Inventor-entrepreneur lee loree wanted to get a better night`s sleep.
He ended up inventing a product, starting a business & changing his life.
By Lee Gimpel
Perhaps you’ve noticed that some nights you can get your usual seven or eight hours of sleep and wake up feeling refreshed, while other nights, you can go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time—but feel as if you haven’t slept a wink.
In 1998, Lee Loree, who was working as an equities analyst at the time, stopped idly wondering about the phenomenon and began researching it. For months he spent off-hours reading sleep studies and quizzing researchers. He even videotaped his wife’s tossing and turning, which he admits, “seems a little creepy” out of context.
What Atlanta-based Loree, 34, learned was that while we sleep, our bodies go through cycles where we’re more or less alert. If your alarm goes off as you’re heading into a deep sleep, you’ll wake up groggy. Conversely, if you arise when you’re most awake in your cycle, you’ll feel less tired. This insight led him to develop the Sleeptracker—finally released in 2005—a watch-like device that measures and records sleep cycles and wakes the wearer at an optimal moment.
As he was doing the research, the invention he envisioned seemed like a surefire winner. Yet, there is a wide gulf between thinking of a great new product and actually creating it and building a business.
“Obviously you need to have a good idea, there’s no doubt about that. But I would say that is a relatively small piece of the puzzle,” Loree says.
THE LONG ROAD
There are a lot of hurdles that an inventor-entrepreneur must get past. Building his invention meant years of engineering, but one of the biggest challenges was being comfortable with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur. “I can’t tell you the number of people who told me I was a fool for investing all the money that I had into a business and for leaving a good job to do something I didn’t have any real expertise in,” Loree says.
For five years after quitting his banking job, Loree had little to show the world to justify his career path. “I was working out of my house, and there wasn’t anything that anybody could see; a lot of my friends really gave me a hard time like I didn’t have a job,” he says.
Once he had a prototype, Loree was just a mere step closer to selling one of his devices. He began looking for a manufacturer by naively asking companies with similar devices if they would connect him with their manufacturers. He might as well have asked for their Social Security numbers and bank accounts—it was not happening.
However, against the odds, Liz Dickinson, CEO of Physi-Cal Enterprises, gave Loree a contact. Loree spent three and a half years talking with the manufacturer before the first Sleeptracker rolled off the assembly line.
“We are not even a tenth the size of their next smallest customer,” Loree says. “The reason [the manufacturer] stuck with dealing with us was because he liked the grit I showed.”
BUILDING THE RIGHT BUSINESS
With the cash and counsel of an angel investor who came onboard at the end of 2004, Loree was finally able to start manufacturing the Sleeptracker. When he decided to run his own business, Loree’s motivation was to find something more stimulating than his previous number-crunching job—and a better lifestyle overall. Thus, he set about to make the company behind the Sleeptracker, Innovative Sleep Solutions, a lean organization built on outsourcing. Two years after launching the product, Loree remains the only employee, although he contracts others to do everything from answer phones to design his Web site, manufacture the device, ship orders and keep track of store inventory.
“I run this business from the road, I run it from my office, I run it from the car; I run my business as a lifestyle,” Loree says. “My quality of life is so much better. I spend more time with my kid, and I spend more time on myself, I spend more time with my wife—my situation is totally flexible. And because I can use a laptop and tap into a Wi-Fi [spot] wherever I am, it allows me to do whatever I want whenever I want.”
Loree’s first efforts to market the Sleeptracker consisted of buying an Internet marketing book and buying ads for a few search terms on Google. His first day, his Web site had fewer than 100 visitors. However, the next day, the tech blog Gizmodo.com mentioned the device and 8,000 visitors stormed the site. The attention was a start-up’s dream, but the nascent company was unprepared and many orders did not go through.
Today, the company sells about five times as many units as it did last year and is on target to do $1.5 million in sales. This jump has made inventory management a big issue, but interestingly, the pressure has made Loree more relaxed.
“Before, I really used to stress about things. I now do less of that because I recognize that stressing about it isn’t going to fix it,” he says. “I’ve just got to do everything I can every day to build for the future. I have 50 balls in the air and I need to be comfortable with 50 balls in the air, keep track of them as best I can and know that as long as 45 of them hit the way I want, it’ll be okay.”
The same relaxed attitude has made him a better parent and even improved his golf game. All that—and he gets a good night’s rest.
Available at www.Sleeptracker.com and through distributors, the new Sleeptracker Pro retails for $179. The device promises to wake the wearer at an optimal time in the sleep cycle with either an audible or vibrating alarm. ■
GUIDELINES FOR INVENTOR-ENTREPRENEURS
Get a lawyer to draw up a provisional patent and a non-disclosure agreement in case you want to discuss your invention with potential partners or investors.
Be sure you know what you`re getting -and giving up- if you contract with a company that promises to commercialize your invention.
As with any entrepreneurial venture, you must accept risk and be willing to commit to developing your product.
