
The Justin Brady Show · 2025-11-12 · 34 min
Ozlo's resurrection of the Sleepbuds represents a masterclass in purpose-built product strategy and audience-first brand building. After Bose discontinued the sleep audio product to focus on core audio business, co-founders Charlie Taylor, Brian Mulcahy, and others secured licensing rights and relaunched independently. The key insight: while Bose saw the market as early and unfocused on sleep relative to their core competency, the Ozlo team recognized an underserved audience of passionate customers whose lives had genuinely changed through better sleep - not just audio enthusiasts seeking incremental quality gains. Rather than chasing horizontal expansion into fitness or calling features, Ozlo maintained ruthless vertical focus: every design decision, from sub-millimeter thickness tolerances to battery life optimization, serves the singular mission "we help you sleep." This constraint-driven approach - refusing lucrative-seeming pivots like workout compatibility - paradoxically created clearer brand positioning. The team bypassed large advertising budgets by leveraging early product access to journalists who had personal history with the original Bose product, generating organic PR momentum pre-launch. Strategic placement on platforms like Goop and earned mentions from high-profile advocates like Gwyneth Paltrow extended reach without traditional influencer spend. The episode distills essential lessons for founders on mission clarity, saying no to seemingly obvious opportunities, and letting product truth drive narrative.
Hosted by Justin Brady. The show scores 71.0/100 on substance across its analysed episodes. See the full show profile.
Bose, as a global top-50 audio brand, prioritized remaining the market leader in headphones and audio rather than investing in building out a new health and sleep category; the product was right but launched during an earlier market moment before sleep health became culturally mainstream, and the business required different expertise than maintaining consumer electronics dominance.
The team worked with PR firm Launch Squad to secure early exclusive coverage (TechCrunch) and provided early product access to journalists who had personal history with the original Bose Sleepbuds; this generated organic momentum in a market where demand already existed from customers searching for a discontinued product they loved.
Adding even minor features increases form factor thickness (even half a millimeter causes sleep discomfort), drains battery life needed for 8-10 hour audio playback, and dilutes brand focus; the mission is singularly "help you sleep," and horizontal expansion into fitness would confuse brand positioning despite appearing to increase addressable market.
People whose sleep quality directly impacts daily functioning and relationships - specifically those who struggle with external noise (barking dogs, snoring partners) and need audio masking, or those who previously owned Bose Sleepbuds and are seeking a successor product; these are passionate, life-outcome-focused customers rather than audio enthusiasts.
By eliminating features not required for sleep (no calling, no fitness tracking), Ozlo achieves the thinnest, most comfortable form factor on the market, 8-10 hour battery life, and clearer brand identity; this constraint-driven design allows them to win a specific customer segment more completely than generalist competitors despite smaller addressable market.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
When Bose discontinued its cult-favorite Sleepbuds in 2020, a passionate cohort of users was left in the lurch. For many, these earplug/headphone hybrid weren't a gadget - they were a nightly lifeline. Charlie Taylor, Co-Founder of Ozlo shares why he left Bose to co-found Ozlo, and how they quickly gained key relationships, and found immediate traction growing a new Sleep ecosystem. Taylor explains why focus matters, how saying "no" to big opportunities leads to more revenue, and how they immediately found acceptance amongst major media despite having no relationships or company history.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
I'm Justin Brady and one of the most fascinating aspects of product design right now is what I'm kind of calling, I mean maybe there's a better name for this or maybe I'm not really coining this phrase, but what I call purpose products. I would say my remarkable tablets in that category. I would say there's a lot of stuff starting to be in that category of like purpose products. People seem to be shoving off like multi-purpose products.
They don't like them that much. One of my favorite purpose products is actually these little sleep buds that I use to go to sleep every night. There's a huge backstory of why I use them, but I'm actually really pumped and kind of starstruck today to be joined with Charlie Taylor, the co-founder of Oslo. They make these sleep buds.
There's a wild story behind this that founders and CMOs need to pay attention to on how to connect to audiences. But first of all, Charlie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Charlie Taylor Thanks for having me.
So there's this crazy backstory, but let's go backwards a little bit. I want to talk to how you connected with an audience. You did a Kickstarter that was wildly successful. You raised some money that was successful as well.
