Rockwell Shah:
Hey there, Fabian to good be here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Good to have both of you. So you are the co-founder and the CEO respectively of Ozlo SleepBud, which in a nutshell are comfortable earbuds designed to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep before we jump into all the details of your product and brand. And we will do that a lot today. You recently wrapped up an Indiegogo campaign and are now shipping products that everyone from Fast Co to TechCrunch is writing about. But did I see this correctly last night that you received over five and a half million dollars from 21,000 plus backers? I mean, that’s amazing. Did this surpass your own expectations or were you ready for that?

Rockwell Shah:
I mean, I think the traction that we have seen has basically surprised everyone. For folks that have used the SleepBud before and in prior versions, they kind of know that there’s this hidden market where people really want AirPods for sleep and they just don’t exist. And so I think for those that have been longtime believers, it’s not as surprising, but I think especially for Indiegogo as a platform, they were basically shocked.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that’s awesome. Well, no better way to enter the market by shocking the platform that does that for a living. That’s pretty amazing.

N.B. Patil:
Also, Fabian, actually, we are the number one in the Demand Indigogo campaign all time. Oh wow. Because of that number that we just, yes. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing.

N.B. Patil:
Yes.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well early congratulations, but now how did you get here? Tell us a little bit about the days where you were at Bose and where you met and how did you form the company? Tell us a little bit of the history.

N.B. Patil:
Yeah, so I spent more than 25 years in automotive and consumer electronics and most of my time I spent at Bose where I was developing hardware, software and experiences across the entire post product lines, from headphones to speakers to soundbars all the product lines. And when we found out that post is actually discontinuing the sleep business because of strategic reasons, myself and other co-founders at Bose, we absolutely love this product. What it did actually, the generation one and generation two, what it did to the customers. And we saw an opportunity where we could take this IP and relaunch it under our own brand and then continue to make this product even better over time. That’s basically kind of how it started. And while we were still at Bose, we started, the company made an offer to buy the ip. Eventually after a lot of negotiation, we actually got the IP at the same time Fabian we wanted to make sure that we just don’t go with what we have and then launch it as it is. We wanted to understand exactly how the customers are using the current product, what are the feedback that they’re actually giving to us, and see what best we can do under our own brand. So we studied all the feedback on Amazon Best Buy, every channel that we could see and understood exactly how this product is being used today. And we tried to do the best of both where the current product that launched was very comfortable, secure, and people love wearing throughout the whole entire night, and we wanted to keep that goodness. So we kept the industrial design and the form factor of the sleepers too. Then we go into redesigning the internal software, both electronics and format and the app where customers were asking to, they want to listen to their own content, they want to understand how well they slept overnight and some additional feedback they had. So we combine the best of what the current product had out the customer, and we all put all of them together. That’s what gave birth to Ozlo.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. I love the whole IP play behind all of this. Keeping the name Sleep Buds, you felt like it had such a good legacy and you enjoyed the product, so it made sense to just keep it, but change the company name obviously, because you are a startup. How did you guys come up with the Ozlo name? How did it come about? What is the meaning behind it? I’ve been thinking about it and I have all kinds of ideas, but I’d rather hear it from you.

N.B. Patil:
No, I can tell you it took a long time. So one of the things that we could choose the road of actually just launching sleep buds as it is, but as founding team, we always wanted to build a brand and then launch SleepBuds as a flagship product. And when we started going that journey and we were looking for anything synonymous with sleep and wellbeing, but every name that we could come up with that actually was taken by somebody. And finally, after 500 plus names that we went through, we narrowed down to Ozlo, one of the recommendations from the agency, OSLO, the capital of Norway. And then we said instead of the S, if we replace that with the Z, because Z is with the sleep that actually we can create a brand around it. And then we always wanted a simple, something that you can pronounce, we can easily print it on the hardware. I think you were talking about the hardware. We looked at all the different ways the logo will be used and we ended up with Ozlo and we are actually very proud actually that we picked that one. It’s really catchy brand name and also how we could use that moving forward as a brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s interesting because when you read it, it basically means “Oh slow” too, which is slow when you’re slowly coming to an end of your day and you’re starting your sleep one, I’m like, maybe that’s it, right? Maybe the four letters.

