[johmas]

Back in 2013 I posted a Show HN (was changed to Tell HN) for our one year old mattress startup Tuft & Needle. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6900625

The post resulted in a Fortune article (https://fortune.com/2014/01/22/meet-the-warby-parker-of-matt...) which helped to catalyze hockey stick growth and triggered a wave of vc money into the industry, we turned the interest down. The vc money resulted in new competitors for us (Casper/Purple/+200 others as barriers fell). This collectively caused massive change.

We grew to 250mm arr before we merged with serta simmons in 2018.. to disrupt within their brand portfolio. We’ve been working on their brands to mimic our model.

Our growth was 100% bootstrapped with no more than $6k. My co-founder and I seriously attribute our show HN as one of the reasons we were able to build our company the way we did and for spurring interest in our competitors to enter the market. The competition also accelerated our growth without the need of funding, their VC money fueled advertising raising awareness.

Anyways, one data point for you. Super grateful for this community.

[djstein]

Heard from HN. Saved up a ton of money in college for one. Miss how good the original beds used to be. We went with another 3 years after our first in 2013 and it was horrible in comparison. Used to recommend the brand to everyone until that point. Sounds like you made a great exit however

[johmas]

If you’d email me (jt@tn), I’d love to send you our newest iteration. We’ve progressively improved customer sat since founding so I wonder if this was potentially a defect. There were a few seasons where our manufacturing struggled with capacity and quality suffered for a while. I’m hoping that’s what happened here. Pls email me, would love to try one more time if you are open to it.

JT