Luke: [00:00:00] From privacy concerns to limitless potential, AI is rapidly impacting our evolving society. In this new season of the Brave Technologist Podcast, we’re demystifying artificial intelligence, challenging the status quo, and empowering everyday people to embrace the digital revolution. I’m your host, Luke Moltz, VP of business operations at Brave Software, makers of the privacy respecting brave browser and search engine.

Luke: Now powering AI with the Brave search. API. You’re listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features Anton Kraken, who’s the founder and CEO of Sleep, aot, an upcoming sleep app that incentivizes users to sleep better using gamification and ai. Previously, Anton worked on product at Duolingo.

Luke: He started Sleep AOT while completing his studies at Harvard Business School. In this episode, we discussed. Surprising Sleeps habits. They’ve learned about their users, the ethics of gamifying health habits and working with sensitive data, combating bots and bad actors attracted to the financial incentives they provide their path to monetization and ways to generate revenue in [00:01:00] this space.

Luke: And now for this week’s episode of The Brave Technologist Anton, welcome to the Brave Technologist. How are you doing, man? Very

Anton: good. Thanks for having me. How are you Luke?

Luke: I’m doing well. Uh, Really kind of excited to have you on. Uh, We’re gonna go into a few areas today before we dive right into kind of sleep.

Luke: Got you. What you guys are doing there. Why don’t you give us a little bit of background, like how did you end up where you’re at, what got you into this Web3 and kind of sleep space and all of that? if you don’t mind setting the table a bit.

Anton: Thanks for your question. I mean, it’s, it’s a big journey really.

Anton: I’ve really looked into how to use, you know, gaming and various incentives also be like web free incentives to try to change behavior, to really change the habits of users to, you know, use those powerful forces that, you know, drive users to like either you know, trade crypto or you know, play games and really kind of.

Anton: Bring it to a positive light, and I used to work at a company that gamified piano education. Then I worked briefly at Duolingo gamifying languages. So [00:02:00] sleep was another area, which isn’t, I think, gamified enough, although you know, I. It is actually the most important habit. In some ways, it’s more important than diet.

Anton: It’s more important than exercise. Kind of sleep is the number one health predictor. So we kind of thought, Hey, this is actually the thing to, if you want to use like, you know, gaming and free incentives to change behavior, this is the one to actually change because this the one that drives. A lot of things for us.

Luke: That’s awesome. Yeah. I, I think getting into crypto a while ago, one of the things that was really cool about it was that people were kind of taking like web two cases and adding virtuous cycles to them and gamifying them and, and kind of showing people that you can have added value from something that you’re already doing.

Luke: A lot of people are kind of tracking like their sleep and, and steps and all that, you know, health and wellness stuff, and I think it’s a really cool area that you guys are. Getting into because these are the ways that you can kind of break through to those broader audiences. Everybody talks up, oh the next billion users or whatever, but you’re not gonna get to those users unless you meet them where they [00:03:00] are.

Luke: Right. And, this seems like such a cool one. I mean, especially With how much people are kind of trying to monitor, get better sleep and all of that. Like how many people are trying to improve their sleep. Did you guys have to do a bunch of research into that before you, decided to do the business and, and how much people are tracking their sleep and things like that?

Luke: Like how, how did that evolution kind of come forward?

Anton: Yeah, I mean definitely I think that the reason that PGO can exist today and for example, not 10 years ago, is because, you know, 10 years ago, nobody really. I think cared about sleep that much. Kind of, you know, this whole hustle car show, hey, you know, you know, sleep six hours, optimize, you know, wake up 6:00 AM work until late night.

Anton: And I think there was like this, you know, this startup grind that kind of in the text circle at least propagated in the 2010s. And I think then you slowly started to see. First kind of, you know, new devices like Fitbit and Aura and whoop, really, you know, elevating the sleep importance. And then the second point is you really see the cultural change.

Anton: You know, you see Huberman uh, labs talking about it. You see, you know, Peter Attia, you see other kind of, you know, health experts really saying you, you know, Matthew Walker, like this y [00:04:00] sleep book that was like super popular a few years ago. And it’s really started popping up, I think like20 19, 20 20 in the last five years.

