This Startup Plans to Save a Million Lives Using Your Toilet | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E7

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young and profiting.com/deals. Last year, 42,000 Americans died in car crashes, 50,000 Americans died of colorectal cancer. All traffic accidents combined. G. For our generation, it is the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. We are putting cameras in toilets to improve people's health in one day safe lives. And that is a new concept, and people need to get comfortable with that.

Scott Hekel is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Science. A company that uses AI-powered toilet technology to track gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and urinary function. And what makes the story so interesting is that Scott is building a real business around something most people would rather not talk about. This is crazy fact. There is a 10% risk. One in 10 people will be diagnosed with a cancer

of a lower GI or urinary tract at some point in their lives. One in 10. Like, yeah, a lot of our friends. You got rejected by 100 investors. Why couldn't you see the vision? Because for me, when I got introduced to Throne, I was like, maybe can I invest? Because everybody should have this on their toilet. I don't understand how investors wouldn't have thought that too.

“It's a great question. And I think at the end of the day, we are consumer health hardware.”

And what was your worst product decision? The cost of getting this wrong could kill the company because we have to recall these sober. So when you're building hardware, you go through a three-step process. And that is Scott, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Halla, thanks for having me. It is so exciting to have you here. You're actually one of my friends. You're my boyfriend's best friend. And it's so cool to live in Austin and be around all these

amazing entrepreneurs. And I always tell Mike, like, hey, can I invest in Scott's business?

Like, I feel like it's going to blow up. So congratulations on everything you've been building with your own kind of like a legend in Austin for what you've been building. And just really excited to break it down with everyone for the How We Profit series. That is the warmest intro. Thank you so much. I love Mike. Love you. Love being in Austin. Love what I do. I'm excited to have this show. Yeah. So Throne Science is the name of your company. And you essentially have a smart toilet,

but it goes like so much more beyond just like a smart toilet device. So in your own words, how would you describe Throne? Yeah. So Throne is a wearable for your toilet that tracks your gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and for men, your prostate health. Hands free, automatically every time you go to the bathroom. It's like aura for your flora or for your poop we joke. But the whole idea is that there is a untapped world of health information in what's happening your gut

that you just flush away. And we track that so you don't have to think about it and help you tie the dot between what's happening your diet in a lifetime, what's showing up in your gut health. And ultimately, your vision is to build not just a wellness device for understanding gut health, but ultimately be the first continuous cancer screener looking for early signs of colon cancer and

bladder cancer every time you go to the bathroom. That is amazing. And so when I first heard about

this product, I was thinking you were going to make money off the hardware sales. But then actually my boyfriend Mike has a throne device and he's talking about how he's like looking at his app

“and he's like monitoring his progress. And it's actually like a subscription model too, right?”

That's part of the plan. It's the aura model. So we charged for both the hardware and the subscription. One of the unique things about our product compared to other rampals is like your aura or your Apple Watch. You're going to be the only person wearing that device. It's a one-to-one relationship whereas with a throne, it's a one-to-many relationship and a many-to-one relationship. Because you can have up to six members in a home using the same throne. Or you can use multiple

thrones all to one account and it's syncs up seamlessly. So everybody has three or four bathrooms when they have a house. Exactly. So like we have three bathrooms at the office and I have two at home. They all have thrones and it all goes to my account, which everyone I'm using.

Yeah, so can I take it out and walk through it? Okay. So basically, it's a little device that

“clips onto the side of your toilet. So we put water down here. And this is a proximity sensor”

that determines when someone is standing or sitting in the toilet. And then it uses your phone's Bluetooth to know this is Scott vs. Holla. And then once it identifies who's there, it turns on. And so this camera and microphone's pointing down into this for the balls. So it records everything happening inside the toilet. You leave, it turns itself off. And then you walk away and you get a push notification, a few minutes later with basically

a report card that tells you, here's a hydrated you were, here's what your gut health looked like.

And most importantly, it allows you to see the trends over time because your gut is super responsive to changes like diet and lifestyle for me. It's stress. Yeah. And it's like frictionless. You just go to the bathroom with your phone already, right? Yeah. Most of us, most of us, most of the time. And so the whole idea is that that is how we identify you. So it stays off for guests. If you have members of your home that don't want it on, it just stays off for them.

So it's like really an elegant solution to tracking gut health for people who want to understand their digestive health better or their hydration better for any number of reasons. Yeah. And I know a lot of these like microbiome tests are really popular now. You go and you send in your stool or send in your saliva and you get all this information. But this actually allows you to track a really important part of your health on a daily basis, right? That's exactly

right. The whole idea is it's hands free automatic every time you go instead of point and time test. So like I like to think of throne as we are to a microbiome test. What like your wearable device is to like a blood draw or like from function or you know any of the other big blood draw companies. In the sense that like with your soup or your aura or your apple watch, you're getting you know 15 to 20 biomarkers every single day. Same with throne. And then when you

want to dive deeper, you can go get a microbiome test or a blood chest that'll get you 120 biomarkers.

