Insomnia has been a personal struggle for both of us. George’s insomnia led to him quantifying his sleep for the last 7 years and making questionable life choices like wearing orange (blue-light blocking) goggles to evening social events.
I (Ed) suffered from chronic insomnia for over a year and tried everything from cutting coffee, blocking blue light, to taking melatonin and antihistamine, but couldn’t find anything that worked. It took an immense amount of energy for me to perform even the most mundane of tasks, such as doing my laundry or ordering groceries. At night, I felt overwhelming loneliness and resentment as I lay in bed wide awake, mindlessly scrolling through reddit and browsing HN in the middle of the night. I even bought a $500 research-grade EEG device to track my sleep, which was honestly kind of depressing because it showed that I was sleeping less than 4 hours per night for weeks straight.
When I finally decided to see a sleep specialist, I was put on a 3-month long waiting list. Eventually, I was able to get my insomnia treated. That finally helped. But it also made me realize that the same therapy that I received could be delivered online—there is no reason why anyone should have to wait 3 months to get treatment. George and I both have experience in digital health, so we decided to partner with sleep experts to create Stellar Sleep.
People with chronic insomnia often receive inadequate care advice. They’re told to try cutting back on coffee, meditate more, or make their bedroom darker, when chronic insomnia is often rooted in deeper, psychological issues (e.g., financial anxiety, workplace stress…etc.). In fact, “present research [now] supports the view that sleep is causally related to mental health difficulties” (Sleep Medicine Reviews, Dec 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2021.101556). This matches up with what we observe—over 50% of our users reported that they have been diagnosed with depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions. Stellar Sleep uses psychology to help chronic insomniacs get their lives back.
We start by understanding a person’s immediate sleep-related challenges and providing them with practical strategies for dealing with them. Then, we drill down on the underlying psychological drivers of a person’s chronic insomnia and create a program to resolve those drivers one by one. Participants spend 5-10 minutes per day completing modules in the Stellar Sleep app.
We launched last August, and have already helped over 10,000 patients improve their sleep permanently. Here’s how one of our customers, Victoria, describes her experience:
“I’ve had insomnia for about 5 years. I was at the point of desperation, willing to try anything. Insomnia feels very lonely. It’s 2am and your spouse is asleep. You’re very alone with your anxious thoughts. About the mortgage rates changing. About all the things you have to do tomorrow without any sleep. It feels like you’re trapped and alone.
After starting Stellar Sleep I’ve now started sleeping better for the first time in 5 years. I’ve gotten hope back that I can be normal. Most people who sleep well don’t worry about sleep. A good night’s sleep should just be normal.
”We have strong clinical data showing that we're just as effective as in-person treatment and have a year-long clinical study running with Harvard Medical School / Brigham & Women’s Hospital paid for by the State of Massachusetts and the US Department of Commerce. On average, our users sleep 74 minutes longer than before and spend 52% less time awake in the middle of the night.
If you have trouble with sleep, try our app and let us know what you think! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask and we will be happy to answer them. We look forward to hearing your comments and experiences!
P.S. Here's our FAQ page (https://stellarsleep.com/faqs) since so many of you asked about pricing
* They start with a questionnaire about your sleep. But that seems to be like those deceptive political ads that look like a questionnaire but are just fundraising clickbait, because…
* After paying I had to fill out a nearly identical questionnaire. Hey, fuck you and the horse you rode in on, you fucking pricks. You just charged me money to waste my fucking life energy. Hey, did I mention I have sleep problems?
* The app provides some version of cognitive behavioral therapy via insulting cartoons. The main therapist or narrator or whatever is the most goddamn condescending talking cartoon owl I can imagine.
My sleep problems are no joke and being talked down to by an owl animated by a $75 Fiverr gig does not make me feel like a valued customer.
I’m desperate enough to go through with this but it’s not an auspicious start.
Also, as a side note, cognitive behavioral therapy may feel like it is infantlizing you because it is digging up stuff that an adult should be able to understand and process more or less effortlessly on their own. But that's kind of the point of that therapy.
Except they will charge you a lot more money, have you come to the office and have you fill out the same form 3 times a row (online, then at the office, then verbally while talking to doctor) in typical doctor’s office fashion
good problem to solve, nice personal story, but disappointed it is translating into clickbait+data scraping
On a monthly model, you want users to keep renewing. However, users want their insomnia to be cured quickly.
What about flat pricing instead? 7 days free to get over the pricing friction, $150 to purchase a license to the customized program, possibly with a fairly weak warranty (minimum 10% improvement in sleep time in the first 6 months or your money back.)
Now your incentives are the same - get them "fixed" as quickly as possible and off the platform (and obviously upselling them on affiliate/related stuff if happy.)
We actually started our beta launch with a one-off pricing model. We only moved to the monthly model because we discovered through feedback from our beta users that chronic insomnia is fundamentally different from occasional sleep problems or light sleeping issues. Instead, chronic insomnia often comes from deep-rooted psychological factors, like unresolved anxiety, chronic stress, or burnout. These underlying issues can't typically be addressed with short-term solutions or quick fixes.