Anton: So if you look at the market size, of course, of the wearable devices and just the frequency of it, like it’s just on the rise as people start to understand. I actually know sleep is super important and it’s much better to, you know, sleep eight hours and have like, you know, predictive products if you know, eight hours of work and then, you know, sleep four and then kind of, you know, grind all day, all night.

Luke: It’s true, man. Like it’s one of those things where, yeah, the hustle culture was real. Like I was caught up in, in all of that like myself and, and some, some of that doesn’t turn off and you know, especially once you start having kids and stuff, it’s just

Anton: okay, you know, you kind of have to surrender some parts of your time budgeting for other things.

Luke: Let’s get into a little bit of like how this works. So how, how does sleep OT work? Like how, how do you guys gamify sleep?

Anton: Yeah, of course. So we give you rewards in different ways. We kind of, we, we operate as a dwelling on steroids, kind of. We really lean into the gaming elements a lot, so we kind of, they bring you different [00:05:00] collectibles that you can use inside Sleep.

Anton: Pego app. We also give you like different heroes that you then level up based on your sleep. And three, we give you like different you know, web free entry as well. Kind give you like you are actually able to trade those currencies, to trade those characters that you get with other users so effectively.

Anton: For some users, you know, you can actually say it’s like sort of like a sleep to earn, almost like ecosystem that is being developed. And the idea is the following, like we actually don’t gamify the quality of the sleep. We gamify a sleep schedule. So the number one thing in sleep is when you went to bed and when you woke up.

Anton: And you need to do it like day in, day out. Similar, roughly similar time, you know, plus or minus 20 minutes because this is your natural rhythm of the body and you need to hit this rhythm one, you hit this rhythm. Everything else inside the sleep starts to fall into sleep, into like into the rhythm. We measure your sleep when you went to bed and when you woke up either with using a phone.

Anton: So if you don’t use your phone at night, you think you’re asleep, or with the variables we integrate with Whoop or a Fitbit, apple Watch, you name it, every single device. And then you [00:06:00] wake up on the morning, we check with your device activity, Hey, when you actually go to sleep, when you actually wake up.

Anton: Then we calculate your different rewards and we fine tune it to really try to give you like a meaningful reward for keeping to your sleep schedule. And that’s the core of sleep pego. And it’s really not a app used at the night. It’s really an app you use in the morning because we really give you, you know, we give you effectively your reward for your sleep score.

Anton: So rather than just like a sleep corn cell aura, suddenly you get much more kind of a social and a gamified experience attached to your sleep.

Luke: Cool. I mean, that’s one of those three things that helps things catch on, right? Because all of this stuff is pretty personal. I mean, and, and one thing we’ve seen at Brave is that there are some features that are kind of socially driven.

Luke: And, and ones where, you know, you get a lot of social energy around the, but like personal stuff. health and wellness stuff, unless you kind of build a movement around it where it, there’s that social element of it. It’s a very personal thing that people tend to not really talk about very much.

Luke: So it’s kind of cool that you’ve got this element where you, you, you could, you could be trading collectible and the [00:07:00] artwork’s cute too. It’s great. I mean, it’s one of the things, it’s like super wholesome and people really, people that I, I think that’s another missing piece here with. Kind of getting to that broader cohort of users is that so much of what happens in the crypto space is tribal and very like niche, oh, this whole like G gen culture thing and, and I think people are kind of burnt on that.

Luke: Like whenever we run something, whether it’s like penguins or something that’s like,we did some stuff with moonwalk and other other folks that are like tying to tie in things that people do outside of crypto with. Like people’s reactions to them are great. And your guys’ did well. It played really well with people.

Luke: People like it like, and I think, yeah, it’s a really cool element and, and people have become so attached to their phones too. I, I think it’s a pretty fair metric like that if people are not using their phones, just ‘cause people are on their phones, like even when they’re in bed, it’s, it’s wild, you know?

Luke: How much of this do you have to balance out when you’re kind of building an app around healthier habits? okay. We’re on the phone. like you said, I like what you said where, you know it’s a morning app. is that something you guys kind of encourage in the UX [00:08:00] for the users is okay, put it away, or, how does that work?

Luke: Is there much of that going on? I haven’t dug too far into it yet, but just kind of curious the mindset.

Anton: So the app as the moment of the recording of this, I isn’t a late life in the app store. We had like a few testssuccess before that. Launch for a limited amount of time and we have it coming up as well.