But you had some super interesting challenges in this path. So for those that don't know the backstory, there was a product at Bose called the Sleep Buds, and they were going to discontinue it. And you and your team broke out of there and saved the product, brought it back, much to the relief of the masses like myself who thought, well, from here on out, I'm just not going to sleep anymore. Great.
And so you guys resurrected this product that I very much love. So obviously, thank you for doing that. We're all indebted to you. But when you were all internal at Bose, clearly they did not see the value of continuing this product.
They had first generation, second generation. And they're like, yeah, I don't think we're going to continue with this. But you and your co-founders saw an ecosystem potential. You saw the potential here.
What do you think the breakdown was there? Yeah, I think, you know, look, Bose is a not only a massive company, they're a global top 50 brand. And so when they were looking at kind of what they are in the future, I think they chose to just focus on the things that really, really mattered. Right.
I'm wearing my Bose headphones. I don't really go anywhere without them. I think most people don't. And sleep is so important to them.
It was something that they truly believed in, but it was still an earlier time in the market. And I think to grow as a sleep company and a medical company would be my words, not theirs. It's different than being to maintain as a consumer electronics company. And if your goal is to remain, at least in my opinion, the global leader in audio, it doesn't necessarily translate fully into sleep doesn't necessarily mean they didn't believe in the product.
And I think that was in their continued support. We work with them. We've licensed various things from the folks at Bose. But building as a smaller independent, particularly as a startup, while there's a lot of challenges, it also in many ways is a lot more freeing than when you're really at the expectations level of a global brand.
We're not in Cadillacs and I think even fancier cars now. So, right, we get to kind of invent who we are. And that gave us a lot of freedom. Yeah, absolutely.
It's interesting because when I'm saying you guys saw a major ecosystem and huge potential for this, it almost sounds like they did too. But they're just like, you know, we may have tapped into something bigger than we even realized, but it's not our core business. Is this kind of where the discrepancy lies? Yeah, you know, I think that's a great way to look at it, right?
Where, and you could see this with the moves that Bose is making now. I think, at least in my opinion, really reemerging as, you know, not your grandfather's brand, but a relevant brand for today. And I think in that conversation, distracting from that consumer side into what is really a health and sleep business didn't really make sense at the time. I'm not sure that that would be the opinion today.
Whereas what we saw it as, you know, yes, we're an audio business, but we saw the opportunity not in audio, right? We're not this world famous audio brand who invented noise canceling. We're now our own thing. And we saw sleep as kind of the one opportunity that not only is it the most important thing, in our opinion, it's having a moment.
Right. I think Bose saw that moment before really anyone else. Right. This is why they had the original products, but didn't get to really get the top.
Right. This wasn't an Andrew Huberman talking about sleep in all this podcast. Mark Hyman. Right.
All these folks weren't talking about sleep yet, but it was getting there. And we saw that coming and thought, hey, you know, there's a really not only big market opportunity, but unlike any other product that, you know, my team and others have worked on. This was a product that, you know, the Sleepbuds that had an audience like yourself that were so passionate, right? In a very different way than people are passionate that my audio sounds better than your audio because of the headphone.
They are passionate because it changed their lives, right? This is a product that for the first time in years helped them sleep or for many folks, more importantly, helped them sleep with their partner again. And that type of passion you really can't make up. And so we saw that as this really, really great opportunity to really build an anchor around a broader sleep business.
Hey, can we take a time out just for a second? Trust is at a premium, especially as AI Slop makes its way everywhere. and podcasts are a great way to scale relationships and trust really quickly. They're the relational extension of your brand and their great core content of which SEO, like search engine optimized content comes off of, and a bunch of clips for all your social media platforms.
I build podcasts for iconic brands. I train hosts, I help them with strategy, and I help them focus on actual results. If this is something you want to work on, if you want to build your own media channel for your company, I guarantee you can do that. DM me, email me, get in touch.
Let's build this thing. You mentioned the market opportunity and people are talking, Huberman's talking about sleep. Everyone's talking about like better sleep. We have Brian Johnson, of course, talking about this all the time.
Major movement there. and that's what you're tapping into. I want to back up a little bit. I want to ask about how you promoted it.
And of course, you've identified a lot of opportunities for how you're promoting this and getting it in front of the right people. But this is kind of, and maybe there's actually a better term for this, but I lump this into the category of like purpose products. Like I mentioned, the remarkable. I would also put like minimal phone in there.