N.B. Patil:
That’s a good one.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
We add that to the strategy. Yeah, that has always been the strategy always from day one. Yeah. And so Ozlo, the actual

Rockwell Shah:
Strong dad joke, energy,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh yeah, thank you, thank you. It changed over the years and I don’t know why, but yeah, that’s what happens. But Oslo, the actual city is still any relation to it or does it just sound good?

N.B. Patil:
There is no relation. We wanted to go after a unique name and something that actually we wanted to build a brand around and somehow it resonated well with us. And one of the things we also liked it is, as you can see, the Ozlo name also has a logo embedded in it, and that actually makes the whole branding much more simple in the long run and a lot of details, a lot of things actually went into and finally agreeing to that,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Actually

Rockwell Shah:
One of our big partners is Norwegian, and when we picked the name Ozlo, they came to us and they said they were so honored that we

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Would

N.B. Patil:
Actually,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s the real story. It’s only for them, right? Well, I mean you might have to have a headquarter in Oslo at some point. You owe it to the name. It’s interesting, the logo type, and I know I’m not talking to professional designers here, but you are the ones who signed off on it and you enjoy it and you put it on the product. It’s a really intelligent, easy to read, easy to remember logo with the idea of the sleep cycle from one end to the other. It’s very easy to understand for everyone, not the sun setting, the sun coming up. It is very smart on many levels. How does that logo with these thin lines work on the actual hardware? Because we talked about how hard it is to print on hardware or to engrave or to do whatever. Did you guys run into problems or are you using only the O as its own main identity piece?

N.B. Patil:
We use actually the entire logo as we have right now. And Fabian, I think you just it, right? It was not easy to actually laser etch that on a cover and then make sure that there is no gaps and they don’t peel off from the hardware. It took solid three to four weeks for us to figure it out in a way where we are satisfied with the result,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But it’s well worth it. Right. You got to work harder on having something that looks very unique.

N.B. Patil:
Absolutely. We didn’t want to compromise on their logo on our flagship product.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And along the journey, you decided not to acquire the domain ozlo.com, huh? Was it not worth it or do you just not believe that it’s important to have a.com at this point?

Rockwell Shah:
So who do you think take a while. Guess who owns the domain? ozlo.com?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I mean, it could be a city somewhere in Northern Europe. I don’t know.

Rockwell Shah:
It’s meta. Oh,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’ve heard of them.

Rockwell Shah:
Yes. So Facebook’s parent company Meta, they bought a company a while back that was named Ozlo and they’re sitting on the domain. So if anyone is at Facebook listening to this or at Meta and is interested in helping a startup out, give us a call.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. That’s a perfect call to action here today. And I have a feeling that might be some people from mate a listening. I’m not sure if they’re the ones who can actually push the envelope on this, but yeah, it’s interesting. I heard it from a few guests and clients that meta a owned their domain. I think they must sit on a good, wealthy, wealthy portfolio there of domain names and startups. I’ll

Rockwell Shah:
Say for the next podcast we do, there’s a story behind acquiring sleepbud.com, so we didn’t own sleepbuds.com until this year, and there’s a very interesting story behind itI

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It. Oh, don’t you wait for the next podcast.

Rockwell Shah:
You

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Pitched this out right now. You tell us now. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah,

Rockwell Shah:
Go ahead. Oh, no, no, no. I’m keeping this one a secret until we meet again.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think it’s a fantastic story. I did not even know that you owned that domain name.

Rockwell Shah:
Yes. So if you go to sleepbud.com, you’ll see that it forwards to Ozlosleep, and we have some interesting plans for it over time.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Alright, well you’re keeping that a secret. It’s interesting because you are not only selling a dream literally as in the ability to sleep, but you are also literally selling a dream because people are buying without having any reviews. I mean now they do since a couple days or weeks, but it’s always posing a very unusual challenge for a startup to have a big coming out party and making sure people start buying the product before the product even exists. How did you approach telling that story and creating trust and what worked well for you? Besides the very obvious, which is the Bose background and connection, which of course helped tremendously, but what did you learn about telling that story?