Anton: But for us, you know that one of the features that we are working on is that, you know, if you, for example, say in your settings, Hey, my Target Badam is like 11:00 PM After 11:00 PM the game turns, the Sleep Pego app turns black and white. So, okay. So you kind of still enjoy it, but it’s not going to be as enjoyable in the morning.

Anton: Nice. So we, we try to be mindful. It’s, it’s like always counterintuitive. It’s oh well, so I need to use my phone to sleeve, but wasn’t I outside of my bed? Yes, you should. But it’s also almost not possible inside, you know, today’s today’s life. You know, you can consume your news, you communicate using your phone.

Anton: So the phone is an almost an ideal proxy for 70% of people in terms of their sleep, [00:09:00] bad time and wake up time. At least for me it is, you know, for, yeah. Yeah.

Luke: Totally. People have, I mean, their alarms are on their phones. People, a lot of people are like falling asleep with, I don’t know, like meditative stuff or things going on, like lullaby types of things.

Luke: Right? Like on their phones. People are so attached to ’em. It is wild. And so, so right now you mentioned the apps coming out soon. I, I know there’s like a telegram channel. what, what are, are you guys building up the social element of it? what, what’s, what’s the current thing that people are doing?

Anton: Yeah, the current thing. So, you know, we have a public test coming out in a few weeks from now, so early May as the plan for it. And then we wanna, like once, if the test goes well and we want to go, well, we kind of rolling out it widely in a global release as a go to market marketing strategy, we release like a very toned down telegram mini up version as we saw the telegram.

Anton: You know, just virality that happened with those sort stuff. And the hypothesis was, Hey, you know, let us use some of the assets we developed, the cute, wholesome characters, just put them into Telegram mini app and let the virality take us part to build a community and build [00:10:00] awareness about the full launches.

Anton: Keep by Gochi, you know, ahead of the launch. And right now people are able to play the version on, on Telegram. There is no sleep involved. You can’t track sleep on Telegram. It’s called Sleep Light. It still shares this MIP. It kind of has a similar ethos, you know, that it’s ultimately. A product that is designed about wellness and health and sleep in his mind, but it is Telegram collectible card game where we share the same IP and tell this story about the upcoming Sleep pgo.

Anton: So we kind of use it as a marketing tool, and that’s why we also did the collaboration with Brave, where we kind of, you know, we took over the tab, we did some push notifications to try users into the Telegram version so that later on they also to convert to the, the, the full product.

Luke: That’s cool. Yeah.

Luke: And, and wanted to kind of get into that bit too especially over the past year, it seems like telegrams really kind of taken off as a, as a distribution channel in a way, like a go to market. how has that been for you guys? I mean, you, you’ve obviously worked in other apps before, right? in the past esp that gamify things.

Luke: How has [00:11:00] that experience been going to market through Telegram? Has it been positive? and, and then like how well has the uh, mini app plugged into that whole process?

Anton: Yeah, definitely. I think that the telegram mini apps have the benefit that it’s very easy to share. It’s very easy to install, so there’s no friction to install it.

Anton: you know, people getting an app installed is already like challenge for many people. I mean, just takes time is friction. And then two is very easy to track referrals. So if I can invite Pin, write the brandand over, it’s very easy to track. Whereas. iOS, for example, doesn’t do it like that easily. So you kind of, kind of send a referral link.

Anton: It’s, you have to always use workarounds. So you have this additional, you know, virality factor that is inherent to all mini apps if you have a shareable product. At the same time, what needs to be aware about Telegram is that the users don’t really retain as well as in like normal apps. Because, you know, if I’m on Telegram, it’s ultimately Messenger.

Anton: I get a message, I quit my, quit my app because I’m, I’m really there to use it. And the second point is that. Telegram is such an [00:12:00] open platform. It’s that they’re just, you know, they’re, they’re bots. They are kind of, you know, bought farm, some people trying to farm those different apps and Telegram because it’s so, it’s an open, like, it’s very easy to publish an app.

Anton: Like they’re almost like no processes. It also makes it easy for you to spin up, you know, a thousand of accounts And do something. So we always need to find the right balance between growth and making sure we don’t, we’re like, are but resistant. So, this was another finding. And also the geographical presence very different.

