A Silent Burden: Designing Better CGM Alerts with Marwan Elwaraki, Co-founder of Sweet Dreams
Digital Product
Dec 5, 2025
In this episode, Marwan Elwaraki, Co-founder and iOS developer of Sweet Dreams, joins host Maxwell Murray to share how a family-centric companion app can reduce alert overload without replacing first-party safety alerts.
They discuss building an “invisible app” experience using Apple surfaces (Lock Screen, Live Activities/Dynamic Island, Apple Watch, CarPlay) so glucose is ambiently visible at a glance, plus touches like snooze from the lock screen, profile-based alerting (sleep/work/school), and lightweight caregiver pings/acknowledgements.
The conversation ties to Radian’s CGM UX study (A Silent Burden), covering real-world signals of reduced burden (fewer app opens, lower alert thresholds), gaps like customizable haptics and watch-first data flows, and why open, developer-friendly data access would unlock safer, quieter care.
Key Takeaways
Sweet Dreams began as a tool Marwan built for his own family to monitor his younger brother’s Type 1 diabetes more calmly.
The app is designed to be “invisible,” surfacing glucose data ambiently so users don’t need to constantly open an app or rely on loud alerts.
Users report fewer alarms, lower stress, and far less app-checking thanks to glanceable lock-screen, Watch, and Dynamic Island visibility.
Notification language is intentionally gentle (“slightly decreasing”), reducing anxiety and alert fatigue.
Customizable alert profiles let users set different behaviors for sleep, work, school, or driving.
Family-first features — like quick two-way messaging from notifications — came directly from real patterns in Marwan’s family group chats.
The Apple ecosystem (Watch, CarPlay, Mac, iPad) is central, enabling safe, discreet monitoring across daily routines.
Community feedback drives rapid iteration, influencing everything from emojis to alert behavior to new platform support.
A separate caregiver-focused app is in development to give parents more structured tools without cluttering the main experience.
Marwan sees the future of CGM alerts in prediction, personalization, and silence — empowering users through earlier, calmer, smarter notifications.
Maxwell Murray
Hello everyone, joining us is Marwan, the co-founder and iOS developer behind Sweet Dreams, an app designed to help families collaboratively manage diabetes. Inspired by his brother's diagnosis, Marwan and his partner developed a solution that enables remote real-time monitoring of blood sugar levels, ensuring critical alerts are never missed. Welcome Marwan.
Marwan Elwaraki
Hey, thanks. Thanks, Maxel.
Maxwell Murray
So I already mentioned that your brother, your family is a part of the inspiration here. Can you tell us a little bit about Sweet Dreams origin story? Like what personally pulled you into building for the diabetes community?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, for sure. So as you say, it's my brother. was diagnosed with, so I have like three brothers. And our youngest sibling, he was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago with type 1. And we were kind of downloading all these different apps to monitor and track him. And it just felt to me like we needed to see it on the lock screen so it's easier for us to follow him. And I could tell that was a pain point to me and to my family and to him as well. And like,
A lot of the features in Sweet Dreams are inspired by that, like how my family was managing diabetes and what that led to. But I remember I was on a a plane and I just heard about live activities shortly before that, that Apple released. And I was like, isn't it crazy that no diabetes app that I'm aware of is doing that? So I started looking into it and sending screenshots to one of my other brothers. And I'm like, this would be cool, right? If I had this, that would be cool.
And he's like, yeah, absolutely. So when I got back home, I started playing around with it and tinkering with it. And the idea initially was just to build something for us to use as a family. And after prototyping it a bit and using it with my brothers and my parents, like, you know what? That's pretty cool. So I was speaking to my wife about it as well. And we're like, yeah, you know what? We can turn this into an app to help other people as well. So that was kind of the origin story. And that was two years ago, I think.
And yeah, we've just been working on it since.
Maxwell Murray
Incredible. So it was like a aha moment. see, Apple releases capability that intersects with what would be helpful to your family. And what I don't want people to miss out on is there's a bigger origin here. You personally work in this space already. So it was like a, like a fortunate moment where you have this background that has enabled you to, to solve a problem for your family. Could you just give us like a quick, like history of Marwan.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, for sure. So I've always been into tech and following what especially Apple is doing, like bit of an Apple fanboy for most of my life. And so I keep up with what Apple is releasing, whether it's new phones or new software, new capabilities, and just following through with that. And I work professionally as an iOS developer, but also in the side of trying to build my own apps a few times before Sweet Dreams.