Rockwell Shah:
N.B., why don’t you take that one? Yeah,

N.B. Patil:
I think as you said, Ian, actually the history of this product actually helped a little bit because of the generation one and generation two of Sleep buds, how it helped the customers. And then in addition to that, as I mentioned earlier, we actually listened to the customers what they wanted in the next generation product. They wanted streaming, they wanted sensing, they wanted the product to do more than what the previous generation did. And when we combined all of that and said with our background at Bose history of developing these type of products for many, many decades, IP from Bose, all the goodness that we are keeping what we are inheriting from the IP plus adding the feature set that customers are looking for, it’s a perfect recipe from all sort of combination. That’s why people, when they saw us in Kickstarter, they could trust us without even before we actually shipped the product to the customer. So a lot of things actually helped us to get to where we were at the time.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. Anything to add from your end? Rocky

Rockwell Shah:
No N.B. gave a great answer.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Okay, perfect. Yeah, no, I think mean obviously the entire idea of working with an existing product and relaunching it under a new brand, it’s just so fascinating because you get the good and the bad, but for Indiegogo to be so successful, that must’ve been a huge piece of it, but I do not want to belittle what you have done as a team, not only from the product perspective, which is obviously doing the research, listening to customers and perfecting the product, or at least getting it to a place where it has so many more features than it had before. But also from a marketing perspective, I mean looking at the video on your homepage, and I would invite all of our listeners to do that. It is very fun. I mean I know that Rocky, you gave me a hard time for that jokes, but I mean it has a certain kind of humor, so I’m sure that that was really well received as well by your audience, right?

Rockwell Shah:
Yeah, the initial launch video did extremely well and our follow-on videos are doing really well too. One of the biggest ones is the Valentine’s Day video, so if you haven’t seen that, definitely go on YouTube, type in Ozlo, Valentine’s and it’s a fun ride.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
We have to check that out. And so that idea of using video, the video format to tell these stories, was it logical because of sound and sleep and it just made sense or how were some of these decisions made of how you want to roll this out and tell the story?

Rockwell Shah:
I think when you look at a company’s behavior, if you just look under the hood and you see the people behind the company, you’ll oftentimes see the truth of why they’re doing what they’re doing. And for us, we have an incredible world-class team of not only people that are experts in engineering and manufacturing and products, but we also have an incredible marketing team. And when you look at the DNA of where our marketing team came from, there are very heavy impressions in another very successful consumer brand called Purple, specifically Purple Mattress. And if you look at how Purple went from a zero to a billion dollar exit in less than 24 months, a lot of that was driven off of their ability to launch really compelling videos in performance marketing. And that combination of storytelling through video combined with paid advertising was just really powerful for them and it’s been honestly very powerful for us too. And so our head of marketing BG is from purple. He was the head of marketing at Purple. He took them from a couple million in revenue to over $300 million in revenue in-House. We have a creative director who was also at Purple, and so the two of them together are this phenomenal tag team of creating compelling content and advertising that and broadcasting it to the world.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is amazing insight and suddenly there’s no more question why the Ozlo website is purple. No,
That is really great to be able to tap into resources that have been able to tell a compelling story like that in a consumer product that can spread really, really wide like mattresses or the idea of selling sleep. Really fantastic insight. Something that I was intrigued, intrigued with is you have very strong founder story with Bose and the team, but then you have Dr. Meredith on Instagram and she’s an expert when it comes to sleep. I’m sure there’s a word for the science of sleep, but she’s that expert. In the beginning when I saw it, I thought that she’s the founder when I looked through Instagram, so

Rockwell Shah:
I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to hear that would be absolutely thrilled to hear that

Fabian Geyrhalter:
She’s going to ask for co-founder status after this podcast airs. But is having someone else then the founders as the face of the brand, at least in this channel, is it challenging because of this or for other reasons or was it a really good choice for you because you do want to have that kind of that angle and that side of the story where it actually becomes scientific?