Anton: So I think you know, telegram is like the CIS messenger, so I myself from the CS region, I told my grandmother. Using Telegram. Yeah. And then it’s also like a very, like, it’s a crypto native, messenger as well, so it’s an interesting mix of users. You know, it’s either likeCIS folks, a little bit Brazil, a little bit of Germany, a little bit like Philippines, but really it’s like CIS plus crypto.

Anton: So it’s a very interesting mix of users.

Luke: Yeah. For, for folks who might be familiar with the acronym, can you unpack that one one real quick, just so people might see I have to, is that

Anton: Eastern Europes, like the former Soviet Republics? Yeah. Yeah. Got it, got it, got it. [00:13:00] Cool. Cool. Yeah.

Luke: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s super interesting.

Luke: I mean, and it’s one of those things where you kind of get the good with the bad, but one thing I liked about it too is it seems like they have, almost like a prefab of the policies and things like that. So they make it easy to kind of like jump in and use the default policies for things and get running with it.

Luke: But it’s interesting to see that, ‘cause you’ve got them when they’re in there. But then, I don’t know, like with Telegram, I just turn the stuff notifications off ‘cause there’s just so much noise in there all the time. But, but it seems like a really cool way like. Knocking out that friction, like you say, you know, like getting people in the door and then if they’re retaining in your app, that’s cool once they’re in.

Luke: But yeah, this is really interesting to me, just the social element of it, how you can tie that in. I really like how you guys are doing that. Kind of like you’re building the app, but like you’re also kind of building a community first. At the same time, like in parallel, which is like super key too.

Luke: Are you guys planning to just keep it sleep related or are there other areas that you guys are gonna look into gamifying too with, with health or other things like that? what’s kind of the roadmap shaping up to be?

Anton: Yeah. I mean, potentially long term, yes. We would look into expanding [00:14:00] into other, you know, health verticals.

Anton: We believe we can scale you know, sleep to a big, big kind of outcome, both as a company and both as a. Consumer product having just, you know, millions of people use it. So right now the focus is on sleep and we really wanna nail this down. In the future, I could see us both like expanding, you know, vertically into like more sleep stuff, like sleep hardware for example, or horizontally into other gamifying other activities, be it, you know, dieting or exercising with all those products.

Anton: It’s always like slightly different target audience. It’s all, it’s always. A slightly different challenge, how to track it, you know? I think about diet, you know, is very hard to track it actually. Like right now, you need to enter, you used to enter the manually, right now, you use the AI to enter.

Anton: Maybe you could take it forward as well, but it’s still cumbersome. Like it’s still cumbersome. Even like I. Walking, not so much like 10,000 steps easier to do, but dieting, you know, I mean, how many biceps curl like someone

Luke: and, and people gotta be honest too, like with that [00:15:00] stuff, and Yeah, people are people, right?

Anton: Yeah, exactly. They have to be honest. And with sleep, you already have the phone as a proxy. Alarm clock is a proxy for your sleep, so, so it’s almost like it’s, its the easiest one to track. More accurately upscale. Yeah. And the reason why I also realized that is because it actually started as a water bottle.

Anton: The original idea was to gamify water intake. Oh really? And then we sort of, it’s so hard to track water. Oh my god. Yeah. But maybe we track sleep. ‘cause it’s easier to track sleep.

Luke: Well, it seems like sleep’s a pretty a, a pretty like evolved thing too. there’s a lot of that you could kind of branch into within sleep itself, like disturbed sleep disturb belief, like a lot of stuff.

Luke: A lot of stuff to learn about, right? Like I’d imagine yeah, who knows? I, I, what I think was really cool too is that what you guys are doing here is kind of creating a model that other apps could even use, right? So if a diet app that’s specialized in diet and health. Wants to like kind of break into Web3 or whatever.

Luke: You guys kind of have a footprint that they can, or like a template that they can use as, as a, as a model and [00:16:00] you guys can work together and it’s super interesting. I, I just think these, these apps that are like, they’re such crossover potential and we’ve seen that with Brave where in the last season or or whatever you wanna cycle, whatever you wanna call it.

Luke: Like a lot of people, like when your neighbors are talking about this stuff, they’re like, look like, I don’t understand what anybody’s talking about over there, but I know that if I use the browser I can. Earn crypto with it. that’s super easy for people to understand like this. okay, if I’m, if I’m maintaining good sleep schedule, like I’m, I’m going to get rewarded for it.