But none of them really took off. was sort of like build it as a hobby and see if it gets any traction. Sweet Dreams is the first one to actually have a bigger user base than all the other ones. So yeah, it was always sort of like an interest to me. And even Sweet Dreams kind of started as like a see if it works for my family and then also as a learning experience, just because I enjoy doing that in the side. So yeah, as you described, it was like a good moment where there's this new capability.
I feel like I've been preparing for this for the past few years by building apps as a side hobby as well and knowing about the problems that we actually have and like, yes, we can finally solve it. Because even before I learned to code, I used to have a book where I'd put various app ideas. And I'm like, I don't know how to build these app ideas, but one day I might be able to. So it felt good that in that moment, there is a problem and I have all the skills I need to build it.
There's no reason not to like, let's just go ahead and do it.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, that's really cool. I love that it's like a culmination of like little experiences and passions that enabled you to do what you've done here. And just want to point out, it's so funny how sometimes the passion projects are the ones that take off in the biggest way.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
"It felt good that in that moment, there is a problem and I have all the skills I need to build it. There's no reason not to like, let's just go ahead and do it." — Marwan Elwaraki, Co-Founder Sweet Dreams
Section 2
Maxwell Murray
So there's a unique selling proposition with Sweet Dreams here. You've positioned it around rest and calmer alerts, not just more data. So what problem did you set out to solve that other applications in the marketplace weren't really addressing?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, was sort of like, kind of plays into this concept of like an invisible app, an app where you don't need to open it or get notifications from it to kind of keep track of what's going on with it. Yeah, it was kind of built on that. So that's the idea was like showing the reading on the lock screen with a graph and everything. So kind of all the data people would typically unlock their phone and open the app for, surface that on the lock screen instead. And that way they can be present in the moment without needing to disconnect.
to monitor this number that's like the most critical number in their lives. And yeah, I wanted to call it sweet dreams because it's kind of like, love buns and it's kind of a play on that with sweet being with diabetes, but also like to let people know that this is something that helps you like sleep easy and take care and rest well in your life. Because like even in my like family's home when I lived with my parents and my brother's there, whenever his blood glucose would like start to go up and down.
there's no way of really knowing unless a notification kicks in. So they had notifications set at like every level and the house would look like we're in a, like a secret military unit with like alarms going off everywhere. And that would happen like multiple times a day. So sort of like, okay, there's like a better way. Like surely if we could have just glanced every, you know, every few minutes and just have it there on your phone, we wouldn't need all these alarms. So the idea is like by giving people that confidence of knowing the sugar level.
they won't need to constantly have alarms going off around them. So things like that. And that sort of then became the foundation for other features as well, where it's like, how can we make it that people are more, that kind of take care of people's well-being, whether it's the app's design or the name or theming or other functionality. We don't want it to feel like a clunky medical kind of solution, but sort of like a fun app that's like, hey, you know what?
This is a bit playful. This is a bit enjoyable. Like, yeah, diabetes sucks, but like, absinthe diabetes don't have to. So it's like, let's have a bit of fun with it. Let's like, you know, write to people's day. it's not a fun experience to keep looking at that number like throughout your day. So I hope we make it a little bit lighter and a bit more acceptable to do that.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, it's so funny. And I often draw on this example, but in contrast to like a social media application or a gaming application or something rooted in entertainment, the goal is not for the, the patient user, the type one diabetes user to not to live in this app. They should live in their life, right. And not live in like, what's that number mean or what's happening there. And I
It makes me think about the recent study that we did as a CGM UX study focused on type 1 diabetes patients. And it includes everything from adults to parent caregivers to teenagers. It captures a bit of the family aspect like you've worked on in Sweet Dreams.
I think of this diagram where we have collected information on the various tools that people use. And you're right, it looks like some type of operation sometimes in people's homes. And one thing that jumped out to me is like even a baby monitor being placed into a child's room at a certain age.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah.
Marwan Elwaraki
Mm-mm.