I would put Oslo Sleepbuds in there because most people have like this thought or some people have this thought that I just want one product that does a bunch of different things. And that's kind of how companies think. But companies, like consumers don't think that way. They want almost devices dedicated to specific use cases.
So do you see the rise in like this purpose product kind of movement? Do you see this? Is this a fair way to kind of put the sleep buds in that category? Yeah, I think there's two types of categories, right?
There's the value product that I'm looking for and the premium product, I'd say. And both have different presets, right? You know, for us, you have to really go single purpose if your goal is to maximize sleep. If your goal is to maximize headphone sales, right, then the idea is get it as cheap as possible, as close as you can to maybe good enough for that purpose.
but you're not quite there. And so I think for a lot of products, that works really, really well. You know, you look at kitchen appliances, most of them are wide ranging. They fit a lot of utility.
I can do a lot of things. But if you want to do a very, very specific thing correctly, purpose-built is the way to go. And that's kind of the line of a premium product. You know, for us to be our size, which I won't take my headphones off, but you know, you're talking about smaller than a dime, right?
These are very, very tiny. and most importantly, we are thinner still than anyone on the market, right? And that Z when you sleep on that means you have to take a lot of things out that you might otherwise do if you were trying to go and build say a conferencing tool right We don use microphones on the Buzz for calling which is why I'm wearing my Bose headphones. I could do that.
I could add that. I could have more utility in the product. It's not super expensive, but it does increase the size, right? It does increase the battery usage.
And when you start taking those things, that means that if you're going to focus on sleep, I care about, can you sleep in it all night, comfortably? And does it last all night with the audio, which means you have to pull back and do other things, right? So to provide a higher value, a higher premium experience for sleep requires us to be much more singularly focused. And I think the market is going towards that.
There's a fine line though, between a gadget, like a kitchen is a good example again of that, right? Do I really need a special spatula for a very specific thing? Probably not, right? But when you're talking about a very specific thing, right?
Like that's, that's where that line comes in. Right. And with sleep, this is not, oh, I want it for the five minutes of activity, even working out, right. The most fit folks in the world, maybe work out one, two hours a day, right.
If you're athletes, maybe you're four hours a day, all of them sleep, you know, particularly if you're working out four hours a day, eight, nine hours, right. Like sleep is, is not just another thing you do. It's the most foundational thing you do every day, how you start and end. And so having a purpose to build device really made sense for us in that world.
But it also allows us to focus a lot more broadly in sleep than, say, audio or headphones or things like that. You said something very, very significant for founders and especially comms people and CMOs. Extremely significant. Just a really quick reset in case I glossed over it.
And correct me if I'm wrong. There was Bose made some sleep buds. They did a version one, version two. They discontinued them.
Your team broke out of Bose, went independent, saved the product, bought the licensing, launched them independently as Oslo. Of course, you made some adjustments and dialed the products in. Right. I think I got that right.
But I just wanted to touch on that in case people are like, wait, what's the connection here? Yeah. So, you know, this product was started. Absolutely.
This product was started, the original sleep buds by one of my co-founders at Bose, Brian Mulcahy, employee number one, it's kind of the story I always told. What? What? He saw really early on.
Well, employee number one of the sleep business. Of the sleep business? Wow. I didn't know that.
Crazy. So, you know, it was really his brainchild, right? This is something that he needed at home. And you can see this in our videos, so I won't speak for him.
Dude, I needed it at home. And he saw how life-changing could be and how audio, you know, we can talk through this later, but audio isn't just this entertainment thing. Audio provides so much promise to help people in a way beyond just listening to music and having phone calls. And so they recognized this, they built the first product, had some market challenges, but really was beloved.
When they released another one, same thing, really beloved, I think again, a little early, the right product, the right thought process, but maybe the timing was a little off and obviously broader things in the market. We're talking about COVID hitting, right? There's a lot of things going on there. And so we saw that opportunity, you know, my other two co-founders all at Bose in various divisions, but all of us love this product and kind of had this idea that, wow, if you can just focus on a sleep business, right?
If the business was about sleep and not broader corporate priorities, you can do some really, really cool things. And luckily, you know, we were able to work with a team there. And we had made the decision that we would potentially do our own thing in sleep. And we're able to convince the folks that, hey, this is the right home for these assets.
