Mark Zhang is the CEO & founder of Manta Sleep mask, the only mask designed, constructed, and optimized for deepest-possible sleep in any environment. A leader of the Pro-Nap Movement, Mark educates others on why an afternoon nap is crucial for unlocking one’s full potential, tips to improve sleep quality, why a great night’s sleep is vital for business leaders, and much more.
What is Manta Sleep all about?
I am the CEO & founder of Manta Sleep mask, the only mask designed, constructed, and optimized for deepest-possible sleep in any environment. Manta Sleep masks provide 100% blackout for maximized sleep quality — so users feel 100%, all the time. Just a pinprick of light can disrupt REM and deep sleep, leading to post-sleep tiredness. That’s why Manta perfectly covers and conforms to the eyes to block 100% of light, even in broad daylight — so users always get deep, uninterrupted sleep.
Manta Sleep Mask offers a personalized-for-your-face fit — your eye covers’ position, angle and strap tightness are infinitely adjustable for a fit so seamless, you barely feel your mask on your face. It’s like it was custom-made for you. Every detail is engineered for unmatched comfort, in any position. Manta is designed for no-compromises comfort and constructed with super soft, breathable, durable materials that gently conform to your face without putting any pressure on your eyelids or lashes. So you snooze soundly whether you’re on your back, side or stomach.
A huge part of Manta Sleep’s mission is our Pro-Nap Movement, which is all about rejecting counterproductive, nap-shaming corporate BS — we want to create a community that incites empowerment and change in our corporations and communities. It’s about reclaiming what should have always been yours in the first place: your vitality. We believe that great sleep is the non-negotiable foundation you need to create your best life. It’s impossible to unlock your full potential if you’re not getting an afternoon nap every day.
Thus, everything we do at Manta Sleep is fueled by our drive to enable better lives through better sleep and regular naps. We believe that napping at work should be celebrated, not condemned. And we believe naps beat coffee, because our bodies are wired to nap. Naps give you energy, focus, strength and clarity that you don’t get when you grind through the afternoon. That said, daily naps have been baked into Manta Sleep’s culture since day one. We hope other business leaders follow our lead and take daily naps, as it will help them maximize their potential and bring their companies to new levels of success.
We are anti-hustle culture. Working long hours and “hustling” is absolutely idiotic, because nobody can make great decisions working 12 hours a day. At that point, you’re just a walking zombie working on low-value tasks and pretending like you are actually doing something important. You are pretending like you are actually making it work and “succeeding”, when in fact, you’re just using mindless work as an excuse to make yourself feel better. In order to live a good life, a happy life, there are several pillars in our lives that we need to make sure to take care of: Health, Wealth, Family, and Friends. When these go out of sync, life sucks. You basically have to keep it balanced in order to live a good life.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I’ve been a light sleeper for as long as I could remember, and I started using a sleep mask when I was 15 years old. The problem with generic sleep masks is that they are either uncomfortable, don’t block out the light, or fall apart after three months. And I always thought we could build a better product, so my business partner and I started Manta Sleep, launching our sleep mask by crowdfunding via Kickstarter and Indiegogo — we ended up raising $700,000+ to start the company!
Another part of the inspiration is… I’ve always felt that as a light sleeper, if somehow I was able to improve the quality of my sleep, I’d be the king of the world. I experienced a lot of frustration from not being able to sleep well and then waking up tired, and then not having enough energy and concentration to pursue my goals in life. So a central focus of Manta Sleep is to empower light sleepers to sleep better so they can do more in life. They will be able to pursue their goals and live a better life.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- Savvy in sales. You’ve got to be able to sell your product. Convey the value to the world and get people to pay you. Not necessarily in person — it could be through great copywriting, or running paid traffic, or videos. Whatever the case might be, your #1 most important skill and job earlier on in the business is to sell your offering and make revenue. Without this skill, nothing else matters.
It is absolutely crucial to focus on making sales for the first three years. That’s all you should worry about. I see a lot of people “playing business”, ie: getting an office, business cards, designing a website, etc. These are just distractions — your job as the founder is to work on the difficult problems and get sales. Only worry about the other stuff once you’ve got sales coming in.
- Learning oriented. It is so important to keep learning as an entrepreneur. The moment you stop learning and getting better, your competition will pass you by. Especially in running a business, things are always changing and there are always new and exciting things to learn.