“But like that's a one-time point in time test and you have to pay for the next one a year later.”

Yeah. So what can throne measure today? And what do you hope it measures like in the near future? That's great question. So four categories today. God health. So like when you think about ticket step back, what does God health mean? It's patterns, right? If you're having regular healthy bowel movements, that's good. God health. Yeah. Anything outside of that, you know, to lose to firm is not good. You know, constipated or diuretic. And those are to find my patterns.

Like you don't know how your God health is just by looking at one sample and that's you know, microbiome test can tell you what's living your stomach. But it doesn't tell you how your God health is over time and how that's changing. So we look at stool frequencies, stool consistency or form on the Bristol stool scale. We look at color volume, buoyancy which can tell you about fat content. And then the next big category is we look at your hydration. Yeah. So every time you

go to the bathroom, we can measure your P and look at the color and volume and the clarity of your P. And that tells you about hydration or what's called estimated urine, osmolality. And yeah. Can we come a real poop expert? Oh yeah. Oh my God. I did not think that I would grow up to be this, but like seven year old me is stoked right now. And so then we look at what we call bathroom

habits. So your timelines on the toilet. So the two most relevant there are the time to first

evacuation is the typical term. Again, that is a proxy for constipation or urgency. And then the other big one is your total time you spend on the toilet is highly correlated to hemorrhate risk. And so we can send you a push notification and say, hey, stop doing scrolling. And then the last big category is for men. And you're asking about the microphone earlier when you peace standing up as a man, because it has to go straight into the middle of the water, we can turn the acoustics

of that p-treme into it's called a urinary flow rate curve. And that flow rate curve is the most important marker for prostate health. And that is a mental health metric only men have prostate. So it kind of works out that the science and the physics of it all meshes together, but you know, something like 50% of men by age 50 and 80% of men by age 70 have enlarged prostate that make it hard to pee. And this is a great way of measuring that. Wow, that's so interesting. So it can

already do so much. And I know colorectal cancer is something that you feel really passionate about

“and cancer in general. So how do you imagine something like thrown, helping with cancer detection?”

So that's our ultimate mission as a company is to build the smoke detector for colon cancer,

bladder cancer. Basically, any cancer in the lower GI or urinary tract whose earliest manifestation

is microscopic blood in your waist. So let me take a step back and just share some of the numbers, because it's like actually mind-blowing. So last year, 42,000 Americans died in car crashes, 50,000 Americans died of colorectal cancer, right? Like all traffic accidents combined. Jeez. And still like 20% more. And that's just in America. And that's just in the United States, around 900,000 people globally died of colorectal cancer last year. And it is the only cancer in the

except for colorectal cancer. It is now, it used to be for like our parents generation.

“They thought of it as like an old person's disease, right? For our generation, it is the”

deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. And the crazy, pernicious shape of this disease, is that on average, it takes 7 to 10 years before it was called a pre-cancer's polyp, like a little wort on the inside of your colon. Yeah. It takes 7 to 10 years before that becomes a malignant tumor that's actually a cancer. It's a very preventative. Exactly. And like, if you got a colonoscopy every year and they looked for those worts on the inside of your colon,

you would never get colorectal cancer. The only reason people died of cancer. By the way,

one and three people diagnosed with colon cancer dies from it. Because we wait too long. We didn't do it. Exactly. Like, the earliest way that people can identify colorectal cancer is by looking for it's called fecal occult blood. So that's microscopic blood. That's the occult part. It's invisible to the naked eye in your stool. And we are building a future version of this device. And our mission is to build a version of this device that is looking for that fecal occult blood and able

to identify the patterns of bleeding in your stool because there's so many things that can cause blood in your stool, right? Like hemorrhoids, fissures, fissures, fissures, ulcers, viral infections, like, you know, got food poisoning or like drink too much alcohol. There's so many things. But like the important thing is looking at the pattern over the course of months. If you can look at a pattern over the three, six months and see that it's increasing, you know, day or day, week or

week. Yeah. That is totally different than something that's like, you know, comes in it goes.

And that is definitely worth throwing up a yellow flag. And so that's ultimately where this is

“headed is like, I believe that product belongs in every toilet in the world.”