And you could read the official transfer of assets over. And we structured a deal and we're able to pull it out and relaunch it and rebuild it, you know, a year or so later. Yeah. So for those paying attention, Charlie, you are very, very dialed in to the customer you serve.
It sounds like your team, before even leaving Bose and coming over and creating Oslo, was extremely focused on a potential customer profile, customer ID. Have you guys written out like a vision statement, a mission statement, a purpose statement? And so like, tell us about who this audience is and what that mission is that drives you, because it sounds like you're very dialed into them. Yeah.
So look, we have a certainly a broader vision and more eloquent statement, I'll say, and I could pull it up, but really it's, we help you sleep. And that is everything we do across, you know, when you use our app and we look at what we're building next, when we add features, when we look at design, everything is, does it achieve the final thing, which is to help you sleep. Now we use audio in that. So part of that is, how can we help you sleep with audio?
Right. So part of that, you know, saying if your dogs are barking or partners snoring, what type of audio do we need to deliver to effectively mask that? But at the same time, and I took it out of its sleeve, you know, this little bud, this tiny bud and folks can't see, you know, it's, we're talking millimeters here. It's less than two grams.
How do I deliver eight to 10 hours of audio? How do I let you stream what you want to, but turn it off when you don't? There are decisions that have been made that sound crazy, where we can get an entirely different level of performance or more features by going less than a millimeter higher on the Z. And you can look at competitors, right, that they'll do that.
But what we found in our research is that even a half millimeter, and we're talking extremely, extremely, extremely small. To the naked eye, you're probably not going to see it unless you were compared. It caused discomfort when sleeping, right? So it'd be the most comfortable thing when you're wearing half millimeter because the placement in your ear when you're sleeping, especially on your side, really, really, really matters.
And we can't be comfortable to everybody, but we're trying to be as comfortable to as many people as you want for the purpose of sleeping. On the other hand, when you're going back to purpose built, I would argue we have the most comfortable headphone on the market, but that means people want to use it to work out. They want to use it for phone calls. And so they ding us because they can't or they get upset because they can't, but it's not built for headphones, you know, for working out, right?
These are, these are different decisions that you would make. And so we knew our entire mission was, does it help you sleep better? And if not, why are we doing it? And I would argue from a comms standpoint, that's one of the reasons, not the reason, but that's one of the reasons you guys were such a breakout success is because of that early focus.
I see a lot of founders and a lot of CEOs that really struggle with that focus. They want to be everything to everybody. They take those calls and emails and they say, yeah, you know what? It is the most comfortable thing.
We should go into workout stuff. But because you guys are dialed into your audience and you know who they are, do you find internally you are all turning down what look like a bunch of opportunities all the time? Yeah, I mean, it's the siren call, right? Workouts and fitness is such a, it's, people love that, right?
They work out every day. We wear headphones every day. It's very personal experience. And when it comes to branding, it is really hard, right?
And I'll use Aura as an example. Aura went massively viral because they have photos of celebrities wearing, I don't have my ring with me, but wearing their ring, they're out, they're working out, they're walking. Nobody's wearing our product and getting photographed. And so when you look at what people are looking at, the idea that, hey, maybe we can use it for workouts and I could tell you why you shouldn't wear it for workouts and we're just not built that way.
It's fine if people do. It gives us opportunity to speak to a different customer, to maybe have different types of PR and different videos, but it doesn't help our core mission. And so certainly internally, there's always been conversations of, can we expand horizontally with this one product into the field? And really what we've always come down to is no, but we can expand vertically on what we can offer through the product in the lens of sleep And if we were to go horizontal it a different form factor it a different product to get there But this product has to be hyper on sleep And I think to what you said that how to maybe our surprise without a big corporate engine we really been able to cut through a lot of the noise in this market.
This is a big market. A lot of people spending money. We've been able to get the recognition and awards and PR. And it's because I think, at least that we've hyper focused on the customer.
Everything that we do is on our sleep customer and not the potential of some boogeyman customer out, you know, that maybe we can get, which is a very easy thing, particularly as a founder to say, oh, I need to get more revenue, right? I need to find another whale and make my market bigger. We found that making your market bigger really dilutes your brand. It dilutes the ability to actually go after what we want to add, which is sleep.
