear how people want to apply this specific technology in their solutions. I think it's going to be really, really interesting.

[00:41:18] And, you know, I'm curious too on a cultural angle, you know, coming from Sweden and, you know, exploring the U.S. market, you know, what have you noticed about how we go about business here that may be different than what you're used to in Sweden? I mean, well, first of all, I lived in the U.S. a couple of years, so I feel I have a good feel for the U.S. market in general. But I mean, my experience is that you're very open to collaborate. It's an open mindset. It's also this win-win kind of collaboration where you go into that, like, let's do business together.

[00:41:48] I mean, obviously, we are also talking to other markets in the world. And one thing that I noticed, and I told you, I think, Eric, is that, you know, U.S. has always been, because I'm from Europe, and I think Europe is fantastic in many ways, but, you know, sometimes there could be a lot of, you know, could be a slower pace sometimes. And U.S. has always been this fast-paced place where I got to know and I got to like a lot in business especially. But I notice now, I mean, some of the companies we're talking about, they're moving the fastest.

[00:42:17] It's also in Asia right now. They have also a mindset where like, okay, let's try this. It's less, it's just more easy to jump in and like, okay, let's try it. I mean, one of the clients we had, they integrated the SDK in two weeks. They said it was the easiest history in the history of SDKs to integrate. It took them two weeks to go live. From discussions, they said, okay, let's do it. Send it over. We try it. And they tried it and they decided to keep it. So I think, you know, it's a different mindset also there.

[00:42:45] But I mean, I have a very special relationship with the U.S. I spent a couple of years there. It's a fantastic country. And especially from a business point of view, I have a general good feel of it. Yeah. Where did you live when you were here? So I lived on the East Coast. I lived in New York City for three years. And then I was also sometimes on the West Coast due to work. So every quarter, I went to the LA area and spent a couple of weeks there. So, yeah. Yeah. And you're in Stockholm now, right?

[00:43:14] So I'm actually on Gothenburg on the West Coast of Sweden. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the little brother to Stockholm. So usually known for the home of Volvo cars. So that's where the mothership is here in Gothenburg. Yeah. Yeah. Which we didn't even get into, which is part of your background. It's probably a little too late now, but maybe in our next podcast we'll talk about it. Yeah, I don't think we need to. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that you came, you know, from, and I know in our conversation, our private conversation we had was, you know, you obviously saw a lot of success in the automobile,

[00:43:44] but you saw an opportunity to make it like, like a lot of people who get into this industry, you come from another one and you're like, it's great. Money's good. Great. But I have an opportunity to actually make an impact on people's lives and health, right? And fitness. And that's, you know, it's, it's a very real thing. The purpose-driven. But it is, I mean, work is what I do. I mean, I have a family I love, of course, I have like three friends that still butters to call me, but the rest is work. So what I want to spend time at work is probably things that are impactful.

[00:44:13] And I felt this is by far the most impactful area I've been in. So, yeah. Yeah. Right on. Okay. So obviously what I, you know, last question I always ask you, Eric, is what you need. And that's in the spirit of collaboration. I think we've been pretty clear, right? You want innovators, you want people who are potential partners with your SDK, but what else? What else do you need that we can help you with? That is, if people want to reach out and talk to you. Yeah.

[00:44:36] I think in the next decade or so, I think that anyone that is serious in the health and wellness space, I think you need behavioral data, not isolated moments. And I think sleep is one of the richest signals that you can get. And it happens every night. And I think that is why it's so powerful.

[00:45:02] So anyone that is interested in using that and wanting to partner around that, you know, I would be happy to talk to. So essentially people that are serious about building like long-term health businesses and not just seeing sleep as an engagement hack, I will be very happy to talk to. It is also an engagement hack for sure. But I would also love to have that, you know, bigger ambition because it's such a powerful signal.

[00:45:31] And I mean, we have invested 15 years in this. 15 years we invested in this platform. And now we just say, hey, why don't you use it for your customers or for your idea? It's right there. And as I said, you know, one customer took two weeks to integrate it. And it's also quite a big customer. They have multiple markets and quite a decent customer base. So it's an easy to integrate thing. So those are the people I would love to talk to. Right on.

[00:46:00] Where would you like people to go? LinkedIn, website? Yeah. I mean, they can go to sleepcycle.com. They can, you know, email me at, you know, eric.jibmark at sleepcycle.com. You know, we will make sure to put up the links there as well, Eric. Yeah. Yeah. Well, man, I'm so glad we crossed paths and I found out about what you guys are doing at Sleep Cycle. It's been a lot of fun getting to know you guys and what you guys are doing. And I think it's tremendously large opportunity to work with you guys.

[00:46:29] And I truly mean that. So yes, thank you for joining me. Really appreciate it. I know it's late your time. And these gentlemen, Eric, jibmark. Thank you. Hey, wait, don't leave yet. This is your host, Eric Malzone. And I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Fitness. If you did, I'm going to ask you to do three simple things. It takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way. We really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it.

[00:46:57] iTunes, Spotify, CastBox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media. Talk about it to your friends. Send it in a text message, whatever it may be. Please share this episode because we put a lot of work into it. And we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly, if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me, simply go to thefutureoffitness.co.

[00:47:23] You can subscribe to our newsletter there, or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone, and this is the Future of Fitness. Have a great day.