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You're listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Anton Kramkin, who's the founder and CEO of Sleepagachi, an upcoming sleep app that incentivizes users to sleep better using gamification and AI. Previously, Anton worked on product at Duolingo. He started Sleepagachi while completing his studies at Harvard Business School. In this episode, we discussed...
Anton, welcome to The Brave Technologist. How are you doing, man? Very good. Thank you.
Thanks for having me. How are you, Luke? I'm doing well. Really kind of excited to have you on. We're going to go into a few areas today. But before we dive right into kind of Sleepagachi, what you guys are doing there, why don't you give us a little bit of background? Like, how did you end up where you're at? What got you into this Web3 and kind of Sleepspace and all of that, if you don't mind setting the table a bit? Thanks for the question. I mean, it's a big journey, really. I've really looked into how to use gaming and various incentives, also be like web-free incentives to try to change behavior.
behavior to really change the habits of users to use those powerful forces that drives users to either trade crypto or play games and really kind of bring it to a positive light. And I used to work at a company that gamified piano education. Then I worked briefly at Duolingo, gamifying languages. So
Sleep was another area which isn't, I think, gamified enough, although it is actually the most important habit in some ways. It's more important than diet. It's more important than exercise. Sleep is the number one health predictor. So we kind of thought, hey, this is actually the thing to, if you want to use gaming and free incentives to change your behavior, this is the one to actually change because it's the one that drives a lot of things for us.
That's awesome. Yeah, I think getting into crypto a while ago, one of the things that was really cool about it was that people were kind of taking like Web2 cases and adding virtuous cycles to them and gamifying them and kind of showing people that you can have added value from something that you're already doing. A lot of people are kind of tracking like their sleep and steps and all that health and wellness stuff and
I think it's a really cool area that you guys are getting into because these are the ways that you can kind of break through to those broader audiences. Everybody talks up, oh, the next billion users or whatever, but you're not going to get to those users unless you meet them where they are, right? And this seems like such a
cool. And I mean, especially with how much people are kind of trying to monitor, get better sleep and all of that, like how many people are trying to improve their sleep? Did you guys have to do a bunch of research into that before you decided to do the business into how much people are tracking their sleep and things like that? Like how did that evolution kind of come forward?
Yeah, I mean, definitely. I think that the reason that Sleepagogy can exist today and, for example, not 10 years ago is because, you know, 10 years ago, nobody really, I think, cared about sleep that much. Kind of, you know, this whole hustle car show. Hey, you know, you don't sleep six hours, optimize, wake up 6 a.m., work until late night.
And I think there was like this, you know, the startup grind that kind of in the tech circle at least propagated in the 2010s. And I think then you slowly started to see first kind of, you know, new devices like Fitbit and Aura and Whoop really, you know, elevating the sleep importance. And then the second product
point is you really see the cultural change. You know, you see Huberman Labs talking about it. You see, you know, Peter Attia. You see other kind of, you know, health experts really saying, you know, Matthew Walker's like this Wivey Sleep book that was like super popular a few years ago. And it's really started popping up, I think, like 2019, 2020 in the last five years. So if you look at the market size of
of course, of the wearable devices and just the frequency of it. Like it's just on the rise as people start to understand. I actually, you know, sleep is super important. It's much better to, you know, sleep eight hours and have like, you know, productive products, if you know, eight hours of work, and then, you know, sleep four and then kind of, you know, grind all day, all night.
It's true, man. It's one of those things where the hustle culture was real. I was caught up in all of that myself. Some of that doesn't turn off, especially once you start having kids and stuff. It's just okay. You have to surrender some parts of your time budgeting for other things. Let's get into a little bit of how this works. How does Sleepagachi work? How do you guys gamify sleep?