Yeah. And that's the hardest balance to get for a lot of founders and a lot of is to find the balance of you don't want to go too broad. You don't want to go too niche because you alienate customers both ways. You need to really dial into the customer.
It sounds like, I love that. Just we help you sleep. Ah, it's so great. Like vision statements and mission statements and purpose statements are extremely obvious, but only in retrospect.
Getting there is actually very challenging. So I applaud you on the simplicity, but also the sheer focus and will on that purpose statement. You mentioned some PR challenges. You mentioned branding challenges.
You mentioned that Brian Mulcahy, when he was leading this, maybe it was just a little early. People just didn't really care as much as they should about their own health and sleep. So maybe you're at the right moment right now. I would argue you most certainly are.
But you also mentioned you have some PR challenges. Like, yeah, no one's out there wearing these at the gym getting photographed and no one's talking about them. I talk about them because I'm kind of a freak and I'm like probably a cult like follower of Oslo. But I'm probably unique.
I'm sure people listening to this like, yeah, you've told me about these stupid things. Would you shut up about them? But how did you you mentioned you kind of touched on the fact that, you know, you got some PR wins. I think it was around 1.
5 million Kickstarter somewhere in there you raised. How did you convince people with, in a way, zero brand recognition? You can't say we're Bose. You guys all left Bose.
You're in a new company that bought the license. I mean, that's a confusing message, or it could be confusing. So how did you do the campaign? How did you do reach out?
How did you get the attention? What was the magic sauce there? Yeah, I mean, I hate to be this guy, but a lot of it was luck, right? I think we had, you know, we can't use another brand for many reasons, right?
But it's not helpful. We did have the trademark, right? So SleepBuds is our trademark. And so we weren't starting from nowhere.
We had a pretty good foundation. And we decided to go to Kickstarter, you know, we're venture backed, right? This is a Kickstarter was awesome. And the team there, if anyone can have the opportunity that the executive team there, they will hands on come and help you build your campaign, which is super helpful.
But we weren't using that to raise money, right? If the Kickstarter made a half million dollars, a million dollars, a thousand dollars, probably would be an issue with investors at a thousand, but we were still ready to build. And so then it was, well, how do you actually create noise? And we've had a lot of good breaks, But a lot of that was following kind of systematic approach, right, which is not spray and pray and hope that people see it.
You know, before we turned on ads, which obviously everyone loves ads, before we turned on ads in Kickstarter, I think we had done nearly a half million or 600,000 in revenue. Wow. We did not have a wide email list, right? There wasn't - in Kickstarter, you could do a lot of things.
You can have a pre-launch and deposits. We didn't have any of that. And so that was working with a really awesome PR house we've used called Launch Squad. But we were in with journalists and we had this really distinct advantage, which is incredibly unfair, but it's folks like you.
We happen to have a lot of journalists who were folks like you, who this is the product they travel with. And they knew the Bose story. They knew the Bose product. They knew challenges and wins that they've had previously.
And so we were able to get in touch with them and give them early product where we said, hey, you know, don't tell anyone you have this. We're definitely not for sale yet. But why don't you come play with it, feel with it, sleep with it? And that really allowed us to launch.
I think with TechCrunch was the exclusive launch, but to have a pretty big push. And when you leave the market, and this is, I think, what happened when the product was discontinued and we took over, you didn't leave the need for the product. And so there was this huge gap of folks who had already been searching for sleep buds, been searching for a sleep solution. And so we were able to fill that in by very quickly getting as much PR and press out, building an organic funnel, right?
I mean, that's step one. And then really just hoping it worked out with the brand, right? You don't really know whether the name's going to resonate, people are going to be upset, right? That these people are very passionate, particularly when they love a product.
But yeah, a lot of it was let the product speak for itself. We happen to let folks do it early. And, you know, even recently now, you know, we're sold on Goop. Gwyneth Paltrow has been a big fan of the product and has mentioned us across a handful of podcasts that are, you know, we would never have that reach.
We don't have the budget for someone like that. And we don't have the capacity to be on these podcasts with, you know, 30, 40 million, nothing on you, but the, you know, the prices on those guys. And so we just, we, we've, we've really been blessed. We're not Joe Rogan for those that don't know.
