As we meet with investors for our seed round of financing, I thought it might be helpful to other founders raising a seed round in the future to understand how we approached specific questions, where we may have a unique angle. Where we have sometimes answered an investor's question poorly, I'll also use this blog series to update what I perhaps should have said. This resource may also be helpful for investors looking to get to know us better. I don't expect the average investor to take the time to read these posts, but we aren't looking for average ;)

For context, SoundMind is improving Sleep Performance with our headband that monitors your sleep state and uses auditory stimulation (sound) to increase the efficiency of deep sleep.

Questions we hear from investors sometimes revolve around the ideas of “are people really going to do this?”, “can you make this an app?”, “do they have to wear it on their head? Why not their wrist?” or the like. Examining these questions closer, they are really asking “is this too strange for people to accept?”.

Are people really going to do this? Sleep with this strange thing on their head? People don’t want to be seen as strange.  

This question came from a very experienced investor who has led business with massive consumer adoption and more than $700m in revenue.

The investor made a very good point when he mentioned that diabetics have difficulty adjusting their diets, and that is a life and death situation. How far will people go? How will we know?

MAYA - Most Advanced Yet Acceptable

Industrial designer Raymond Loewy came up with the concept of MAYA – most advanced yet acceptable. MAYA says you can’t jump too far ahead on a time scale or you scare off customers. People need a context to understand what the thing is. They want want to be surprised by the new, but they need familiarity. Derek Thompson does a great job of explaining this concept in his TedTalk

In our specific space, start-up Dreem, and Philip with their SmartSleep headband have failed to capture market acceptance. We believe there are many reasons for this, but what cannot be ignored is the visual language of the design. Every review starts along the lines of “if you don’t mind the looks of the thing, it’s great”.

When looking at sleep, we cannot only consider how it makes us feel. A board advisor at ResMed (CPAP company) told us that the biggest complaint about adherence is from the wearer's partner. This is a life-saving device, but nobody wants to wake up next to somebody who looks broken or ill.

In early discussions with designers, we talked about how we can take something familiar, and imbibe it with magic. We used the example of superheroes and their common tools. WonderWoman with her lasso, and Thor with his hammer. Though common, they are not “everyday”. Familiar, but unique.

Villains by comparison have complicated and unfamiliar tools. Dr Octopus from Spiderman is the perfect example of this, unwieldy and complex. Ok, it isn’t common for a man to be half spider, but aside from his suit, Spiderman's superpower itself is easily understood.

We’re excited to reveal our design, but we are currently in the patent process, so that will have to wait until later.

Fringe to Mainstream

There was a time when computers were strange. This weird device that you’d have in your house, why? What would you do with it? It’s even harder to imagine a time when running or lifting weights, and going to the gym was considered “fringe”. More recently, AirBnB is somewhat famous for investors walking out of meetings, and suggesting nobody would ever rent another person's couch.

Investors we’ve met with have suggested we can directly serve a huge market because sleep is so important and such a huge problem. We disagree with this approach.

Everything starts at the fringe, even when you’re dealing with as massive a problem as sleep! We can’t ignore Clayton Christianson’s Crossing the Chasm, just because we are dealing with a large market and acute issue.

Our market approach deserves a whole blog post, but we are clear in how we will target our early users. Suffice it to say, you need to explain why this group will accept a fringe idea. How will you find the innovators and early adopters?

User Identity

I’ll write further in the future about how we approach marketing and target user groups, but this is also a key to moving beyond the “strangeness factor”. Our goal is to speak directly to the identity of the user, and to have that identity drive acceptance.

As an example, if you suggested to your average white, middle aged man that when he meets his friends for a coffee on a Saturday morning, he should dress head to toe in spandex, he’d say you’re crazy! But if that same man is a cyclist, it would be unheard of not to wear spandex. Though cyclists will give all kinds of reasons for wearing spandex (and I’m a cyclist, pedalpete is my handle on most platforms including LinkedIn), the real reason they are doing it is because it is part of the identity of a cyclist.

The holy grail for any company is that their product is accepted as part of the identity of their users. That overcomes any issues related to strangeness.