What a rollercoaster- How I brought better sleep to the world with the Somnox Sleep Robot

Today is my last day at Somnox! 

What an awesome ride it has been with such an amazing group of driven young entrepreneurs! After signing my term sheet together with my son last June, I was immediately adopted as a new Uncle:) in the Somnox Family. An uncle, because by joining Somnox with my 38 years old, I raised the average age in the company significantly. The average currently is 25 years.

′Lepeltje lepeltje′ with colleagues

Being responsible for Somnox Internationalisation, I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Zurich, London, Houston, Las Vegas, New York, Tokyo. The travel was far less luxurious as I was used to in previous roles, Somnox style accomodation was typically a shared AirBnb+ sharing a bed with colleagues was a rule rather than an exception, at least this was a fasttrack to get to know your colleagues.

Global Distribution

In the past year, we set up an amazing and solid distribution across the world. When joining I was naive to think that the crazy PR exposure worldwide we had would be a prelude for massive and easy sales success. Whilst I am proud of the strong basis I have helped to establish, it did not come easy.

Somnox is now hiring my lucky successor, here’s a preview what one can expect:

The Capital(s) of Sleeplessness

In our quest to help the world sleep better, I recently traveled to the World’s Capital of Sleeplessness (Tokyo) and the City that Never Sleeps (NYC). 

Both Japan and the US are part of what we call our sandbox (main target countries) because of the sleep-loss epidemic happening there. Japan and USA rank respectively 1st and 2nd amongst the OECD countries in adults getting less than 7 hours of sleep, Japan (56%) to the USA (45%) (National Sleep Foundation, page xi).

In both countries, people have been conditioned into believing that sleep is a commodity and simply a waste of time. Of course, nothing can be further from the truth??. Sleep is a fundamental human right and a core human need. The economic costs of the lack of sleep are a staggering: 549bn USD in both countries combined. In the same RAND (2016) study, they found that Japan loses on average 0.6 million working days, or 4.8 million working hours, per year due to lack of Sleep.  That’s something to think about.

Also by visiting different stores in both countries, it became obvious that we are onto something here. As in other countries, Americans and Japanese, often revert to harmful sleeping pills to get to sleep. It was mind-boggling to see the amount and diversity of harmful sleep medication on the shelves all promising better sleep whilst mentioning little about the adverse side effects. 

In Japan, we signed a new distribution agreement with our partner Weatherly, a thought leader in sleep in Japan for more than 12 years. The cooperation started off with a nice morning run in Yokohama and a visit to the National Sleep show, organized for the 1st time ever in Japan. 

For our market rollout, we decided to start running a crowdfunding campaign mainly to get some market feedback prior to a full-our retail launch in Q4.

We urgently needed more photos of men sleeping with the robot, so Julian and I spontaneously shot some photos and now feature in this crowdfunding campaign. Turned out quite alright, don’t you think?

Visit to New York

Two weeks after my Japan visit, I flew to New York. In the Big Apple, I was welcomed in a very nice way at Quantum’s HQ, our partner for Amazon. It’s great to have launched with the biggest e-tailer in the world and working with a professional party like Quantum that really understands Amazon will be paramount to the success there. We celebrated the launch of Somnox on Amazon!

At B8ta, I had the pleasure to meet Josh, one of our Retail sales heroes, he has sold the most sleep robots amongst all B8ta store staff.

Sleep will Change the World

In downtown Manhattan, I visited one of the 25 Sleepnumber USA stores that launched the Somnox Sleep Robot and met with Sheila, the store manager. It was very inspiring to see the level of innovation at Sleepnumber as a listed company and I feel blessed about the opportunity to have worked with them.

Impact stories

At the end of the day it was impact that mattered. No international deal could beat an impact story from a customer. Reviews such as below were celebrated beyond above anything else.

I will now embark on a new entrepreneurial adventure (details will follow), but will spend 1/3rd of my life being remembered of Somnox with my own Sleep companion by my side at night. 

Because of the great time I had a Somnox, I can only very much recommend this amazing vacancy as Global Account Manager Retail. https://bit.ly/workatsomnox

BTW if you want to try one yourself, Somnox has a ‘no strings attached 30 nights trial period meetsomnox.com.

Grateful to have finally discovered Sleep as my new superpower.