Luke: So that’s a meaningful thing. And it, you’re, you’re playing on an existing, there’s no way to get around the fact that you need sleep. Like it’s a great behavior, right? that’s a building, you know, an app around. And I’m surprised like more people haven’t done this either. I think it’s super cool that you guys are like, leading away on this, especially in crypto, right?

Anton: Yeah. Yeah, I mean with many points theory, I mean like earning crypto for browsing is, you know, it sounds like such a neat idea as well. But at the same time, I imagine that so many pieces need to fall together to actually make it work. Like you need to build a network out of advertisers. You need to make sure that this whole infrastructure works out.

Anton: So that the payments in crypto are actually sustainable and are [00:17:00] not driven just by speculative, like demand by Suncor. So for us as well, I mean, yes, it sounds like very cool in concept like, hey, you know, earn crypto for your sleep at the same time to make it sure that this model is gonna work five, 10 years from now.

Anton: We have to really, you know, think very deeply about how does this ecosystem look like, what are actually the, the behaviors we reward? Where is the money coming in? You know, who’s paying for, right? It’s a very like,interesting problem to solve, I have to say.

Luke: Yeah, and, and I think upfront too, I mean it, it’s almost like a lot of this is the inverse of what you deal with in Web two space where like it’s all about growth, growth, growth, growth, growth.

Luke: But then in this space there’s the bots and the Sybil stuff is so intense because there’s such an incentive to do that upfront that it’s almost look like I’ll knock myself out at the knees to have lower numbers that are real. A lot of that kind of gameplay at the beginning and then growing that healthier number.

Luke: ‘cause we deal with that too, where it’s like you, you throw a reward out there. People want to gamify that. and they’re pretty good at it too, like with, with that stuff. And so I think that’s really [00:18:00] interesting. So, so let’s get into this bit too. so people are earning from their sleep. Like how are you guys making money with all this?

Anton: Yeah, so we explore like different models, like how do we actually make sure that there is some financial incentive in. So the main idea that we have is basically we can build such an engaging. Experience and a game around the sleep that we will have, like users who are willing to pay just for the in game items being like cosmetics or kind of heroes.

Anton: And then, you know, part of this economic kind of revenue activity kind of flows back to the other user bases. So for us, this idea, can we build an engaging product where people would stick even without kind of crypto incentives so that when on top you kind of add them. You know, adds fuel to the fire in a sense, effectively.

Anton: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of as a benchmark that we use is that, you know, one and a half years ago, a Nintendo released Pokemon sleep. It’s like Pokemon Go, but you sleep, you wake up in the morning, you collect different Pokemon, and they gamify the sleep quality, not the schedules like we do, but they make a hundred million revenue [00:19:00] per year in revenue, and there’s kind of fewer revenue that goes towards, you know, Nintendo, the Pokemon company in that case.

Anton: We think, Hey, you know, this outcome is possible for a sleep gamification app, a sleep game. Of course they have the Pokemon ip, but we have, you know, web free, we have other kind, you guys have good ip.

Luke: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that’s the thing. I, I love sleep

Anton: as well. Yeah.

Luke: That’s also what makes this industry a bit different from others, is that you look at well, we have Luca Nets on the podcast.

Luke: In in with the, with the IP pudgy, I mean with pudgy ip, like they’ve been doing all sorts of things like building, you know, startups around that, et cetera. Like you guys have good ip. Like I think a lot of the times it’s so, like we talk about the inverse, you know, of what you’re dealing with compared to likethe web two world, right?

Luke: A lot of this is just. You have projects that have good IP that can’t, that don’t know what to attach it to. And here you’ve got, well, you’ve got a, a good app use case for, you know, sleep and health and all that. and you’ve got good ip, like Web3 is actually a space where you can make those two things click and, and work really well.

Luke: I think that’s smart too. ‘cause earlier you mentioned, right, [00:20:00] like how you’re, you’re building marketplace types of activity, people can trade things, et cetera. There’s like lots of ways to process. Fee to catch a fee on that stuff and, and kind of build a business around that. And yeah, that’s a thing where, that’s the other thing I really like about this space is that if, if you have the right ingredients, like the community and cultural aspect of it can do a lot of, there’s so many projects out there that you’re like, why does this have likea huge market cap like this for, I mean for these like Nintendo eight bit.

