WakeMate is the only YC company that left me feeling completely duped for dropping cash on them. My whole experience with the product felt like a sham. Good on WakeMate for having the opportunity at a 2.0, because I personally feel like they did not deserve it :(
Because I love the concept so much, I will give it another shot, and maybe my bitterness will fade, and we can all hold hands and skip in the park one day! Good luck!
I am generally pro YC company and pro startup, but after the 14 months of delays, then receiving a worthless, non functional product (which I threw away), I have totally given up on these guys.
I got a $299 zeo, which works pretty well, and has an open API, great distribution at retail, and very friendly responsive and professional support. I kind of stopped using that too since I now sleep in a bed with the gf most nights, but for actual sleep tracking, the Zeo seems like a great solution.
This is part of my reply to swaits from his accurate review of the WakeMate 1.0.
"Thank you for your considerate e-mail and your respect for my privacy (by bcc-ing my e-mail).
It's funny that you e-mailed me, since my boyfriend and I read your story on hacker news, about an hour ago and thought about how they could be launching a new product in the ill-be-gotten gains of defective wakemate sales.
The experience I had was very similar yet, I still have my two wakemates (defects and all). I have no desire to send either back until I get a replacement charger, prepaid postage and working device. I have explained that to their customer service. Basically, I am holding them ransom; though, since they don't work, I don't think I have the upper hand.
If you would like, I can send you one of mine. I don't know if you like/play portal, but it could become you companion band.
Thank you for speaking out and letting other's see what has become of this. It had so much promise and then went horribly wrong."
I feel that everyone should know of this service atrocity (yes! An atrocity!). I worked many years in customer service, and I know that I would not be in business, let alone retain customers, with this type of service. The fact that customers paid for a device/service that has not delivered the features that were advertised; and, the Wake Mate company has not come close to satisfying their current customers, with broken devices that have not been replaced, nor a charger that won't cause a fire, one would wonder what they will do with the 2.0 version?!
That looks like a good way of doing it as well but I'm not all that positive to having my phone in bed with me.
I occasionally move around quite a bit during sleep and I'm sure others do as well, I don't think my phone would survive that long if we had to share a bed.
I have been using Sleep Cycle too. Most the most part, yes, it does wake me up less cranky. You still need to allow for enough sleep though. If I only get ~6 hours of sleep. It wakes me up at an appropriate time - I feel better - but I am still tired - and thus crankier than usual.
The creators countered by saying those reviewers were testing on uncalibrated phones. The app normalizes the movements so even if it detects only very small movements it will still render a graph with full range of movement.
I don't know if this is true but I saw in their changelog http://mdlabs.se/sleepcycle/changelog-v3.0.html that they "removed "dreaming" from graph legend we've done a lot of research around this with help from sleep scientists and determined that Sleep Cycle cannot reliably detect when you are in REM sleep".
That makes me think they're legit. Their test function is also pretty convincing. It detects large and small movements quite accurately.
I was somewhat skeptical after reading some of the reviews, but after using the app for a couple of days I was satisfied that they're not faking data. I tend to wake up easily and have been able to match occasions when I wake up to the graphs.
I've been using the app for a couple of months and I feel that I am groggy less often when I wake up (though this could be expectation bias). It seems to work much better when I am sleeping alone I or my partner are traveling, though maybe this just means I need to buy a bigger bed.
I use it, but really only for the "intelligent snooze" feature, which decreases the length of the snooze each time until it starts refusing to snooze. If anyone knows of a simpler app with the same feature, I'd love to hear about it.
Let me tell you my WakeMate story. Its publication has been long overdue. It's a bit long, so please bear with me...
I pre-ordered. All excited. I love "life hacks", and this is right up my alley. Even encouraged several friends to jump in on the WakeMate wagon!
It finally arrived, and for the most part it worked. The app was buggy at first (iOS), but they did eventually get some updates approved that made things better. The algorithms employed on the website are questionable. They seemed to weigh certain variables a bit counter-intuitively, but what do I know. I went with it, charging it every other day and sleeping with it at night.
It was a bit snug, but I stretched it out and it was comfortable enough. The "WakeMate" logo stuff wore off in a matter of days though.
They emailed me a few days after receiving it saying to NOT use the charger that came with it because it was faulty and might catch on fire. Yikes. They never sent me a replacement. I just carried on with another standard USB charger.
Then, at some point, my WM started refusing to sync with the app. I submitted a trouble ticket, and they responded about a week later acknowledging a hardware bug. They requested that I send the original unit back to them in NoCal and proceeded to send me a new unit.
I didn't send the unit back to them, mostly out of sheer laziness. But, also, they were rather presumptuous in telling me to send the unit back. No mention was made of postage, or the inconvenience to me.
A new unit arrived and worked for about a week. Same exact problem. I submitted another trouble ticket and got NO RESPONSE. Never even an acknowledgement.
Months go by... crickets. Silence. Nothing. I mentally give up. At this point I had two dead WM's and I really didn't care about it any more, because my excitement was quite high, and I was really disappointed, mostly in the extremely poor customer service.
Then one day, someone at WM (apparently) decided to email everyone who had WMs that still needed to be sent back. Only this time it was more of a rather rude demand, not so much of a request. Again, no mention of postage, or apology, or anything remotely friendly.
The worst part of this? They CC'd all of us in a single email! So yah, we now had not only been treated pretty poorly in terms of customer service from a company with a broken product, but we were also being publicly shamed for it!
Now I cared again.
I was rather disgusted. I replied to all to share my disgust. Others replied to all and were considerably more vocal than me about their own disgust. That was ugly. After some time, they sent out another email admitting they should have BCCd us instead. Yah, amateur hour.
I never got any sort of acknowledgement after mailing the two units back to them. I can only assume they received them. I waited a full month before contacting them again.
This time I've asked that they reimburse me for my WM as well as the postage I incurred. After that I'm not interested in doing any further business with them. Still no response, other than a robot email saying they have lots of support requests blah blah blah.
This is sad because I really wanted to like this company! :(
Update: About 24 hours after I posted this I received a full refund for my Wakemate along with an apologetic email. No consideration was made for the postage I paid to send their defective products back to them. Oh well. For now, I'm just happy to put this ugly scene behind me.
I'd really like to see a tech review site (Engadget perhaps?) do a Wakemate/Lark/Zeo comparison. Wear all 3 devices at the same time, compare results, etc.
There's a nightly beta for Android that addresses the connection issues. I got an APK from the support some weeks ago and I can confirm that the connection issues have reduced dramatically.
I guess this is one advantage iOS has, a mostly unified platform for developers. I've been part of the Wakemate beta for Android for awhile now, and it seems that Android has wildly varying bluetooth stacks depending on device manufacturer and phone model. For example, my LG Optimus V won't reliably work with Wakemate with the stock firmware, but works flawlessly with CyageonMod
Man, I am serious now, there is one place in my life where electronic devices are not allowed (including TV, alarm clocks etc.) and it is my bedroom.
Taking your "SmartPhone" to bed, in order to improve your sleep seems ridiculous to me by all means.
If you want to improve your sleep and get up in the optimal hour, do the following:
* Disconnect yourself from those devices (phone, pads, laptops, tv, etc.) two hours before you go to bed.
* Take a warm shower or bath
* Go to bed at a fixed time every evening, and get up naturally.
* Read a nice book for 20/30/40 minutes (whatever suites you).
* Close your eyes then and meditate until you fall asleep.
You will see how within few days, you are getting up naturally at the same hour, feel better and energetic all day, etc. etc.
This is kind of a weird "side complaint", but: despite being a humongous guy, I actually have reasonably sized wrists. The wakemate, when it arrived, had a wrist band so small (and if there were sizes on the site I'm certain I would have ordered the largest one) that I gave it to my girlfriend's little sister (who likely never used it), as I knew there would be no way I'd be able to wear it. I wonder if this has also been handled in 2.0 ;P.
For what it's worth, I am a tall but slim male and my wrists are very thin, I can fit my hand around with my thumb and little finger meeting together, the wakemate fits me very well so I imagine anyone with "normal" wrists who isn't a midget would have comfortability problems.
To me my WM is more than to just wake up less groggy. Using tags I'm trying to identify anything that would help me sleep better. This is where I think WM is missing out:
I see a leader board but no way to get tips or compare notes (tags?) with other users (specially those in the leaderboard that seem to be sleeping like freaking kings) I would love to figure out how to get a 90+ night when I'm currently in the low 60 everyday.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what on earth would you compare notes about?
"Slept a bit rough last night, think I was a bit stressed out after that deadline."
"Woke up hot and worn out, maybe I should get an A/C unit."
"Fit as a fiddle this morning, must be that cheese I ate before bed I guess!"
I don't get it. People are different. Some sleep well and are able to adjust to regular schedules, some are the opposite; there's no magic bullet, and any specific trick will not necessarily work on a different person.
If you ask people who sleep well what the trick is, I suspect you will invariably discover that they went to bed early, before they got really tired, that they avoided coffeine drinks, stress, exercise, TV etc. in the hours before bedtime, and have learned to eliminate as many external (eg., lighting) or internal (sleep apnea) sources of discomfort as possible.
All pretty obvious stuff, and nothing, I think, that a good GP wouldn't be able to steer you towards.
Just to chime in. I got my Wakemate a few months ago and totally love it. The software had a few flaws (just features id like to see) and support promptly and politely replied with their roadmap and such. I randomly emailed the founders to thank them and they were great too.
Because I love the concept so much, I will give it another shot, and maybe my bitterness will fade, and we can all hold hands and skip in the park one day! Good luck!