Rockwell Shah:
No, I mean look, I think most brands, you don’t know who the founder is. If I ask you who the founder of Red Bull is, most people will not know. If I ask you who’s the current CEO of Sony, you have no idea. If I ask you who’s the current CEO of Nintendo? No idea. These are brands that are really powerful that make waves in the world and you don’t necessarily know who their founders or their CEOs are, right? So I would say it’s not the norm for the executive management team to be out there on social media broadcasting. I think what we have seen because of more recent times and more high profile founders, founders like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos where they dominate headlines and they dominate your LinkedIn and your Instagram and your Facebook, we get brainwashed to believing that’s the norm, but in reality, it’s not the norm. It’s very abnormal that a founder or a CEO is the right person to be the spokesperson for the brand or out there on social media.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is really interesting and something we can discuss most probably into the evening hours because most probably, and we won’t, don’t worry you have a company to run. But yeah, it’s most probably half of the founders that I have on the show are very much the face of their company and I think it’s very consumer products, very much like retail, young startups where in the beginning they just have to kind of do that because they don’t have the funding and they just step in because they feel like they’re the best ones to tell the story. So I have a feeling it, on the one hand, it happens organically and I think on the other hand it also happens because it’s a lot of younger founders that are already so social media driven that they just jump into it.

Rockwell Shah:
Yeah, but I have to because what oftentimes people see is they want to go start a business and they’re like, oh, but I’m not extroverted. I can’t see myself on social media talking about my business all the time. Maybe that’s not for me. And it kills me because there are so many capable, incredible people who know they don’t want to be in front of the camera, but they can be incredible operators, incredible founders. They can lead and scale a business very successfully. It’s not part of the job requirement that you have to be out there as the number one spokesperson and salesperson. So that’s the lie that social media has told us. And for those people listening who it’s like they want to start a business but they feel so overwhelmed by that aspect, it’s like that is not actually part of the job.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that you say that. I absolutely love that you say that. Yeah. Did you want to add something to that?

N.B. Patil:
Also, one thing to add to what Rocky was saying, we also wanted to be authentic. Actually the advice about sleep and how sleep is important, why sleep is important, it’s better coming from the expert in the industry than coming from us who are actually not the doctors, sleep doctors. We know how to build the product, we know how to build an asleep ecosystem to help you, but it’s coming from the right source actually has more meaning. I think that’s one of the reason also we went with Dr. Meredith being this number

Rockwell Shah:
And N.B. how many patients did you see last week?

N.B. Patil:
No, that’s what I’m saying.

Rockwell Shah:
Zero. How many patients did I see last week? Zero. But Dr. Meredith is actually a practicing clinician, so she meets many patients on a weekly basis and helps them with their sleeping issues. And so she has that background and the context of like, Hey, this is actually what’s happening on the ground with people. These are the things that they’re actually struggling with and she can authentically talk about that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s a huge asset for you. I mean even just learning more about the science and to be able to integrate it into solutions, into tech solutions, it works both ways. Absolutely. We talked offline before about how hard hardware is, and that’s because I got my feet wet in the

Rockwell Shah:
Hardware’s four guy. This fourfold has stepped into hardware.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
My listeners already know of my suffering story, but you had a lot of advantages stepping in with this company based on your background, but it was still hard for you and you re-imagined the product I think in an extremely short period of time. That’s pretty unheard of. What were some of the unexpected hurdles? And I know most probably 4,000, but what were some of the unexpected hurdles that you faced or where you feel like they were either in hindsight really, really fun or funny to talk about or they were something where others can learn from or in hindsight they actually made you a better company?

