Mark Zhang tried a lot of things before starting his current company, Manta Sleep. As I reflect on this interview that you’re about to hear, I’m most impressed by our conversation about his trial and error approach to entrepreneurship.
There’s an important lesson for all of us in this. We rarely get it right the first time. Our first thing is rarely our one thing. And even if it is, it may only be for a season.
Whether you’re crafting a career, a life, or an entrepreneurial pursuit, give yourself the space to try and fail, and then learn from it.
Mark describes himself as the Chief Napper at Manta Sleep a company whose mission is to empower light sleepers to sleep better so they can do more.
He believes prioritizing rest and sleep is the secret to unlocking organizational excellence, and realizing people’s full potential.
Mark has a passion for physical products and has created several 7-figure eCommerce companies in the last 10 years.
I can’t wait for you to hear Mark’s journey and some of his reflections on these themes.
Listen in here:
Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Overcast | SpotifyIn this episode you’ll learn:
- What Mark does
- How did he ended doing affiliate marketing
- How pressures fueled his career journey
- How life events can be a catalyst to jump start your career
- Why some careers are so draining
- Why entrepreneurship is not for everyone
- How your self-doubts can define who you become
- The importance of seeking out contexts to meet people
- Where to find a circle or community to join
- How Mark defines a “Light Sleeper”
- The product line of Mantis
- The importance of napping
- How to improve your sleep
Resources Mentioned:
Mark’s Email
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
Software Generated Transcription:
Dan
Mark, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to The Meaning Movement podcast.
Mark
Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Dan
The question I always like to begin with is, how do you begin to talk about the work that you do?
Mark
I was thinking about this question. How do I begin? Do you mean in terms of the journey in terms of when I started?
Dan
Well, that’s a great question. Why do I start with that question?
Mark
The reason I started that question is because one of the tougher questions I’ve gotten a podcast, which is great.
Dan
I love that you ask. No one has ever asked why that question because it’s the beginning of the conversation, right? Like, I don’t think you could encompass everything that you’re bringing to the world and hoping to accomplish and trying to actualize in just a few sentences. And so that’s why I asked that question of where do you begin? So less about where did you begin? But how do you begin the conversation about what are you doing? What’s your work life, your career, your work in the world.
Mark
Got it.
Dan
What does that look like?
Mark
I understand. So right now and for the past five years now, six years, almost my and our mission, my business mission, man, to sleep, is to empower light sleepers to sleep better. So we’ve been singularly focused on that mission, that vision in terms of being able to empower people. And I’ve been a light sleeper for most of my life since I started using sleep masks and sleep accessories. And since I was 14 or 15 and then later on sleep hacking and all these kind of things. And we’ve just been very focused on that.
Mark
And so I think that’s a good starting point.
Dan
That’s a great starting point. So let’s just rewind beyond your entry point as a light sleeper into this direction. Did you always consider yourself entrepreneurial? Is this kind of, like, destination or a career path that you envisioned when you were young?
Mark
No, not at all. I don’t have any entrepreneurs in the family and never even occurred to me that this could be a legitimate career path, if you will. I think there’s two inflection points, maybe three. The first one was when I was 18, had just gone to College and had to take a long bus ride from home to school, like, about an hour and a half. And at that time, my dad got me an ipod. And rather than listening to music, I just loaded up with a bunch of books.
Mark
One of the first books that I read that’s semirelated to business was rich dad, poor dad. This was a while back, but I was like, wow, there are all these other ways to make money. Real estate, like, what is that? So that sort of planted the seeds for later, for what’s to come. But even then, going through College, I never thought about going down the entrepreneur path I started a quote, unquote online business was like an affiliate business in 2005 and got really lucky during that time because Google ads was like, two cent a click.
Right.
Mark
So any idiot set up an account to make money? I was the idiot, and I made a bunch of money. But even then, even at that point, it was just not having the influence around me to show me that this is actually a legitimate way. I just didn’t want to work at McDonald’s. So I did that. And the plan was always to be a good Asian kid and become an accountant. So I study accounting. So, yeah, it was definitely not something that I grew up like, wanting to be an astronaut or something, wanting to be an entrepreneur, something that was upon later on, for sure.
Dan
Yeah. So much of that is fantastic. Rich Dad Poor Dad is such an amazing book. I think it has opened many people’s minds to new possibilities as far as work and career ways of earning horizontal income. Those kinds of ideas. Also, like, 2005. I feel so early for affiliate marketing. I’m really just really impressed. How did you even end up there? Especially because you said you didn’t have a sphere of influence around you, pushing you in this direction. I’m just so curious about that.