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“today. I think about all these wearable devices and how popular they are. And I feel like”

it could be like something that's mandatory in everyone's home because it's such like a huge like your, your poop is a really big health indicator. It's universal in human, like people don't talk about it. But like that's also just like such a uniquely Western attitude right? Like yeah.

relatively new thing in human history, right? Like, and we're flushing away all this amazing

health data. Exactly. And the advent of the toilet was actually like a great sanitation innovation that saved hundreds of millions of lives. Like the deadly diseases in the 18th and 19th centuries were diarrhea real diseases, dysentery, and cholera. And so looking at poop, like one of the most important diagnostic tools we had for most of human history, especially recent history. And then the introduction of the toilet pushed that out of sight, not a mind. And that all converged with

the Victorian era when like, you know, we had premium proper attitudes and modesty and you were talking about privates. It was like, I don't know loud. And so now we're at a point where like, you know, Dr. Current, our chief of science has this beautiful phrase where people are dying of embarrassment. Oh my gosh, it's so true, especially certain cultures and women. That actually just reminded me of a really crazy story. I know somebody, their parents were very conservative,

their mother was very conservative. And her breast was literally like she had breast cancer. And her breast was oozing and she was too embarrassed to go to a doctor and even show them her breast. And she passed away very shortly because they caught it so late because she was so embarrassed to have to go to the doctor and talk to him about that. But how great is it to have like a device in your home that can flag to you. So even if you are a little bit embarrassed about talking,

but at least you can go to the doctor knowing something is flagged. Exactly. And I think the

“there's a statistic on this that I think is really important, which is so at and at the big health”

insurance company sends out a million prophylactic, so like preventative, what's called fit test

fecal immunocomocole, which is testing for that fecal called blood. But you have to collect a sample and send it off to the mail and people hate doing that. As you might have met it. Yeah, it is not a user friendly. No, that's a horrible thing to have to do. The return rate on those fit tests is like 3 to 6 percent. Like microscopic, right? Like so people don't end up having to do 100, they get like three or six baths. Oh wow. Yes. The other side of this though is Cologard, which makes a more advanced

test that also looks at not just for microscopic blood, but it's also looking for like DNA mutations in your stool associated with Cologard cancer. Same thing that you have to collect a sample instead of an off to a mail. They get a return rate of like 66 percent because that's prescribed by your doctor and they're like barking down your neck. Yeah. Telling you like take this thing save your life.

“And I think there's a really like, you know, negative interpretation of that, right?”

Which is like still one in three people won't take this thing that their doctor says this good save your life. On the other hand, when your doctor says this good save your life, it increases compliance by an order of magnitude. 10 times more people send these back. When their doctor is saying, hey, please do this. And it's to me that it says there's so much power behind probable cause, right? When you show someone into your point,

having this in your toilet every day that's telling you useful things about hydration and like your diet, some packing your gut health. And one day it says, hey, by the way, like there's a yellow flag here, like you should be aware of this and like don't be embarrassed. Like it's not embarrassing. It's human. It's natural. And like this is a crazy fact. There's a 10% risk. One in 10 people will be diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract at some point

otherwise. Like one in 10, like yeah, a lot of our friends. That's really sad. It's sad, but it's also like it's universal and it's human in its random. And we shouldn't be embarrassed about it. We should talk about it because, to your point, like when you wait too long, especially with colon cancer, which is like, you know, breast cancer is like, I can understand how that is private and, you know, taboo culturally, but like colon cancer even, like, even more tough or so,

right? There's so many stories about particularly like put to your point. Women men, it's universal, but like people are- It's just like embarrassing, right? It's embarrassing to say that's something wrong with you down there. And yeah, scary. But hopefully, you are kind of de- tabooing. Everything that's going on with our poop health. 100% and that's the- what's one of our secondary missions is like, hey, we want to build this product and get it out in the world. But

be we want to make it okay to for people to talk about it because it's totally not of like embarrassing

“thing. It's human and universal and it's like, everyone does it. Why would you be ashamed?”

Let's talk about the actual business behind creating a healthcare hardware device. What would you say is the most difficult part about the type of business that you're creating right now? Creating a new category by far. Like, this does not exist. We are putting cameras and toilets to improve people health in one day safe lives and that is a new concept and people need to get

comfortable with that. Yeah, and I know that when you first had this idea, you and your co-founder

went to Trader Joe's and you started asking people out the groceries to or how they felt about a camera in their toilet. What was some of the concerns of privacy that people have and what

Man, that is a deep cut. That's an amazing recall on your part. So yeah, that's exactly what

we thought this was a crazy idea first. Then we had to go out and convince ourselves that, like, no, this actually has legs and people will do this. And a huge part of that, we ran some surveys on Facebook and survey monkey and those surveys kept coming back and people were interested, but we were like, no. Like, are they sure? They're basically with the camera and the toilet. Those are just like pixels on a screen. I didn't know those people, right? And so we were like,

we got to go look in some people's eyes and like actually confirm that we're not losing our minds here. So we were not excited to trade our Joe's. And of course, we, you know, ask people to do wear wearables, like, what, how do you track your health? And then we'd ask them, okay, like, would you be interested in tracking your gut health, your hydration, and like almost universally curled. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, a shocking amount of people have gut health issues that they would

like more insights into. And then we'd always ask them to be like, okay, but now let's say we're

“doing this with a camera in your toilet. And the lens is facing down. Yeah. How do you feel about that?”