Luke: Graphic looking IP that they’ve got. And it’s just well, sometimes the ingredients work for that. if you guys have ’em with, with sleep and health and wellness and it’s actually like helping people. that’s something I feel like there’s a real appetite for in the space right now, just because of all of the shenanigans that have been happening.

Luke: What’s the feedback like so far, like from the mini app? I know the real, the full on app isn’t out yet, but like how have people been responding to what you guys are doing?

Anton: You know, we had I think two, two tests so far. Public tests, private tests in some capacity. And the feedback was, you know, very positive.

Anton: We were able just to keep growing the community. We had a very large user base in Japan in [00:21:00] particular. You know, we saw that a quarter of our users came from Japan. Wow. And this was the most organic community for us. And we were like, Hey, why Japan? This is so weird. I’ve never been to Japan before. You know, I, I, I, I started for example, working on Steve Pgo.

Anton: And, but then we look at the data, Hey, Japanese people sleep the least in the entire world. So, you know, sleep as a cultural issue because Japanese, much more than it is, they sleep six hours, 15 minutes. Americans sleep seven hour, 15 minutes, for example, on our Asian, but the need is still the same. So we say, okay, that’s interesting.

Anton: So we can, we see a little bit more product market fit pulled towards Japan. So we start to. Make changes to the product so that it appears not just to what I think, you know, the West, for example, is getting used, but also some elements that are, you know, very popular in Japan. So this is like KA Hawaii art style kind of very cute, cozy, wholesome animals, you know, gacha components.

Anton: And we add A-J-R-P-G. So Japanese role playing games component also to the gamification element from that side. And the other feedback that is sort of. You know, hard to get from [00:22:00] users is that just we saw the activity of users and we look at the data of the test and it’s Spike activity, you know, seven oh five seven ten seven fifteen.

Anton: So it’s like when people wake up, the first thing they actually do is check their sleep score. So we actually motivate them to do it before they do WhatsApp, before they do Instagram, before they check the messenger. So this is another finding for us. Oh wow. Like we can make, this product has potential to become a habit based product very early on for the users.

Anton: Oh yeah. It’s 7 10, 7 to five. Wow. First thing on the mind of a, of a user before the. Go to Instagram is sleep. We’re like, oh, wow, that’s really interesting. We should do it. So we, we really use this feedback to convince us that we should work on this idea and not something else.

Luke: I mean, that, that fact alone is incredibly powerful, right?

Luke: you are in the mindset of the user. Before they even go to Instagram, that’s insane. That’s awesome, man. I mean, yeah. That’s really, really, yeah. That’s a really, powerful statement. Like,to find out, and this is just certainly too, how much is [00:23:00] AI a part of what you guys are doing?

Luke: Are you guys using AI in the app or with the process or tooling or any of that?

Anton: Oh, we use AI across, I think every single process inside of the development of the app itself. Be it like in concept, our generation for our artists or coding or, or just, you know, for engineering support, or we use it for some, you know.

Anton: Write up inside the community communication. Sometimes we just make sure that hey, you know, make it crispr, make it cleaner. Yeah, yeah. You know, those type of, of stuff. Inside the product, you know, the main use is that the way we, we measure track with our device actually uses a fair bit of AI and machine learning, because the phone data, for example, yes.

Anton: We kind of, I, I mentioned that, hey, you know, we use, like when you use the phone at night, we use in the morning, this is the proxy of your sleep, but we actually use it like using, I. Phone motion activity data, and then if you get like a push notification at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM suddenly the data tells us you were awake, but obviously you weren’t awake.

Anton: [00:24:00] So there’s actually quite a lot of AI stuff, machine learning stuff to figure out so that actually this data is clean. This data can be used as proxy for your actual sleep data because there’s so many edge cases, people all sleep so completely different. Some people just, we look at the data. One to 3:00 AM they actually kind of, they actually kind of wake up every night for no reason at all.

Anton: And we really try to use machine learning and AI to make sure that the sleep algorithms works. And then with those LLMs, we just use it large language models. We use them in production process mostly, but actually can come into product like, Hey, here’s some sleep tips. But this is like a very like fast feature to build, but you also need to be safe and secure that AI isn’t like hallucinating.

Anton: Any tips?

