This Woman Entrepreneur’s App Aims to Help People Sleep Better with Relaxing Content in Regional Languages
Neend, an app developed by Surbhi Jain, claims to be the solution to all your sleeping problems. The free app offers stories, soothing sleep sounds, meditation, and more in regional languages to help you sleep better.
Rising up from a small village to being a national level entrepreneur is not an easy task. But so is the inspiring story of Surbhi Jain.
Surbhi Jain grew up in Lawa, Rajasthan, which has a population of only 5,000 people. She struggled with her education as in her village there was no teacher for even essential subjects like science and math. She recalls studying on her own as there were no private tutors. But she achieved excellent marks in her exams.
Her parents faced heavy resistance from their conservative neighborhood when they decided to send Surbhi to Kota for IIT-JEE training. But despite the adversaries, Surbhi trained at Kota and secured a seat in IIT-Bombay. After her education, she was part of a few major companies.
But life took a turn during the pandemic. Surbhi and her family caught COVID and struggled with it. Surbhi who always was a sound sleeper lost her sleep post COVID. She realized how difficult life must be for people who struggle to sleep. And hence, Surbhi who always wanted to be an entrepreneur decided to choose that path for her business.
She launched an App ‘Neend’ which offers sleep stories, Nidra-inspired stories, and relaxing music to aid sleep. “Our sleep is impacted by multiple factors across our lifestyle, physical health, emotional health, and external environment. And that varies with different individuals. We have started with relaxing content like bedtime stories, music, and meditation for users to relax because relaxation is the biggest step before sleeping. Neend is a sort of one-fit solution for everyone, which works irrespective of the reason people are not able to sleep,” Surbhi says.
Neend started off with content in Hindi and English.
“Our idea is to offer content in regional languages as we believe when it comes to relaxation, a sense of familiarity and the ability to passively consume plays a huge role. Through a lot of users interviews, we have understood that people who use English as a day-to-day language also prefer to listen to something in their mother tongue when it comes to relaxation and sleep. You don’t need to put effort to understand and can passively consume it which would help you to wind down instead of making your brain active,” she says.
“I went to sleep every night hearing my grandmother tell me stories. I have understood that when you try to fall asleep, you want to listen to something very passively, as compared to attentively, so the content now available is very contextual to the Western market, whether it is the accent or the setting of the stories. I believe if the language is your mother tongue, it becomes easier to consume,” she emphasizes.
Currently, all content on the app is free to use. “We are doing linguistic expansion right now and launching in Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali. We are also trying to launch a couple of relaxation-based products to help users to destress/relax and sleep better,” Surbhi says.
Credit: The Better India
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-Staff Reporter