Maxwell Murray
it's, I already have this ailment, right? I already have this lifelong disease I need to monitor. Now my parents are putting a baby monitor in my room to make sure I'm safe or other type of interruptions there, you know, to some they might be like, oh, no big deal, like stay alive, right? But it's also quality of life that's important in there as well. So like the work you're doing is tremendously important because
people have to cobble together many things to make sure that the one that they care for is safe. And I think what people are seeking is calm, right? What do you think are the signals that tell you that your application is reducing the burden on patients?
"We don't want it to feel like a clunky medical kind of solution, but sort of like a fun app that's like, hey, you know what? This is a bit playful. This is a bit enjoyable. Like, yeah, diabetes sucks, but like, apps in diabetes don't have to." — Marwan Elwaraki, Co-Founder Sweet Dreams
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah. Yeah, it's, and you're right, like, yeah, from what you guys are doing in the study, it's really interesting because it shows all these different things that like live in a diabetic person's brain or the family of a diabetic person. it's a lot to manage. So when we look at signals, it's sort of like,
how often are people opening up app and it's like counter to, as you said, like social media entertainment. We don't want them to keep opening the app. And we've had issues because we kind of assumed in the past that if someone doesn't open the app for a week, we assume that they're inactive. So we kind of like suspend certain things for their account. And then people would tell us, these things aren't working. We realized, yeah, they just haven't opened the app for a week. They didn't need to. They were just monitoring it from the outside and through their notifications. And it's super interesting to see things like that.
So I think that's like a big part of it. also hearing from people that they're bit comfortable reducing like the alert thresholds, like when they start getting alerted, just because they're, they know that like during this time of the day, they're monitoring it on their phone anyway, their phones on a nightstand or on their desk. And they're like, I don't need it to be blaring at me in the office all the time because I can see my reading. So things like that are like good signals for us. It's not opening the app as often, not needing.
adds many notifications, that kind of stuff. think, yeah, that's what we use.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, wow. I think that's the right way to look at it. And it must be so satisfying to think you were addressing a problem and then have users come back and say like, no, no, no, like it's so good. I don't need to open your app all the time.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah. It's super interesting, honestly. And yeah, it's honestly so satisfying and means so much to us. Because I didn't expect this from the app. I thought it would be something for my family to use and maybe a couple other families if we're lucky. But now there's a pretty large user base compared to at least what I'm used to in the past. And it's really gratifying getting emails from people almost daily.
where they talk about the app and the benefits it helped them with. And it's just so motivating to like, we're going to keep working on it. We're going to keep adding more features. We don't need to, but you know what? I'm just going to keep adding more features because this person loves the app but wishes it had this one more thing. You know what? I'm just going to give it to them.
Maxwell Murray
Right.
Yeah, that's great. That's great. So I noticed you leaned into iOS services here, like lock screen, widgets, live activities you mentioned earlier, Dynamic Island, Apple Watch, and even like calendar and CarPlay visibility. Why are these surfaces so important?
"We don't want them to keep opening the app." — Marwan Elwaraki, Co-Founder Sweet Dreams
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, I come from a background of developing specifically for iOS. And my wife comes from a background of not developing at all, but more in engineering. And she self-studied iOS development with my support and stuff. And so now we're two iOS engineers in the house. So our focus was iOS first. And initially, it was just an app for iPhone.
But people would ask for it on their other, like, on their Apple Watch, on their MacBook, iPad, CarPlay. Like, it started to kind of spread through all that. an Apple kind of like, credit to Apple, it's, once you build like an iPhone app, it's not super hard to then kind of take that and put it in other places in the Apple ecosystem. So was sort of like, yeah, why not? Let's enable that functionality. Because like specifically for the watch, for example, at first, it was just an iPhone app.
And then we met a few people who have like a Facebook group for sweet dreams and we have like people coming in and there was a guy called David and we like came pretty good friends with him. Got him like a gift at some point and we're like always in touch and he suggested the Apple watch app and he kept like pushing for it. And at first I was like, weird. I was a bit skeptical about it. I felt like the iPhone app should do the job. but after he like kept pushing, so I was like, okay, let's go ahead with it. And we did the Apple watch app and it became like maybe an even bigger selling point than the iPhone one.
