• by Les Luchter , 3 hours ago

BetterSleep, a sister app to online therapy’s BetterHelp, today launches “The Rest Report,” a 20-minute twice-monthly podcast in which BetterSleep General Manager Nathalie Walton discusses sleep improvement methods with a wide range of experts.

The first of six season-one episodes, for example, features nutrition doctor Brooke Scheller on the relationship between sleep and alcohol use.

For Walton, who joined BetterSleep in August, both the new podcast and her new job are personal, she tells Marketing Daily.

Due to her own “deeply personal sleep journey,” Walton was already a BetterSleep user before joining the company, she says, “and  I wanted to take on this role  because I felt there was such an underserved market. People were still struggling and real solutions weren’t being seen.”

“The Rest Report,” she admits, “is a passion project of mine. If you struggle for five or six years without sleeping on a regular basis, it really cuts to the core of who you are.”

Walton’s own struggle with sleep started while she was pregnant, she explains, and was exacerbated when she later learned that her four-year-old son had sleep apnea. “If your child doesn’t sleep, chances are you’re not going to sleep very well,” she notes.

The resulting stress, she continues, led her to speak “with over 40 different specialists ranging from behavioral specialists to hormonal doctors and everything in between.”  

And that led to “The Rest Report”: “I feel it’s my responsibility to share what I’ve learned with the world, because sleep is the best gift you can have.”

BetterSleep itself has served more than 85 million users since its launch 15 years ago, Walton says.

The app features “hundreds of sounds, meditations and sleep stories” to help users, she relates, but she’s personally enamored by its availability in six languages, French in particular.  The French content, she says, is “so soothing. Perhaps it’s because I can’t understand it fully, it just puts me to sleep instantly.”

“The Rest Report” is initially residing on the BetterSleep platform and on YouTube, with Spotify and Apple set to be added on Feb. 24. In tandem with the podcast, BetterSleep is also starting a newsletter, Walton says, “because people digest content in different ways."

While “The Rest Report” is her first podcast, Walton is no newcomer to being a media host, having done various video series as CEO/cofounder of women’s pregnancy/postpartum content hub Expectful, which she sold to gift registry platform Babylist in 2023.

As if on cue, Babylist last week also entered the podcast media business, with a show called “Birth with Babylist” dropping weekly on Spotify, Apple, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio and other platforms.

Walton, though, is reluctant to say that “The Rest Report” fits into any trend of consumer health companies taking on dual roles as media companies. “It's  a little early to say that,” she states, “Our goal is to serve our users through our app and our content, to support then getting the sleep that they need.”