And not a single person was offended by that. They're like, oh, the lens is facing down who cares? And we do what you got to do. Exactly. Like, I don't, you know, there's nothing special about that. And what we found is that people assume other people will have an issue with it. But then you ask like, how do you feel about it? No, I don't care. And like, that's a really interesting psychological thing where everyone assumes that other people will be more worried about it

than they are, but then they themselves aren't worried about it. But that's true of almost everyone. So you were able to convince yourself. So this was a good idea. I want to talk about fundraising. And I know you got rejected by a hundred investors. So we definitely want to talk about your fundraising. But first let's talk about the origin story. Because it's it's quite a heat story. And you also pivoted from an original business. So from from my understanding, you actually were making a joke.

Boys night poker game. And you guys were talking about it. What are the worst ideas you ever had

“in terms of a startup? Tell us about that. Yeah. So Mike was there.”

Yeah, of course. He was there. He was wondering, like, is that a poker night like the same poker boys that that I know about? Okay. The same poker group has been around for like six years. And so the question wasn't the worst. It was, what is a startup idea you would love to start, but wouldn't want your name associated with, which is even more fun. And everyone else is pitching like sex drugs, rock and roll, vice industry types stuff. All right. A lot of only fans adjacent stuff

in the world. Yeah. And my co-founder Tim was like, no, no, no. Like the actual, like legitimate answer to this question is smart toilets. I was like, oh, that's so good. Like clearly your name that company thrown and put a leaderboard on it. And there's your go to market. You came up with a name thrown on the spot. And there's the perfect name. It really is. And so fast forward, Tim and I ended up working together. We joined a company that was selling crypto, our music royalties and the

blockchain. So it was like a crypto company. And very 2021. Yeah. Era of, you know, technology, very fun. But we wanted to even go do something a little bit more grounded in reality. And so we both come from healthcare families. My dad's a medical advice inventor. My mom is a jury attrition. It's like a primary care physician for, you know, aging adults. And Tim has a mom and three sisters that are on nurses. And so, you know, this was like peak COVID, right? 2022. And

nurse staffing was a, that was the problem in healthcare. Like, and so we're like, let's go build a healthcare staffing marketplace like Uber for nurses, basically. Yeah. But like treats the nurses really, really good. Because that seemed to be one of the big problems is that all the nurses felt like they're treated like cattle and not people or like just numbers on a page, but not, you know, there's no humanity behind it. And we're like, let's go do that. And so we went and built a whole

two side of marketplaces before you could vibe code stuff. So like, Tim actually like, you know, can code it. Exactly. All, like, hand rolled this whole thing fast forward. We went and raised

our first million dollars from previous investors in my last company and friends who told me they

wanted to invest when we started a company. That was quick. And then we tried to launch that company. And like this was, you know, I'm now early 2023 in COVID was ending. And the nurse staffing crisis

“was ending with it. And that was just like six weeks into you creating this business, right?”

Totally. Yeah. It was, we had one facility. So we got like 90 nurses to sign up in like two months. Like, yeah, just under two months. Okay. And that was amazing. Our nurse recruiter was a killer. And then the actual like sales of getting facilities to sign up for the platform. They had been burned by so many temp staffing agencies of the past three years. It was a very cutthroat business. Yeah. And most importantly, as COVID was ending, the like burning need for like all hands on deck

was kind of going away. And people were moving back into like full-time roles. And so one of these facilities that we had under contract was like, oh my god, we just made our first full-time higher for the first time in two and a half years. And I was like, you raised money. You were telling everybody about this idea. It takes a lot of like, I guess confidence, courage to be like,

or, or, I mean, it's actually really smart that you pivoted. But some people wait way too long. So like, how did you know, like, okay, I'm pulling the plug, I'm moving forward, I'm doing some

“idea. I think about this a lot. If we had started that nurse staffing business six months before”

hand and got me just like a little bit of traction. You would have been stuck in that business. It would have killed my soul. Yeah, you would have been, and you probably would have stayed in it for like years like chasing the initial, actually. So it's just like the fact that in hindsight, the fact that it wasn't meant to be in the timing of it at all is just like the biggest blessing. And like this is so clearly what I was put on the planet to do. This is my passion.

And I stumbled backwards into it just by pure luck. Right. So you guys had this joke at the Poker night. And then two years later, it came full circle when you went and tried to go get

basically you were telling your investors like, we're not doing this nursing idea anymore. And it

just happened organic. It tells that story. I had to go back to all my investors and say, hey, this nurse staffing thing is not going to make. We're going to spend the next couple of months. We'd like to go over the whole team. We're spending two months figuring out what comes next. And if we can't figure something out by the end of summer, we're just going to give you your money back. And we had like a whole list of 30 ideas thrown. Wasn't even on that list. There's been a

“lot of time. Like we were looking for more serious ideas, right?”

