Ep174 – Alexandra Zatarain (Co-founder – Eight Sleep) on branding, company DNA and category creation

February 22, 2024
rohitbhargava
Podcast

My guest for Ep174 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & VP of Brand & Marketing of Eight Sleep, Alexandra Zatarain.

Back in 2014, Alex moved from NYC to Silicon valley to launch a smart mattress company as 4 “outsiders” to the silicon valley startup scene. They wanted to build and create a first of its kind hardware product, built by a founding team with no prior hardware experience between them!

In 2015, Eight Sleep launched via an Indigogo campaign that raised over $1M in pre-sales and fast forward to today, Eight Sleep is the world’s leader in helping people build their sleep fitness.

The company has gone on to raise a total of over $150M (valuing the company over $500M), operates in 13 countries and has over 200 of the worlds leading athletes across F1, Tour de France, NBA and the NFL (to name a few) using their product.

In this episode, Alex shares a lot of the journey, lessons and insights over the last decade in building Eight Sleep. Some of the topics we covered included:

How to think about your company DNA
The importance of brand messaging and positioning
The benefits and challenges of creating your own category
How to run successful influencer marketing campaigns
and much more!

Time stamps:

3:33 – Alex’s background, growing up in Mexico
9:43 – The decision to move to San Francisco and launch Eight Sleep
15:13 – The early days of building Eight Sleep
17:51 – Importance of brand messaging and positioning
21:23 – How to think about company branding
23:53 – Philosophy on brand messaging and company DNA
28:21 – Benefits and challenges of category creation
31:43 – Keeping stakeholders engaged when making big changes to a company
34:23 – How Alex thinks about marketing campaigns
37:13 – Product innovation and iterations
39:23 – How Eight Sleep leverages high profile athletes in their marketing
42:03 – Setting up successful influencer/athlete partnerships
48:34 – Insights from user data
51:37 – Sleep tips

Our partners

A big thank you to Matt de Boer for helping make this episode happen!

Also a big thank you to our partners for the show:

Scendar

Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business.. Find out more at Scendar.com

Vanta

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Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time.
Get started with a Sydney-based Vanta team member today, or watch a 3-minute demo to learn more, at vanta.com/playbook.

Links mentioned

Alex’s links

People mentioned

Companies mentioned

Feedback/connect/say hello:

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/rohbhargava (LinkedIn)
@rohit_bhargava (Instagram)
My Youtube Channel

Credits:

Music: Paycheck

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