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In previous articles, I shared my views on the “night economy”, “tracking economy”, and “addictive economy”. Let me talk about “sleep economy” today.

Three major pains of modern young people-hair loss, insomnia, and weight gain. Among them, insomnia indirectly leads to hair loss and weight gain.

Perhaps insomnia is the first major pain of young people. Do you know how bad the sleep quality of modern young people (especially post-90s) is?

The 2019 China Sleep Index Report shows that at least 300 million people in China have sleep disturbances. Among them, the post-90s young people are the hardest hit areas. Among them, 3/4 fall asleep after 11pm and 1/3 are 1am. Point to sleep.

People’s Net has a description: “Post-90s” has been the main consumer of sleep aid products, steam eye masks, soundproof earplugs, gravity blankets, sleep meters … fully armed from head to toe, but still can’t sleep. In 2019, the number of imported sleep aids purchased by the “post-90s” population in China increased by more than 100%, exceeding the total number of consumers of other age groups.

Why do young people “can’t sleep”? I think social networks may be blamed.

1. Because social networks are connected anytime and anywhere, the boundaries between work and life are gone. Returning home does not mean that the work is over. As soon as a phone call, an e-mail, or a message about you being @, you have to deal with work at once.

2. Social networks always disrupt your time rhythm. It is not that the workload ambassador is anxious, but that the rhythm of work is too chaotic, which directly leads to a sense of stress and anxiety. Important tasks that are temporarily arranged interrupt your rhythm, which will stimulate your emotions to some extent, which is normal.

Time is more and more unbelonging to oneself. In order to resist this feeling of loss, young people after the 90s tend to stay up late for revenge. This behavior pattern is called “procrastination before bedtime.”

Before bedtime, most of the post-90s will play mobile phones, and many of them play mobile phones for more than an hour before going to bed.

Alibaba’s “Night Economy” report shows that the highest peak of Taobao transactions is after 21:00, accounting for about 45% of the day’s consumption. In the middle of the night from 23 o’clock to 3 a.m., tens of thousands of people “took the latest night and bought the most expensive eye cream” on Tmall.

You do n’t feel sleepy, it ’s really “expensive”!

OK, post-90s young people can’t sleep well. It’s an obvious pain point. User pain points are the driving force behind business.

01. Have you paid for the Sleep Economy

It is said that the current “sleep economy” has catalyzed a huge market of hundreds of billions of yuan. The statistics are not important, the focus is on the business logic behind them-what are the consequences of long-term insomnia, and how can business innovation address these consequences?

Insomnia consequences based on physiological logic

The human brain is like a city. There are many high-rise buildings in the city, and they will shrink many times at night to facilitate the removal of metabolic waste debris. If you ca n’t sleep well for a long time, you just do n’t let the metabolic debris clear up. The long-term consequence is Alzheimer ’s disease (Alzheimer ’s disease). Come out of another personality).

Insomnia consequences based on management logic

The greatest value of employees is to focus on things, and long-term insomnia can hardly make people focus. When you are trapped, you have to do things hard, and the efficiency will be very low. Time magazine statistics show that poor working conditions caused by insufficient sleep in the working class in the United States will lead to reduced productivity and increased risk of death, which can cause losses of about $ 411 billion a year.

Aiming at these costly insomnia consequences, a large number of business innovations have brought new business models, product logic and traffic strategies:

1. Business model innovation

Many companies, including Google, Facebook, Huffington Post, Huawei, Alibaba, etc., provide employees with a “sleep cabin” service.

Many small and medium-sized enterprises in Japan have converted vans into bedrooms and provided them to overtime employees. Toyota, Honda and even actively participated in these modification designs.

In the “sharing economy” bubble period in China, there have been some “shared sleep warehouse” companies, mainly for overtime workers of IT companies. The shape is a bit like a capsule, with bunk spaceIt is self-contained and independent. There are facilities such as wireless network, fans, reading lights, charging sockets, etc., and disposable bedding is provided. However, due to some technical bottlenecks, the industry has not done it.

Last year, two forms of internet celebrity bar restaurants-“Siesta Bar” and “Sleep Cafe” were particularly popular in many countries.