So it's interesting like that, like a lot of that gaming conversation with other people. But things like CarPlay, for example, I was driving and I had my phone with Google Maps like docked up in the car and I could see the reading in the dynamic island. And I was like, wow, like if I was diabetic, like this is perfect. I can just drive and have the reading. And it got me thinking as well then about CarPlay, like if we can integrate that. So yeah, so we we tried to make it work, like whether it's CarPlay, iPad, iPhone.
Maxwell Murray
Wow.
Marwan Elwaraki
MacBook, like just bring it everywhere on Apple devices. And then the next step is to look how we can bring it to other devices like Android and Alexa and things like that. Hopefully I didn't trigger an Alex in your room now.
Maxwell Murray
No, no, you're good, you're good. Man, it just hit me when we were talking about driving. Imagine if for some reason you are a heavy commuter or...
You travel for work and that includes a lot of road time or the parent that is raising this young person that has type one diabetes. And they've reached that age where it's time to start letting them drive themselves to school. It's, it's time to let them drive themselves to work and soccer practice and XYZ knowing that they can see that they're in good shape on the way to go exercise or on the way to get to work or go meet up with their friends.
that's got to be completely impactful. So yeah, the question was prepared beforehand, but then I visualized someone driving and all that could mean. That's incredible. Sorry, you were gonna say something.
Marwan Elwaraki
You ever got...
Marwan Elwaraki
Hahaha
No, no, no, no, you're absolutely. And it's not something that I really thought of. It was more when I saw it on Google Maps and also from people telling us. And it has been impactful to be honest. We've had like people telling us that, there's a heavy fines if you use your phone. Like there was people in Canada told us like, there's a huge fine if I use my phone in Canada while driving, but I need to, cause I want to know if I'm going to like, if there's any health issues that I need to take care of right now. So they were like, it's like really great for them to have it on the car.
And we started to do some things there in the course specifically where we added like glanceable emojis. And that came after like a user suggestion, like we're not that smart. Someone suggested that to us, where you can have an emoji that's like either green, yellow, or red alongside your reading. So if you're driving, you don't have to keep reading numbers. You can just kind of like peek with the corner of your eye and just see the color. And then we let people customize that so they can choose their green emoji, their yellow emoji, and the red one. And like a lot of people put hearts, like green hearts, yellow hearts, red hearts, just.
And it was cute, know, it's like these kinds of things that can make the experience a bit more playful, make it a bit more fun.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, personal, like that, this means this, this means that. Yeah. My emoji in my notes, looks like a sticker book sometimes. So I think that would be one of the people for heavily using that. do you notice any surprising behavior, any changes that occur when readings are ambiently visible versus like hidden or like, you know, the user has to open the app.
"If you're driving, you don't have to keep reading numbers. You can just kind of like peek with the corner of your eye and just see the color." — Marwan Elwaraki, Co-Founder Sweet Dreams
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, think it makes, well, it's not really super surprising, but it's kind of like, makes people more, like the two things I said earlier, it makes people more present and it makes them have less notifications. And we saw that from like people's emails, but I also saw that whenever I visit my family now, it's like, I see them have the live activity on their phone on the lock screen. And I was like, that's cool. And I can see the impact like now versus a few years ago when I'd go visit and.
There's alarms everywhere and they're checking their phones all the time. And my brother has to check it before food, right after food, like for the next two hours, he's always checking his phone. Now he checks it for Instagram, but it's still on his phone. But it's sort of like having that number there and meant that they like, yeah, people can be more present and they don't need to have alarms blaring all the time.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, and being present is so important. I think that the thing that can exasperate health conditions for us is when we are so worried about what could happen that would be negative. I think being cared for and caring for yourself is having the confidence to make what's going on in your life, make a sickness a priority, but not the priority.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, you don't want it to like kind of consume your entire life. You want to be on top of it. You want to take care of your body, but you still want to live your life and take care of your well-being and your mental health as well.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, wow. Cool.
