Sweet Dreams: Matt Hassett on Loftie, the Wellness Industry, & Entrepreneurship
Today I am joined by Matthew Hasset, the CEO & Founder of the sleep company Loftie. With technology being an unescapable part of everyday life, sleeping habits are getting significantly worse, so Loftie combats this by creating a sleep ecosystem of both products and educational sleep and wellness content designed to help us rest, relax, and recharge.
Episode Transcript
Lauren Stenger: Thank you so much for meeting with me here today, virtually. It's really an honor to be able to talk to you all about you and this awesome company you've created Loftie. Your company Loftie has had a very successful year, being in the Times Best Inventions of 2023.
What made you want to start Loftie?
Matthew Hassett: Well, thank you so much for having me on the show, Lauren. It's a pleasure to be here, and I really admire what you're doing with your show and at such a young age. And I'm very impressed. As for why I started Loftie, I was noticing that a lot of my friends were doing sort of hacky things to spend less time on their phone. They were deleting Instagram for the weekend, putting it back on Monday, or they were getting off of Facebook entirely. This was actually in 2017, way back when I first had the idea for some company like this. And it was before Apple introduced screen time to tell us how much we are on our phones. And it was early days to realizing that we were probably overdoing it on social media and on our smartphones. So I realized there was some need there to do that in a better way and in a designed way, rather than these kinds of hacky ways. And so that's where it all started.
Lauren Stenger: Everyone has their own personal relationship with sleep, whether you're a night owl or early riser, whether it's really easy for you to sleep or really difficult.
What is your relationship with your own sleep, and how has that changed with the development of Loftie?
Matthew Hassett: I always thought I'd slept fairly well, although now I'm a little more tuned in to how to optimize my sleep now that I've read so much about it. The basics of good sleep are pretty straightforward, and they're very intuitive. So it can feel obvious when you hear about things like it should be cold, dark and quiet. But actually, doing those things day in and day out is does take a little bit of commitment, especially if you're traveling or in a new place. Having a sleep company has really helped me understand the relationship of sleep to the other parts of my life. I think a lot of people, when they think about wellness, they think about diet and exercise and the physical body. If you're dieting and exercising great, it won't really stick unless you have great sleep. If you're not getting the right sleep, you'll get hungry at the wrong times, you'll get hungry for the wrong foods, and you won't build up muscle as quickly and you're more prone to injuries when you're under slept. So we think of it as the foundational core of wellness and are trying to raise it up to its peers of fitness and nutrition.
Could you talk a little bit more about the science behind how technology interrupts our circadian rhythm and our natural rhythm of sleep?
Matthew Hassett: Totally. So the thing that we all hear about a lot is blue light. Blue light is sort of the opposite of what we need to go to sleep. We really want red spectrum light and the evolutionary biology angle to that is that type of light that would be towards the end of the day, signaling to our pineal glands and our brains that release the hormone melatonin that it's time to go to sleep. If we're instead bombarding our brain with blue light, the opposite, we’re basically saying to wake up. It's contrary to the relatively stable cycle of almost 24 hours that our brains are used to. And that really gets cued by light. So if you're left alone in a cave, and people have actually done this and they put themselves voluntarily in pitch black caves to test this to see how well your clock stays on track, and it gets a little off when you're not getting light cues. The light is really important to stay on that track. It really controls the release of the hormones that tell us either to wake up or to come down or go to sleep. If we’re living our modern lives and keeping the lights on, especially bright fluorescent lights, we're really altering what our brains are used to and what they're expecting, so we can throw off our circadian rhythm and mess up our sleep. It's not only that; the quality of the sleep is also impacted, and you're more likely to wake up. Therefore, you don't get as deep sleep, and you're not able to move into some of the later stages of sleep.
How does Loftie help to get us back to the right track of natural sleep?