Yeah, of course. So we give you rewards in different ways. We kind of, we operate as a Duolingo and Star Wars kind of, we really lean into the gaming elements a lot. So we kind of, they bring you different collectibles that you can use inside Sleepagotchi app. We also give you like different heroes that you then level up based on your sleep. And three, we give you like different, you know, web free incentives as well, kind of give you like
you are actually able to trade those currencies to trade those characters that you get with other users. So effectively, for some users, you know, you can actually say it's like sort of like a sleep to earn almost like ecosystem that is being developed. And the idea is the following, like we actually don't gamify the quality of the sleep, we gamify a sleep schedule. So the number one thing in sleep is when you went to bed and when you woke up and you need to do it like day in, day out.
roughly similar time, you know, plus or minus 20 minutes, because this is your natural rhythm of the body and you need to hit this rhythm. Once you hit this rhythm, everything else inside the sleep starts to fall into sleep, into like, into this rhythm. We measure your sleep when you went to bed and when you woke up, either with using a phone. So if you don't use your phone at night, you think you're asleep or with the variables who integrate with Whoop or a Fitbit, Apple Watch, you name it, every single device. And then you wake up in the morning, we check your sleep.
with your device activity, hey, when did you actually go to sleep? When did you actually wake up? And then we calculate your different rewards and we fine tune it to really try to give you like a meaningful reward for keeping to your sleep schedule.
And that's the core of Sleepagotchi. And it's really not an app you use at the night. It's really an app you use in the morning because we really give you, you know, we give you effectively rewards for your sleep score. So rather than just like a sleep score or suddenly you get much more kind of a social and a gamified experience attached to your sleep.
That's cool. I mean, that's one of those three things that helps things catch on, right? Because all of this stuff is pretty personal. I mean, and one thing we've seen at Brave is that there are some features that are kind of socially driven and ones where, you know, you get a lot of social energy around the bit, but like personal stuff, health and wellness stuff, unless you kind of build a movement around it where there's that social element of it, it's a very personal thing that people tend to not really talk about very much. So it's kind of cool that you've got this element where
You could be trading collectible. And the artwork's cute, too. It's great. I mean, it's one of those things. It's like super wholesome and people really, people that, I think that's another missing piece here with kind of getting to that broader cohort of users is that so much of what happens in the crypto space is tribal and very like niche. There's a whole like G-gen culture thing. And I think people are kind of burnt on that. Like whenever we run something, whether it's like Penguins or something that's like, we did some stuff
with Moonwalk and other folks that are like trying to tie in things that people do outside of crypto with crypto. Like people's reactions to them are great. And your guys just did well. It played really well with people. People liked it. Like, and I think, yeah, it's a really cool element. And people have become so attached to their phones too. I think it's a pretty fair metric like that if people are not using their phone, just because people are on their phones, like even when they're in bed, it's wild, you know? How much of this do you have to balance out when you're kind of building an app
around healthier habits. Okay, we're on the phone. Like you said, I like what you said where, you know, it's a morning app. Is that something you guys kind of encourage in the UX for the users is, okay, put it away? Or how does that work? Is there much of that going on? I haven't dug too far into it yet, but just kind of curious the mindset.
So the app, as the moment of the recording of the century, isn't yet live in the app store. We had like a few tests that were quite successful before that was launched for a limited amount of time. And we have it coming up as well. But for us, you know, that one of the features that we are working on is that, you know, if you, for example, say in your settings, hey, my target bed time is like 11 p.m. After 11 p.m., the game turns, the Sleepagotchi app turns black and white. So.
So you can kind of still enjoy it, but it's not going to be as enjoyable in the morning. So we try to be mindful. It's like always counterintuitive. Oh, well, so I need to use my phone to rule my sleep, but wasn't I supposed to keep the phone outside of my bed? And really...
Yes, you should, but it's also almost not possible inside today's life. You consume your news, you communicate using your phone. So the phone is almost an ideal proxy for 70% of people in terms of their sleep, bedtime and wake-up time.
At least for me, it is. Yeah, totally. Well, people have, I mean, their alarms are on their phones. People, a lot of people are like falling asleep with, I don't know, like meditative stuff or things going on, like lullaby types of things, right? Like on their phones, people are so attached to them. It's wild. And so, so right now you mentioned the apps coming out soon. I know there's like a Telegram channel. What are you guys building up the social element of it? What's, what's the current thing that people are doing?