Were you telling your investors like these are the ideas that we have to pivot? No, we just told them like, we know this is not the right idea. We have a list of, you know, a bunch of ideas. We're going to spend some time exploring all these. And if we can find the right one, great, we're going to go do it. And if not, we'll give you your money back. Got it. Okay. But like and everybody was, we had one investor after their money back. And that was like painful. But okay,

fair enough, we had everybody else was like, let us know what you're chasing. But we trusted you more because we're like these guys are not afraid of going back on their word, learning something new. They probably liked you more. So two great stories came out of this. One is one investor offered a hostess that his ranch in California. He was like, come out to California. Let's spend some time brainstorming. So we booked our flights by the time

we got out there like a week and a half later. We kind of decided thrown might me the thing.

“And we hadn't committed to it yet. We hadn't gotten to Trader Joe's. But we had to say,”

"Death, like wait, the smarts were the thing. Might actually be good." And he like sits down. He's like, "I hate hardware. But if you think this is the right thing, I got your back." And he's invested more since then. And his wife, or just like some of our biggest supporters,

they were early beta users, which had been just amazing. And then another investor came back.

And he was like, "I have been waiting to invest in smarts with companies for my whole career. I just haven't found the right one. But please go build that thing." And it turns out, like another nurse staffing platform, you know, there's a dime. It doesn't. It was like a legitimate smart toy that platform that can promise to improve health and save the lives of millions of people is like a much bigger mission. And like my biggest learning in all this is this size of the

mission is directly proportional to the quality that people you're able to attract to the team. It's so true because I get to meet like really successful billionaires pretty much every week at this point. And they all really care about improving humanity. And they're all super-mission driven. We're like, they have this huge ambitious goal. And very rarely do I meet somebody who's very successful that doesn't actually want to help people. And like their goal is like to make money.

It's like money is the like the after effect of everything that they're doing. Don't really. And like, but I have reoriented around this mission. Like it's something a whole so sacred. And if it works inevitably, this will make it work. But like we are here in service of a larger mission that is there are, you know, tens of millions of people with chronic

digestive diseases and 10 million people with chronic urinary tract conditions and like a life-saving

mission for cancer prevention. Like that is the type of thing that people can rally around. Yeah, fam, if I had a dollar for every time a business leader came on the show and told me, Hala, hiring the right people is everything. I'd probably be retired by now. And guys, they're right. Hiring gives you leverage. But the wrong hire can weigh down your entire team. And I've seen this in my own business at media. So when I need to hire and right now at yet media, we've got

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ind.com/podcast. Just go to ind.com/podcast right now and support us show young and profiting by saying you heard about indeed on this podcast. Indie.com/podcast terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero. This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. So you pivoted. What's your advice to all the young and profitors tuning in? Who may have raised money or they bootstrapped a company and it's been, you know, a year or so and they haven't gotten traction. What is your advice

about pivoting, whether to pivot or stick through it? For us, we pivot it. I think in general,

“my advice is life is too short to spend your wheels. If it's not working, go find something that's”

going to work. There is zero shame. Like the whole beauty of America is that we get second chances and third chances and fourth chances of fifth chances. I have started so many businesses and this is finally the one that stuck. Go do that. I agree. It's like, once you find something that actually has traction like for me, I have yet media. It's been easy since day one. I had a failed. Like, I had a blog site that I couldn't monetize and I had an event business that like I barely

made money and I had too many employees. And now I have yet media and it's like everything is so much more like effortless because it's like the right market. It's like scalable. Right and it's got all this that's just like working for me organically and naturally. And I feel like that's what people really need to find is something that like works more effortlessly than not. 100% when you find that thing that actually suits you like a glove, it's the most mode of it.

You wake up every morning like so excited to go do what has to be done. Whereas like when you

“are swimming upstream, it's exhausting. And that's how it was with the nurse staffing is like,”

we saw that we were going to be swimming up a freaking waterfall. Yeah. And so you don't have that you've got choice. Yeah. You've got choice. Even when you raise money on a specific idea like you proved, you've got choice where you can just go back to your investors and explain it and save they want to ride with you or not. And as long as you have these conversations with integrity in candor and say, hey, we gave it a college try. And what it is, I wrote a post-mortem memo.

So I just said, here is everything that we came into this. You were all the assumptions we had. Here is what we've learned since. Here is what this means. I don't think it's a good idea. Yeah. We're going to go find a better idea. And nobody was offended by that. Yeah.

So you raised $4 million or a little bit over $4 million in your first round for throne.