Mark
That’s a great question. I don’t think anybody has asked me. And I’ve always told myself this narrative where my parents didn’t really know what’s going on with entrepreneurship.
Dan
Right.
Mark
And so for most of the journey, until finally, when I show them, hey, here’s our revenue. Here’s our financial statement where they’re like, okay, he’s actually doing something with his life. Their default state has been to be worried about this whole situation. But actually, now that you ask the question in thinking back, that very first affiliate business I set up was because my mom and dad had heard one of their friend’s kid was on the Internet, on the Internet, making the money. And they said, you should check it out.
Mark
It sounds like it’s a good opportunity to at the time, all my buddies are getting jobs working like College jobs. I just didn’t want to go to McDonald’s, I think, actually thinking back. They were the ones who really got me to start that.
Dan
I love that.
Mark
But then later on.
Dan
They were like, hey.
Mark
Man, maybe.
Dan
We shouldn’t have told you that. Yeah.
Mark
Focus on being accounted instead, which is kind of funny, actually thinking back.
Dan
Yeah. So just maybe connect the dots for me between doing that project, not wanting to work at McDonald’s, feels like some familiar pressure familial pressure to have a Capital C career. Connect some of the dots for me between that and then starting, Mantis. And where that piece of your journey.
Mark
So I graduated, right. And I went and I worked in accounting. That’s what the plan was for about a year. And I felt that my soul was dying every single day that I went to work. It was just not a great time did not inspire me. It was not good. And then around that time, one of my childhood friends passed away from cancer. So that was obviously a huge shock. And that shock was what propelled me to kind of not necessarily to go into entrepreneurship but to take risks and to experiment with life.
Mark
Right. So I quit to quit my job as a result of that, because I was thinking, man, if I was going to die in the next year or six months or whatever amount of time that’s going to be, I don’t really want to spend the last of my days working at an accounting firm. So quit packed my bags. I was living in Vancouver, Canada. I’m Canadian, and I just started traveling, went to Asia for many years and hopped around. And during that time, I was the four hour work week by Tim Ferris, which I’m sure most of your audience maybe knows, was also an inflection point for me.
Mark
And then also listening to podcasts like yours. I was listening to Mixer G by Andrew Warner, and he was interviewing all these, like every single show will be interviewing an entrepreneur, asking them what they’re doing, how they’re doing. And he’s a tough interviewer. He really drills them. And as I was listening, I was thinking to myself, these people sound just like average people. If they were able to do it, couldn’t I be able to kind of figure this part out? I think mindset is the hardest to change.
Mark
And it really took, like, a good year and a half of me just listening and reading to actually feel and think that maybe I could be an entrepreneur because I always thought it was for crazy people, for risk takers and all that stuff. Now from there to man to sleep, there are many failed businesses in between. Right. But that’s what got me started to really think, oh, I’m going to go started a business and I’m going to pursue this path.
Dan
So you said at the top of the show, there are two major inflection points. One was listening to rich dad, poor dad on the bus. And then it sounds like maybe this was kind of this other inflection point with your federal.
Mark
I don’t know how it would have turned out. Maybe with enough time, I would have left as well. But my friend’s passing definitely was a catalyst and kind of helped me make a jump.
Dan
Yeah. And it’s amazing how those just life events can be such a catalyst. Inciting incident. I often think about it and talk about it in terms of every story has an inciting incident, that kind of jump starts the process, and that when it comes to career and it comes to meaning and purpose. And these existential questions of Why am I here on this Earth and what am I here to do that it usually takes some sort of stimuli to get us moving and your story. It’s unique in this specific character, but in the overarching, I guess, movement, it fits the model in so many ways.
Dan
I’m curious when you’re in the assume as accounting firm, when you are an accountant, you said it was a year or so of just soul sucking. That just really resonated with me. I think from my own experience post College during the career that I thought I was supposed to be doing and just was not a good fit. And I don’t know exactly what the question is here, except, yeah, I guess why are some careers? Yeah. It feels like such a stupid question as I’m saying, how to make this sound articulate.
Dan
But why is it that some careers can be so draining?
