My guest for Ep174 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & VP of Brand & Marketing of Eight Sleep, Alexandra Zatarain.

Back in 2014, Alex moved from NYC to Silicon valley to launch a smart mattress company as 4 “outsiders” to the silicon valley startup scene. They wanted to build and create a first of its kind hardware product, built by a founding team with no prior hardware experience between them!

In 2015, Eight Sleep launched via an Indigogo campaign that raised over $1M in pre-sales and fast forward to today, Eight Sleep is the world’s leader in helping people build their sleep fitness.

The company has gone on to raise a total of over $150M (valuing the company over $500M), operates in 13 countries and has over 200 of the worlds leading athletes across F1, Tour de France, NBA and the NFL (to name a few) using their product.

In this episode, Alex shares a lot of the journey, lessons and insights over the last decade in building Eight Sleep. Some of the topics we covered included:

• How to think about your company DNA
• The importance of brand messaging and positioning
• The benefits and challenges of creating your own category
• How to run successful influencer marketing campaigns
• and much more!

Time stamps:

• 3:33 – Alex’s background, growing up in Mexico
• 9:43 – The decision to move to San Francisco and launch Eight Sleep
• 15:13 – The early days of building Eight Sleep
• 17:51 – Importance of brand messaging and positioning
• 21:23 – How to think about company branding
• 23:53 – Philosophy on brand messaging and company DNA
• 28:21 – Benefits and challenges of category creation
• 31:43 – Keeping stakeholders engaged when making big changes to a company
• 34:23 – How Alex thinks about marketing campaigns
• 37:13 – Product innovation and iterations
• 39:23 – How Eight Sleep leverages high profile athletes in their marketing
• 42:03 – Setting up successful influencer/athlete partnerships
• 48:34 – Insights from user data
• 51:37 – Sleep tips

Our partners

A big thank you to Matt de Boer for helping make this episode happen!

Also a big thank you to our partners for the show:

Scendar 

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business.. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on.
Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Get started with a Sydney-based Vanta team member today, or watch a 3-minute demo to learn more, at vanta.com/playbook.

Links mentioned

Alex’s links

• Alex’s Twitter/X
• Eight Sleep

People mentioned

• Matteo Franceschetti
• Elon Musk
• Mark Woodland
• Andy Cunningham – Get to Aha
• Al Ramadan – Play Bigger
• Aaron Judge
• Brock Purdy
• Matt de Boer

Companies mentioned

• Fitbit
• Jawbone
• Kismet
• Indiegogo
• Peloton

Feedback/connect/say hello:

Rohit@startupplaybook.co
@RohitBhargava7 (Twitter)
/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

Other channels:

Find all of the links for the podcast on Linktree here

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS