A Student Success

SleepBot: The Student Entrepreneur Project 

Photo courtesy: SleepBot 

What do college students say the never have enough of? I know, I know you're thinking monetarily, but take economics out of the equation and the answer is sleep. Lack of sleep affects your ability to work, think and co-ordinate, not to mention morphs even the sweetest of us into the grinch that stole Christmas. 

Jane Zhu, 22, would struggle with her sleep, or lack of it, when she studied Finance and Marketing at New York University. Spending her nights awake at five in the morning she would chat with her friend, and coder, Edison Wang. Eventually they started SleepBot, a mobile app designed to help you track and improve your sleep cycle. Edison was the tech architect and Jane the self taught design whiz. That was in 2010. Fast forward to 2012 and SleepBot has over 750,000 users and 200,000 daily users. All without any seeding money. 

"It doesn't require money to create the app," said Zhu, who graduated from NYU in 2012. "It requires time, and lots of it. And people value their time dearly." After setting up the app, the SleepBot team entered and won several entrepreneurial contests, most notably the 2012 NYU Stern New Venture Competition where they shared first place (winning $37,000). A few thousand dollars here and there from other competitions completed their "emergency fund". "That's not a lot of money to run a company," she says, laughing. "Thats only enough for living off ramen noodles for a year!"

Speaking fast and furious Zhu passionately described the difficulty and hard work that went into balancing being a student and entrepreneur. She had drawn a color coded graph of her last four years, and pulled it out of her bag to prove the work she had put in. At any given time she was doing at least three different things; her schoolwork, internship and extra-curricular activities or SleepBot. The one semester she did only focused on two things the grades would shoot up, and the semester she did four things her grades sunk. However graduating has not freed Zhu up as much as she has liked. "If you think you wasted time in school, try being your own boss!" she said. "There are days when you wake up and say 'oh my god I am a horrible founder'."