Luke: They’re giving you nightmares or, or whatever, right. you know, and to that point too, I think, you know, we talk a lot about the positives too. What are things that you guys have to be mindful of? are there negatives? are there ways that this could get outta hand or, or are there threats or concerns that you guys have when you’re building something like this?

Luke: I mean, I, I would imagine data privacy is one of them, but are, are there any other [00:25:00] things that you guys are actively factoring in?

Anton: You know, for us, because we have. Crypto incentives big into the sleep. For us, a big thing, it’s anti sheet anti-spam and anti DDoS meaning and anti sebel res like sebel resistance as well.

Anton: Just because once you add a financial incentive, boy there are, you know, people all around the world ready to hang it up. Even for the Telegram Uni version where there’s no direct benefit today, there’s like a promise of an airdrop later on coming up. We see that people are, you know, playing around with the app we see GitHub repositories, where people literally write and share like bots how to potentially kind of play it out.

Anton: So for us, we just wanna make sure that no, like we don’t reward bad behavior, we reward actually kind of real users inside the app, like the most valuable people inside the ecosystem. And also. So that we don’t accidentally kind of, you know, print, you know, a million rewards to our users and more. So this is [00:26:00] kind of the top of mind for us.

Anton: Yes, of course. Kind of data privacy is important for us. We kind of, we, we keep the sleep data, we don’t share it with anyone, but for, but kind of just in web free, I. Just the scale of the bots. You know, even at Duolingo there were like bots. There were like people trying to, you know, climb up to the awards, et cetera.

Anton: So, and there’s like Duolingo, literally like a language learning app with nothing, nothing at stake. it’s not even a game, right? It’s just like awards. You get bots and people writing it up, et cetera. Free. It’s, it’s an incredible, I, I don’t know if you, if you see like a brief as well, but for us,

Luke: oh my God, if there’s a surface, if there’s a surface to gamify, it’s already been gamified and there might be a village somewhere with the sleep of Gache Village in Thailand or something where you know, they’re running, you know, they’re, you’re feeding an entire village off of the crypto rewards on it.

Luke: Like we saw that kind of stuff. It’s an interesting mix too, ‘cause you have these It’s like almost like friendly fraud cases where like people that are legitimately like genuinely excited about it, but might be misusing it, right? and then you’ve got like people that are, are, are definitely bad actors.[00:27:00]

Luke: And then you’ve got people that are just, you know, the intended use case who either it’s one person or it’s a, it’s a household or, or whatever. And it definitely is a balancing act. or has been at brave okay. Balancing the people that are genuinely excited, but might be like, and some of this might just be language barrier stuff.

Luke: there’s all these like factors you’re dealing with, like global community, right? Where it’s not okay, I’m just targeting. The US or Western Europe or or wherever. You, especially Telegram, you’re running it for everybody, right? that’s that’s where the world’s kind of gone in, in, in this whole like post covid era.

Luke: a lot of people were getting their news from Telegram and a lot of things like that, just because that’s where they could get information quickly. It’s interesting, man, it says something about the resilience of a startup. If you can make it through that and get to scale, like past that, you’re learning lessons there that.

Luke: You’re, you can’t learn ’em in school like that. This is like real world stuff. It’s if you can get really good on defense and really good on, and still put out a product and have a really authentic, genuine community that like, loves it. I don’t know, dude. that’s a whole, there’s a whole set of founders out there.

Luke: I [00:28:00] mean, I. Especially like over the past four plus years. Like if you, if you were putting something together, you’re still around and now where things are kind of lightening up on that front, like you can, you can really scale up. Like it says something about the resilience of the founders that can make that happen.

Luke: But I, I don’t know. I think you, so much of this boils down to just having the right ingredients and I don’t know. I’m really excited to see what you guys do.

Anton: Yeah. And I, and I think at this point, I think the, the biggest challenge is, you know, you could add all those security measures, but then you start to.

Anton: Really endanger the core experience of the real user. If you add all those productions, you’re like a capture element of every single, like action, for example, as a perfect way to come with bots, then your product is not usable. So how do you balance it out so that you still use it frictionlessly, but still limit the bots?

Anton: So. It’s, it’s a massive, it’s a massive fight. And,

Luke: and the thing is, there is no silver bullet and everything gets gamed. I mean, that’s, that’s part of it. Like whether you’re dealing with like legitimate bots or even when people say like KYC am ML stuff, it’s dude, like everybody that really wants to get around [00:29:00] that’s already gotten around it, by the time the next thing comes out, they’re already.