So what's interesting about your application, Sweet Dreams, is the positive feedback you received from notification style. I think users are ecstatic about things like slightly decreasing when looking at numerical deltas and notifications and things like that. How did you figure out the right way to speak to your users?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, it was, it's kind of like a mixture of, what I saw would benefit my family and then also like user feedback. So things like slightly decreasing and things like that, that stuff, my family wanted, they wanted to, to have like a, just have that bit of extra awareness instead of like sugar decreasing. It's like, slightly decreasing, you know, as bad as decreasing or significantly dropping or whatever it is. So that came through that, but then like,
other touches came from other people. Like, so people suggested to us, when they actually used to say like, your blood sugar level is slightly decreasing and they were like, you can just say glucose and it just even sounds nicer than like blood glucose, know, blood sugar level. And then these like little touches, I think really add up, especially if, if you're seeing these alerts multiple times a day, like any small change like that where it's like 1 % happier or 1 % less, you know, brutal, just make them feel better as well.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, words have immense capabilities to influence emotion. love the empathy. I love the empathy I'm seeing here. And I love that it's like rooted in like first, what would work for my family? And then my wider, I guess we could say family as well of users that use the application. How do we continue to listen to them and tweak things to improve the way we communicate?
you know, as we look at the study in the patients we talked to, there's like a sense of wanting like to be empowered and wanting to be informed. But on the other end of it, there can be some anxiety inducing behavior in digital health applications and CGM applications specifically as long as as well as other ones. Like where do you draw that line?
in driving actionable and motivating notifications versus like anxiety inducing notifications.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, it's a hard one because it's like, sometimes you do need to kind of induce some anxiety to someone if it's like, not really, but like you got my point, if it's like a really urgent situation, you want them to be aware of it. You don't want this to be like, hey, you can kind of check this if you want to. It's like, this is urgent. You need to like pick up your phone right now. And yeah, it's like overall, like notifications. And I saw like in the study as well, you talked about it where it's
It's sort of like a balancing, like you're trying to balance this line that's really difficult to balance. Because on one hand, it's too many notifications and people start to develop this alert fatigue and they start to maybe even ignore some notifications. Like they might hear it and it's like, whatever. And then on the other hand, it's like, if you give too little notifications or very calm notifications, people might like miss something that's super important. So there was like,
This is something that we've been iterating on for the past two years. So initially, was just the notification is there. And then we added in a feature where if you're on your phone, you can just hold on the notification and choose to smooth right from the lock screen. So again, playing into this invisible app. You don't need to open the app to smooth your alerts. So you can just smooth it right there. I'm on my phone. You don't need to scream at me five minutes later. I'm aware of what I'm doing. I'm on top of it. And that's received a good reception from users.
And then we iterated on that where different alerts can have different sounds and different alerts can, some alerts can break through like your phone sleep mode or do not disturb. So people set that for like their urgent low numbers. And then we added the option like to have different alerts for when you're at work versus you're at home or versus when like your kids at school. So you can have like, and you can change everything. You can change the threshold, the sound of the notification, whether it breaks through sleep mode or not.
That kind of gives them all that flexibility. it's it's kind of like put it in their hands and give them that control where they can choose to balance it themselves. Like they have all the tools they need or most of the tools they need to balance it themselves. And it's like up to them to choose what that balance looks like. And yeah, and then it's just a matter of like educating users about these features, like best practices, things like that use like smarter defaults. But yeah, so we kind of like
to give the control to users in that sense and let them choose and they at least have an option to choose their well-being and trust themselves to make the right call.
"Any small change like that where it's like 1% happier or 1% less, you know, brutal, just make them feel better as well." — Marwan Elwaraki, Co-Founder Sweet Dreams
Maxwell Murray
interesting. It's making me think of the experience map that we garnered from talking to users. And I just continue to think about teenagers. Like you're high school kid, you kind of just want to fit in, right? You don't need something going crazy. Like when you're in the middle of a quiz or, you know, in the middle of a conversation with friends, like, hey, are you okay, man? Like, you know, I think
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah.
Maxwell Murray
Thank
Maybe sometimes we don't give the youth credit for the amount of empathy that we are seeing in some of the younger generations, but still, like in that setting, you don't want things blaring and going crazy. And then on the parent side or older sibling side, you know, you might be in a meeting and you want to be informed, but you get a obnoxious alert that is not right sized for the situation. And it causes a sense of panic unnecessarily. Like these things,
Marwan Elwaraki
Mr.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah.