No, no. And if he wants a product, we're happy to let him any, you know, no politics, whoever, if it helps you sleep, we're happy to give you a sleep. I'll have our people reach out to their people. Sounds great.
But yeah, when people like it, right. I mean, I think the Acquired podcast, people were messaging us that, oh, you know, the founders are talking about you. We didn't know. And so if you build this, because going back to the core mission, if you build a product that does the thing you say it's going to do, you try not to overpromise.
You try to be very clear with your mission. You know, for us, it's always been science backed. We think that in audio it can get very woo woo very fast. right and so if you if you back a product that works with a science that endorses it with a brand you can trust you can you know i call it luck but you you you can break through right because the right folks like yourself find the product value it and you know this is not a i made you know your life a little easier if i could help you sleep i could be your most important thing in the day and that can speak through.
Yeah. And so what you did is you nailed the messaging and focus first, then went wide. And the reason that's extremely important is because if you go wide and you don't have the we help you sleep, you don't have the focus messaging. What happens is you just go wide and you confuse people further.
They see you. They don't really understand what they're like. You hit the, you know, let's say you hit a big podcast with 30 million people or whatever, and you got lucky. I don't think it's luck, by the way.
Then people hear the message and they just don't really understand. Like, wait, are you another headphone company? You do sports, you do sleep. I already have headphones.
No, thanks. Right. So if you go wide first, you don't have your messaging nailed. You actually risk alienating people and pushing them further away.
And then the next time you come around, you say, hold up, guys, we've focused our mission. Now we're just sleep. They're like, yeah, I've heard about you before. You guys are unfocused that they don't say that out loud, but that's how they think.
And so you mentioned that you kind of had some luck and sure there's some luck involved. But really what I'm hearing you say is that you were highly strategic and you use something that maybe looked like a disadvantage to your advantage. Here's what I mean. You had a brand that was difficult to talk about, but what you did is you made a choice.
You made a PR choice. Cool shout out to Launch Squad there. and you actually reached out to people who you already had relationships with You mentioned strategic and this is so brilliant Your systematic approach was to reach out to people who already had an experience with the older version of the product and to maintain that relationship. This was your strategic approach and that is how you got some of those big PR wins and you were able to convert that audience from Bose over to Oslo.
Is that fair assessment? Yeah, that's exactly it, right? We knew folks who, even if they haven't been friendly in the past to the product, right? Not all reviews were positive, but almost every review spoke to the need for a product like this, right?
And so we went where we already knew the audience of us, which is the reporter or influencer or whoever it may be, is looking for something like this? And can we give them our latest and greatest and show them, hey, this is the missing promise that you thought you wanted, right? This holds the missing piece. You know, for us, the biggest thing, and sure you remember this, the previous product did not allow you to stream your own audio, right?
And that was, again, there was a very important reason for that. It has to last all night. It has to do these things, right? The technology wasn't quite there with some innovations in Bluetooth and we won't go super technical.
But now we were able to say, hey, listen to whatever you want, right? Listen to a podcast while you go to sleep. And now when you fall asleep, switch over to audio, private alarm in the morning. It was a much more compelling story, but it's easier to get in the room with the folks who have already been looking for the solution and trying to make them your advocates versus someone who's net new where I have to jump and try and explain what we do first and then how we do it.
And that's just going back to narrow, not wide. If you shoot the field too wide, you haven't talked to anybody. The allure is you've talked to more people. And I think you know this, but in the world, particularly of small brands and startups, that's not the case.
If you go super wide, you kind of don't really get anyone and you risk alienating the folks who really care about sleep. Because if I really care about sleep, I probably don't care as much about the fitness headphone or the Focus headphone, right, whatever it might be. But I do want the sleep. Yeah.
And you basically said you found something that these journals, you basically found a point of trust. Like they already trusted that old product or they already trusted what it could be. And you started there, which is a brilliant approach. Probably our final question.
But one of the interesting things that stuck out with me, you guys wanted to discuss this show before. And that's actually quite unusual for our show. I don't normally discuss shows ahead of time. But what really stuck out to me is you and your team are extremely sensitive and dialed in, it goes back to dialed into your audience.
You don't want to say the wrong things that could be misconstrued. You're very careful about how you message. Tell me the difficulty because sleep is very deeply connected to people emotionally in their personal lives. It is deeply connected.