That's precisely why we believe a one-off program might not provide the continuous support and adaptability required to address such nuanced/varied problems. Our monthly model actually creates a strong incentive for us to provide a highly effective product. After all, no one is going to keep paying us if our product doesn't continue to help them. As a result, we continuously invest a ton of resources into developing new, top-notch clinical content, make it incredibly engaging via animated videos, and are always refining our offerings based on user feedback and the latest research.
To add to George's point, people w/ chronic insomnia (like myself) had gotten this stage of consistent poor sleep after many month or years of negative behavioral/psychological conditioning. To see permanent improvement, it'll also take many months of positive conditioning. And there will be occasional relapses (due to new triggers, etc). And this is the case even if you go through a very good in-person CTB-I program that costs thousands of dollars.
Our pricing model (quarterly, and in the future, monthly) is tailored toward the changing needs of our users. The goal is to equip our patients with an arsenal of tools to manage their sleep problems depending on the root cause, and help them recover from relapses more quickly when they need it, with similar efficacy as seeing an in-person specialist at a fraction of the cost.
Also, that fake loading bar while "building your personalized program" is cringe.
You had an opportunity to make your part in making the web a nice place again, yet you failed.
wonderful personal story, but doesn't look like it is translating 100% into empathy.
Can your app help me? Or is it made to help some other kind of insomnia?
But yes, not waking up at all at 4am would be great.
Sleep With Me
https://www.youtube.com/@Sleepwithmepodcast
Jason Stephenson's Sleep Meditations
https://www.youtube.com/@jasonstephensonmeditation
I believe it's stress related for me. Meditation and sleep hygiene works, but nothing else so far. YMMV, good luck.
Much of the content is (and ought to be) freely available information anyway, at least for boilerplate CBT-i (see e.g. https://insomniasos.net/). Obfuscating what is the size of a buzzfeed article behind payments and apps to make a buck is absurd.
Seeing a professional is one option, but ymmv. GPs don't seem to know much about this and reflexively prescribe pills because that's what people want and expect of them. Sleep specialists can be good, but the source material behind their approach can be limited and dated (like CBT-i itself). What I did is read a pile of research articles (maniacally at first), and books. It's not for everyone, but you'll find more useful information than in glorified advertisements in google searches.
That said, we do offer more than just information. We allow users to track their sleep on our app so we can customize our program. Each user goes through a personalized track based on their sleep habits. We also automatically calculate your sleep restriction window for you. We also have relaxation content that you can listen to right before you go to bed, a worry/ gratitude journal and a routine tracker.
Books by (relatively) renowned/trustworthy experts are also a thing and they all cost less than your monthly subscription.
+ A lot of people don't have the time or patience to invest several hours into reading a book. They'd prefer things broken down into actionable steps. In fact, we've done a lot of product testing to figure out how to improve program efficacy and we found out that the shorter and more "bite-sized" we made our modules, the more willing our users were to follow them, and the better their result.
+ The big "open secret" in the sleep research community is that yes, CBT for insomnia is a great starting point, but it needs to be followed up with further psychology-based care. Stellar Sleep delivers CBT for insomnia-based programming initially, then transitions into continued psychology-based programming which sustains the results of the initial CBT for insomnia work.
Also, do you plan to offer a version of this for teenagers? I noticed the youngest age range is 20.
The way it works is everyday, you will spend 5 - 10 minutes completing modules related to sleep/ psychology. These modules can be video or text based and is based on cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I), which is the first-line treatment recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
You also record your sleep on the app, so we can further personalize your program and also apply an algorithm to analyze your sleep patterns and adjust your bedtime automatically to improve your overall sleep quality.
You can learn more on https://stellarsleep.com/science.
Our app is recommended for 18yo and above. Hope this answers your question!
- send them a daily quiz and youtube video
- suggest a bedtime
Is that an accurate summary?
Wish I were kidding.
Dead Comment
Given the dark pattern around email, I immediately assumed your monetization was going to be via selling ads or personal data - I see that might not be the case, however I think that not making this very clear from the start is consumer unfriendly, particularly when your customer base is a self-described sleep-deprived individual who probably has mental health issues (which describes me, FWIW).
I'd totally pay for this if it's something that might work, but honestly am skeptical about it working for my particular sort of sleep pattern. Congrats on the launch!
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/insomnia/in-d...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6796223/
There's also more information on https://stellarsleep.com/science.
If you don't think you have insomnia (you fall asleep fast and you stay asleep long enough), then you probably don't have chronic insomnia, which is what our app is designed for. That said, if you find yourself feeling groggy or not refreshed despite getting sufficient sleep, I would recommend that you talk to your physician. You might still find our app helpful (so give it a try and cancel if it doesn't work - we also have a 30-day moneyback guarantee), but just want to point out that our target audience is people with chronic insomnia.