N.B. Patil:
The one thing I want to say,

Rockwell Shah:
There’s so many. Go ahead, N.B., please. There’s so many. Well,

N.B. Patil:
We got to say Fabian is actually, we are incredibly lucky to have a team that we have on Ozlo right now. One thing I tell everyone, if I had a choice of a magic pen and a paper and I want to write down who should be on an engineering or the product team in Ozlo, I would not have written the names that I have right now. I want to set it out there with an incredible team. We have, even though we are very small, we are. Because of that, we are able to achieve so many things with such a short time. One thing that I learned along the way, which is I always work for big companies, I work for Bosch and I work for Bose many times. There are so many resources that’s available to you at your disposal. You don’t have that luxury in startup.

Anytime there is an issue, there is an expert for this, there is an expert for this. That’s one thing that I realized we had to do within the world of what we have access to. And if we need more, we can go and do a concerting and all that. That is one lesson that I want to share with everybody that sometimes we take it for granted working for big companies. All those resources are available to you when you need it, when you’re starting startup. We need to be flexible. You need to figure out how to use a resource that you have and still manage to make forward progress us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally. Absolutely.

N.B. Patil:
That’s one lesson. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely. Rocky. And you talk to my heart and soul here because I’m a one person bootstrapped startup, so it’s a little bit different. I look at you guys and I’m like, whoa, they have all the resources, but I totally get where you’re coming from. Rocky, anything to add? I mean, I know this could also be a long conversation, but anything that stood out in the

Rockwell Shah:
Journey? I mean, the joke that’s been told a million times is hardware isI hard and

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s no joke.

Rockwell Shah:
It takes longer, it costs more. It bleeds your heart and your soul. And so you basically have to look at yourself in the mirror if you want to do hardware and ask yourself, am I ready for this pain? Because you will go through a tremendous amount of pain to realize your dream. And on the other side of that are incredible things, but the road is very rocky. There’s lots of obstacles that you can’t even predict. There’s so many unknown unknowns that you need to have the time, the capital, the people to overcome those things. And for most of the time it’s just most hardware startups fail even at a bigger rate than traditional software startups.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, no, absolutely. A hundred a percent are in the world of data, any company that has to do with tech. Did you go against any of the customer data that you either already owned through two of the product back at Bose or did you receive any new customer data and you felt like, you know what? I hear you. I see the data. I know we should maybe act upon it, but we actually want to go the exact other way, or we want to introduce a new feature into the third iteration of the product that no one really is looking for, but we think people really need it. Did you ever do a data game where it was more like gut instinct versus the actual data?

N.B. Patil:
Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, we used the data from the previous product to understand the product market fit in terms of what we need to do in the generation. We didn’t stop there. We also looked at what else we could do proactively to close the loop with the sleep ecosystem. One thing, I’ll give you an example, Fabian, which nobody was expecting, we do the biometric sensing in the year. We can detect when you fall asleep and we can turn off the music or whatever you’re listening to and then switch to masking sounds. But at the same time, we are actually measuring your environment that you’re sleeping in. That’s the one that actually very few products or no product does on the market, but a better night’s sleep. You need a cold room, dark room and a quiet room. And while you’re sleeping, we are measuring all three of those in the room that you’re sleeping and the next morning when you wake up, we should be able to tell you whether your environment that you slept was perfect for you.

If not, what went wrong? Did you wake up because there was a siren went by at two o’clock in the morning? Did you wake up because three o’clock somebody turned on the light? That type of an insight is actually more useful to the customer and say, why I didn’t sleep the way I did the previous few days ago. Is it because of temperature? Is it because of the noise? Is it because the light in the room? So those are the things actually we wanted to make sure that we address, not just help you to sleep. Everything actually affects your sleep as a full package. And that’s where I think your leading question was. The data comes into the picture. We’re going to use all of this data to actually see how we can actually personalize the experience for the individual and continue to make the product better and the experience better. Our end goal is help people sleep better, so this data will be helpful to us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
N.B. That was really, really fascinating because it is such a huge feature and it feels so different from anything that’s out there, but yet most probably no one asked for it, but you just figured that no

N.B. Patil:
noone asked for it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
If you have that data and if you start understanding what actually disrupts a person’s sleep and they wake up and they know about and then they can adjust the temperature or tell the burglar not to come in at night or it’s like whatever disturb their sleep, you could do

Rockwell Shah:
That.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is really insightful. That’s very cool. Alright, I’m going to see whoever of the two of you wants to take the next one. Since this podcast is mainly about the idea of branding and creating brands and brand strategy and brand naming. Now that you have played the brand game in very different ways with different companies and now you just launched a product, you are in midst of it and it’s on top of your mind, branding, the word itself is so misunderstood. What does branding mean to you now? What does it actually mean to you?