Luke: I have a way to get around that too. It’s just a, it’s an adversarial game, right? and so like to a certain degree you kind of have to loss lead with some of that in the beginning to just learn what the fit is, right? I mean, you guys that sleep, but there’s so much more to that, I would imagine.

Luke: ‘cause you’re trying to build community and I, you’ll find stuff in there. You’ll find, you’ll find things in the community that stand out, right? Like,I mean there’s just like behavior patterns of people like engaging with each other where you’re like, oh my gosh, yeah, this guy’s You, you know, just from seeing things that, okay, you start to spot the patterns.

Luke: I think you just gotta let some of this ride in the beginning and, and see build some community around it. And, and some of that that’s self policed out too and things like that. So are, you guys are on Telegram, right? Like, where can people find sleep got right now? If they want us clue in and, and, and when is the app coming out?

Luke: so we can, you know, get folks excited about it.

Anton: In May we are planning to do the test release and then estimating in June is gonna be like a wide release for us. Cool. You’ll be able to find us an iOS app store or in the Google Play Store. In the meantime, [00:30:00] it’s the Sleep Live version is live on Telegram.

Anton: It’s gonna be live on the line messenger very shortly. Line Messenger is the kind of the biggest messenger in Japan and Taiwan, and also you can find us on sleep com or on X handle sleep. So it’s spelled like Tamagotchi, but we sleep. So gonna level up your tamagotchi while you sleep. That’s kind of also the concept there in the.

Luke: I love it, man. What blockchain are you guys working with? Just outta curiosity.

Anton: So primarily for us is the Solana blockchain. Mm-hmm. We also partner with Sodium the AL two by Sony on Ethereum for the line mini app because Oh, cool. We really wanted a person familiar with the free and Japan at the same time because in comparison, for example, to Telegram where it’s a very open Messenger line is a very, I mean, Japan and Line is a very closed acquisi.

Anton: It’s huge.

Luke: It’s

Anton: huge, but it’s all you need to know your, your stuff. I know. I, I think like in brave, like it’s all it’s all like Japan is also like a big market for brave, and it’s like separate, yeah.

Luke: We have a whole team of [00:31:00] people in Japan that only focused on Japan because it’s like such a huge market, but it’s such a different market.

Luke: You have like language barrier, but then like you said earlier, like the gamification is different, the cultural stuff. They did a lot of stuff like 10 years ago that is starting to become more popular now, go build puzzle pieces together and collectibles and things where a, a lot of that started to, we saw a different fit there, but, but it was good.

Luke: You gotta get out there too, by the way. Tokyo is fantastic, one of the best cities ever. it’s amazing. It’s like a, the inside of a watch. You know, you look at it, you’re like, oh my God. like how it’s been here for thousands of years and it’s clean and it, it is very different, but awesome experience.

Luke: But yeah. So, and also too, where can people find you, if they wanna follow what you’re doing or are you publishing stuff or you, you out there on X or any LinkedIn or any of these platform?

Anton: Yeah, so mostly on X, so it’s like Anton Gochi. So rather than replace the sleep a with Anton, so Tamagotchi, but with Anton.

Anton: So that’s my handle on Twitter and on Telegram.

Luke: Awesome. Awesome. Well, Anton, man, I really appreciate you making the time to come here and tell us about it. I’d love to have you on too, like to [00:32:00] check back in, like after the app’s out and see how things are going and, and learn more about what you guys are up to then.

Luke: But uh, yeah, I really appreciate it. Really appreciate it. You guys are kind of like kind of trying to gamify better health and, and building a, an interesting use case for crypto that we can actually go and, and, and get people grow the space with, you know, I think that’s really fantastic. So thanks again for, for making out today.

Luke: Really appreciate it.

Anton: Thanks a lot. Look for having me. It’s been

Luke: fun. We’ll talk soon. See. See ya. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to the Brave Technologist Podcast. To never miss an episode, make sure you hit follow in your podcast app. If you haven’t already made the switch to the Brave Browser, you can download it for free today@brave.com and start using Brave Search, which enables you to search the web privately.

Luke: Brave also shields you from the ads trackers and other creepy stuff following you across the web.