I will say when I heard news that Sleep Bud 2 were going to be discontinued, I was legit pissed off because I am kind of dependent on them to get sleep. I've slept like crap my whole life. And then when I developed tinnitus, so my sleep got worse. And then when I started using the Bose Sleep Buds, my sleep actually got better than before I had it.
And so I was legit concerned. It was an emotional, I would say an emotional thing for me being discontinued. Do you have a delicate balance? Are you very precise?
Are you very careful with how you market and how you message your clientele? Yeah, I mean, look, I personally am not very precise, and that's kind of the founder privilege. And I can say whatever I want. But, you know, we look at it in a couple of ways when we go to talk and we aren't on a lot of podcasts.
I think we stay away and we try and stay away from things that don't speak for the product on one hand. And so is this a, you know, I think, and you know this and I said, hey, you use the product. You know, I run our customer support team, an awesome team that leads it. I no longer have to take those phone calls.
But we have a customer base that is really, really, really passionate about the product. I was on the phone yesterday. Please don't call our number, but people find it. And occasionally I will call back and try and help folks debug or figure out the issue.
And we'll find folks. They've hit the wrong button. It happens all the time with any product. But they're not, oh, let me go Google.
I'll fix it. This is a conversation with a woman, I assume in her 60s or 70s, had hit the wrong button. accidentally unpaired the product. Her problem wasn't, I need to repair the product, right?
And this is what I would do with a headphone. It's not pairing. It's not pairing. Her problem was I cannot sleep, right?
I've been so addicted. This past month has been the best sleep I've ever had. How do I do that? And so when we communicate, we don't want to increase expectations.
On the one hand, on the brand side, we always want to under promise and be able to over deliver. On the other side of that, in the world of audio, in the world of audio and sleep, people are very quick to make claims and it makes us very uncomfortable, particularly as a hardware manufacturer. When you make sleep hardware, we make sleep software. You can kind of say in the U.
S. regulatory environment, anything you want about sleep software. But when you start doing it with sleep hardware, you start approaching as medical advice and a medical device. We have aspirations to build, and I know we've talked about it.
I won't go into detail, but it helps some of the things you've mentioned you have. and using audio in a clinical way. And so that means that we're always balancing these two worlds of, is it the right, not necessarily precise, but the right communication on a brand side for how consumers will look at us? But also, is it something that is helping move our goalposts forward on a clinical and potential future that's more regulated?
And you have to balance those two. And so when we have communications, we try to always make sure that we are talking about the brand in the way we want to talk about. It's a very serious fun, but serious. Like we believe sleep is not something that you should write off or is really a joke about.
Like getting better sleep is extremely important to folks. And at the same time, we want to not make promises in terms of performance and things that will improve that don't really make sense in our kind of long term mission. Wow. Yeah, I love the don't.
We don't under. We don't over promise. We under promise. We want to make sure.
Yeah, I love that. I love how, again, you're dialed into the audience. You're even dialed into the partners you work with. You're dialed into podcasts and media you do to make sure that people are kind of aligned with that vision and mission that you've set.
It's such a brilliant strategy. You understand in a very deep level, an empathetic level, who your audience is. And so bravo. It's a great story.
And I hope CMOs, I hope founders are listening to this. Charlie Taylor, the co-founder of Oslo. Congrats, by the way, on Time Magazine's Best Innovations. That's huge.
Thank you. Thank you. If people want to reach out to you, learn more about the company, how do they do that? Well, they could always email me.
You can find my email online. I won't dox myself there or LinkedIn. But if you reach out to support at Oslo Sleep and ask about me, it will get sent to me very quickly. But you can find us at OsloSleep.
com. We're on Amazon. We're on our site. We're now in Best Buy.
We're in Walmart. We're available globally, at least the EU, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US. But yeah, we love the product. Black Friday is going to be a fun time for us.
Maybe wait till then. But yeah, if you have trouble sleeping or your partner snores, I obviously could not recommend a better solution. I can't either. Not a paid endorsement, by the way, for those acting asking or those thinking, is this a paid?
No, it's not. It's a great product. It's a great story. And I appreciate from a comms PR standpoint how you are so dialed in.
Charlie Taylor, the co-founder of Oslo. Thanks for coming on The Justin Brady Show. Thanks for having me.
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