Rockwell Shah:
Well, I think it’s terrible. It’s inhumane. There’s got to be a better way than what we do today, and that was a joke from my Montana born wife who literally grew up branding.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Tell me more. Let’s dive in.

Rockwell Shah:
Oh God no, but I mean very simply branding to me is alignment. So branding in its most pure sense. The question is are you on my team and how much are you on my team? And the more you can align the individual with the outcome that they’re looking to achieve with your product or service and the way that they’re getting there, the stronger that your brand is going to be. And so a very simple example, which I think it has popped up recently in the press is this whole Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney thing where the product didn’t fundamentally change. The drink was the same before and after the spokesperson came in and Dylan Mulvaney representing Bud Light all of a sudden gave people a completely different impression about the product and a completely different motivation of whether they wanted the product or not. And funny enough for some people, and this is why branding is so individual, for some people, Dylan Mulvaney was a great spokesperson for Bud Light and motivated them to go and get the drink for some people.

And arguably most people it didn’t. And so it was bad branding for them. And so the nuance conversation that folks tend not to have with branding is they don’t look at it at the individual level. They just globally label things as good and bad branding. But ultimately some people will feel that Coke is the best drink in the world and you couldn’t pay me to drink a Coke. It doesn’t matter how much branding you do around Coke, you’re not going to get me aligned with that product because it fundamentally just crosses some own internal ethos barriers. So I think branding for me is a fancy word for, it’s like how well are you aligned with this product or with this company or with this mission or what they’re trying to do? And if you as a company can deliver a product that achieves the outcome for the customer or the ideal customer in a way that resonates with them, then you’re moving towards being a stronger brand.
But if you fail at any one of those steps, you’ll weaken your brand. If you have a great product that delivers the outcome but not in a way that resonates with people, then you end up with the Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney situation. If you have a great product that doesn’t deliver the outcome, but it resonates with people, you get the category case where product isn’t very good, but the marketing is so good that they still dominate market anyways. And there’s been plenty of brands that have succeed. I don’t want to call them out specifically, but there’s been plenty of brands that have succeeded with very subpar products, but the brand associations that were so strong that it still motivated people to buy and use the product. And so I think these are kind of the components of brand to me, and the better that you do them, the stronger that your brand is and the worse that you do them, the weaker that your brand is. And ultimately it all summarizes to alignment.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Really, really well put. And I asked that question to every single one of my guests for the last, I don’t know, like 116, 117 episodes. And everyone says it in slightly different words, but no one said it like you said it, where it’s really, it’s black, it’s black and white. It’s like branding is alignment. That’s what it is, it’s alignment. I really love that because if the alignment, it’s with a car tire, it’s with a printer cartridge. If the alignment is ever so slightly off, you feel it. You drive in the car and suddenly the tires need to be aligned and you’re like, something’s off. I can’t tell what it is, but I’m not enjoying this. Or you print something and suddenly the ink doesn’t spread as well and you’re like something is off. And that idea that if it’s something that’s a little bit even off that you can feel it with a brand I think is really fascinating.

Rockwell Shah:
Well, it gets even deeper in that it’s funny how fast it turns, especially with consumer products. Imagine that you’re using a website every day and all of a sudden you go to the website and there’s errors everywhere on the page and you’re like, oh, I can’t log into this thing that I really need to access. And then you get so mad you’re like, why is this thing not working? And then you contact customer support, you’re like, what’s wrong with you people? What are you doing? Why doesn’t this thing work? And we see it so quickly happen, especially in the modern times that if you fail to deliver on the promise of your product, your customers can turn so quickly and it can be so damaging to your brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I think’s interesting. Oh, sorry, Rocky, it’s even more so, right? It’s not only the promise of your product, but now it’s also the promise of the brand or the perception of the promise that you instilled in some way. And some that’s what happened with Bud Light, right? Where it was that perception of the product that it had and the audience that clinked onto it and then suddenly that changed. Like you said, the product didn’t change. So we really looked at this from both angles, which I think is fascinating. Hence I’m in the business of branding because I think this is really interesting. And B, did you want to add anything? I know I heard you wanting to chime in.