Yeah, the current thing. So, you know, we have a public test coming out in a few weeks from now, so early May, as the plan for it. And then we want to like, once the if the test goes well, and we want to go well, we kind of rolling out it widely in a global release. As I go to market marketing strategy, we release like a
very toned down Telegram mini app version as we saw the Telegram, you know, just virality that happened with all this stuff. And the hypothesis was, hey, you know, let us use some of the assets we developed, the cute, wholesome characters, just put them into Telegram mini app and let the virality take its part to build a community and build
awareness about the full launch of Sleepagotchi ahead of the launch. And right now, people are able to play the version on Telegram. There is no sleep involved. We can't track sleep on Telegram. It's called Sleepagotchi Lite. It still shares the same IP. It kind of has a similar ethos that it's ultimately...
a product that is designed about wellness and health and sleep in its mind, but it is a Telegram collectible card game where we share the same IP and tell the story about the upcoming sleep agot. So we kind of use it as a marketing tool. And that's why we also did a collaboration with Brave where we kind of, you know, we took over the tab, we did some push notifications to drive users into the Telegram mini version so that later on they also can convert to the full product.
That's cool. Yeah. And we wanted to kind of get into that bit too, especially over the past year. It seems like Telegram's really kind of taken off as a distribution channel in a way, like a go-to-market. How has that been for you guys? I mean, you've obviously worked in other apps before, right, in the past, especially the Gamify things. How has that experience been going to market through Telegram? Has it been positive? And then like how well has the mini app plugged into that whole process?
Yeah, definitely. I think that the Telegram mini apps have the benefit that it's very easy to share. It's very easy to install. So there's no friction to install it. You know, people getting an app installed is already like a challenge for many people. I mean, just six times friction. And then two is very easy to track referrals. So if I kind of invite a friend over, it's very easy to track. Whereas telegrams,
iOS, for example, doesn't do it that easily. So you kind of send your referral link. You have to always use workarounds. So you have this additional virality factor that is inherent to all mini apps if you have a shareable product. At the same time, what needs to be aware about Telegram is that the users don't really retain as well as in normal apps because if I'm on Telegram, it's ultimately Messenger. I get a message, I quit my app because I'm really there to use it. And the second point is that
Telegram is such an open platform. It's that they're bots. They are bot farms and people trying to farm those different apps. And Telegram, because it's an open ecosystem, it's very easy to publish an app. There are almost no processes. It also makes it easy for you to spin up a thousand accounts and do something. So we always need to find the right balance between growth and making sure we're like,
are bot resistant. So this was another finding. And also the geographical presence is very different. So I think, you know, Telegram is like the CIS messenger. So I myself from the CIS region, I told my grandmother, you know, using Telegram. And then it's also like a very, like it's a crypto native messenger as well. So it's an interesting mix of users. You know, it's either like CIS messenger
A little bit Brazil, a little bit Germany, a little bit like Philippines, but really it's like CIS plus crypto. So it's a very interesting mix of users. Yeah. For folks who might be familiar with the acronym, can you unpack that one real quick just so people might see it? Is that Eastern Europe? Yes, it's like the former Soviet republics. Yeah, got it, got it, got it. Cool, cool. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's super interesting. I mean, and it's one of those things where you kind of get the good with the bad. But one thing I liked about it too, is it seems like they have almost like a prefab of the policies and things like that. So they make it easy to kind of like jump in and use the default policies for things and get running with it. But it's interesting to see that because you've got them when they're in there, but then you
I don't know, like with Telegram, I just turn the notifications off because there's just so much noise in there all the time. But it seems like a really cool way, like knocking out that friction, like you say, you know, like getting people in the door. And then if they're retaining in your app, that's cool once they're in. But yeah, this is really interesting to me, just the social element of it, how you can tie that in. And I really like how you guys are doing that kind of like you're building the app, but like you're also kind of building a community first to at the same time, like in parallel, which is like super key to.