Maxwell Murray
things, you know, little by little, iteratively add up to stressors and can make things difficult. So it's interesting that you talk about the user taking the reins and deciding what's appropriate for them. do, something just occurred to me though, that customization is helpful. There's another line that probably needs to be drawn and that's the line of
Sure, you want to demote or configure this or soften this notification, but under no circumstance can we allow this level reading or this chain of events in your data to give you the space to ignore something serious. So what's that threshold look like? What's that like? Absolutely not. We want to give you control, but there are certain things that you cannot have control over.
Marwan Elwaraki
That's something I would do if we were like the the CGM app itself. But with Sweet Dreams, the way it works is it's like a companion app. if you use Dexcom, for example, Dexcom can mandate some alerts for you and you can turn them off. And if you try to turn them off, it like keeps annoying you until you turn it back on. For us, it's like we kind of treated that someone might have never downloaded Sweet Dreams in the first place, so they would have never had these alerts anyway. So it's sort of like
Our job then is to make sure people don't turn off alerts in Dexcom or Libre, like their main CGM one. So we tell them like, for like really important alerts, make sure you have them on. Like we put a banner in our notifications page about that. Make sure you keep them on in your main app. don't mess with that. Use ours as a companion for like the less urgent notifications or maybe catch the urgent one a bit earlier than you would have with Dexcom, you know, something like that. But our job is like, yeah, cause we.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah.
Marwan Elwaraki
I don't think it's even possible for them to fully get rid of alerts from their main app anyway. So our job is like, yeah, make sure you keep those on, but use us for the less urgent ones, or even for the more urgent ones, use us. But use us alongside the other app as well. If we somehow mess up, if I make a mistake somewhere in the code, whatever happened, I don't want that responsibility, use the main app as well. And that's always something we stress in the app.
Maxwell Murray
Right, right.
Yeah, and it's redundancy. Any good system should have that to a certain degree without overloading the hardware or the user. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah. Now, let's see here.
Marwan Elwaraki
Mm-mm.
Maxwell Murray
One of my next questions here. You've explored family friendly touches like quick messaging, family subscription models. What principles guide you when designing for caregivers without reducing the user's autonomy? And, you know, we've been talking about them quite frequently in this conversation, but especially for kids and teens. Like, how do we balance that group care with autonomy for them?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, it's like starting with like the quick message. So we have the option for people to like quickly send a ping or like an acknowledgement that they're monitoring things. And that started because of like, again, my family, like in our group chat, it would be like, we're sending updates about random things in life, pictures, whatever. And then it would be like a page, like he's called Moaz. Check Moaz's sugar. And then like Moaz would answer, I'm fine. I'm at like school. This is blah, blah,
And would sort of like be that happening like multiple times a day sometimes, but definitely multiple times a week. So that wasn't even one of the initial like thought processes for SweetGym, but before we ever released it, we had that as one of our first features. yeah, it just worked out for us that I was like, I don't want to clutter like our family group chat. I just want to be able to do that within a separate app. And then by doing that, it then opened up other avenues. So.
So know how I told you, if you get an alert, you can hold on it and snooze it from the lock screen. And that's the invisible app kind of mentality. People can also set it up if they are using it within a family or caregiver setting that they can also choose to directly from the notification. So if my brother's glucose level is dropping, I can ping him right from my notification or from my watch's notification. I don't have to open any app at all. And then he can acknowledge it back from the notification as well. So it's sort of like enabling that two-way communication.
with the invisible app mentality still ongoing. So that's one of them. And we're actually working on a separate app as well, but to be released in the future, where it's specifically focused on a caregiver setting. And with that, it's reduced the autonomy given to the caregiver and let the parents fully control it so parents can set things in the notification to say, yeah, glucose level is dropping.
three whatever pieces of this specific food that we put in the lunchbox. So kind of like, but that's like a separate sort of discussion maybe, but it's sort of like, thanks. Yeah. It's, was actually started because one of like, we met someone on sweet dreams called Andreas who reached out and he said his kid is going to school now and he's been using sweet dreams. And he's like, I think there's another like,
problem to be solved here that does not fit within the capabilities of Sweet Dreams and will clutter the app for everyone else. And so we've been building it alongside them and it's exciting. And yeah, we hope to release that like in the next few months as well.
