What the world is missing in a sleep solution

Hi, we’re Ali and Warren, co-founders of Chorus Sleep.

We started Chorus because stress was keeping us from sleeping and we personally experienced how effective breathwork was at enhancing, well, everything in our lives. We initially started our path building a breathwork-only solution, designed for generic stress relief. But after about a year we learned that the problem the vast majority of our customers were facing was their sleep. It jived with our personal experience too - the underlying factor contributing to most of our challenges and the solution that solved them the most effectively was simple: improving our sleep.

When we learned a few easy changes, like dimming our lights at night and incorporating short relaxation before bed, we started sleeping better. As a result, our mental health (like mood with our families), physical health (like workout routines), and performance at work (like creativity and problem-solving) drastically improved.

Chorus Sleep is a mobile app and coaching program that helps people sleep better. It’s the first solution to bring everything you need for better sleep under one roof.

Since COVID, sleep challenges have surged, with studies now estimating over 80% of Americans struggle to sleep each week.

While many of us intuitively know “sleep is important,” the data is often surprising.

People who routinely sleep 6 hours or less (an amount we previously thought was fine) are 2.5x more likely to suffer from poor mental health, and insomnia has been shown to cause depression.

Longer term, sleep deprivation also harms physical health, increasing the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes by ~50%.

From an economic and business perspective…

Sleep-deprived employees burden payers with extra health care costs that, together with productivity losses, cost ~$1M each year for a company of only 200 employees.⁽¹⁾

Sleep-deprived employees are also less engaged, have lower job satisfaction, and leave companies at higher rates.

While historically, companies have focused on wellness related to exercise and time off, thankfully, more employers are now implementing what sleep neuroscientist Els van der Helm highlights — that companies should “start with sleep because it’s so fundamental.”

Companies like Asana, Zappos, and Aetna, are now exemplifying key elements of Sleep Leadership to improve workplace outcomes.

But looking at the market, existing options are only part of the solution.

Sleep-tracking products help you ~track~ your sleep, but research has found they don’t improve it.

On the other hand, relaxation or meditation apps help you fall asleep but don’t teach you how to improve it, so are just a band-aid.

Then, on the more clinical side, there is a fantastic program called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I), which studies have shown is more effective than benzodiazepine and non-benzodiazepine sleeping pills.

However, traditional CBT-I is only designed for folks with long-term, severe, clinical insomnia and accessed via an expensive sleep specialist.

And nothing in between.

So, Chorus is bridging this gap.

First and foremost, we are evidence-based, based on CBT-I and other well-studied practices.

But we’re designed for the estimated ~80% of people with mild to severe sleep challenges, not just those with the most severe disorders.

Lastly, we’ve made the program bite-sized, so it only requires use a couple times a week to see material results.

Overall, we strive to always be customer-obsessed and continue to learn from our internal research, product data, conversations with our community, and the latest academic research in our field.

Here’s how it works:

• 📈 Track your sleep to measure progress. We integrate with any wearable or no-wearable needed
• 🎶 Fall asleep fast with expert-led relaxation techniques and white noise + sleep sounds
• 💡 Learn to improve your sleep with short, interactive content
• 🤝 Get help from a real, human sleep coach on your custom program

Want to sleep better without drugs?

We’d love to share our learnings to help other people like us.

You can check out the app for free, and we’d love your feedback.

Ali & Warren

(1) From Chorus’ Sleep Deprivation Cost Calculator, based on the data from the following studies:

• The cost of poor sleep: workplace productivity loss and associated costs; National Library of Medicine
• Insomnia and absenteeism at work. Who pays the cost?; National Library of Medicine
• Chronic insomnia sufferers are an average of 12.5% of the population; The Cleveland Clinic
• The National Safety Council: How Costly Are Sleep Disorders?