by Jules Goldberg is the inventor based in London Wave of sleep, the smart motion-sensing alarm and sleep tracking app. A self-taught developer, Goldberg has created several pioneering apps, including SnoreLabwhich has been downloaded over 13 million times.
The individual in the context of the first boss who had a great impact on me in a professional environment? Well, without a doubt it was my wife Vanessa, who was a great inspiration to me on my journey through education into my first job.
I was lucky to be good at maths and physics early on but the UK education system quickly becomes narrow. I also studied economics at Cambridge and lost interest after my second week there and didn’t have that direction.
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My first few jobs saw me doing economic forecasting before I met my wife. Originally from Belgium, she studied two different degrees in two different languages and qualified as a lawyer in the UK through determination, focus and a sense of direction.
When we started a family I had the feeling that I wanted to do more. That came in 2011 when I was jabbed in my ribs at night and my wife told me I was snoring loudly.
I didn’t believe her and I wanted to find a tool to shed light on this; this was the early days of the App store and there were no solutions to be found back then.
I said we should take our savings and spend money on this concept. Vanessa said it was a great idea but I should buy a laptop first and encouraged me to learn and do it myself.
For the first time in my professional life I had vision, excitement and determination.
Over 10 months I built the first version of SnoreLab, including the interface and algorithm. To date, it has more than 13 million downloads and has helped people with their sleep, snoring and relationships.
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It was a great success, but it would never have happened without my wife and her as an example of what I could achieve with ambition. It made sense for her to focus on something new, exciting and the less trodden path that could have a positive impact on people.
We cannot see ourselves sleeping or snoring because we are unconscious for one third of our lives. The app shines a light into this darkness and I think it’s a powerful use of technology for what we can do by tapping into our phone’s hardware.
I didn’t understand leadership on this trip and it was hardly the classic high-tech startup CEO way. I had to go from being a one man band until it was hard for me to quit, to then let people help me, to developing a team and being the CEO.
It’s one of the great joys I’ve had with people with no tech background who learned new skills at an app company, as well as many self-taught developers.
It wasn’t too long ago when I was still answering SnoreLab support questions. It was liberating when I took on employees to work on general user base management and development, which allowed me to work on the cutting-edge technology that underpins Sleepwave.
It is actually a vessel for our new technology, a contactless movement using inaudible sound waves. It uses the speaker in microphone and detects breathing movement near a phone and is very accurate.
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The project addresses the big problem of how people wake up in the morning, and many of them are doing so with set time alarms. What our motion detection technology can do is pick an ideal moment to wake you up, for example when your body moves and you are naturally more awake.
Our survey showed that 73% of people who woke up feeling tired more than half the week. In addition, 91% who used Sleepwave reported an improvement in how they woke up.
It is still in an earlier stage than SnoreLab. We are currently expanding and our retention and user retention is increasing, as is the younger demographic. With Sleepwave, there are now over 100,000 active users and the growth trajectory is amazing.
We are completely bootstrapped, with no outside investors and my wife and I as shareholders. My time is not spent making pitch decks; it’s focused on the product, the technology and all our money comes from users.
This helps give us a clear vision that we are meant to create great products that people love while being a sustainable and profitable business.
Watch: 2 out of 3 consider themselves to be restless sleepers
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