Mark
Yeah. I often think to myself, if I have kids in the future, obviously, I think entrepreneurship is the best thing to do, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the answer for everybody. It’s not something where everybody should or have, in fact, my wife, because she sees me with all these entrepreneurs. I’m always encouraging her to take a look at what she’s interested in. What she’s good at. Entrepreneurship is not the final answer for everything. But when it comes back to the career, I think it’s just and this is something that we try really hard to do.
Mark
Manta sleep, which is to create a culture where people are respected and heard and don’t feel like they’re just part of the cog in the machine. I don’t know. But I like to go into accounting firm and just having to deal with all the office politics. And I think, I don’t know, maybe this generation of millennials I remember punching so in county firms, you have to do these audits. And a lot of times clients will give these huge files of their numbers, but they don’t give them to you.
Mark
An Excel sheet. They give us physically printed sheets. And I was sitting there sitting there with my calculator out, and it was really fast using calculator. I was going out of the sheet and adding these numbers up, and that was all I was doing for the first four months, and our firm was booking these clients at $400 an hour for me doing basically that right. I don’t know. It just felt I think there’s some level of arrogance to being a young kid and thinking I should deserve more than just this.
Mark
I don’t know.
Dan
But.
Mark
I don’t really like that.
Dan
Yeah. No, it’s just such a curiosity to me of how you can have two people that are so similar in many ways, but put them in the same context and one might thrive and the other one. Yeah.
Mark
It kind of built as you grow up and different values get instilled into you. Also, there’s like this personality, whether it’s innate or after. But I have friends, good friends who are very happy with what they’re doing with the job that they have. They have a schedule and things are more predictable and they’re happy. I’m not happy for them. It’s all good for me. I don’t like authority for one what to do as I’m sure many entrepreneurs probably like.
Dan
I love it. So then you went through this process of maybe reimagining yourself, changing your mindset as you mentioned it, and which maybe kind of started you down the entrepreneurial path. You said there’s many failed businesses along the way before Mantis. Are any of those worth highlighting, or should we just jump into Mantis? Is that journey interesting or they’re just like, yeah, just churning, making stuff, failing a lot. And here we are.
Mark
I think maybe the single one lesson. I joke how people’s entrepreneur careers usually it’s like super slow and you eventually hit it like an exponential curve. Mine was like, it was amazing College because I got lucky. And then it was just crap. For many years, we finally started making back during that time. It was a real struggle. And I think the person that I am today was a direct result of those years struggling in Singapore, in these places, trying to start businesses who I am today is not defined by the little success that we’ve had with some businesses.
Mark
And mentally, it was defined by those years of struggling, of being poor as hell, of constantly worrying and constantly sort of banging my head against the wall and thinking, Why can other people figure out how come I can’t figure it out? And the self doubt and the sort of that grinding process, I think, is what really defines a person’s characteristics, like those tough moments. But if there’s one single lesson I learned from that entire experience is to go out there, meet people, post code, get to conferences.
Mark
I was thinking, I don’t want to spend this money on my phone, just going to bang away on the keyboard. I was a keyboard warrior trying to figure out all myself. It wasn’t until I started to go meet people, talk to people and just surround myself with other entrepreneurs. It wasn’t until then that our business start taking off. So if I had to do this again, I would just start meeting people and hang out with people who believe in the same thing. I do much, much sooner rather than trying to be a keyboard warrior myself.
Dan
I love that so much. I want to circle back to the people, please. I think it’s really important. But first, what I think is super interesting about what you said is that who you are today as a result of all those years of struggle, as much as if not more than the success that you’ve had. And it sounds like what you’re saying in some ways is that you’re not defined necessarily by your success. But then you’re also not defined by the failure and the struggle and that you went through that struggle and came out the other side of it not feeling like I can’t do this, but that you built grit.
Dan
You built tenacity, I guess through that, right. Exactly.
Mark
I don’t want this to be like, struggle porn. I mean, struggle porn is a real thing because a lot of stories about, like, I was on the street living with a single dollar. I had housing all day long. I wasn’t homeless or anything like that. I don’t want this turns us into another struggle porn story. But I think the training, if you will, during that time, is it makes like sometimes our team members ask me, Well, there must be a lot of pressure, but the thing is, it doesn’t really matter these days how big the pressure is.
Mark
It was never as bad as those early days when I really felt like I was a loser. Can figure things out. And it was just bang my head against the walls. So it sort of provides context.
Dan
Right.
Mark
And then whenever things get seemingly tough, I think about those times and I’m like, Man, there’s nothing compared to back then, we had no direction, no help, no idea, no money, right?