The threshold for starting a nap is particularly high. The key words are prime business locations + busy nobles.

For example, the Siesta & Go (snap off in the middle of the financial district) in Madrid, Spain, and HSBC, Google, Deloitte, etc. are nearby. There are only 19 beds in the store, equipped with fine linens, earplugs, Slippers, you can wake up and have a refreshing drink in the coffee area before leaving.

“Sleep Cafe” is an innovation of Nestlé challenging Starbucks. For example, the “Sleep Cafe” in Ginza, Tokyo also provides “Sleep Service” and “Siesta Service”. Guests will drink decaffeinated coffee before bedtime. It is generally believed that drinking coffee before bedtime will prevent sleep, but it does not contain caffeine Coffee can maintain sleep quality.

2. Product logic innovation

The spread of “procrastination before bedtime” is making nighttime diets popular. This “nighttime diet” is not the supper you and I often say. It is mainly a product that helps people relax and sleep better , Such as adding chamomile, lavender and other herbal formulas to tea drinks.

This is an age when focus is increasingly important to consumers. The food and beverage industry has long been targeting innovations in food products that promote the soothing and relaxation of the human body at night, and even play more healthy functions.

For example, Mengniu recently launched a “good night” chamomile-flavored milk drink with a formula that focuses on soothing and sleep-aid effects. Brands even look forward to opening a window of opportunity for “new social retail”.

In recent years, many hardware brands have also actively participated in the market segmentation of the sleep economy, mainly from the direction of sleep monitoring, such as monitoring sleep quality through wearable devices such as bracelets. Samsung, Apple, and Xiaomi are entering this field with high profile. Even wearable devices cannot solve insomnia, but collecting hardware sleep data from users is only the first step, and these big data will be useful for future smart homes, AI applications, mobile health, etc. The development of the industry will be a great help.

3. Traffic strategy innovation

In recent years, sleep assistance has become part of the “traffic strategy” of many Internet companies. For example, in addition to a hypnotic sound effect, a domestic app called “Snail Sleep” can also record snoring dreams, monitor the depth and quality of sleep, and also develop sleep assistance products such as music smart pillows; Windy, a popular sound effect software in the United States It is through wind sound and 3D scene map to help you relax the visual and auditory nerves; Swedish sleep aid sound software Spotify, through broadcastThe sound of rain and the sound of air conditioning in the office create a hypnotic atmosphere.

Among them, Spotify started with audio products, similar to the domestic Himalayan app and get app, the difference lies in the traffic strategy.

The business model of domestic audio apps is mainly IP payment (knowledge payment), and Spotify started as a music player. In the sleep market operation, it uses the sea, bird song, bonfire, mountain stream, forest and other sound modes to help People with insomnia relax and quickly fall asleep. It was later discovered that the maximum traffic window of the app is video podcasting, that is, video and audio must be operated together.

So, Spotify bought three podcasting companies in one breath and invested $ 400-500 million, which quickly caused the number of podcasts on the Spotify platform to exceed 500,000. Last year, Spotify ’s traffic revenue rose by 40%. . According to Spotify himself, “the conversion rate is too good”, so good it is hard to believe it is true.

It can be seen that the reason why the current traffic cost is getting more and more expensive, and what kind of traffic dividend is exhausted, the main entry point is not found right. The sleep economy is likely to be a new traffic entrance for a period of time in the future.

02. Two exits to the “sleep economy” that broke the game

In recent years, the main way for domestic Internet companies to discover the “sleep economy” bonus is online applets and apps. For example, night listening, snail sleep, small sleep, etc. are all based on content output and psychological massage. These companies are well aware of the pain points of users on this track, but often do not have good operations, which is a big regret.

In the whole year of 2019, the financing of companies related to the “sleep economy” has declined significantly. Only about 200 sleep brands have successfully raised financing. So, where is the exit of the “sleep economy”?

I think the domestic “sleep economy” related companies have lost two main points: one is that they don’t have a good sense of operating rhythm, and the other is that they can’t really understand the users.

1. What is “operational rhythm”

Liang Ning, director of product modules at Lakeside University, once said that some Internet companies have no sense of operation.