Matthew Hassett: When I first started out, I was reading this really great book that I recommend called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, who's a sleep scientist. I believe he's now at Berkeley. He has an appendix at the back that has his top 10 tips for getting better sleep. And the first one is be consistent in your wake and sleep schedule. It's not just about how many hours of sleep you get, but also keeping those consistent. So to that end, he says, “Why not set an alarm for bedtime?”. I can't even remember now if he says that, but I think he says, set an alarm for bedtime. And that really resonated with me. So I thought, “Okay, that's a great feature for Loftie, let's have an equally important bedtime alarm, not just a morning alarm”. So we have a bed signal that shines a little nightlight on the clock and plays a lullaby when it's bedtime so that perhaps if you hear it from the other room or see it, if you're in the same room, you say, maybe I won't let Netflix autoplay the sixth episode of the show I'm watching, I'll actually go to bed. All of our design is meant to provide contextual clues to create better behaviors. Everything we create at Loftie is meant to help you make better choices. We think of our products as investments in reminding you to do the right thing at the right time. The bed signals is an example where you've chosen to by the Loftie clock, you set this reminder for bedtime, and then hopefully when you're actually living your life, it reminds you that you've made this choice that I'm going to take better care of myself and I'm going to follow this thing I set for myself. Rather than rely on willpower, which is very fleeting and hard to summon, let's rely on products and behaviors and try to create better habits that we can stick to.
Along the lines of creating structured and consistent routines in your life, has Loftie helped you to create your own structured morning and night routines?
Matthew Hassett: So I remember speaking to the founder of Hinge several years ago and hearing about his morning routine, which is truly wild to me because I just can't imagine such a calm start to the day. He wakes up at four something and then meditates for an hour. I can't remember, but it was it was involved. I really respect that, but I am quite the opposite. I think I'm more of a night owl. And so I'm working later, and I do not meditate every day. I can't say I have the best optimized routine. I put way more thought into everyone else's routines, and I work pretty much around the clock to keep this company going. It's sort of a strange irony of being a wellness entrepreneur. If you really want your company to last, you have to work a little longer than you would really want to based on what you know about wellness. So that's a tough one for me. I've struggled with that this year, especially because in March, I all of a sudden fainted and passed out and fell on the floor. I ended up in the hospital; it was a pretty traumatic experience. That was definitely a wake up call to take better care of myself. On that particular day I had just kind of pushed through. I didn't really have enough to eat, I had too much caffeine, I hadn't slept enough, I should have stayed in bed longer, but I didn't. There's a maybe some weird hero complex of startup founders that you think you have to just keep going. My lesson learned from that is that I don't, and that the company will really fail if you're dead. First point is to be alive. I've been taking better care of myself since then. I've been going to the gym more, and I've been getting better sleep. But yeah, having a startup, especially when without big venture capital funding is very hard. And for a long time, it really just depends whether you decide to keep on going pretty much on a weekly basis. I think most early-stage companies probably fail because the founder gives up. I mean, there's also the fact is that a good idea or not, but so much of it is like, do you just keep on slogging through it?
Similarly, what is a piece of advice you would give to a young entrepreneur or someone who's wanting to start their own company?
Mathew Hassett: I think the number one thing is that most people are going to think you're wrong, or that you're not going to get to where you're going. I mean, there will be 1000 reasons why they think you don't have a good idea or why you're not capable of doing it. And I think you just have to believe in yourself. It sounds so corny. But there's no way I would be where I am with out that. I've talked to thousands of people at this point, I've talked to probably 100 investors, and at every stage, someone always says, “Well, I don't think it'll work because of this”. Those people aren't entrepreneurs. They are critics, and they are maybe investors or they’re consultants, they've always worked for something that's already established. I don't think a real entrepreneur will come at you that way. I think they would be helpful; they'll be realistic because they're not naive. Entrepreneurs want to help other people succeed. We like seeing people who spot problems and want to fix them. Because I think the entrepreneurial mindset is just approaching the world and saying, “Why would you ever do something this way?”. For example, yesterday, I was in the CVS in Chicago because I had to get some allergy medicine, and I had to wait five minutes for someone to come and unlock the case. And it's just mind boggling to me that there wouldn't be another solution to this, that these companies with so much money would design such an inelegant solution that is doing more than any Amazon ad ever could to drive people to Amazon and out of those physical stores. Entrepreneurs just constantly see those things every day and think this can be better. There'll be lots of people who, you know, with that example, they'll say, “Oh, these companies are too big, and they won't change”. It's all just kind of noise in the signal. It is good to talk to all these people, and a lot of them will have very helpful feedback. You just have to persevere through all of that.