N.B. Patil:
No, I think Lucky summarized very well. I think that focus of trying to be aligned with the customer also actually has actually drives a lot of decisions behind the scenes. Also, every time we make a product decision or experience decision, we always ask the question, is it in line with what we want to be as a brand? Is it centered around the people? Is it centered around what customers are talking about? So that’s how we actually start the brand and also continue to keep the brand and maintain the brand and grow the brand purely what TA was talking about. Make sure every decision we make is aligned with the customer on what they want and what we want to be at some point.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I love that. Yeah, it’s the only right way of doing it, but it’s not done by everyone all the time.

N.B. Patil:
So

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think the most difficult question that I always ask my guests as we slowly wrap up this episode is if you can take your still very young brand and you can take all of the components that N.B. you just talked about and Rocky you and I talked about from the brand perspective and you put all these components through a funnel and out comes one word or a phrase or two words that basically say, this is what our brand’s DNA is, this is what our brand is all about. In one or two words, have you given this some thought? Do you have some thoughts about what that would be for Ozlo?

Rockwell Shah:
I think the most obvious answer is sleep. Obviously anybody that’s listening to this podcast who has heard what this product is, the first word that’s going to come into their mind is sleep. And the challenge is that what our brand really is, is what happens when you get good sleep, when you get great sleep, when you get amazing sleep, when you actually wake up feeling refreshed every day. And so while we’re delivering sleep to you, the thing that you actually are getting from that is what you yearn for. So you yearn is like great sleep is awesome because of how you wake up feeling and how you show up the day after, right? You are a better parent, you are a better coworker, you are a better tennis player, pick whatever it is. Sleep affects every area of your life. So ultimately what you are hoping to achieve by getting great sleep is what Ozlo is trying to help you with, which is your wellbeing. And the answer that people will think is sleep, but the real answer is wellbeing.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I love that because it is sleep, but there’s some adjective before sleep and summing it up in wellbeing that is really, and having that be the DNA that actually runs through the entire company that that’s what you are in the business of creating is wellbeing. Wellbeing can be user interface. I mean it’s like how does something make you feel? How do you go through that? Do you feel good about that? It actually is much deeper than just the sleep, which I really enjoy. And N.B., any thoughts from your end or

N.B. Patil:
No? I think Rocky summarized very well.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Very, very good. Very good. Well, any brand advice for maybe for founders or for marketers as a takeaway that we haven’t talked about yet? Anything from your end to summarize?

Rockwell Shah:
Oh, I’m actually, I’m fascinated. What would be your advice?

N.B. Patil:
I think one advice that I would say is actually, but we have some advantage with the previous product, with us. One advantage that, one thing that I would advise is it’s easy to go off and create an individual product without creating a brand. First one advice that I have is spend time to figure out exactly not just the one product in front. Think about the generation of products, the ecosystem that you’re playing in, see whether you can create a brand around it and then launch the product after that because you cannot do the other way around after launching a product. If you start to build the brand, it’s actually much harder, much harder.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I am so glad you said this because a lot of product founders, they focus on the one product and that’s the brand and that’s just how it is. But having that, you have to have that foresight in order to have insight into branding. So you have to think about, okay, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, who knows, it might not even be your company anymore. It doesn’t even matter what changes with technology matter, but what’s the vision matter? Yeah, no, I totally agree.