Are you guys planning to just keep it sleep related or are there other areas that you guys are going to look into gamifying too with health or other things like that? What's kind of the roadmap shaping up to be? Yeah, I mean, potentially long-term, yes, we would look into expanding into other health verticals. We believe we can scale sleep to a big, big kind of outcome, both as a company and both as a consumer product, having just millions of people use it. So right now the focus is on sleep and we really want to
nail this down in the future i could see us both like expanding you know vertically into like more sleep stuff like sleep hardware for example or horizontally into other demifying other activities be it you know dieting or exercising with all those products it's always like slightly different target audience it's all it's always a slightly different challenge how to track it you know i think about diet you know it's very hard to track it actually like right now
You need to enter, you used to enter them manually right now. You use the AI to enter. Maybe you can take it forward as well, but it's still cumbersome. Like it's still cumbersome. Even like walking, not so much like 10,000 steps easier to do, but dieting, you know, I mean, how many biceps curls? And people got to be honest too, like with that stuff and yeah, people are people, right?
Yeah, exactly. They have to be honest. And with sleep, you already have the phone as a proxy. Alarm clock is a proxy for your sleep. So it's almost like it's the easiest one to track more accurately at scale. And the reason I also realized that is because I actually started as a water bottle. The original idea was to gamify water intake. Oh, really? And then we started, it's so hard to track water. Oh, my God. But maybe we track sleep because it's easier to track sleep.
Well, it seems like sleep's a pretty evolved thing too. There's a lot that you could kind of branch into within sleep itself, like disturbed sleep, disturbed sleep, like a lot of stuff to learn about, right? Like I'd imagine. Yeah, who knows? What I think was really cool too is that what you guys are doing here is kind of creating a model that other apps could even use, right? So if a diet app that's specialized in diet and health
wants to like kind of break into web three or whatever you guys kind of have a footprint that they can or like a template that they can use as as a as a model and you guys could work together it's super interesting i just think these apps that are like there's such crossover potential and we've seen that with brave where in the last season or whatever you want to cycle whatever you want to call it like a lot of people like when your neighbors are talking about this stuff they're like look like i don't understand what anybody's talking about over there but i know that if i use the browser i can earn crypto with
That's super easy for people to understand like this. OK, if I'm if I'm maintaining good sleep schedule, like I'm I'm going to get rewarded for it. So that's a meaningful thing. And you're playing on an existing. There's no way to get around the fact that you need sleep. Like it's a great behavior. Right. You know, an app around. And I'm surprised like more people haven't done this either. I think it's super cool that you guys are like leading the way on this, especially crypto. Right.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with many points of theory, I mean, like earning crypto for browsing is, you know, it sounds like such a neat idea as well. But at the same time, I imagine that so many pieces need to fall together to actually make it work. Like you need to build a network out of advertisers. You need to make sure that this whole infrastructure works out so that the payments in crypto are actually sustainable and are not driven just by speculative demand. So for us as well, I mean, yes, it sounds like very cool idea.
in concept like, hey, you know, earn crypto for your sleep. At the same time, to make it sure that this model is going to work five, 10 years from now, we have to really, you know, think very deeply about how does this ecosystem look like? What are actually the behaviors we want? Where is the money coming in? You know, who's paying for it effectively? It's a very like interesting problem to solve, I have to say. Yeah.
Yeah, and I think up front too, I mean, it's almost like a lot of this is the inverse of what you deal with in Web2 space where it's all about growth, growth, growth, growth, growth. But then in this space, the bots and the Sybil stuff is so intense because there's such an incentive to do that up front that it's almost looked like,
I'll knock myself out at the knees to have lower numbers that are real. And a lot of that kind of gameplay in the beginning and then growing that healthier number because we deal with that too, where it's like you throw a reward out there. People want to gamify that. And they're pretty good at it too, like with that stuff. And so I think that's really interesting. So let's get into this bit too. So people are earning from their sleep. Like, how are you guys making money with all this?
Yeah. So we explore like different models, like how do we actually make sure that there is some financial incentive flying in? So the main idea that we have is basically we can build such an engaging platform
experience and a game around the sleep that we will have like users who are willing to pay just for the in-game items, be it like cosmetics or kind of heroes. And then, you know, part of this economic kind of revenue activity kind of flows back to the other user basis. So for us, this idea, can we build an engaging product where people would stick even without kind of crypto incentives so that when on top you kind of add them
it adds fuel to the fire, in a sense, effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of as a benchmark that we use is that one and a half years ago, Nintendo released Pokemon Sleep. It's like Pokemon Go, but you sleep, you wake up in the morning, you call it different Pokemon. And they gamified the sleep quality, not the schedules like we do, but they make $100 million revenue per year in revenue. And it's kind of fewer revenue that goes towards Nintendo, the Pokemon company, in that case.