- Persistent and resilient. It really helps to have a clear idea of WHY you want to launch a business. This will help you stay steady and work through the inevitable ups and downs. Most people fail in entrepreneurship, not because of a lack of smarts, money, or ideas. They fail because they don’t persist. In order to persist, it really helps if you’ve got a strong reason behind it. Beyond that, just do it. There is no better way to learn and succeed than by jumping in and actually doing.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
Manta Sleep’s vision is to empower light sleepers to sleep better so they can do more. So in that sense, we aren’t a “sleep mask” company — we’re really a “sleep empowerment” company. The plan is to be clear with our WHY and keep innovating on products that can empower people to sleep better. We’ve got a ton of exciting products in the pipeline, and as long as our focus is on adding value for our 300,000+ (and rapidly growing) customer base, we will also grow as a company.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Product innovation is what got us here today. Sleep masks have been around for a long time… there are a lot of companies making them, but we were able to disrupt the category by coming in with an objectively better-designed product that serves the customer better. Thus, product innovation is something that we will continue to focus on and invest in.
Beyond product innovation, branding, being clear with our messaging, and creating emotional connections with our customers are important to separate ourselves from the competitors. Over time, even the most innovative products will get copied and commoditized, so our focus is no longer ONLY on “making the best sleep mask”, but also on developing a product portfolio that will help “create the best sleep experience” for our customers.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- Earlier on in one of our eCommerce businesses, the entire sales funnel was concentrated on selling on Amazon’s marketplace. This was great because everyone shops on Amazon, but we unnecessarily concentrated the risk onto Amazon’s platform — this meant Amazon controlled our fate as a business. This was extremely risky, and the worst-case scenario did eventually happen when one of our seller accounts in Europe got suspended for whatever reason, and we couldn’t get it back. This was obviously devastating because we had worked so hard only to have Amazon say “you can’t play on our platform anymore.”
For quite a while, I was feeling very down and very stressed, because it’s not something we had control over. It’s not something I could just get out of by working hard… how could a small business like ours do anything when Amazon says ‘no’? But I had no choice but to keep pushing on, because we have team members we had to take care of. The lesson learned here is to make sure we diversify. Now, we sell on multiple marketplaces and our own store, so no one single company/entity can shut us down. That applies to other platforms we use as well, including Facebook, Google, and Bing. We always make sure we have multiple sources of traffic, hosting, platforms, etc.
- Not hiring soon enough. I didn’t have the confidence earlier on to make the hire, because it costs quite a bit of money, and I thought I could just do it myself. However, I became the bottleneck, and the business would’ve grown much faster if I had actually hired sooner. What I learned is to think of hiring team members as making an investment, and that I can’t do everything by myself. There was no way to grow if everything had to go through me.
- Trying to change people, when people don’t change. We should focus on leveraging people’s strengths, rather than trying to improve their weaknesses (this is a core value at Manta Sleep today). Earlier on, I tried to train people to do things that they either didn’t have an interest in and/or were not naturally good at. This was frustrating for them and frustrating for me. People fundamentally don’t change, and it’s much more productive to find roles that leverage a person’s strength (like being detail-oriented, being creative, interacting with people, etc.), rather than trying to improve the person’s weaknesses. It just doesn’t work, and I spent a lot of frustrating years early on in the business learning this lesson.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
Manta Sleep was able to grow so quickly in the first few years as a result of our success in paid traffic. First, with Facebook ads, and then followed by Google and YouTube ads. Most businesses start or succeed on just a couple of marketing channels before branching out to more channels. As long as you figure out what your channel is (SEO, paid traffic, email marketing, video, podcasts, influencer marketing, public relations, etc.), you’ve got a good chance of scaling rapidly. The key is to test, learn, and rapidly iterate and improve your process. You’re often going to have to try a lot of things before something sticks.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
It’s not capital. It’s not hiring. It’s not marketing. It’s not the product. It’s none of those things because starting a business has never been easier. Don’t have capital? Do a crowdfunding project. Too expensive to hire locally? Outsource online. Don’t know marketing? Just Google it. We have so much available to us in terms of resources and information. That said, the biggest challenge, in the end, was me, my limiting mindset. My biggest challenges were dealing with setbacks, having the persistence to push forward, and having the courage to make calculated bets. The biggest challenge I overcame in launching my business was dealing with my own mindset limitations.