Maxwell Murray
Okay, I'm going to go ahead and request that we get a podcast episode when that, I want exclusive, exclusive rights to, to, talk about that first. Cool. That's very cool.
Marwan Elwaraki
100%. You got it. I'll sign it right now. Yeah, you got it. But yeah, things like family subscription and stuff, it's also modeled over that where it's like within the diabetes space, to be honest, like a lot of the apps we see that are not from the main companies tend to be free or open source.
There was sort of a bit of a weird feeling like charging for this app in the first place, because you're kind of tackling a problem for the community. And it was like, should we even charge for this, or should we not? And so we kind of took the approach where the app is free to download with some features, but then to unlock additional features, you pay a subscription and put it at a reasonable price. that was to make sure that we don't keep the app sustainable. We have a server to run. We have costs to pay ourselves.
for developing this app and we've put like two years building it so far. it like, it made sense to charge for it. But we said that it also makes sense then that one person paying makes sense. You shouldn't charge other people in the family. And in cases where it's like multiple people in the family are diabetic or multiple, like someone wants to follow his friends who also paid for sweet dreams, we just figured like, yeah, that's enough, like one person pay.
everyone else can use it, like no matter how many people want to follow you, like 10 people, 20 people, you name it, as long as like, you know, there's a subscription that's active, then I think that's fair to give to everyone else. Cause my family, we wouldn't pay individually, we're six people. So it just makes sense like, yeah, to focus on that as well.
"It's kind of like put it in their hands and give them that control where they can choose to balance it themselves." — Marwan Elwaraki, Co-Founder Sweet Dreams
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, very not Netflix and streaming platform minded. Yeah, yeah, I had to throw that job in into the conversation. So as a co-founder and developer, how do you balance speed and responsiveness to the community? You're getting Facebook group feedback, so on and so forth.
You gotta balance that with safety, quality assurance, and platform constraints. How do you approach that?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, it's been honestly like a fun part of our lives, like me and my wife, because we launched Sweet Dreams, I think it was like three months after getting married. So sort of like with us during this like journey of our marriage. And it's like, yeah, it feels like a big part of our life. And my wife tells me sometimes like, you know, we're like really grateful that we have this app that people use and that's keeping us busy. But nothing lasts forever. Like what would our lives look like without it? Like what?
You know, we'd have so much free time in our days now. And yeah, it's, it's kind of tricky to balance it where it's, um, like, know, between development and answering customers and like, you know, participating in Facebook groups and things like that, while we both have full-time jobs and living our own lives alongside it and stuff. So it's sort of like a matter of, I mean, I reduced my working days to four days a week, just to have more time now to spend on this. And my wife is the one who like,
took most of the control of customer support and promoting the app and things like that, especially at the start. And now that she's starting to get more into the development of it as well, I'm also doing customer support. So we kind of split the work of customer support in half. And it's just part of our day-to-day life. We're sitting having dinner, and we're discussing, know what? Someone suggested this feature today. What do you think? And it's a big part of our day-to-day.
And we could be like discussing a feature to add in where like, I'm like, you what, would make more sense to do this way. And she's like, no, it makes more sense to do this way. And we're like talking about for like 30 minutes and then it's okay. We need to pause and like do something else with our day. Let's go start cooking or something. yeah, it's like pretty hard to balance, but it's fun because it's like with my wife and we live together. it makes it easier to do so.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah.
I love that. One marital piece of advice that I got was, remember that your relationship is bigger than the two of you. Do you need a purpose together? So I just love that you guys have this purpose together and that you're trying to balance also like, okay, like let's like maybe watch something or cook something, you know, and before, yeah, yeah. Maybe they'll charge us because we're both sitting on the same couch.
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, let's put on Netflix before they raise their prices again. Let's finish the show.