And we think, hey, you know, this outcome is possible for a sleep gamification app, a sleep game. Of course, they have the Pokemon IP, but we have Web3. We have other. You guys have good IP. I think that's the thing. Yeah. That's also what makes this industry a bit different from others is that you look at, well, we have Lucanets on the podcast with the IP Pudgy, I mean, with Pudgy IP, like they've been doing all sorts of things like building, you know, startups around that, et cetera, like,
You guys have good IP. Like I think a lot of times it's so like we talk about the inverse of what you're dealing with compared to like the Web2 world, right? A lot of this is just you have projects that have good IP that can't, that don't know what to attach it to. And here you've got, well, you've got a good application
use case for sleep and health and all that. And you've got good IP. Web3 is actually a space where you can make those two things click and work really well. I think that's smart, too, because earlier you mentioned how you're building marketplace types of activity. People can trade things, etc. There's lots of ways to process
catch a fee on that stuff and kind of build a business around that. And yeah, that's the other thing I really like about this space is that if you have the right ingredients, like the community and cultural aspect of it can do a lot of... There's so many projects out there that you're like, why does this have a huge market cap like this for these Nintendo 8-bit graphic looking IP that they've got? And it's just, well, sometimes the ingredients work for that.
If you guys have them with sleep and health and wellness, it's actually like helping people. That's something I feel like there's a real appetite for in the space right now, just because of all of the shenanigans that have been happening. What's the feedback like so far? Like from the mini app, I know the real, the full on app isn't out yet, but like how have people been responding to what you guys are doing? You know, we had, I think, two tests so far, public tests, private tests.
in some capacity. And the feedback was very positive. We were able just to keep growing the community. We had a very large user base in Japan in particular. We saw that a quarter of our users came from Japan. And this was the most organic community for us. And we were like, hey, why Japan? This is so weird. I've never been to Japan before. I started, for example, working on Steve Pagocci. But then we look at the data. Hey, Japanese people keep the least in the entire world.
So sleep is a cultural issue because Japanese much more than it is. They sleep six hours, 15 minutes. Americans sleep seven hours, 15 minutes, for example, in our Asian, but the need is still the same. So we said, okay, that's interesting. So we're going to be seeing a little bit more product market fit pull towards Japan. So we start to
make changes to the product so that it appears not just to what I think, you know, the West, for example, is getting used, but also some elements that are, you know, very popular in Japan. So this is like kawaii art style and a very cute, cozy, wholesome animals, you know, gacha components. And we add a JRPG, so Japanese role-playing games component also to the gamification element from that side.
And the other feedback that is sort of, you know, hard to get from users is that just we saw the activity of users and we look at the data of the test and it's spike activity, you know, 705, 710, 715. So it's like when people wake up, the first thing they actually do is check their sleep score. So we actually motivate them to do it before they do WhatsApp, before they do Instagram, before they check the messenger. So this is another finding for us. Oh, wow. Like we can make, this product has potential to become a habit-based product very early on for the users. Oh, yeah.
It's 7.10, 7.05. Well, first thing on the mind of a user before they go to Instagram is sleep. I got you. We're like, oh, wow, that's really interesting. We should do it. So we really use this feedback to convince us that we should work on this idea and not something else.
I mean, that fact alone is incredibly powerful, right? You were in the mindset of the user before they even go to Instagram. That's insane. That's awesome, man. I mean, that's really, really... Yeah, that's a really powerful statement to find out. And this is certainly too. How much is AI a part of what you guys are doing? Are you guys using AI in the app or with the processor tooling or any of that?