Dan
Yeah. I love that.
Mark
So I guess tenacity, like you said.
Dan
Yeah. It’s fantastic. You mentioned just one of your main lessons is meeting people, going to conferences and hanging out with people, which just also feels like you want to connect the dots here to what you said early on with your affiliate business. You said you made a comment, something along the lines, like just that you didn’t have the influence the people around you to influence you to show you the way. And it feels like that’s maybe one of the major differentiating aspects of the success that you’ve had now versus what you were trying to do then and why it didn’t carry on and continue.
Mark
Yeah.
Dan
For people who are looking for that community, looking for the people who can help them imagine what a different future for themselves can be, whether that be in their current career or career change or something entrepreneurial or maybe a passion project or creative pursuit or whatever. And they’re just looking for their people. Do you have any other thoughts about where do you go?
Mark
Where do you look?
Dan
Where should people be looking for people to share the journey with?
Mark
It’s been. How many years has it been, like, over ten years? I think now, since I started this whole process and back then, there was already digital. Nomad, right. But it is nowhere near as big as it is today. Honestly, the whole kind of community and the movement has changed and definitely accelerated as a result of Kovid. There are just so many great places. I’m not sure if I can give any specific ones. I can give specific ones for the ones that I’m interested in. There’s one called The Dynamic Circle, which I’ve joined many years ago, if you’re looking for ecommerce, there’s a form called Ecommerce Fuel.
Mark
I think these ones, they require you to be an entrepreneur and starting business already. But just even on Facebook groups. I see all these digital Nomad groups where you can just join and kind of shoot the shit if you will, with others doing the same thing you are. It’s so accessible these days. I feel like and just a simple Google search or even a Facebook group will be a great way to get started. And the other thing is just to listen to podcasts. You listen to an idiot like me work on entrepreneurship and start a business.
Mark
And maybe over time it can shift the way that you think, because honestly, before then, I was like, man, entrepreneurship is for crazy people, for people who are willing to take risks but really risk aversion. Yes.
Dan
I think that’s a great recommendation. I think that when it comes to mentoring or being mentored or finding that community, we can think about really wanting people that were physically hanging out with that they’re sitting side by side, working together and sharing life with. But that’s not always possible or not always possible in all the ways that we want it to be possible. And I love what you’re inviting people to kind of broaden your definition of what it looks like to have company on that journey, one of which is listening to podcasts like this, getting that input from other people as well as like you did a couple of points in your journey, like books like authors, thought leaders to get that input, people who might already have been where you want to go and just find ways to learn from them, I think, is a big takeaway for listeners right there.
Dan
Let’s take into Mantis sleep a little bit because I’m Super curious about.
Mark
All of it.
Dan
The mission empowering light sleepers to sleep, to sleep better, and then how you go about what that actually means when it comes to products, when it comes to making money, when it comes to success and how you measure success first, I think, how do you define a light sleeper? Is there, like, a hard data on that or is that just like, yeah, I sleep light or I don’t do people just know it.
Mark
I think when you talk to light sleepers, they’ll tell you, yeah, I’m a light sleeper or not. It encompasses various things, like light sensitivity. You get woken up easily by noises. Some people have sleep issues like snoring or different kind of. It sort of encompasses. And also there’s some folks work shifts, so they have to work during the day. And so you got sunlight coming through the window. You got to sleep during the day. It’s difficult. So it sort of encompasses a whole area of people.
Dan
Yes. And Matthew’s main product is sleep masks, correct. Or what does the product line look like? Maybe that’s a better question.
Mark
So when we started, we launched with a single product on Kickstarter, which is a sleep mask. And the reason for that is because like I said, I’ve been using sleep mask for ever since I was 15, and I always thought we could do something better. And my business partner, who was industrial designer when he and I came together, that’s what we did. We created something better and then obviously made a lot more sleep mask, improved it, refined it. But going forward, our mission is really focused on accessories surrounding the sleep experience, to be able to use cleverly designed accessories to empower light sleepers to sleep better and ultimately do more in life.
Mark
Because I often have this fantasy. Not these days, because these days I sleep really well. But I know in my early 20s I was always thinking, man, if I just sleep like some people, they just go anywhere and they fall asleep matter no, what kind of new environment you’re like. Damn, how do you do it? I wish I was like that. Always thought if I could do something like that, I’d be like a billionaire. By this point in my life, we’re trying to empower people, stop me anytime, Dan, because I get excited about this stuff and I ramble.
