Sleeping. Closed for business. 10p to 6a | Hacker News Reader

Sleeping. Closed for business. 10p to 6a

18 pointsindus37 comments

I'm a founder of a fintech startup[1]. We are celebrating sleep awareness by snoozing our website at night. We want your business but let’s chat in the morning.

Yes, you are reading it correct.

Why am I doing this?

No thanks in large part due to remote–I realized that many of us are available to others all the time, at the cost of downtime, friends and family.

I hope many of you do this, and get away from the hustle culture.

Get Sleep.

[1] Taking a stand, and not shamelessly plugging my startup’s URL

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In my humble opinion that seems to be a very rude and aggressive way to do virtue signalling. I would feel extremely offended by having a website tell me to go back later just because I was supposed to be sleeping. I look forward to never ever have to do business with you.

Who are YOU to tell me I have to be in bed between 10pm and 6am? What do you know about me and my life? Do you even know in which time zone I'm operating?

There are a lot of things I can only do after 10pm due to work + kids.

ya i could see some kind of interstitial like those newsletter pop-ups being effective that basically said 'we're offline for the night, we will respond to you in X hours'. to make the website less functional or accessible seems a bit extreme.

I think you misread the post. The author is not telling you to go to bed at 10 etc. what the author is doing is not diff then one going to a grocery store after it’s service hours. A closed sign at the entrance doesn't mean you need to be in bed. it’s simply stating you can’t do business with them at that hour.

Majority of the physical stores work this way because there are real people running them. It’s just that digital stores never worked this way it generally thought they are run by computers - which is mostly true but at some point if there is a need for human interaction one has to wait. At least until they are completely run by ai and robots. And that applies to physical stores too :)

Ps: I have kids too and know what you mean

Thank you for the response. You framed it better than I did.

You would not only feel offended but extremely offended by a message on a website? That is such strange behaviour to me. You need to just accept it and move on.

This is exactly how I feel about people complaining about the BLM banner that was on the go website (and others) for a while.

There's another comment to this effect, but I do wonder if this is fair to customers with non-traditional schedules. Plenty of people work nights and early mornings, and they have not been well-served by brick-and-mortar banks and other financial institutions that are open from 9 to 5.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, but if your fintech startup caters to retail customers, I would urge you to make the snooze function dismissible if you haven't already. Maybe also store a record of the dismissal in localstorage or the like so that somebody who uses your site on the way home from their night shift at the hospital doesn't have to dismiss the snooze every time they use the site.

Yes, the snooze function is dismissable. Our customers are across multiple timezones.

a) The timezone of your browser is used to make it snooze b) you can dismiss and do why you visited us for

Ah, that's what you mean by "snoozing".

Thanks for the clarification. It's obviously not tyrannical, just a little quirky.

Still, it seems unnecessary to me and a little patronizing.

Don't get me wrong, I think the sentiment is pretty good, and I think most people here would agree that getting enough sleep is vital. If you want to use your company blog or something to urge a good work/life balance and getting sufficient sleep, that's awesome.

But your approach seems a bit too paternalistic, like you know my schedule and are deciding what's best for me. Some people are going to be offput by that.

We don't know your schedule..that's correct. The goal is to not tell you what to do, but what is good to do.

You do you: it's your website and you can do whatever you want. But this strategy comes across as overly paternalistic or patronizing to me. I'd be very offput as a customer even though I agree with your idea on sleep.

You are running a financial company. Focus on that. Don’t tell people what is good to do. That’s well out of your bounds.

What if their motto is "earn money while you sleep"? ;)

I would never use a company that thinks I’m a child that needs a bedtime.

This also assumes everyone wakes up in the morning and has a normal schedule.

I'm burnt out af. But is this going to stop me from hustling? No.

Does this make me pause and think? I guess so. So well done.

I like seeing companies take a stand. So while I may not agree with it, I definitely respect anyone who does something radical to make a statement.

Expectation of tech being 24x7 is foundational, to make our lives better, but at the same time not at the cost of a healthy lifestyle.

There was a Canadian private health insurance company whose website was offline from 8 pm to 6 am... probably due to technology issues, or saving energy or whatever.

Whenever I needed to upload an invoice to get a refund the site was unavailable. Really frustrating user experience! Not like people have things they want to do in their day to day that don't involve having to use your site..

You can use our website if you really want to. It’s not dysfunctional during that time :)

There is a “Hey buddy wake up” button which brings back the normal website.

A lot of companies do overnight batch processing so that could have been the case here.

I think I understand and while I appreciate the sentiment, and certainly your customers will too... I'd add this as an option, even on by default. Maybe a dark and snoozey landing page during those times? But to completely hard-lock your website at certain times seems reckless and unnecessary, tyrannical and misguided.

it is not a hard lock -- we have a "wake us up" button.

If I were your customer and coming up against a deadline like 11:59PM on December 31, or April 18, I would not be happy.

Kinda silly, especially since you do it on the client side and the button says "wake us up," even though it might be 1pm wherever you are.

In general, to reduce the probability I will give you money, it makes sense to pop a modal on my screen the first time I visit your website.

> snoozing our website at night

what does snoozing your website mean?

turn off all your webservers so all inbound requests time out? switch the theme to dark mode? keep the frontend and queues running so you can acknowledge and store customer orders but turn off the backends that process batch jobs?

a dark banner that “we are gone to sleep”

when we we were brainstorming how best to accomplish the awareness to the sleep problem, we thought of completely powering off. But then it would be disservice to people in other time zones.

We then decided to do it based on the user-agent’s timezone/time.

A startup is not supposed to raise sleep awareness or to get away from the hustle culture. You are only responsible to generate cold hard cash and grow the business if necessary. Your startup will die otherwise.

While you claim to be taking a stand and not plugging your startup, it is at the top of your HN bio. This does seem like a good way to cause controversy and get people to seek out your website

I like it. It’s quirky and memorable. As you say elsewhere, it’s based on the user time zone and you can “wake up“ the site if needed. Nice idea!

Are you measuring the impact of this? I’d be curious to know what sort of impact this has on your business, either good or bad.

Stupid question: is your customer base all in your time zone?

they are worldwide!

So you detect local time and serve a "sleeping" page based on that?

yes, get the browser's local time and seve a "sleeping" page.

Ok, cool. It's not actually a bad idea. Where I am right now, shops are open very limited hours compared to north america, and while I don't agree with imposed opening hours, I do like the culture of family time / downtime. Definitely a neat idea to support it.

Edit - I know it's impossible, but I like the idea of an organized nightly or weekly shutdown of social media, it might be enough to break its hold on us.

I really like this idea. I might put my router on one of those timer outlets.

Haha! If you have neighbors on your wifi, they may object :0)

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