For example, if you travel to the United States, you just need to buy something. Open the APP and see a list of LOGOs on the page: Lancome, Dior … want to have afternoon tea, and on the APP page is a list of supplier brands: Starbucks, Man Kee Dessert, Xu Liushan …

Does the user feel a lot of words like this?

What does it mean to have a sense of rhythm? The travel and shopping app Liang Ning wants should be opened at first glance and you can see that “the legendary *** is just 1 kilometer away from you”, “***”, “Dirty Girlfriends ****” are full of thrilling product pictures, I feel that if you do n’t buy it, you will lose the price difference between China and foreign countries, as well as domesticSeeing superiority …

The app for drinking afternoon tea should be opened at first glance. It is a detailed picture of food that makes people drool when they look at it, as well as weight loss after drinking, beauty after eating, and temperament after serving a cup. Now, if no one buys a glass for themselves for a week, they will feel that life is too hard, work is boring, no friendship, and unhappy …

Similarly, if the app of a domestic “sleep economy” company seems to be a knowledge payment service, psychological comfort service, online information service, or partner introduction, product recommendation … Which user will feel it? ?

Recently, domestic lychee podcasts described in the listing prospectus submitted by NASDAQ: As of 2018, the number of users in the audio market in China is 377 million. The “audio” in this includes podcasts, radio, and audio Books, live audio and social networking, etc., the number of users will reach 900 million in the next five years.

I think this expectation is reasonable. With the advent of 5G, various user scenarios have been developed, and the market inventory of a single smart speaker will be several times that of today. At present, audio content is not integrated with artificial intelligence and big data technology. It can be expected that the peak user traffic of these smart products in the future must be before bedtime (working time + sleep time accounts for about 70% of the day, but there is not much development value).

No matter how the technology products evolve and iterate, the focus will never be on the technology itself, but on the high-density refreshing sense of “operational rhythm.” Just like some TV shows, even serious academic forums such as “Hundred Schools” require a refreshment every 30 or 50 seconds. This is the rhythm of operations.

2. How to really understand users

In the early days of Apple ’s launch of Airpods in 2016, they suffered a lot from spitting and ridicule. Airpods have been regarded as sleep aids by many people. They look strange and easy to lose.

In a few years, Airpods has become the fastest growing of all Apple products. This is already an explosion of tens of billions of dollars in sales.

If you just use Airpods as a headset, listen to something during the lunch break in the office or sleep on the high-speed rail, and assist you with sleep, it will be meaningless.

Airpods are actually accessories similar to earrings, necklaces, and watches. And wearing Airpods means that you must have an iPhone in your pocket, which is a social signal. Some people ridiculed that Airpods were used to show off wealth and show status after the 90s.

Sleep, generally belongs to everyone’s privacy time, and does not want to be seen by others. But with Airpods, I want to be seen by more people-as a social currency, this is the real user demand.

Someone wants to get their company’s aromatherapy machine into the sleep marketOn the market, the main focus is on aromatherapy and sleep aids, and an advertisement appears in the advertisement to give you a baby-like sleep. Because I don’t know the user, for a long time, the product has not been concerned.

The products you sell are sleep products, but this is not a simple problem of sleep aid function, nor is it stress before going to bed, need psychological comfort and so on.

In fact, many user needs are a matter of identity and scenario. Later, the company that sold the aromatherapy machine changed its strategy. The main spa room (health room) had aromatherapy machines. It injected social scenes and gradually opened up sales.

The problem of insomnia is almost a well-known pain point for users. On the contrary, only world-class companies such as Apple (Airpods) and Amazon (Echo smart speakers) have real breakthroughs.

Ordinary people tend to fall into a kind of “Edison dilemma”. Edison invented epoch-making products including gramophones, movie cameras, tungsten electric lights, etc., but never successfully served users.

Edison’s only time to directly develop the consumer market, commercialize and promote civilian DC technology, and soon lost to Tesla’s AC technology.

Exploiting the pain points of users is not their ability. It will continue to give users a soft and refreshing feeling. That kind of rhythmic operation is the real breaking point for exploring the opportunities of “sleep economy”.