Five lessons from Pulse founder Johan Matton on building the world's first mindfulness ring

Pulse, the Berlin- and Stockholm-based mindfulness ring, launched with a pitch that counters the entire wearables playbook.

While Oura, Whoop, and Apple all race to layer more sensors and dashboards onto the wrist and finger, Pulse is going the other way. The startup just launched a vibrating ring designed to make wearers more present, not more measured. There are no sleep scores, no readiness score, no biometric feed. The product simply nudges the wearer with a haptic pulse as a cue to slow down, breathe, or step out of autopilot.

Founder and CEO Johan Matton, a former filmmaker who spent 12 years in New York before relocating to Berlin, has together with his co-founder Elliott Bavarian, assembled a hardware team with experience at brands like Oura to build the product which launched recently. "Sometimes I use it for simple things like; when I eat, to remember to chew and eat slowly and put the fork down," Johan says.

Here's the inside track on how Johan has built Pulse from the ground up and generated a waiting list of over 15,000 people.

1. Differentiate by subtraction

Every other ring in the category is racing to add sensors. Pulse went the opposite way. When the company teased the product on LinkedIn as "the first wearable in the world that tracks nothing," the post went viral, not because the technology was novel, but because the positioning inverted a category convention everyone had stopped questioning.

Life is also meant to be lived, not just measured.

"All those wellness trackers don't necessarily make you feel good. They just provide you with opportunities to feel good," Johan said. "Life is also meant to be lived, not just measured." The reframe from wellness to well-being and from measured to felt, gave Pulse a distinct piece of ground in a crowded market.

In a category where every competitor is competing on the same axis, the differentiation opportunity is often opposite that axis, not further along it. Ask which assumption the category has stopped interrogating, and build against that.

2. Hire people who've already done it

Hardware is unforgiving. "You can't change anything once it's out. People are very harsh in regard to hardware. They expect things to be perfect right away," Johan said. The cost of a failed prototype loop is months of cash and credibility a five-person startup cannot absorb.

Pulse's answer was to recruit talent that had already done the work. Oura's former COO Tommy Pyykönen joined Pulse as hardware CTO. With him came an engineering bench with wearables experience, plus existing supply-chain relationships. "We really stole some of the best people in the world in the wearable space," Johan said. "That's why we raised a few million dollars and were actually able to build this, because of the team."

Mission did the closing argument the salary couldn't. "People love that they could leave a legacy after themself of creating a company and actually help people live better lives," Johan said.

3. Do the things that don't scale

Johan's recruiting and ambassador-acquisition playbook is built on effort and one-to-one relationships. Cold emails to publicists, management teams, and senior executives almost universally failed. He estimates 99% of his outreach to angel investors via email went unanswered. "Almost everyone answered my LinkedIn messages," he said. The same prospects, contacted with a personal LinkedIn or Instagram DM, frequently replied, but only when the message was clearly written by him, to them, one at a time.

When the conversation moved offline, Johan went physically to the contact. He flew two legs to northern Finland to meet Pyykönen in his hometown coffee shop. The gesture — "hey, what's your favorite coffee place? I'll come to you" — opened doors that virtual outreach had not. None of this is leveraged. All of it is slow. That is the point.

Recruiting senior talent, landing high-profile ambassadors, and closing angel checks are not problems you solve with better tooling or wider funnels, they're problems you solve with personal effort that doesn't scale. The competitive advantage comes precisely from the fact that most founders won't put in the hours, the flights, or the bespoke DMs. "My answer is always in person. People don't understand the importance of that sentence," says Johan.

4. Turn paid acquisition into ICP research before launch

Pulse's 15,000-person waitlist was built primarily through Meta ads. But the campaigns were not built to maximize sign-ups, they were built to discover who the customer actually was. The team ran ads against three positioning hypotheses: productivity and focus (including ADHD users), habit formation, and meditation and breathwork.

The resulting split was clean: 50% signed up for meditation use cases, 25% for productivity, 25% for habit change. That data now informs how Pulse segments its onboarding, app courses, and ambassador strategy.

Each ad was also a price test. "I asked them: are you willing to pay this price for the ring? Are you willing to sign up on an email list and register to be the first one to get notified when we go live?" Johan said. Sign-ups, in other words, were a proxy for purchase intent, not just curiosity.

Pre-launch ad budget is research budget. Run distinct ad sets against your candidate positionings, layer in a price-validation step, and let the conversion rates pick your ICP. By the time you launch, you've already validated the angle, the price, and built the list to support it.

5. Don't peak on launch day

When Pulse soft launched it didn't send a message to its 15,000-person waitlist. The celebrity and influencer ambassadors weren't asked to post. And the main press launch was still months away. The strategy was deliberate. "Not to hit the big drama of marketing and big campaigns," Johan said. "We're really starting slow because we wanted to learn from the first 500 users."

Instead, the company is focused on its first 500 customers. Johan runs a WhatsApp group with direct founder access for this audience, collecting feature requests, vibration-pattern preferences, and bug reports in real time. "I have access to them and they have access to me as a founder," he said.

The goal is to use the cohort as a credibility engine. "Create these super-users — a fan base that really loves what we're doing so they can spread the word," Johan said. "We have a good reputation right from the start, good testimonials. Then slowly, in a couple of months, we're going to start to use all of our outlets."

What's next

Johan's and Elliott’s four-year target is one million people wearing the Pulse ring — the bar they believe establishes Pulse as the category-defining mindfulness tech brand. "There's no one leading this space," they said. "We have meditation apps, but it's not the same as mindfulness and self-development. I want people, when they think about mindfulness and tech and self-development, to think Pulse." says Johan.

Pulse is available now via https://www.pulsemindfulness.com/order.