Why Monotone Exists

3:47am on a Tuesday

You know that feeling. You're staring at the ceiling. Your body is exhausted but your brain is running through tomorrow's meetings, that thing you said three years ago, whether you locked the front door. You grab your phone. You open a sleep app. A voice tells you to "visualize a warm light in your chest."

You close the app.

That was us. Over and over. We tried the white noise machines from Amazon. The meditation apps with the monthly subscriptions. The 3-hour "rain on a tin roof" YouTube videos that cut to an ad for mattresses at the 40-minute mark. Some of it worked for a night. None of it stuck.

Then we noticed something

One of us fell asleep on a FaceTime call with a friend. Nobody was talking. The friend had already dozed off. It was just the sound of breathing and the faint hum of a fan in the background. And somehow, that was the best sleep in weeks.

Another one of us used to fall asleep in the back seat on long drives as a kid. Not because of the road noise itself, but because someone trusted was up front. You could hear the engine, the tires, the occasional turn signal. You didn't need to be alert. Someone else was handling it. So you let go.

We started comparing notes and realized the pattern: the thing that actually helped us sleep wasn't a sound. It was a feeling. The feeling that someone is there. That you're not alone in the dark with your own thoughts.

The problem with every sleep app

Every sleep app we found treated sleep like a content problem. More sounds. More guided sessions. More features. Sleep scores, streaks, badges, "sleep stories" read by celebrities.

But sleep is not a content problem. Sleep is a safety problem. Your brain won't let you fall asleep if it thinks it needs to stay alert. That's why you can't sleep the night before a big presentation. It's why kids sleep better when a parent is in the room. It's why you dozed off on that FaceTime call.

Your nervous system needs to believe: it's okay to let go right now.

So we built Monotone

Monotone is simple on purpose. Soft, steady sounds that don't change. No sudden volume spikes. No dynamic playlists. Just a continuous, even layer of audio. Brown noise, pink noise, soft rain. The kind of sound that your brain stops noticing after two minutes because there's nothing new to process.

And then we added companions. Not chatbots. Not therapists. Not voices telling you how to breathe. Just quiet presences that sit with you. They're there when you open the app at midnight. They don't ask you questions. They don't need anything from you. They're just... there. Like that friend on the FaceTime call. Like the parent in the front seat.

What we're not

We're not going to gamify your sleep. We're not going to grade you on how well you rested. We're not going to sell you a "14-day sleep transformation masterclass."

We just want to be the thing you reach for at the end of a long day. The app you open without thinking about it. Less like a product, more like a habit. Less like a feature, more like a feeling.

That's it. A small team that couldn't sleep, built something that helped, and figured maybe it could help you too.