Hacking Together a Business in 2 Weeks

Note: Dreamless is a pillow subscription service. It’s live on Indiegogo right now. I’d love it if you’d consider backing it, or sharing it. You can share it from the campaign page, or, we have a little tool that makes sharing Dreamless super easy.

How I Made Dreamless

This essay is meant as a service for anyone who wants to learn from what I did. It’s not sophisticated at all, but I thought it might be useful.

I came up with the name for Dreamless.io on the spot, and decided to roll with it. I checked instantdomainsearch.com and saw that it was available for $33 on Namecheap, and grabbed the domain.

I got inspiration for the logo using a service called Logojoy, they automatically generate logos. The service learns over time, so every time I go back the output is better. It’s excellent. Unfortunately, this time I wasn’t completely satisfied with the offerings from Logojoy (sorry guys). I ended up doing the Dreamless logo in Adobe Illustrator, with the help of my wife, Whitney Bell, who is a graphic designer.

Due to a previous project that failed, some of my friends had leftover time on a Squarespace account, so I asked if I could repurpose it. They agreed. I got all the images for the site from Unsplash.

The sharing tool was first built by the people from Soma Water, when they launched their Kickstarter campaign. I had a developer named Nathan Adams adapt the sharing tool for me. Nate is an excellent, fast worker. I’m hosting the adapted sharing tool with GitHub Pages, on a subdomain of dreamless.io.

I have an uncle who works with a high-end bamboo bedding manufacturer called Cozy Earth, and I got some great advice from a contact over there about the bedding industry. Originally, I was planning on offering pillows and sheets, but after talking with Cozy Earth, I decided to go with just pillows for the initial test. My Cozy Earth contact also pointed me to pillow suppliers.

Finally, my good friends Dan Hess and Joe Gabriel made the video. Excellent job to those two.

Dreamless.io is an MVP meant to test the hypothesis that at least 200 people will want pillows sent to them every 6 months. In sharing how I created this MVP, hopefully I’ve been able to help someone out there learn of a new resource for validating their own ideas. Again, I realize it’s nothing special, but here it is nonetheless.

Backstory

I have a habit of waking my wife up to tell her business ideas. About two years ago, I woke her up to say that someone should make a pillow subscription service, because we always kept our pillows way too long.

I thought it was a really good idea for a person like me, but I wasn’t sure if anyone else would want such a service. I sat on the idea.

Recently, I’ve been sleeping on a pillow that I need to replace. I could easily go buy new pillows, but somehow I haven’t gotten around to it. So the idea for a subscription came back to me, and now I know that the only way I’ll be able to get it out of my head is to test it. Either the market will say ‘no thanks,’ or they’ll think ‘hmm, I guess it would be nice to have a fluffy new pillow periodically arrive at my door.’

Questions You Might Have

You may wonder what kind of pillows you’d receive if you signed up. They are standard polyfill pillows. They are comfortable, and not expensive: $19 apiece. Since we send new ones every 6 months, you’ll always be sleeping on a fluffy, full one.

You may wonder why you’d want a subscription. There are a few reasons. Pillows get gross: over time, they collect skin flakes and the accompanying oils. When most people replace their pillows, the can weigh twice as much as when they were new. Having a subscription means you don’t have to think about it: you’ll always have plump, clean, fresh, white, new pillows.