Oh, we use AI across, I think, every single process inside of the development of the app itself, be it like in concept art generation for artists or coding or just, you know, for engineering support. Or we use it for some, you know, write up inside the community communication. Sometimes we just make sure that, hey, you know, make it crisper, make it cleaner. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Inside the product, you know, the main use is that the way we measure track with our device actually uses a fair bit of AI and machine learning because the phone data, for example, yes, we kind of, I mentioned that, hey, you know, we use like when you use the phone at night, we use in the morning, this is your proxy of your sleep, but we actually use it like using phone motion activity data. And then if you get like a push notification at 1 a.m. or
or 2 a.m. Suddenly the data tells us you were awake, but obviously you weren't awake. So there's actually quite a lot of AI stuff, machine learning stuff to figure out so that actually this data is clean. This data can be used as proxy for your actual sleep data because there are so many age cases. People all sleep so completely different. Some people just look at the data 1 to 3 a.m. They actually kind of wake up every night for no reason at all. And
We really try to use machine learning and AI to make sure that the sleep algorithm works. And then with those LLMs, we just use it, large language models. We use them in production process mostly. Potentially can come into product like, hey, here are some sleep tips. But this is like a very fast feature to build. But you also need to be safe and secure that AI isn't like hallucinating any tips you shouldn't do.
You're giving you nightmares or whatever, right? And to that point too, I think we talk a lot about the positives too. What are things that you guys have to be mindful of? Are there negatives? Are there ways that this could get out of hand? Or are there threats or concerns that you guys have when you're building something like this? I mean, I would imagine data privacy is one of them, but are there any other things that you guys are actively factoring in? You know, for us, because we have, you know, crypto incentives baked into the sleep, for us, a big thing, it's anti-cheat.
anti-spam and anti-DDoS meaning and anti-civil resistance as well. Just because once you add a financial incentive, boy, there are people all around the world ready to hack it up. Even for the Telegram mini version where there's no direct benefit today, there's like a promise of an airdrop later on coming up.
we see that people are, you know, playing around with the app. We still have repositories where people literally write and share like bots how to potentially kind of play it out. So for us, we just want to make sure that, you know, like we don't reward bad behavior. We reward actually kind of real users inside the app, like the most valuable people inside the ecosystem. And also, so,
so that we don't accidentally kind of, you know, print, you know, a million rewards to our users and more. So this is kind of the top of mind for us. Yes, of course, kind of data privacy is important for us. We kind of, we keep the sleep data. We don't share it with anyone, but from, but kind of just in web free, just,
just the scale of the bots, you know, even a Duolingo, they were like bots, they were like people trying to, you know, climb up to the leaderboards, et cetera. So, and there's like Duolingo, it's literally like a language learning app with nothing, nothing at stake. It's not even a game, right? It's just like leaderboards. You get bots and people writing it up, et cetera.
In the free, it's incredible. I don't know if you see it like in Brave as well, but for us... Oh my God, if there's a surface to Gamify, it's already been Gamified and there might be a village somewhere with Sleep of Gachi Village in Thailand or something where they're running, you're feeding an entire village off of the crypto rewards on it. We saw that kind of stuff. It's an interesting mix too because you have these, it's almost like friendly fraud cases where...
Like people that are legitimately, genuinely excited about it, but might be misusing it. Right. And then you've got like people that are are definitely bad actors. And then you've got people that are just, you know, the intended use case. It's one person or it's a household or whatever. And it definitely is a balancing act. There has been a brave, OK, balancing the people that are genuinely excited, but maybe like and some of this might just be language barrier stuff.
There's all these like factors you're dealing with, like global community, right, where it's not OK. I'm just targeting the US or Western Europe or wherever, especially Telegram. You're going for everybody, right? That's that's where the world's kind of gone in this whole like post-COVID era. A lot of people were getting their news from Telegram and a lot of things like that just because that's where they could get information quickly. It's interesting, man.
It says something about the resilience of a startup. If you can make it through that and get to scale like past that, you're learning lessons there that you can't learn them in school. Like this is like real world stuff. If you can get really good on defense and really good on it, still put out a product and have a really authentic, genuine community that like loves it.
I don't know. There's a whole set of founders out there. I mean, especially like over the past four plus years, like if you were putting something together, you're still around. And now where things are kind of lightening up on that front, like you can really scale up. Like it says something about the resilience of the founders that can make that happen. But I don't know. I think so much of this boils down to just having the right ingredients. Yeah.
