By most measures, selling sleep-related products (like sleep masks) is not an ideal opportunity:
- highly competitive
- low barrier to entry
- lots of different solutions already offered
- pricing was a race to the bottom
Yet Mark Zhang went all in and launched Manta Sleep in 2016 with a Kickstarter campaign.
CEO & Co-Founder of Manta Sleep, is building a movement around his sleep-related products.
But Mark isn’t selling just masks. But instead, he’s selling us the best version of ourselves.
And this is exactly what Manta Sleep’s mission is: “empower light sleepers to sleep better so they can do more”:
Manta Sleep is a great case study on building a brand and a mission around a product.
I spoke with Mark about Manta Sleep, and how he started and grew it. Here are some of the lessons:
Sell the customer on the best version of themselves. “Our focus is giving you the energy to create your best life. Sleep is just our strategy.” We all have goals. Whatever our personal goal is, it’s more achievable when we are performing at max capacity.
Choose An Enemy: Having a shared enemy creates unity in the Us vs. Them battle. Especially powerful when it’s a contrarian approach.
Make a Strong Statement: “The Pro-Nap Movement is about creating a community that incites empowerment and change in our corporations and communities. And reclaiming what should have always been yours in the first place: your vitality.“ Be unapologetic in taking the stance.
Here are some of the takeaways from our conversation:
What was the launch story behind Manta?
If you were to look at the competitive landscape, if I were to do an analysis, I would never go into it: A sleep mask brand or industry, because:
It is super competitive.
Low priced items
Many different styles already.
And so if I were purely looking at it from a market opportunity would be a terrible opportunity to be much, but from the very beginning, we had a long-term vision. 5-10 years.
we thought, “Hey let’s make this our legacy business.”
And so that changes the equation that changes how long we’re, we’re willing to invest and fight and battle it out in order to stand out.
So we did a Kickstarter campaign, for the cash.
We didn’t necessarily have to, but it was good marketing, and good for awareness.
And we could say at the time that we were the most funded sleep mask in crowdfunding history.
We moved from Amazon as a channel strategy, not as the entire business.
Why did you launch on Shopify to start, instead of Amazon?
The mission that we have is to empower light sleepers, to sleep better.
We are going counter to the hustle culture and nap-shaming.
We wanted to do something meaningful. That was fun. That solved a problem.
I’d been a light sleeper for most of my life, and using sleep masks for 15-20 years at this point. And I thought that I could do better. So I launched the business with my business partner, Ben, who is an industrial designer. It’s the third or fourth business at this point.
Selling on Amazon is all about ranking products organically for different search terms. It’s always more fun to develop your own products. It’s more challenging, but more fun and fulfilling as well. And not surprisingly, the brands and products that have a custom design that we built ourselves have the strongest sustaining power.
When you private label, there’s a lot of downward pressure on price, and it gets very hard to compete over time. It becomes a competition, like cat and mouse, with other people.
So we decided to invest more in the brand.
How Manta drives brand awareness and traffic?
In 2016, when we launched, it was all about Facebook ads. We had raised $700k from Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
It was huge validation and a nice chunk of cash.
So we started heavily spending on Facebook, and then the growth trajectory after that was just heavily investing into Facebook, traffic growing there. And then later on diversifying into Google, YouTube, and then also Amazon from a channel perspective.
What does the Manta Sleep funnel look like?
Right now we’re working on a quiz funnel, because I think it’s engaging.
It’s a way to do more at the top of the funnel, to get people into an email list and engage with them, knowing what they are looking for.
Because our price point is relatively low, it’s more of an impulse buy. So the funnel itself is actually not very complicated.
A lot of people just buy within the first couple of days of seeing the ad.
So essentially we have front end acquisition to our website and to the product page on Facebook, on Google, they click on it, they see it.
Maybe they sign up to the 10% email, pop up 10% coupon often.
And they get put into an email autoresponder sequence.
We also do a retargeting on all of our channels, Facebook, Google, YouTube, and that’s the funnel.
Branding and the Mission:
We’ve gotten really clear about what it is that we want to do in the last year, because the, the mission really is to empower light sleepers sleep better so they can do more.
When I was working for the corporate world, I was an accountant, and I remember being at a client’s office every day after lunch, I would feel super drowsy.
And if I had just had a 30 minute nap, I’d be able to get the work done within two hours, and be super productive and efficient. But because of the corporate culture, we basically had to sit there and pretend like I was working, literally, clicking on an Excel sheet, doing absolutely nothing, wasting two hours.
Essentially wasting the company’s money, the client’s money, but because of the limitation of the culture. And that was a big reason for me to kind of transition into entrepreneurship.
We definitely live what we preach right. Every day at the office lights off, everybody’s taken it up.
The story element of our brand is quite important. We incorporate stories, with social proof, product recommendations.
We don’t want it to be just about the product, but understand the story as well.
We have a strong stance and belief in what we do. We’re not for everyone, and you can never please everybody.
So it helps us to attract customers, and team members, who believe in what we do too. That’s what we want.
Every brand is supposed to have a mission, a vision, values, just to tell people this is the most important thing for small businesses like ours is to communicate things that the founding team believes in.
So it’s not, we don’t try to go out specifically to create any sort of narratives to fit our story.
We’re just going out and telling our story. We’re trying to convince people who value sleep, who are light sleepers, to use our product, rather than a competitor’s crappy product.
We’re not trying to convince somebody who sleeps well or doesn’t believe in naps to buy the product.
And so, so the story is really laying our cards on the table: Here’s what we believe in. If you believe these things too, then cool! Come and join us. If not, there are plenty of other brands out there that you can shop.
How Do you Get More Product Reviews:
Three ways that we get reviews:
- We started off so first a lot of people really liked the product. So organically people just post them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. And so we pull those content.
- We also have a post-purchase email autoresponder asking people to submit to user generated content.
- And then within the last six months, we also started an ambassador program, essentially engaging our most active and loyal customers with. Basically a loyalty program that encourages them to produce even more user generated content that we can then funnel back into the marketing mix.
We do like a gift draw for them, but I think based on what we’re seeing, a lot of times people want to share it because they just want to share. When you incentivize it actually kills the motivation, the intrinsic motivation to be able to share something cool.
If they really love it, sometimes it doesn’t take too much to just simply say, “Hey, do you mind if you took a photo?”
And as long as they’re happy with the products, customers are, I find often more than happy to be able to share that experience.
Check out Manta Sleep and join the movement to be the best version of yourself!