Mark
But one of the things that we’re super excited about and passionate about is what we call pro nap movement, which is basically giving people permission.
Dan
In fact.
Mark
North American culture. At least if you take a nap at work, it’s still even to this day, despite all the changes, still seem as something that’s lazy, that’s weak, like Winters. Don’t take that. That’s just completely the wrong approach. We are biologically wired to do it. And we all take, like at our office after lunch, the lights are off. Everybody sleeps on a yoga mat like a 30 minutes power. Now you get a second morning, so much more productive. Okay, quick jump back to the accounting days, right?
Mark
Yeah. Like I was supposed to remember at the client office after lunch feeling absolutely tired. And if I could just take a 30 minutes power nap the entire option, I would have gotten the work done in an hour or two because you get so refreshed. But as a result of the culture of not being able to, I was literally sitting there. I’m not exaggerating. I had an Excel sheet open, right? And I was just flipping through mindlessly. I was so God damn tired, but I couldn’t sleep.
And.
Mark
The firm is billing the clients 300 $400 an hour for me opening a spreadsheet because I was like, this is so stupid. If I ever created a company, I’m going to make damn sure that this is not what’s happening with our culture with our people anyway. But part of that is also just to give permission and to celebrate the fact that napping is what winners do, right? Like balancing rest and work is what winners do, because it’s not the number of hours you put in with the work that we’re doing.
Mark
We’re not working on an assembly line. It’s all about the way you think and how creative you are with pretty much all of the roles that we have in the company and to make that effective is not about the actual hours. It’s about being well rested and having that mental capacity. Anyway, I’m sorry, I’m rambling.
Dan
I love it. No, it’s fantastic sleep I mentioned before we started the show started to hit the record button at this moment at the moment recording three kids under six, which has its own set of challenges. I’ve never thought of myself as a light sleeper, but I’ve become the equivalent of simply because of all the distractions that come my way. I’m curious to hear from you who’s thought long and hard, both for your own in your own journey, as well as thinking about products and how to build a company around the concept of increasing sleep quality.
Dan
What’s the low hanging fruit of sleep? What are the simplest things that a person should be doing to ensure that they’re setting themselves up for success? If this is a topic that you want to explore, but I know you have something to share here and I’d love to hear it.
Mark
Well, the first question is, do you drink coffee or tea? Yes. Okay. When do you drink your coffee and tea in the morning? That’s great. So don’t drink coffee after lunchtime because caffeine’s got a half life of like, whatever, like 8 hours or something like that. And so if you drink coffee after lunchtime, it’s still going to be in your system by the time you go to sleep. Do you know the room temperature of the room that you sleep in?
Dan
No, it varies.
Mark
The point here is to sleep in a pool room. The warmer it is, we tend to fall asleep much easier in warmer rooms. Sorry, in cooler rooms, there is an official guided temperature. Things like 20 degrees or something like that. Anything below that, you’re very comfortable. Anything above it’s going to impact your sleep. And the final thing I could go on. I’m just going to give you because a lot of people drink coffee, the temperature thing. And then the other thing is just light, if you can, where you are, get some blackout curtains.
Mark
Get yourself a man’s sleep mask. Get that 100% blackout. Make sure you take out a piece of duct tape or something like that. You know how we have electronics and Chargers in our bedroom and emits that little Led light. That blue light frequency is very disruptive to sleep. So get a piece of duct tape and tape it over. If you can eliminate most. Actually, you should try to eliminate all sources of light in the room weather from outside. It’s going to significantly help you improve the quality of your sleep and don’t drink little charges.
Mark
Okay.
Dan
You’re just a tiny little sources of light.
Mark
Even those tiny little lights when the room is dark and you open up your eyes and they hit your retina, it’s got blue light inside, right. And it contains frequency, blue light. So that impacts your sleep quality.
Dan
Yeah. I love that. I have also heard that alcohol has a very negative effect on sleep as well. So I think that.
Mark
Potentially help you fall asleep, but it makes the quality you sleep really light so you don’t get rested, you fall asleep. But your quality of your sleep is terrible.
Dan
Yeah. I love it.
Mark
Great.
Dan
Well, for anyone who’s looking to up their sleep game, rewind and put some of these into practice, I know one thing that from this list. I think night lights and Chargers. We don’t have many lights in our room, but with kids, too.
Mark
You got to get rid of, at least in your bedroom.
