Happy new year everybody!
We wanted to offer you a quick review of the past year beforepreviewing the year ahead.
We are a bit late posting this but we have a good excuse: we were exhibiting, at theCES in Las Vegas. This is nothing less than the biggest event of the year for consumer technologies. Our Superbowl. You can read our week recapHERE.
Now back toearly last year. We had just finished a successfulKickstarter campaign. We were three persons with a mountain to climb.
Wedecided to raise funding to accelerate product development and realize our mission to help the millions of people struggling with sleep.
David, our cofounder/CTO, was in Shenzhen working on the product. Soon joined by Dhylane, who arrived inFebruary, we improved acoustics, materials, electronics, software. We also met a lot of factories with the help of theHax community.
Back in Paris, Coline, our cofounder/CEO, was meeting with business angels and investment funds to convince them to join our mission. This took a lot of energy and we had to keep the discussions confidential. This explains why you didn’t hear much from us around that time (sorry again!). By the end ofApril, we had raised a seed round of €650 000 ($750 000).
Thishelped us recruit our first two full-time employees to lead firmware development and marketing. We also teamed up withTohtem on manufacturing, a great engineering team with a wealth of expertise.
Meanwhile, David had brought backten new prototypes from China to run extensive testing in real conditions. Feedback from our users is invaluable. This is what helps us improve Moona every day.
With a bigger team for thesecond half of the year, we were able to double down on testing and improving each part of the system.
We went through the different testing phases. From the EVT (engineering validation tests) to the DVT (design validation tests) and finally the PVT (production validation tests).
We settled on the final design of the product, which we showcased for the first time at CES.
We havepassed all certifications pre-tests including CE-Safety, CE-EMC and FCCs DOC.
We have made great progress on the software side as well.
Theapp is now privately available on both app stores!
A lot of work has been dedicated to the “backend” development: the architecture of what goes on behind the scenes. We have to make sure everything runs smoothly and securely between your phone, our servers and Moona.
We unveiled a slightly tweaked logo, a tagline “Tonight powers your Tomorrow” and an icon for the first time!
What was important to convey isour belief that good sleep is a prerequisite for a healthy, happy and fulfilling life. We wanted the icon to reflect our values (empowering, committed, scientific and caring) while expressing sympathy and modernity. We hope this will help us create familiarity between our brand and our users.
We had to postpone the estimated shipping date three times. Testing takes longer than we thought and we had to overcome a few technical hurdles. We apologize for these delays and thank you for your incredible support throughout the year. We are lucky to have such a wonderful community.
This is tough for us as we work really hard to meet your expectations but we believe this tradeoff is the right decision in order to send you a great product.
We unfortunately can’t keep our interns forever! A huge thanks to Edgar, Hugo, Ken, Baptiste, Youssef and Candice for their great work. They stayed with us between three weeks and six months and helped us with marketing, app development, firmware and design.
We worked with Hopital de Nantes (France) on a first medical study for more than a year. The thesis was presented in April, showing very interesting results in decreasing sleep fragmentation (number of awake periods during the night), total sleep time and sleepiness during the night. It was really motivating to see the strong interest of the medical community in our system and to hear the potential they see in it !
We are excited tolaunch a second study in 2019. This one will run on 30 women with sleep issues (compared to 15 healthy patients in the first study).
We answered all of your questions. Is this something you would like us to do again? Please tell us!
Trade shows can be a great way to meet with sleep experts and get feedback on our product. But it’s also time-consuming and there’s so many of them that we have to be very selective about where we want to go. We want to put as much energy as possible behind developing and shipping the product.
In 2018, we decided tofocus on a few medical events (Somnex Sleep Show, JPRS, etc) and a bigger, more consumer-oriented tech show (Vivatech). The latter one allowed us to educate about the importance of temperature on sleep, draw media attention and improve the ways we communicate about Moona to the general public.
Given its importance, sleep is always an interesting topic to cover for the media. With our innovative solution, and a lot of work to get the word out, we are lucky to have had good press coverage around Moona. You could have seen us onFrench national TV a few times or more recently in theWashington Post.
We were also very proud to already be named by CB Insights as one of the150+ Startups Cultivating The Wellness Industry!
We hope your 2018 was equally filled with learnings, challenges, breakthroughs and laughters as it was for us.
Here’s now a look atwhat’s in store for us in 2019!
Have a great year,
The Moona team.
PS: any questions? Please reach out to us at hello@getmoona.com.