Banks hand college freshmen free checking accounts because the first financial relationship tends to stick: the average American has held the same primary checking account for 17.75 years, according to a Bankrate survey. Steven Van Alen built a mattress topper company on the same arithmetic. "I want Sleepyhead to be the name brand that students ask for when they move into college and also when they move out," he told CNN Business in 2019, a year after launching the brand.

Sleepyhead sold mattress toppers to college students, and nothing else, for eight years, reaching No. 213 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 with revenue up 1,789% over three years. "My vision was to sell toppers tailored to college students that they'd buy in their freshman year and would last them until graduation," Van Alen said in the same CNN interview. Its first actual mattress only arrived in 2026.

'An Easy Solution Was A Mattress Topper'

Van Alen met the problem in 2016, as an international business student at Cal State Northridge. "Students usually have no choice but to sleep on thin, sometimes used mattresses that are provided in their dorm rooms by the university," he told CNN Business. "I watched my friends, classmates and myself suffer from lack of sleep due to substandard sleeping solutions," he said. "Since you can't really easily change the mattress, an easy solution was a mattress topper."

He won first place and $20,000 in a university business-plan competition, then launched in March 2018 with roughly $100,000 in personal loans and zero-interest credit cards, turning a profit in his first year, according to CNN. "Students were turning to mattress toppers, but most didn't know what they were or where to find them," Van Alen said in an interview with Authority Magazine published in October 2025.

A cold Instagram message turned LoveSac founder Shawn Nelson into a mentor, then Sleepyhead's first outside investor with $150,000, and a Dormify partnership reached students at over 900 universities. "I wanted to create a brand that not only solved that problem but also became a trusted, memorable part of a student's college experience," he said.

'Part Of The American Dream'

Banks have run the same play since the era of free pizza at campus credit card tables, and the payoff is habit, Ron Shultz , an executive at payments firm ACI Worldwide, said on the On The Margin podcast. "I sit in between two generations. I recently visited my parents who are in their 80s. And I can picture my father sitting at his desk and taking out his checkbook and paying his bills. And it's a ritual he's done for decades. And on the other side, I have my 24-year-old daughter who is living in an apartment and has to pay bills."

The Credit CARD Act of 2009 ended the freebies; the CFPB still counted $19.6 million paid to colleges across 143 partnerships in 2022. "I dare you to find someone under 30 who knows their transit and routing number from the bottom of their check," Shultz said on the podcast. "They're used to using their debit card as a secure way of making a payment from their bank account."

Michael Rangel, the co-founder of business banking startup Novo, said in an interview that big banks walked away from small businesses on the same margin logic. "Our bet was on the small business because not only has it been the engine to this country historically, but it's always going to be because it's always going to be part of the American dream."

Polymarket, among the platforms chasing a generation set to inherit $15 trillion , courted an Arizona State fraternity through emails published by Ryan Craig in Inside Higher Ed, starting with "$10 codes to begin betting" and escalating to "$500 in exchange for displaying a Polymarket flag outside your house." The apps can legally sign up 18-year-olds; sportsbooks wait until 21.

Doug Ricket, the CEO of phone-financing lender PayJoy, said on the On The Margin podcast that the segment incumbents skip can turn out to be the market itself. "We actually started in the US, like our first year or two of operation serving the US underclass," he said. "We followed a lot of immigrants back to Mexico who were coming here for work, working solidly all week, sending money back to Mexico. So we went back to Mexico and found instead of us serving the ten percent, we were serving like the eighty or ninety percent. And then we pivoted fully to international."

Casper, the best-funded mattress startup, spent $126.2 million on sales and marketing in 2018 while losing $92.1 million, per its IPO prospectus, and went private in 2021 at about $286 million. "I just felt like I would be stupid to do anything other than focus, focus, focus on credit," said Ricket, whose company now runs at roughly a billion dollars in revenue. "What I love about the phone security is we can say yes to ninety percent of people for some phone."

'Grateful To Come Out On Top'

The college-only bet nearly broke Sleepyhead in 2020, when campuses emptied; the company's September 2021 press release counted more than 95% of universities online in 2020. "Despite current worldwide supply chain delays and shortages, Sleepyhead is in stock and able to keep up with the high demand, where bigger companies, such as Tempur-pedic, are on backorder. We're grateful to come out on top," Van Alen said in that release. It claimed 300% growth through the pandemic and credited a partnership with LoveSac's foam supplier for keeping product in stock.

The parents noticed the product before the industry did. "Our toppers are designed to make your bed at home feel less comfortable than your bed in the dorms. Crazy, huh? But that's the feedback we get from moms when their students come back home for the summer or holidays," Van Alen told Romper.

The Sleepyhead Mattress: First Edition launched at $1,299 to $1,999. The Sleep Foundation, noting the brand "is known primarily for producing mattress toppers with college students in mind," wrote that it "added a mattress to its product line in 2026." The Phoenix Business Journal put revenue past $10 million by late 2025, with more than 150,000 students and parents served, the company says.

"Whether it's a student attending college for the first time, or a first-time homeowner looking for a more comfortable sleeping solution, we pride ourselves on customer satisfaction," Van Alen told Authority Magazine in October 2025.

Van Alen has also been buying the company back, purchasing stakes from more than half its investors, Romper reported. "We've come a long way, but this is just the beginning," he said in the same profile. "Our goal is to continue innovating and expanding our product line. We want to ensure that every college student can experience the benefits of quality sleep."