The big idea: A night nurse for snoring
In a world of fewer children, night nurses need job security. Is the DINK market the answer?
One of my friends recently had his first baby, which exposed me to the phenomenon of the night nurse: someone you pay to soothe the baby overnight and give the parents a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
This seems to have genuinely been a huge relief for them. And it makes sense that after weeks of sleepless nights, removing the stress for a short period feels like an incredible luxury.
It got me thinking: babies aren’t the only ones keeping people up at night. Is there a bigger market for night nurses in a world of fewer babies and more double income no kids (DINK) couples?
Introducing: The Snore Sitter, a night nurse specializing in snoring adults.
The economics of a night nurse are good, but their long term outlook is bleak
Night nurses have some very appealing economic characteristics.
First, it’s a position of significant trust. Not only are they in your house overnight while you’re asleep, they’re in charge of keeping your newborn child safe and secure. Because it’s so much responsibility, trust shapes everything: rather than hire a stranger, night nurses are often found via word of mouth. This is a major moat, given it’s not trivial to find a new night nurse if you’re unhappy with your existing one.
Night nurses also work with disproportionately higher income clients, whose price sensitivity goes down as the sleep deprivation goes up. That means that while the typical price is around $30 per hour, well-reviewed and in-demand night nurses have significant pricing power.
Finally, there’s a clear route to repeat customers: younger siblings, cousins, and friends are natural new clients. Once a sales funnel is set up, it’s not hard for the best providers to stay busy.
That doesn’t mean that there are no threats to their business model. The archetypal customer for a night nurse is two working, high income parents who live in a large urban area. This is exactly the population that’s seeing the most disruption; NYC’s population of under-5s has dropped 19% since 2020, with similar numbers in other urban metros like LA and Chicago.
Birthrates are falling worldwide, with declines particularly concentrated among the $150k-$400k earning families that make up the core night nurse customer base. For this industry to survive, they have to adapt to a new customer base: high income DINKs.
Snoring is the answer
Snoring actually shares a lot of characteristics with crying babies. The person suffering is not the person making the noise. It’s disruptive to sleep, and getting up to fix it just wakes you up more.
So a snore sitter doesn’t have to start off that different from a night nurse: intervene in times of noise to help the couple get a full night of sleep.
During the night, the snore sitter could follow a gentle escalation pattern:
Pillow tilting and optimization
Pushing into a new sleep position
Turning on wave sounds to cover the noise
Spritz some humidifying essential oils around the bed
If all else fails, gently waking up the snorer and rocking them back to sleep
The interactions might take some adjustment at first — it’ll be weird to wake up to pee and see someone staring at you — but over time they’ll become like a member of the family. And since people tend not to age out of snoring, you’ll have lots of time to get used to them watching you.
Of course, their scope goes beyond addressing snoring during the night. In the hours before bedtime, the sitter is at work creating a relaxing sleeping environment. They’re adjusting temperature and pillow selection. They’re coaching you on sleeping position. They’re slapping your phone out of your hand before you can start doomscrolling on TikTok.
During the night, the sitter also collects data on your sleeping habits. Using the outputs, they can do the equivalent of a low-quality sleep study every night. The aesthetic dashboard of your snores per hour is going to be candy for the sleep optimizers of Silicon Valley.
A lot of people might genuinely want this
The snoring market is deceptively large.
About 40% of men and 24% of women are habitual snorers. Let’s assume that our population is only high earners — there are approximately 11.5 million households with >$250,000 income per the census bureau. 69% of Americans are in relationships; ideally we would see what the crossover between these are, but naively:
11.5 million households x 69% in relationships x 54% of couples with at least one partner snoring1 = 4.3M households in our TAM.
A night nurse goes for $30 or so per hour in New York, typically with a 10 hour commitment 3x a week — a total cost of approximately $900 per week. Assuming we can charge the same, the total addressable market value would be $200 billion annually, which is twice as big as the film industry. That might be a bit generous, but is it so crazy to think that even 1% of people are open to this? If they are, we’ve discovered a $2 billion market.
Even better, this is a subscription business with high retention. Are you really going to tell the person sitting in your home all night that you don’t need them anymore? They can hear you snoring!
This has all the ingredients of a venture-funded success. Introducing: Snöör, the venture-scale provider of snore sitters.
How to scale Snöör
Startup founders like to say: start with things that don’t scale. What would the first hundred customers before Series A look like?
Trust is the key initial dynamic. As mentioned before, night nurses today rely heavily on word of mouth. For an unproven concept, getting customers to trust a stranger in their home overnight is going to require significant social capital.
So the first stop is partnering with people that the target market trusts. Focus on high-end medical establishments, social clubs for the wealthy, marriage counselors, concierge doctors, plastic surgeons, luxury spas, high-end divorce attorneys, and expensive hotels. Your first exposure to a snore sitter might be as an upgrade perk at the Equinox hotel.
Build on this strategy by adding in luxury services, emphasizing the Snore Sitter as a luxury experience. Linen changes, aromatic therapy, massages, anything to turn this from a stupid idea into an indulgent luxury. There’s plenty of pricing power; even if you charge $75 an hour, it’s cheaper than a divorce lawyer.
After an amazing experience, Snöör can aggressively offer perks for referrals, including referral bonuses and comps, on the assumption that referrals are the most effective social proof.
But this isn’t just a services business. The data that night nurses collect puts them in a trusted position to recommend options for improved sleep and reduced snoring, including doctor visits, anti-snoring devices, and bedroom furniture.
Why shouldn’t Snöör get a commission for products they sell, or even develop their own line of CPAPs, snore guards, and more?
The world of the snore sitter
To justify a high valuation, Snöör needs to be able to match people with a snore sitter at scale. It might seem like a leap, but if Uber can normalize getting in a strangers car and Airbnb can normalize staying in a strangers house, why can’t Snöör normalize a stranger watching you sleep all night?
Regular users may eventually not be able to sleep without their snore sitter present. This could become an economic and social differentiator, with access to snoring services becoming a class signifier that drives new political ideas. While a universal basic snore sitter sounds absurd today, you never know — nearly half of Americans say that food delivery is now a need.
As a growing essential service, Snöör will have to face new regulatory issues. One of the biggest fights will be data privacy. Staying overnight exposes the Snore Sitter to a lot of personal data; does Snöör defend data privacy to make people comfortable with a stranger in their home? Or do they go the other way, building a sneaky T&C that allows them to narc to insurance companies that they found a pack of cigarettes despite claiming to be a non-smoker?
And speaking of, why shouldn’t Snöör be part of the standard coverage for health insurers? Good sleep means good health, which means good reimbursement from insurance companies. Although I feel bad for the claims adjuster trying to evaluate whether fluffing the pillows was medically necessary or a cozy but elective procedure.
Official idea rating:
5 out of 5 stars. In a world where people have fewer kids, I can totally see an entrepreneurial night nurse moving into this space to fill their calendar in the slow months.
Sure, it’s unconventional. But so was paying someone to deliver you coffee or loan you their tools. If interest rates go down enough, VCs will once again start throwing a dart at the wall and seeing what sticks. Snoring services is ready for a cultural moment. Sequoia Capital just needs to have the courage to make it real.
This assumes snoring is distributed randomly between men and women; in reality, I would guess this is somewhat correlated within couples.
Could we get a "do whatever the cats are crying and making noise about in the middle of the night" sitter? It's not my spouse's snoring that keeps me awake; it's the cats' nighttime activities.
This is obviously written by a very good husband