Lauren Stenger: That's really good advice. Loftie has a pretty distinctive aesthetic I would say. It seems like you guys put a lot of focus into the marketing and the aesthetic of the website.
How does creativity play a role in creating a product?
Matthew Hassett: So I was very lucky to work at the design firm. IDEO, which is a global design firm. It started out at Palo Alto but has offices in many places. I was an entrepreneur in residence at the New York office for a couple of summers. Before that I was an IDEO client. Basically, that company changed my way of thinking about the world and introduced me to this amazing network of people. About a dozen alumni of IDEO have worked on Loftie at this point. I basically made all these connections to the IDEO in New York office, and I've recruited them slowly to work on various projects. It's just a great way of thinking that they really embody. Their way of thinking 's kind of the opposite of what I was saying you would meet. If you had a good idea, IDEO folks would totally want to encourage you and help you run with it and make it more fun, more exciting, and more attractive. I think one of the ways they do that kind of at the core of their thinking is a customer centric and an user centric way of thinking, sometimes referred to as human centered design. Big companies tend to create products and services in a vacuum, and what actually is the experience of the customer is almost an afterthought. IDEO flips that around and says, let's start by talking to the customer, understanding what they're actually experiencing, just living a day in their lives, really understanding exactly what they're dealing with. Don't come up with any preconceptions of what this thing should be like. You come in thinking it's going to be a car, then it becomes a car. But if you come in thinking that this person needs a mobility solution, then it's maybe something totally different. Specifically, with the clocks design, that was the first chance to really define our aesthetic. We work with an amazing industrial designer named Greg Wallace, who had trained at Boeing and the WL Gore company.
I met him just after he'd left IDEO. He'd worked on SimpliSafe, the alarm company, he worked on PillPack, which got bought by Amazon. He was amazing and taught me so much about product design and product development. We went around to individual homes around New York and met with people to see how they wind down and how they wake up. We learned all about their blinds, their alarm clocks, everything that they used related to sleep we observed and asked them about. That all informed the design of the product, so we weren't just coming up with what we thought would be good, we are coming up with a whole blend of customers together to say this is something that could really solve a lot of issues for a lot of people. And then in terms of the brand of the company, I was really lucky I hired someone who has had just been promoted. She's a now a freelancer, but she was at a major design company at the time, and she did this as sort of a side project just for fun. She did an amazing job and created a enduring brand that has really kept us in good stead. I'm very proud of the aesthetic, and sometimes we have to push back on the need. It's such a beautiful brand that sometimes it can be hard to market because people tend to like less polished content. I've actually pushed our team right now to do more UGC, user generated content, that's a little more rough around the edges and a little more natural. But left to their own devices, our design team will make everything just incredibly beautiful. And that’s the skill of our creative director whose background is at Christie's and Ralph Lauren, and IDEO. So I mean, that is the nature of how we do things. It's sometimes at odds with what you need as a startup, growing your brand on the internet, but I wouldn't want to have an ugly brand. So I won't complain.
Lauren Stenger: It totally creates a visceral, inner feeling for the customer. You really get drawn in. So additionally, and kind of a different topic, before Loftie you were working more in the housing industry. Could you talk a little bit about that and what it was like switching from that to more of the wellness industry?
What was it like for you to switch from the housing industry to the wellness industry?