To overcome this, it really helped to hang out with other successful entrepreneurs and listen to podcasts of interviews with business owners. Over time, you realize that they are not so different from you, and you start to absorb their spirit and way of thinking. Over time, this slowly stretches your mind to help you overcome the limitations you have in your own mind.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
I spent so many years early on in my entrepreneurial journey being a “keyboard warrior”, just banging it away on the keyboard and trying to figure out everything myself. This was really slow going. My business grew significantly when I decided just to spend the money to go to conferences and meet people and exchange ideas. So if I could start my business again, I would not try to figure it all out by myself; I’d go out there and meet people, as even a single idea from someone else can change the trajectory of a business (it did for me). It may seem like a lot of money to go to some of these conferences, especially when you’re starting out and don’t have a lot of cash, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
Notion. My favorite thing about it is all the templates people have already created that you can just download and use. For example:
- A to-do list
- A task prioritization system
- A decision-making process
- A weekly review
- A daily review
- A note-taking system
- Asana. We use this at a company level for project management, and it works pretty well for a team of 20.
- Zoom. We have a distributed team, and Zoom makes team meetings easy!
I recommend reading A Guide to the Good Life, by William B. Irvine. It translates stoicism in a way that can be understood by the modern man. I’m a huge fan of stoicism, as it’s actionable and can be used to improve the quality of our lives in a short amount of time. At the end of the day, even if I were flipping burgers at McDonalds, the quality of my life (access to technology, medicine, food) is probably 100x better than the lives of kings and queens just 300 years ago. There is a lot to appreciate, and this book gives a framework on how to be happy.
One podcast I’m a big fan of is Mixergy. When I first started my entrepreneurial journey, listening to all the stories of the other entrepreneurs succeeding in vastly different ways gave me a lot of ideas. It also made me realize that they aren’t all that different from me, which gave me the confidence to persist and keep going.
One online course I recommend is Digital Marketer, as it has some really solid marketing classes and provides a fantastic foundation.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would come up with 5-10 different product ideas and use the $1000 to build the landing pages/offer pages for each idea. Then, I could take these 5-10 landing pages and pitch people on forums, Reddit, social media, and Facebook groups to see which one has the most interest and potential.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
I love creating products… it’s a passion. Also, I’ve been a light sleeper for most of my life, and understand the pain and frustration that light sleepers go through. Therefore, being able to work on a business that empowers light sleepers is very motivating.
What is your favorite quote?
My favorite quote is:
‘Success isn’t always about greatness. It’s about consistency. Consistent hard work leads to success. Greatness will come.’
– Dwayne Johnson
This quote continually inspires me to work hard to accomplish all of my projects that will help grow my business success.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
Know your WHY. You’ve got to have grit and persistence in order to bring ideas to life. Whether it’s money, passion, belief in something, etc., whatever it is, you have to know your WHY, because that’s going to carry you through all the difficulties of bringing something to life.
Break a big goal into smaller goals, and celebrate those successes at the smaller-goal level. Big ideas… they can be challenging and intimidating, so we all get overwhelmed sometimes. But, by breaking the big goal into many smaller pieces, it’s much easier to tackle and keep track. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year.
Mistakes will be made, and mistakes are a necessary part of everyone’s learning process. If you can’t handle your people making mistakes, you’ll never be able to delegate effectively, and they will feel as if they don’t have ownership or control of the process (because they won’t). When everything is done well, then you have amazing people with accountability doing work better than you, as the entrepreneur/CEO, could ever do. This then frees up your time to focus on higher-level strategy and vision, which is what you’re supposed to do sitting in the CEO seat.
Finally, you’ve got to be accountable. Some people are good at doing this all by themselves. Others are not. If you are not, hire a coach or pay a friend to make sure they keep you accountable.
Who should we interview next and why?
I think you should interview Ezra Firestone next, as he is an eCommerce legend. He would provide fantastic advice for business leaders.
How can readers get in touch with you?
To get in touch, you can visit my website at mantasleep.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Random Interview: Engineer Turned Entrepreneur: Story of An Immigrant
