Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Jaqueline Schaupp and Simon Greschl, Co-founders of Tinus, a sleep solution for people suffering from tinnitus, based in Germany.
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Here’s what Tinus is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Tinnitus patients have trouble falling asleep. In Germany, there are around 3 million of these tinnitus patients who have issues falling asleep. These issues arise because, in the absence of background noises while falling asleep, people start focussing on the tinnitus and there is no device out there that can distract you from your tinnitus without disrupting your or your partner's sleep. Headphones are not meant to be slept with, and background noise through a TV, for example, will likely affect your partner. This same problem applies to other people who struggle to fall asleep without background noise, such as people suffering from anxiety or severe stress.
The Solution:
We invented a pillow that transfers sound through its entire surface without radiating the sound into the surroundings. You can only hear the sound on the pillow, but not next to the pillow, to maximise the comfort for both the tinnitus patient and partner. The pillow senses when you are lying on it, so it will automatically play and pause, and through certain movement patterns during sleep, the pillow will also identify when you drift into deep sleep and phase out the sound.
The Team:
Jaqueline studied Management and Technology in her Bachelors and Masters at the TU Munich. She spent most of her student time freelancing in marketing for influencers. At 18, she also worked as the right hand to the founder of a startup. Simon also studied at TU Munich, focussing on med-tech and mechatronics. He was involved in his first startup during his Bachelor's working on smart embedded devices, and another startup during his Master's building smart shopping carts. There are 5 of us working full time right now, and we have some stellar working students working with us, too.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
Jaqueline: We met in 2019 during a university course where we had a project to develop a product that solves a real-world problem in 10 days. We both couldn't identify a problem that was immediately affecting us at the time, so I went home and asked my dad what his biggest problem was. He told me that he struggled to fall asleep due to his tinnitus, but when he left the TV on in the background his partner couldn’t fall asleep either. We discussed this the following day, and Simon noticed that his father also had tinnitus. We realised that likely many more people suffered from this, and started talking to as many tinnitus patients as we could find within those 10 days and built a simple prototype of the pillow. It didn’t work perfectly, but we had an MVP of a pillow that could transmit sound to the person lying on it while isolating the sound for the partner beside them.
Simon: The positive initial feedback we received for our arguably crappy prototype was incredible, and proved to us how important this problem would be to solve. At this point, we decided to keep working on it, and tried to find ways to finish our Master's degrees as quickly as possible.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Simon: There is a lot of technology within the pillow that is actually pretty new, which allowed us to build it now, and likely not a few years ago. At the same time, there is increasing awareness about the importance of sleep and living a healthy life, which was to a large extent driven by the effects of the pandemic. This trend has likely driven a lot of media attention towards us.
Jaqueline: Additionally, there is still ongoing research into the correlation between Covid and tinnitus as a long-term symptom. The number of tinnitus patients rose tremendously during the pandemic, and research is ongoing to explain this. Regardless of the cause though, we can see that the problem is increasing.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
Simon: We are so proud to finally finish the first product. It’s been a long journey, but with a lot of iterations and improvements, we have moved from our initial prototype to our current model, which we don’t want to miss in our beds anymore! We have produced the first 150 pillows and will start shipping in May.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Jaqueline: We have definitely struggled with figuring out how to get our components together to build the actual product. Since we are a new product in the market, it’s quite hard because no supplier knows what you're talking about, and you have to be very specific in your explanations. You also have to build some of the production machines from scratch, if there is no previous use case as with our pillow. Some parts we are still producing in-house, because we haven’t been able to find an external partner matching our quality standards yet.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
Jaqueline: There were so many stressful weeks where you are so focussed on your work and getting stuff done, that it is easy to forget to look after yourself and not reflect as much as you sometimes should. Looking back, I would take a step back in these situations and really take a break to look after myself and get back to my full mental level. You will be more resilient for it.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Simon: If you don’t feel slightly ashamed when you go to the customer the first time, you’re already too late with it. Bring prototypes out as soon as possible and remember to develop your product with your customers and users.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
Jaqueline: Start somewhere, and figure the rest out along the road.
One of the biggest problems you can create for yourself is overthinking things and creating a perfect version in your head, which you are then unable to achieve in reality. What you do doesn’t have to be perfect at the start, in fact, it never will be.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
Simon: If you want to work with and learn from external people, sometimes it can be really hard to transfer knowledge to them. It is important to remember this when looking for advice from others, for example. They might give you the greatest advice in the world, that worked for their context, but you need to find a way to apply it to your situation and derive value from it since you have so much more knowledge about your business than they do. What worked for them, might not work for you.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
Jaqueline: I’m very inspired by one of our investors, who is a business lady from Munich. She is such a power woman, who has paved her way in a very male-dominated field. It’s very inspiring how she always finds smart ways to solve problems and I really look up to her.
Simon: I’m definitely also inspired by our incredibly supportive investors. I would also say I’ve been inspired by my host dads in the families I stayed with during my stays abroad. One in South Africa, and one in Sydney, and both happened to be founders. They both had such inspiring stories and these crazy careers they are living, while still having healthy lives with their families.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Never Split The Difference - Chris Voss