Dan
Yeah, I love it. That’s fantastic. So with Mantis, how do you think about what’s next? How do you make the decisions as far as okay, we made this mask, and now we’re going to do the next thing to help people sleep better. What’s the matrix that you run your decisions through.
Mark
So at this point, since we’ve been in business for many years now, we have a lot of customer feedback, customer data in terms of what they’re interested in, where they think we should go next. As a business, what kind of value they expect to get from us. So it’s sort of from the data that we have from the customers, as well as our own vision of what we want to do. We can kind of map out a rough direction and a path that we can potentially follow.
Mark
But at the beginning, it was more just on intuition. But it was helpful, especially to start a business when you are solving a problem for yourself. It just makes it much easier to intuitively know what the customers may also want. If I started a makeup brand today, I wouldn’t have any idea. I wouldn’t even understand what the pain points of women are. And so while as a good marketer, you could learn that and empathize with that, it definitely takes more effort compared to something that you already are struggling with or passionate about.
Dan
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. How much of this? Like when you were launching your first product on Kickstarter, the sleep mask. Could you even imagine at that point the business as it exists today, or was it just like we’re going to want this thing?
Mark
No, absolutely not. I wish I was one of these grand visionaries. I had done two Kickstarter campaigns before Man’s Sleep. The first one, I raised $4,000, and I was like, Damn, this is amazing. Second one was like, $40,000, and I was like, this is the top. I’ve hit the ceiling. And then when we did Manta Sleep mask between Kickstarter and Indiegogo, we did, like, 700K in sales, which was like when we went in, we were like, hey, if we do 200, I think this would be a great starting point for the business, but the results blew us away, and I like to attribute that to our genius, but I think also there’s always an element of luck involved.
Mark
We obviously do what we can to create opportunities for luck. But I think the fact that we enter the market at that time, the competitive landscape, how weird the product looked, and also, in the end, how effective it was. It just really kind of helped us to accelerate our growth. Yeah.
Dan
So it sounds like it’s not just like third time. You’re learning and improving your numbers every time. Third time is a charm. But it also sounds like you both were taking your experience and expertise from your last launches, as well as leveraging an opportunity. A cultural moment, if you will, right? Yeah. Absolutely. I love it. Well, for folks who are interested in following along with your work and curious if you have specific things that you’d like to invite people to any call to actions. Yeah.
Mark
Hey, if you guys are looking for a great sleep mask, the best sleep mask in the world, we’re coming up with something new very soon after this podcast launches, go to Mansleep so that’s the Mantaray and atmantasleep. Com and your audience has any questions for me, I’ll be happy to answer. Just reach out to me. Hello at Markzang M-A-R-K-Z-H-A-N-G. Com. And I’ll be happy to connect with your listeners. Beautiful.
Dan
I’ll make sure to link up to those in the show notes. I’m curious as far as the next release, and if there’s any teasers you can give us to that, because here’s the thing. I don’t use a sleep mask. I should get a manta mask and give it a try, but it doesn’t. For a non sleep mask user, I have a hard time imagining how you improve on a sleep mask, and yet you’ve built a fantastic company around it, and you’re iterating on. It like you haven’t reached the pinnacle of sleep mass yet is what I’m hearing you imply.
Dan
So I’m curious. Tell me about that.
Mark
Here’s the thing, Dan.
Dan
Here’s the thing.
Mark
Here’s the first lesson in business. You’re not our target customer.
Dan
Yes.
Mark
It would be hard to build a business trying to target Dan based on us.
Dan
Really.
Mark
What we do is we focus on people who are already light sleepers and or people who already know the benefits of using a sleep mask or are curious about it. As a general rule of thumb, it’s just real hard to convince people to do something that they are not already interested in doing.
Dan
Right.
Mark
And in terms of how to improve the sleep mask, I’m going to leave that as a surprise. We really have some really coming out.
Dan
Can’t talk about it.
Mark
But it would be. I’m sure by the time this podcast comes out beautiful.
Dan
Well, I will be anxiously awaiting the updates and see what you guys are coming up with. And I should myself give it a try. Thank you, Mark. So much for just sharing so much of your journey here with us. I love what you’re up to. I believe in sleep, in my own life and the power. I’ve seen my own just mood and wellbeing as well as that as my kids. Just how much sleep can make, take or break a day and not even just a day, but your health and everything else.
Dan
So you’re doing good work. Thank you so much for sharing it with us today.
Mark
I appreciate it. It’s my pleasure to be here. Thanks, Dan.