Matthew Hassett: I basically spent my 20s doing something completely different, which I recommend to an extent, although I would say my own advice would probably be never stay at a job for more than four years. I think I stayed at one a little over five years, and I do regret the last year even though I accomplished a lot. But yeah, I used to work in affordable housing. It sounds very different, but I used a lot of the same skills that I use now because I was in the communications and policy side. My goal was to use information and numbers and maps and design to convince people of to care about problems. We were combating the aftermath of the mortgage crisis when so many working class and middle class homeowners were fighting to keep their homes which had been sold to them at an inflated price by a system that everyone acknowledges was totally broken. I learned so much. It's fun, as a young grad, because you can go a lot further in industries that are a little less the well-trod path. So it was actually great for me to be working in New York City government because they really wanted smart driven young people to take on something. Without going into a long tirade about the civil service, there's a lot of people who are pretty checked out in New York City government. So you can go pretty far as a young person in the government if you really put in the work and really want to learn. I had that opportunity, had a great boss, and was able to learn a lot about finance, about housing, communications, lending, and much more. That was really fun. It eventually, at least for me, I reached a point where I felt like I had made as much difference as I could at my kind of career level. I think if I wanted to make more difference, I would have to be a senior senior government official, and even then it would be a Sisyphean task. Anyone that is in the political world for the right reasons and pushing the boulder up the hill, I commend because it is extremely dispiriting. Tere's just a constant push from the opposite side of big business and government that is looking out for the wrong interests. It's very challenging. I commend anyone who is sticking with it. I definitely got my fair share of that and decided that the next thing I did, I really wanted it to be something that I really had a lot more control over. Because I think one of the problems with working in government is that you can think something's an amazing idea, and you can spend tons of time on it. But then some politician decides to prioritize something else, and then it gets scrapped. Or, in my case, for instance, the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, decided to basically take all the money that the Attorney General had gotten to help people with the mortgage crisis. And he just took that over the weekend, and in a weird budget move that was later dramatized in the series Billions, which was fun. But yeah, I mean, it's a weird transition, right? There's not a lot of people who go from that to direct to consumer, but I really wanted to do something that I could fully control.
Lauren Stenger: It's really interesting to see different career paths. I'm a sophomore in college, so it's nice to see different paths you can take and different outcomes.
Where would you like to see Loftie in the next few years? Where do you want to see your company go?
Matthew Hassett: That's a great question. There are so many things I want to do. I was just doing a 2024 prioritization with our CTO this morning, and we have enough projects that we could go through 2025 with all that we want to do. I am going to try to fundraise slightly in the new year, and try to increase the size of our team in order to take on more of these things, because I think there's just a huge opportunity in the sleep space, and also the audio content space. We're a sleep company, but then we've also gotten pretty into generative AI content. Not just because we think it would be cool to show on a fundraising deck which I think a lot of people are fairly into it. We have a product called Storymaker which is part of our Lofite+ offering. People can put in a few details, and we'll create a personalized bedtime story that's narrated out with music, and it's sent to your app and your Lofite clock if you have one. Those are really fun. We just launched it a few months ago, and we've already made about 12,000 of these stories. I think it's great for kids, especially being able to hear your name in the story, your friend's name, your teddy bears name, your dog's name, or your parents name, and have it really be about you and the things you care about. It makes it so much more engaging. So I think there's a ton more we'll do there. We've also got a couple more products we want to roll out. Ideally, by the end of 2024 for a second version of the clock with a voice assistant, a privacy first assistant, a kid's version of the clock with a lot more bright colors and button lights and just a more child-friendly vibe. Ours is much more you know, the clock that's in the MoMA and Goop. It's elegant and minimalist. So those are some of the things. We have more than I could possibly get through, but we'll give it a shot.
Lauren Stenger: Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking some time out of your really busy day to meet with me. I really appreciate it. It was great to hear all about you and your company. I just think what you're doing is really amazing, and I'm excited to see where Loftie will go in the future. So thank you so much.
Matthew Hassett: Thank you, Lauren. I can't tell you how heartening it is to hear from someone in college just excited about what we're building and so supportive. It's just very kind, so I'm really glad you reached out to me.
Lauren Stenger: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it!