That was our seed round. We'd raise our seed round. I'm not a VC but I don't know what round is what, but you tell us. So we raised a $1.2 million pre-seed. That was a fine way, the nurse staff. I mean, we're spending the throne immediately. Okay. And then we raised $500,000 and $250,000. We're raising on safes, which are these convertible notes. Basically, it's a very quick and easy way for investors to invest in the company without you having

to involve too many lawyers. Instead of taking what is that called? It's called a safe. It's a simple agreement for future equity. And there's a standard template on why combinators website that everybody in technology uses. Okay. And so you can go to an investor and they say, yes, I will put in

you know, $250,000 on a $10 million cap. Okay. And it's quick and easy and you get the money

of the next week or the next day. So we raised like $750,000 on safes and then we were in now to raise our proper seed round and we raised $4 million in that round. And by that point, we had like a prototype. So it wasn't this and what, like, I'm very proud of how a tragedy this is. It was very nice. It's very sleek. Yeah, but we had before this, the prototype was like this big and like a camera in the toilet was like massive. And it wasn't waterproof so like, you know,

one instance of batting was all over. It was in waterproof. That's hilarious. But it was enough to show the like we could build hardware and the app worked. And like we had the whole experience like we could kind of, you know, paint the vision of where this was. And that was when you were raising the

$4 million. Exactly. Okay. But like seeing is believing, right? Like showing up with like the actual

thing built was so important. And so we raised that money. But let's pause there. Okay. You got rejected by 100 investors. Oh, yeah, it's got richer. Well, I couldn't see the vision because for me, when I got introduced to the throne, I was like, can I invest because everybody should have this on their toilet? I don't understand how investors wouldn't have thought that too. It's a great question.

“And I think at the end of the day, we are consumer health hardware. And any venture capital investor,”

most of them are allergic to like one of those three categories. Okay. Much less like the convergence of those three categories. Right. So they're why, why are they just like hard, they're hard

And like VC specialized in consumer or health care. But like very few do consumer health care.

Then hardware is also a notoriously hard category. Yeah, it's like the quick money is in like B2B SaaS or like, you know, the big money now is in like these foundational AI. Yeah, the AI company is exactly. And so this is much riskier. And a lot of investors like kind of saw the vision at that point. Also, we had no progress on blood detection. We just had like a, you know, a notion that like, we think we should be able to identify microscopic blood using these advanced imaging techniques.

And, you know, here's some papers we can point you to. But we hadn't built anything like that ourselves yet. And so we like proven out like the basic technology, but like the advanced stuff that's

“like, you know, ultimate. Because I think everyone agrees with the premise that like life saving.”

But they're like, can your thing actually do that exactly? And like at that time, it couldn't. And we just got very lucky. Again, like going back to the size of the mission. One of our, not one of our lead investor in that round when she offered to invest. I was like, why? You know, like, I can feel your excitement in your passion for what we're building. Where does that come from? And she shared, you know, my husband died of cancer in his early 50s. And all I can think about is like,

what could we have done to catch the sooner? And again, just like, thank God, she was put in my life, you know? Yeah, as people who aligned with the mission, even if you weren't there yet invested. And then what was the difference between people that you cold outreach to versus people you were introduced to? How is that different in terms of fundraising? So Mark Anderson has a very famous perspective on this, which is that if you are a serious founder, it is your job to find

away to get in touch with me. Because if you can't go through the hoops of getting in touch with me,

“and it's not that hard, then how are you going to break through all of the walls that it takes to”

build a company into something successful? So I ran a very disciplined process. I had a spreadsheet. I've had my wish list of like, here are all the investors that I want to get introduced to. Here's the firm they're at. Here's the specific investor I want to invest in. Here's the other similar companies like Woop or a sleep levels that they've invested in. You know, so I know why I want to get in touch with them. Here's the list of all the people that I have mutual contacts to who might

be able to introduce me to that person. That's really smart. I got coach on this by Eric Bond, who's a investor at Hustle Fund. When he got win that I was about to go fundraise, he called me who was like, "Do not fundraise yet until I coach you through how you do it." And he walked me through this masterclass. And then he was like, "And then you have your list of all of the other founder friends you have." And you get on a call with every single one of them and say, "Hey, who are the

investors you can introduce me to?" And you keep a list of all of them. And so you're like, "Let's say you, Hall, I give me five names." He's like, "Great, keep track of all that." And then this is

“important, the sequencing of it, because you want to build momentum in a fundraise. You want the”

valley to be talking about you, because investors trip. And he was like, "Very specific about you get this whole list of compile, but you don't let people make introductions for you yet." And then you say, "On the same day, like, make it a Thursday." Like, go to all 500 people, or fit in some more like 50 people. But like, go to all 50 people and say, "Hey, here's the five people you told me you could introduce me to." And here's the eight people you told me you could

introduce me to. Like, here's my blurb. Please send this to these eight people." That's like a blitz. Exactly. It's a blitz. And then you get a bunch of these double optins coming back in saying, "I'd love to meet Scott." I'm going to pass. Like, a lot of people just

passed, right? Like, he was like, "Not a fit." And like, by the way, that's like my second favorite

