Yahoo Finance My first boss: Jules Goldberg, CEO of SnoreLab and Sleepwave
The people who helped shape business leaders
Jules Goldberg is the inventor of London-based Sleepwave, the motion-sensing smart alarm and sleep tracking app. A self-taught developer, Goldberg has created a number of leading apps, including SnoreLab, which has been downloaded over 13 million times.
The individual in a first boss context who has been very influential for me in a professional environment has undoubtedly been my wife Vanessa. She has been a huge inspiration for me in my journey.
Hailing from Belgium, she had studied two different degrees in two different languages and qualified as a UK lawyer through determination, focus and sense of direction.
I had the good fortune of being good at maths and physics early on but the UK education system gets narrow pretty quickly. I also studied economics at Cambridge, lost interest after my second week there and just didn’t have that sense of direction.
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My first few jobs involved economics forecasting but when we started a family I had a sense that I wanted to do more. It started in 2011 when I was jabbed in my ribs during the 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 was nothing to find solutions back then.
I said we should take our savings and spend money on this concept. Vanessa said it was a great idea but that I should buy a laptop first off 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 helped people with their sleep, snoring and relationships.
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It was a wonderful success, but never would have happened without my wife and her setting the example of what I could achieve with ambition. There was a sense from her of focusing on something new, exciting and the path less trodden which also could have a positive impact on people.
We can’t observe sleep or snoring ourselves as we are unconscious for one third of our lives. The app shines a light into this darkness and I find that it is a powerful use of technology on just how much we can do by tapping into the hardware of our phones.
I wouldn't call it the classic tech start-up CEO route. I had to go from a one-man band to finding it hard to let go; to then let people help me with it, grow a team, become a CEO and understand leadership.
It’s one of my great joys that I’ve taken on people with no tech background who have learnt new skills at an app company, as well as many self-taught developers.
There was a time not too long ago when I was still responding to SnoreLab support queries. It was liberating when I took on employees to work on general management of the user base and development, which allowed me to work on the groundbreaking technology which is the basis of Sleepwave.
It’s really a vessel for our new technology, which is contactless motion using inaudible sound waves. It uses the speaker in the 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, many of whom are doing so with fixed time alarms. What our motion-sensing technology can do is pick out a great moment to wake you up, like when your body moves and you are naturally more awake.
Our survey showed that 73% of people wake up feeling tired more than half of the week. Additionally, 91% who used Sleepwave reported an improvement to how they woke up.
It is still in an earlier phase than SnoreLab. We are currently in expansion and our retention and user retention is growing, as it is with the younger demographic. With Sleepwave, there are now over 100,000 active users and the growth trajectory is great.
We are fully bootstrapped, with no external investors and my wife and I as shareholders. My time hasn’t been spent making pitch decks; it’s been focused on the product, technology and all of our money comes from users.
This helps to give a clarity of vision that we are about creating fantastic products which people love as we become a sustainable and profitable business.
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