Maxwell Murray
But like, I love that there's like that purpose and that passion. And it's so ingrained in your family and even your marriage. That's cool. And so when you get like these list of ideas or something is decided over a romantic dinner for two, what's your criteria for shipping or pausing, you know, these features in the app?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, like one of our main kind of principle is we don't want to clutter the app. Like we think one of the strengths of Sweet Dreams is that it's simple enough to use. We have people of all age groups, you know, like whether children or grandparents using the app. And we want to make sure that like everyone knows how to use that. There's nothing, it's not too cluttered. It doesn't look too, you know, walking in a hospital room and it's confusing with these big machines and all these buttons and all these numbers everywhere. So before adding any feature, it's like
does that fit in within everything else since we do this? Will this clutter the app? Will this make the other parts of the app harder to use? That's kind of like our main decider and driving force. And then we also base it on what people are asking us for and what we believe works well. we keep note of every feature request we get. I get them, since we split customer support, I have some and Salwa has some.
We started discussing like, know what, I've been getting this a lot. And she's like, yeah, me too. And then it's like, okay, let's see if we can fit that into the app. So that's kind of the, what decides it. and I just remembered something about balancing time. It's the tricky part though, about both of us like living together is sometimes like, let's say we're traveling. So like we're flying off and that's the whole day. It's like, you're busy with packing and traveling and everything. then.
people would have messaged us in the morning and they're waiting for a response by nighttime. We're too tired to answer tonight because we just had a long journey. And then it's just kind of things can stack up. So because our personal lives are intertwined as well, it just means that things can stack up or like if there's an issue with the app and we're asleep, there's no one to know about it until we wake up because we're both going to wake up at the same time. So yeah, that makes it a bit tricky.
Maxwell Murray
Yeah, I hear you that I can only imagine like when I travel, I'm not raring to open my laptop when I get to the hotel and especially on vacation for a work trip. My boss listens to this. So I'll say for a work trip, I, my laptop's always, it's always open and ready to go. Uh, but, um, here's a question kind of like off the cuff here.
Marwan Elwaraki
Mm-hmm. Of course, of course. Yeah, yeah. 100%.
Maxwell Murray
As a founder, as a co-founder and something so ingrained in family, as you scale, would you consider leveraging AI for administrative support, not taking over, but aiding in streamlining product management?
Marwan Elwaraki
Yeah, it's, we've used AI a lot, not for customer support, but for things like developing like writing code. So even though we're both developers, AI has like grown tremendously and it feels like a waste not to use it. So we use it like to assist us while we're coding and building certain features. for the app server, for example, like our experience is both with like the iPhone app itself, but we had to build out a server for the app.
And that's not something we have much experience with. So AI was like great. I literally tell my wife, like, I've built something and I'm like, it would have taken me 10 times longer if AI didn't exist. Like, I'm really glad it does. So we already use AI for that. And I've started to use AI to help with emails a little bit in the sense that there's a common question that we receive. So I have like templates for these common questions. And then my email app uses AI to tailor that like.
template back to the person's question. So in a sense, it's been like helpful there. But yeah, I'm like, I'm always looking to see like where else we can utilize AI without like losing that personal touch with people. Because I think that's what makes Sweet Dreams grow the way it is now is like, talk to people all the time. Like we put, we put a button like to get in touch and like almost every page of the app, like we have a button like get in touch. Any questions? You're stuck here. Do you not know how to just get in touch?
And that was super helpful at the start because it meant more people talking to us, having that loyalty with them, building that friendship with people, and actually listening to them so we know what to fix in the future. does now, to be honest with now it's sort of become that it means we've got too many emails that we can't actually handle. I wish we could answer. We do answer everyone, but I wish it was like we have more time to really put in even more thought in our answers and things like that.
So AI would help. And I think AI can also help answer people's questions before they can even get in touch with us, surfacing questions that we think are relevant. So yeah, we're always exploring what we can do with it, but 100 % making sure that we're the ones talking to people. They're not talking to a machine thinking it's a human. That's a new goal.
Maxwell Murray
I love that. love that. The AI is the assistant. It's not the point of contact. Awesome.
Marwan Elwaraki
Exactly, exactly. That's a much better way of putting it. I didn't need to ramble for two minutes.
Maxwell Murray
No, not rambling. It's good. It's good. So in our CGM UX study, there were some bottlenecks revealed, especially surrounding alert functionality, like reliability, context, sensory overload. We touched on that a little bit earlier. If you could change one first party behavior tomorrow to reduce burden, what would it be and why?