Wildfire Spotlight: Lux

What is Lux?Lux is a sunrise simulation lamp, or smart lamp. It uses sleep cycles and what time you usually go to bed and wake up to guide you to bed at your optimal time so you can wake up during your light sleep. It’s customizable to the individual and molds to their patterns over time. What made you interested in this problem space?Last spring in my entrepreneurship class we noticed that in the winter time, it was really difficult to wake up. That was because it was dark and gloomy outside and there was hardly any motivation to do anything. We wanted to help people to get out of their bad moods by focusing on sunrise simulation, and although we initially we were similar to a bright light therapy lamp, we’ve transitioned to being a sunrise simulation lamp. We would have an accompanying app that you would enter your usual time to go to sleep and it would guide you into bed by sending you notifications so you can get into bed at the optimal point in your sleep cycle.How far along in the product development cycle are you?Right now we are in our prototyping phase. We’ve already created our MVP and we’re already going through three phases of testing, alternating between those week by week. Our main goal for wildfire is product development and honing in on who our consumers are. We know what we offer – we offer time and a better mood. People can attend meetings, spend time with their families, or take time for themselves. We’ve conducted consumer interviews, such as with friends and family, infiltrated Facebook groups, and we’re going over what we’ve found this week. We are trying to find out who wants our product – athletes, parents, professionals - we are trying to find our beachhead consumer.How has The Garage helped you?The Garage has really helped us by pairing us with experts who let us gain expertise from them, and ask them any questions we want. For example, last week an accountant came in and he really helped us with setting up our books and figure out our budget. We’ve talked with people offering help with business models and legal advice, and this has all been extremely helpful.Which entrepreneur do you admire most and why?Neal Sales-Griffin came to The Garage the other day, and he was telling us a really compelling story about building businesses his freshman and sophomore years of college, and I think that’s a really big driving factor in entrepreneurs. He’s really helping people and tying their purpose into what they do. The founder of Farmer’s Fridge came to speak during the school year at Family Dinner, and he’s really inspirational – he didn’t paint a picture of entrepreneurship being easy, which I think is really, really, easy to do. A lot of people say that it’s very linear, and that’s not necessarily true. It clouds the difficulties you’re going through. He was very transparent about the whole process, and this came through in his delivery.This article is part of an ongoing series highlighting the startup teams admitted to Wildfire, The Garage’s Summer Pre-Accelerator Program. For more information about Wildfire, click here.