Two brothers who found fame on Britain’s Got Talent have created an app which they hope will help young people get a better night’s sleep.
Daniel Neale, COO of Snoozle, and his brother, founder and CEO Philip, previously starred alongside their brother James and their father Laurie as ‘The Neales’.
The act finished ninth in the 2015 competition. In the BGT semi-finals they even made music mogul Simon Cowell cry.
Now Daniel and Phillip are focused on helping young people sleep better.
“It’s ludicrous that in an age where fridges and light bulbs are connected, and when we all use a smartphone as our alarm clock, that we still wake up to a noise we hate and that we grow to resent and dread,” said Philip.
The 28-year-old, who has a background in digital marketing and previously worked as a brand manager for Tesco Finest, wants to bring social content to the sleep routine.
“We swap your alarm tone for an audio news feed that is tailored to you,” he explained to BusinessCloud.
The app replaces a ringtone with a series of ‘snoozles’, audio clips of up to 12 seconds in length.
These snoozles are played in chronological order and repeat until you wake up to turn off your alarm.
By curating the snoozles, users get a new and unique feed of content to wake up to.
The business will initially target Generation Z; people aged 13 to 21-year-olds.
“Because we’re targeting young people to start with, we want to give them a meaningful reason to care about their sleep routine,” he said.
“Sleep isn’t cool when you’re a teenager. If they are a little bit more excited by their alarm clock, and feel more connected then it might encourage them to consider sleep more.”
Last October the company secured a £100,000 investment through the Seedrs platform in just nine hours, a record on the platform.
“We know it’s a small raise, but in that week we have still had the most investors invested, and we had the highest percentage increase.”
“A lot of businesses can be guilty of trying to hype up their valuation to such an extent that investors worry that the company has to grow very big if there is any profit to be made.”
The business now hopes to earn revenue by offering media opportunities to brands, which will allow them to create their own bespoke snoozles.
“We’re effectively creating a media opportunity in the first moments of the day that doesn’t yet exist.
“We don’t want pop-up ads on our app, but if brands are creating content that can enhance that morning experience then they can pay to be part of more people’s morning routine.
“In the same way that Twitter was only 140 characters, and Snapchat was 10 seconds, I think there’s a lot of value in giving people a restriction so that they have to provide the creativity.”
Neale said that company’s second revenue stream might come from subscription-based content designed specifically for falling asleep, which would replace the harmful blue light rays which come from late-night phone usage.
“It stops melatonin being created and that disrupts your sleeping pattern. We would love to get people listening to content when they get into bed instead.”
The app currently has a ‘lullaby’ feature, which offers 20 sounds of nature and ‘white noise’ sounds designed to help people drift off.
In future Neale hopes that it the company might create its own bespoke content, including guided meditations.
“You could get into bed and listen to a comedy series or revision notes,” he said.