N.B. Patil:
Because the brand thinking actually Fabian will help you define the product and the experience you’re going to launch as the first product. But once you launch a product and then you define the brand, it’s very difficult to undo what you did. So people think that it’s a lot of work, but if you align those things properly, it’s actually’s going to help you in your favor, not the other way around. So that’s the one advice I want to give you, give to the listeners.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s really deep advice because it runs as deep as what is the name of the company? Why doesn’t it have three z’s in it for sleep? Right? Well, because maybe it’s not sleep, maybe it’s wellbeing and maybe you can expand or at least not limit yourself to something because who knows what the future brings. A lot of that is really equipping yourself to be open as a brand and building a brand and not just a product. So there are a lot of things that you mentioned. Absolutely. Anything to add from your end, Rocky?

Rockwell Shah:
Yeah, I mean, when you analyze why startups fail, over 75% of startups fail because they build something that nobody wants. I mean, if you sum up all the human hours and months and years of time that has been spent building things that nobody cares about, it’s actually staggering. It’s almost unbelievable. And I meet so many founders where they focus on building a product and then they go looking to sell it to someone and they’re like, wait, why can’t I find anybody to sell it to? What’s wrong? And the, there’s many pieces of advice there that are important in that process, but for the sake of branding, what I would say is tell stories that matter. The reason that your product is struggling so much is because you’re not telling a story that’s actually relevant to people. When you tell a story that’s impactful for someone, it motivates them, it gets them to move, it gets them to act. There’s a huge difference between telling a bad or mediocre or average story and telling an amazing story. And most of the rewards are reaped by telling really good stories. And I just can’t emphasize enough, if you are struggling, you probably need to be telling better stories in one way, shape or form in some aspect or all aspects of your business.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Really, really great advice. And it goes back to why you are so video story based because you really firmly believe in this. And it goes back to the idea of this overused word and branding and marketing empathy, but it is so overused, but no one actually understands empathy. It actually means that you can think your customer’s thoughts, their journey, you are them for when you create marketing pieces, branding pieces, when you create that story and people forget. And I think that was really, really important that you brought that up. Very well said. What’s next for the Ozlo brand? Everything, right? What are you excited about in the next couple of months? What do you have coming up?

Rockwell Shah:
So we’re very focused around getting the product ready for general availability and a big public launch later this year. So we’re very focused around that. We’ve already sold over 21,000 units. We’ve delivered over 13,000 of those units to early pre-order backers, but there’s still more work to do before we get to general availability. And we’re very focused around that. People oftentimes think that we’re a hardware business, and yes, we do produce hardware. It is a core component of our business, but we’re not a hardware business. The sleep buds are a delivery mechanism to your ear at night, and once we have your ear at night, we can build you interesting experiences that live on top of the hardware. So a tinnius therapy for people that suffer from ear ringing at clinical insomnia program, sleep apnea detection, consumer wellness content. There’s so much can live on top of the platform that is SleepBus beyond just the hardware itself and the data that it captures. And so we’re really focused around how do we make this not only AirPods for sleep, so to speak, but build all the interesting experiences on top of it to make it so much more, and we’re spending a lot of time with that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I think you just gave away a little bit about the other domain name you bought, but hey, I’m just putting two things together. I think we going to keep it right there. Where can people go right now To learn more about Ozlo,

Rockwell Shah:
Just go to our website, ozlosleep.com, and you can find out everything about us there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s awesome. Perfect. Hey, we are out of time. I kept you for a pretty long time here. Thank you so much to both of you for making the time doing this really, really event full time in your company. It’s exciting what you just said at the end, Iraqi makes me really think that you’re going to have to come on again once you actually turned into this 2.0 company. So thank you both. Really appreciate your time and all of your insights.

Rockwell Shah:
Thank you so much, Fabian. It’s my pleasure. Thank you, Fabian.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So thrilled to have caught Rocky and N.B. of Ozlo during this fascinating phase of them building the Ozlo brand. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I have the conversation. If so, please subscribe, rate, and share the show. Hitting the mark is produced by my consultancy FINIEN, where we create clarity for brand transformations. This episode was edited by Everett Barton in the Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness one. I will see you next time when I hopefully will not have this cold anymore and when we once again will be hitting the mark.