I'm really excited to see what you guys do. Yeah. And I think at this point, I think the biggest challenge is, you know, you could add all those security measures, but then you start to really endanger the core experience of the real user. If you add all those protections, you're like a capture element of every single like action, for example, as a perfect way to combat bots, then your product is not usable. So how do you balance it out so that you still use it frictionlessly, but still limit the bots? So,
It's a massive break. And the thing is, there is no silver bullet and everything gets gamed. I mean, that's part of it. Like, whether you're dealing with, like, legitimate bots or even when people say, like, KYC AML stuff, it's, dude, like, everybody that really wants to get around that's already gotten around it. By the time the next thing comes out, they're already...
Have a way to get around that too. It's just a, it's an adversarial game. Right. And so like to a certain degree, you kind of have to loss lead with some of that in the beginning to just learn what the fit is. Right. I mean, you guys at sleep, but there's so much more to that. I would imagine because you're trying to build community and you'll find stuff in there.
you'll find, you'll find things in the community that stand out, right? Like, I mean, there's just like behavior patterns of people like engaging with each other where you're like, oh my gosh, yeah, this guy's, you know, just from seeing things that, okay, you start to spot the patterns. I think you just got to let some of this ride in the beginning and see, build some community around it. And some of that stuff is self-policed out too and things like that. So are you guys are on Telegram, right? Like where can people find Sleepagachi right now if they want us to clue in and, and when is the app coming out so we can, you know, get folks excited about it? Yeah.
In May, we are planning to do the test release and then estimating in June, it's going to be like a wide release for us. You'll be able to find us in iOS app store or in the Google play store. In the meantime, it's the sleep. I got you live version is live on telegram. It's going to be live on the line messenger very shortly line messengers to kind of
the biggest messenger in Japan and Taiwan. And also you can find us on sleepagotchi.com or on X handle the sleepagotchi. So it's spelled like Tamagotchi, but we sleep. So we're going to level up your Tamagotchi while you sleep. That's kind of also the
The concept there in the name. I love it, man. What blockchain are you guys working with? Just out of curiosity. So primarily for us is the Solana blockchain. We also partner with Sonium, the L2 by Sony on Ethereum for the Line mini app. Oh, cool. Because we really wanted a person familiar with the free end Japan at the same time. Because in comparison, for example, to Telegram, where it's a very open messenger, Line is a very, I mean, Japan and Line is a very close ecosystem. It's huge.
Yeah. It's huge, but you sort of need to know your stuff. I know, I think like in Brave, like it's all like Japan is also like a big market for Brave and it's like separate. We have a whole team of people in Japan that only focus on Japan because it's like such a huge market, but it's such a different market. Yeah.
You have like language barriers, but then like you said earlier, like the gamification is different. The cultural stuff, like they did a lot of stuff like 10 years ago that is starting to become more popular now. Go build puzzle pieces together and collectibles and things where a lot of that started to, we saw a different fit there.
But it was good. You got to get out there too, by the way. Tokyo is fantastic. One of the best cities ever. It's amazing. It's like the inside of a watch. You know, you look at it, you're like, oh my God, like how it's been here for thousands of years and it's clean and it's very different, but awesome experience. But yeah, so also too, where can people find you if they want to follow what you're doing or are you publishing stuff or are you out there on X or any LinkedIn or any of these platforms?
Yeah, so mostly on X. So it's like Anton Gocci. So rather than replace the sleep A with Anton, so Tamagotchi, but with Anton. So that's my handle on Twitter and on Telegram.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, Anton, man, I really appreciate you making the time to come here and tell us about it. I'd love to have you on to like to check back in like after the apps out and see how things are going and learn more about what you guys are up to then. But yeah, I really appreciate it. Really appreciate you guys are kind of like kind of trying to gamify better health and building an interesting use case for crypto that we can actually go and get people grow the space with. You know, I think it's really fantastic. So thanks again for making it out today. Really appreciate it. Thanks a lot, Luke, for having me. It's been fun. All right. We'll talk to you soon. See ya. Bye bye.
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