Sunny

Nearly half of Americans snooze their alarm on over 80% of their mornings — snoozing is habitual, not intentional. On a college campus, three things compound it: sleep inertia from endless snoozing and doom-scrolling, sleep schedules wrecked by class and event timing, and shared dorms where one roommate's snooze habit becomes everyone's problem.

Co-Founder & Lead Developer

Co-founded with Hannah He and Alex Cismaru.

Designed an alarm flow that only disarms when the user taps an NFC tag placed away from the bed, forcing a physical action to fully wake up. Ran the product through repeated rounds of testing with UCLA students, using direct feedback to refine the alarm behavior and onboarding.

Paired a mobile alarm application with NFC tag scanning as the unlock mechanism, requiring physical movement to disable the alarm rather than a screen tap.

Chose a physical NFC sticker over a purely software solution — a screen tap is too easy to do half-asleep, so the app doesn't count you as awake until you've physically gotten up to it. Went to market through in-person channels first — tabling, door-to-door sales, a matcha pop-up bundle — rather than paid ads, treating early sales conversations as user research.

Three challenges recurred through the quarter: finding people whose sleep habits actually made them want to change (a bad sleep schedule alone wasn't enough — motivation mattered more), continuously fixing bugs and refining the UI and sticker design and cost, and figuring out the sales motion itself — pricing, product-market fit, and the supply chain for the physical stickers.

Sold 100+ stickers and reached 73 app downloads and 226 app page views, with 9 five-star reviews. Ran go-to-market through direct, in-person channels — Bruinwalk tabling (40+ sold), door-to-door sales in the dorms (30+ sold), a matcha pop-up bundle, and free samples to grow the early user base — alongside organic Instagram growth.

The biggest surprise came out of user research: the assumption going in was that snoozing itself was the core problem, but interviewing 12 potential users surfaced a more specific, counter-intuitive one — roommates disturbing each other's sleep with their alarms. That reframed the sticker from an individual habit-breaker into a shared-space problem, and changed how we pitched and sold it in person.

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