investor. My first favorite investors are the ones who give me money. My second favorite investors are the ones who say upfront, not a fit. My third and distant, least favorite investors are the ones who waste a bunch of time and then say, "No." So he blitz everyone. And then you get all these return coming in and you schedule them so that you have like, you know, your tier two investors are the first calls you take, so you can like warm up your pitch. Because like, when you're,

if you do this right, you're pitching, you know, five, six, eight times a day, and you're responding to what their faces are showing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you can, you get your story, right? After you practice, you figure like, what story you're telling, what data points, what questions people ask. And I'll tell you a huge learning for me about the story is so many people gave me the well-intended advice to start with the big vision first and then pitch

how we get there. Yeah. And so the original pitch was we're building the smoke detector to become a cancer. And the way we get there is step one, we build this device that tracks got health and hydration. And what I found after pitching that 80 times is that when you pitch,

here's the $10 billion thing. And here is, you know, the step by step process for how to get

there. Gen one is not a medical device. This is a health and wellness device. People are like, well, why did you go straight for that? Yeah. It's like, you're setting yourself back. But when you

eventually, the mission is to become the smoke detector for colon cancer. And we think we know how to get there. And that's the note that you went on. Incidentally, more compelling. So you went out to these investors. And you were pitching. But you did have a lot of step back. So talk to us about the hundred nose that you got. What were they concerned about? Privacy. People didn't believe that there was a market for this device. People didn't think it was technically feasible to do a

smoke detector for colon cancer that could look for a fecal occult blood or microematerial. People worry about the X factor. Like, there's so many reasons someone says no. And at the end of the day, like, it doesn't really matter to you as a founder. Like, why they said no, just take the known move on. I will say the hard part about fundraising is like, it is emotionally gutting.

“Just like any sales job, right? Exactly. And like the only thing I can compare to if you've never”

worked in sales or like done a fundraiser's like dating. But the difference is like, you know, if you're dating really activities like one, maybe two dates a week. And you get rejected from those. Like, this is like, eight a day. And like, you're so emotionally invested in this because it's your baby. Yeah. And like, to your point, someone says, no thanks. And they have to jump on the next call. Like, all right, let me tell you why this is the greatest thing ever. It is such a emotional roller coaster.

Right? It's really hard to describe. But now you've got an amazing leadership team. You've got

somebody from whoop on your executive team. How did that change the perception of everything that you're doing? My co-founder and chief product officer is the former co-founder and chief technology officer from whoop. Oh, wow, I didn't realize who's the co-founder. Yeah. So John Katzenko dropped out of Harvard his sophomore year to go found whoop. He built that from 2012 to 2022. He left after a decade. And he is now my co-founder and chief product officer. He along the way of building

“whoop was diagnosed with pan colitis, which is the worst form you can have of all sort of”

colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. And so he's very passionate about God health and continuous health tracking. Perfect. There's like, yeah, there's a bit of a better fit. I literally don't think there's a more perfect person on the face of the planet from what we're doing. Yeah.

Yeah. That's amazing. And so he joined us originally as an angel investor and then we made

him an advisor. And then he added him to our Slack group and he was like in every conversation. Like, could not help himself. Yeah. I was like, John, you're going to come join us forever. And he was like, I'm thinking I'm good. And then a few months later, he was like, yeah, I should come join. Yes. Well, that's amazing. I'm so happy for you. It's so great when you have like a leadership team that you just feel like so locked in with. Let's talk about the marketing. So

you guys are officially launched. You launched in March. Yes, March 10th. You took it to the consumer electronics show. Yeah. So CES wins in January. We're there with some preview devices. We didn't actually have like devices rolling off the assembly line until the beginning of March and that's when we were able to ship them. CES was an amazing experience. 500 people a day coming

by the move talking to you. Like, there's a lot of amazing innovation happening in the world of

consumer electronics. Did that make it feel real for you that moment? Because I remember seeing images and stuff. And I was just like, oh, wow. Like, this is really a thing. Did it feel like a real like turning point for you? When you talk to like literally probably me personally, 130, 150 people a day. And you see the switch flip in their minds. But they come and skeptical about like, what is this thing on the toilet with the flowers and it because we put the

flowers in it because people come and talk to you when they're like, what's the flower in the toilet? But then you say, hey, like, no, this is actually to help you connect the dots between your diet or lifestyle. What's happening in your gut health? People think about it and they go, oh, wow. Like, either I need that or I know someone who needs that. How did you generate interest for throwing like, what are your marketing strategies right now? What has not worked and what is

