Insight
Garg: Tricking your mind makes five hours of sleep feel like six
“You sleep for five hours. Your recovery in the morning is going to be almost equal to sleeping in six hours if you can trick your mind. And the trick in the mind is don't tell him how many hours you slept.”
Insight
Garg: Lowering mattress prices drives Wakefit's volume and profitability flywheel
“We say that the moment we reduce the price, we become profitable. So it has always worked for us. Like we grow, we become profit. It's a cycle. Like you become more and more efficient as you keep on getting more and more customers.”
Insight
Amazon and Flipkart act as the true VCs for Indian D2C brands
“I think Amazon Flipkart are the true VCs. I would say they have created hundreds of entrepreneurs, like both, look at both, look at Wakefit, look at Mama, look at so many brands out there. Amazon has created those so many D to C brands, right?”
Insight
Garg: Overanalyzing sleep science disrupts sleep by inducing self-consciousness
“If you know what matters to a good quality sleep, you will actually never get a good quality sleep because you'll be so conscious that you will disturb your own sleep.”
Opinion
Garg: Sleep trackers degrade sleep quality by fueling user fear and anxiety
“It only tells you what happened last night and actually makes you more anxious and fearful. So it's a business of creating more fear. So you want to measure it because you might be feeling that, you know, you have the worst quality of sleep and you bite and yo…”
Insight
Garg: Alarms ruin sleep quality by interrupting deep sleep cycles
“I think alarms alarms are the worst thing to have in your life. You can watch probably another half an hour of Netflix and wake up, maybe a little early, but I think alarm just disrupts you, and most likely it'll disrupt you in in a deep cycle. And if you get …”
Insight
Garg: B2B is restricted to tech differentiation or commoditized cash flow
“In B to B business, you're just probably restricted to either running a cash flow business, Or a very technologically differentiated business versus a B to C where there are 10 or 15, 20 things that you can do to create anything anywhere.”
Opinion
31 VCs rejected Wakefit over superficial TAM before Sequoia invested
“Until then, 31 customers, it was mostly like, how big is the market? Can you become a billion dollar unicorn? Can you do this? Like, it was all superficial numbers. Like, everybody was looking at, can this become a billion dollar company or not, right? But I t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wakefit reached 21 crore INR in revenue with zero paid marketing
“Till we were doing this 21 close-up business, we had spent zero marketing. Like, there was no money involved. No Facebook, no Google, no Amazon, nothing. Like, it was going autopilot.”
Disclosure
Wakefit operates at 40% to 45% gross margins
“After that, we work at about we about 40 to 45% gross margins. I think raw material costs about 60%. So 40% of the money is what is used for logistics, returns, marketing, employees, everything. And GST also.”
Insight
Co-founder equity should be based solely on risk taken, not skills
“Equity is in proportion to the risk of people. And it just can't be racist that this guy has got a lot of skills. This guy has got a lot of commitment. He's very smart. He's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It, equity just can't be related to anything othe…”
Assertion Contradicted
Indian D2C IPO multiples equal or beat SaaS and tech businesses
“Multipliers that people are getting when their IPOs are happening are also very, very equivalent or even better than SaaS or, you know, tech businesses.”
Insight
Early-stage D2C startups should ignore branding until they hit scale
“I think branding should be left until you hit a certain scale. I don't think branding comes in very handy when they're very, very small. All you should be solving is about the right product, the right prices, the right value that you will offer in that product…”
Insight
Garg: Indian consumers no longer buy furniture expecting it to last 20 years
“In fact, when we sell furniture to our customers, the common question that earlier we used to get is like, this will be going to be 20 years. 20 Now people are saying, what this means? This means that people have moved on to, you know, owning things for, becau…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Garg: Traditional Indian mattress retailers marked up products 4x over material costs
“I worked for a chemical company, so I knew what is the cost of the mattress, raw material that goes inside. I realized that if X rupees, Was the price of raw material? They were selling me at Forex.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Garg: Electricity shortages force tier-3 Indian towns to sleep by 8 PM
“We've seen that, you know, people in tier two and tier three town specifically, they generally, because I think there's a lack of electricity. In those towns, and by force, people go to sleep at eight o'clock, nine o'clock, because they can't do anything beyon…”
Insight
Garg: Sleep is universally the first habit people sacrifice
“The easiest thing that people want to cut in their life is sleep. And it just goes across. And only people who realizes the quality of sleep are those who have friends and families suffering because of this, or probably athletes or coaches who have told them, …”
Insight
Garg: Sleeping before 10 PM yields better sleep quality regardless of total hours
“We learned that that if you sleep before a certain point in time, which is about nine or 10, your quality of sleep is much, much better compared to if you sleep at 12 or one, irrespective of sleeping for eight hours or nine hours or 10 hours.”
Assertion Partly supported
Garg: Fighting with your spouse after 4 PM ruins your night's sleep
“If you want to have a fight with your spouse, have it before four PM. If you want to have it, you have it before four PM, because if you have it after that, I'm dead sure. We have the research on it. You're not going to have good quality sleep.”
Assertion Contradicted
Garg: Sleeping more burns calories and drives weight loss
“More calories are burned when you're sleeping and your organs are rest and stuff like that, right? So more you sleep, the more weightless you are.”
Disclosure
Ankit Garg decided never to build a B2B business again
“I decided from the first phase started that I am never going to build a B to B business in my life because it restricts you from having a very high technological differential capability.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Incumbents charged ₹50,000 for memory foam mattresses costing ₹5,000 to manufacture
“They were selling memory foam matters at that point of time with a price of 40,050 thousand, you know, a king-sized mattress with a price of 50,000. Like, I was amazed. You know, how, how is it possible that, you know, I am selling the chemicals to them. I kno…”
Assertion Partly supported
Wakefit was likely the first brand to sell mattresses on Amazon India
“So I happened to be the first one probably who started mattresses on Amazon.”
Assertion Partly supported
Wakefit's revenue scaled from 81 to 420 crore INR in two years
“In 19, we did 81 or 83. Then we did 200, and then we did four 20 last year.”
