“Sleep is a waste of time.”

That was Leon Sasson’s mindset in college until he partnered with classmate Jeff Kahn to start researching sleep with Northwestern’s sports teams and saw what it did for performance.

Other teams heard about the results, so Leon and Jeff cofounded Rise as a high-end business offering one-on-one sleep coaching to sports teams at thousands of dollars per athlete per year. 

After struggling to scale this model, Leon and Jeff pivoted Rise into a consumer app in 2020 with a new mission: bring what they had learned helping elite athletes sleep better to anyone with a smartphone, without the need for any wearable device.

Rise is now one of the top sleep apps in the world, used by over 10 million people. In addition to its core sleep tracking business focused on sleep debt, Rise also recently launched an AI coach and a clinical care platform that helps patients with conditions like insomnia and sleep apnea. 

In this episode, Leon shares:

• Why Rise built its product around sleep debt to maximize a user’s “energy schedule”
• How Rise connects new users to the core value of its product in their first 60 seconds
• How Rise built a rigorous and high-velocity experimentation culture
• What the company found when it revisited A/B tests that it had previously called “losers”
• How Rise thinks about Oura and Whoop in the increasingly competitive sleep space
• How Rise is expanding beyond sleep tracking into AI sleep coaching and clinical care
• The three specific sleep tips he believes matter most for long-term health and wellness

Leon Sasson:

• Website: https://www.risescience.com/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leonsasson/ 
• X: https://x.com/leonsasson 

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://elementalgrowth.com/
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter