Hello Sense

» see hello.is as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Hello Sense was a frosted-glass orb that sat on your nightstand and listened. Microphone, light sensor, temperature, humidity, particulate matter, a little speaker for white noise. The companion piece was the Sleep Pill, a coin-sized accelerometer you clipped to your pillow that tracked how much you moved. The app stitched it all together into a sleep score in the morning.

James Proud was 21 when he founded Hello Inc. in August 2012 as a Thiel Fellow. The Kickstarter launched 23 July 2014 and pulled $2.4 million from 19,000 backers in a month, one of the better consumer-hardware Kickstarters of that era. Two rounds of VC followed, the big one in June 2015 at $40 million on a $250-300 million valuation, with named angels from Facebook, Twitter and Spotify. The product shipped to backers about a year late, which was normal for the kickstarter class of 2014.

The reviews when it shipped were mixed in a quiet way. The hardware was beautiful, the data was accurate enough, but the sleep score itself was not actionable. Fitbit and Apple Watch were starting to do the same job from your wrist without needing a pillow accessory. By early 2017 Hello was trying to sell to Fitbit and could not close the deal, the Series-C never landed, and on 12 June 2017 the company announced it was shutting down. Most of the staff lost their jobs the same day.

by the time i would have signed up for a sense, kickstarter shipping to turkey was still a ten-week customs gamble and a 40-dollar duty bill on a 99-dollar orb. i watched the launch the way you watch indiegogo from the wrong continent. the devices that did make it to turkish desks were jawbone ups, mi bands, fitbit charges, things you could buy at a real store.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

The pitch was that wrist trackers were the wrong form factor for sleep. You take the watch off at night, or it makes your wrist sweat, or the strap wakes you up. A passive sensor on the nightstand could measure your environment, and the pillow clip could measure the bed itself. The data model was supposed to be richer than what a wristband could produce.

It was, on paper. In practice the sleep score from a sense looked very similar to the sleep score from a fitbit on your wrist, because both of them were guessing from movement patterns and ambient sound and neither was a polysomnograph. The hardware was overbuilt for the insight it produced.

~ the day it died ~

12 June 2017, a blog post on hello.is announced the shutdown. The CEO posted a short note thanking backers. The cloud service kept running for a few weeks of grace, then the app stopped syncing and the devices became expensive paperweights. The hello.is website stayed up through January 2018 as a slow archive, then went dark.

There was no buyer for the IP. Sense devices were already on ebay by fall 2017, sometimes still working in degraded local-only mode, sometimes bricked. A small forum community kept patches alive for a while but the cloud-dependent features could not be revived without the original servers.

~ the long tail ~

Hello Sense sits in the same wearables-flameout bucket as Jawbone, Pebble and the Microsoft Band, products that raised real money on the hardware-renaissance thesis of 2012-2015 and then got crushed when the apple watch and fitbit consolidated the category. The orb form factor never came back. Sleep tracking moved fully to wrists, then to rings (oura, ultrahuman), and the nightstand-sensor idea quietly disappeared from the consumer space.

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