“working? Great question. So definitely by far the best thing that works for us is referrals. Like,”

word of mouth. Word of mouth is the number one thing. People use advice. Like, it's a very sticky product. People like, there's this ratio called a dowel mouth, which is like of your people who use the product in the last month. How many of you have used it in the last day? And on average, we're like 0.6, which is phenomenal. So you're like, have you built habits? Exactly. It's very habit forming because it's frictionless, right? And people use the product on average four or five

times a day and they check the app every time they go because like you want to see what my hydration score. Yeah. And like, you know, you wake up dehydrated. You get better hydration score at 11 a.m. and you love to see your scores move up into the right. Who doesn't love up into the right progress, right? Yeah, gamifying it referrals is a big, big mover for us. The other big one is we've gotten a lot of press and we've had some fire moments on like TikTok and Instagram. Those

have been great for us. What hasn't worked for us is like, paid meta marketing. And that's just paid ads. Payed ads. Exactly. So paying for TikTok and Instagram reels doesn't work new as well

already trust posts about it, like that's a totally different thing than a brand that you maybe

have never heard of putting an ad on your feed. And you're like, this is interesting. What's the

thing on the toilet? But you know, you're just, we can show you the statistics. Most people watch like six seconds of a 30 second reel. Yeah. And so they just really have only the faintest glimpse of what we're actually doing. And there's so many legitimate questions people have that aren't answered when they by the time they get to our website. And so what we're doing now, you know, going back to like what our marketing is, what's working, is we're building a long-form

“content engine because we know that's how you build the category. And this is a brand new category.”

One of the best examples of this is a company called Levels that was the first to put continuous glucose monitors. Those like sticky patches. That was like circle loads. Exactly.

I think that everywhere. Yes. So Levels was the first company to put those on non-diabetics.

And like half the level team is here in Austin. And so good friends with their former head of growth who knows are VP of growth. Oh, cool. Look at you building that rock star team. Again, like this big mission attracts great people. And Levels grew their YouTube to like 330,000 subscribers in an average watch time of 15 minutes. And you think about like, that's a ton of great attention. And great traffic that when someone goes from that YouTube page to levels, they know infinitely

more about what that company is, what the product is, what they're about, then if they'd come to them through a paid ad. So you're really just witnessing that your consumers

“need to be educated. They need to have like a real reason because it's not cheap, right? It's like”

400 bucks. Exactly. This is not an impulse buy. So it's like, it's not an impulse buy. You've got to really help them understand like why they need this and educate them. And you've even feeling like the long form content. It's what's pushing the needle. How about influencers that they already trust has happened working? Yeah. So our Chief of Science is Dr. Current, who has like the biggest following of any GI doctor on the internet. And when he posts, we see huge

specs in our traffic. Like, I don't know if you've watched his content. He's just a gifted speaker about health issues. Health is one of those things that anybody can talk about. It's universal, but also like when you start getting into like real medicine and like human anatomy and physiology and like how these systems work under the hood, it is so complex and to talk about those subjects that are deeply interesting, but make it also educational and entertaining at the same time

is like a gift. Influencers can when they're really trusted, they reduce the time to buy, right? Or like the thought or the risk associated with spending $400 on something because you trust that influencer so much a good idea for you would be whitelisted ads. So do you know about this? Oh, yeah. So that's something that we know we're going to experiment with for redoing the website right now and doing all our life cycle marketing. So that when we start spending on ads again, it's

we are doing more efficient capture on the back end of it, but yeah, the right list is high on my

to do list. So basically, this is like something that I've noticed is becoming way more popular because

I'm in the influencer marketing space, right? I have a podcast network. I grow and monetize like 45 shows and more and more brands want to actually put their own money behind our creator's posts. So it's like the creator puts up a post, you know, they might have talking points or whatever it is,

“it grows organically but then the brand actually puts paid ads money behind it and that's what”

a whitelisted ad is for those who don't know. So that's really cool. So is there any other branding, marketing tactic that you've been leaning into? The other big one for us is just long form editorial like written content. And the two reasons for that is a traditional SEO, but the other big one is AI search. And we've had a surprising number of customers come to it because they found it out about us through Jackie Pt. Wow, that's so interesting because they're probably being

like what's wrong with my exactly. Like there's a very big difference in the intentionality from like push marketing, which is like, you know, meta, you know, Instagram, TikTok, that's push marketing. We are pushing this on you. Whereas like if you're going to Jackie Pt or Claude or Google and asking like, what's wrong with me, that's pole marketing. Yeah. And like when we can find people in those pole moments, it's way more intentional. They're already like down the funnel because they're

looking for the solution. You're not having to educate them. They have like a real burning need of figuring out the solution. So really interesting stuff. Okay. So I want to do a segment with you called founder failure. It's a new thing that I'm trying out for this series. For basically, I ask you like what your biggest marketing mistake was, your biggest manufacturing mistake, whatever it is. And you tell me some of your failures because we all learned so much from failure, especially as

worst product decision? Oh, that's a tough question because the reality is with hardware,

like there's the hardware side of the product and then there's a software side of the product. Yeah. In the software side of the product, the cost of making a mistake is very low because you can go and fix it the next day. Right? Like it just go update the code with hardware, the cost of making a mistake is very high because like the best case scenario, you recut the molds that the plastic is molded in it. Yeah. So you've got to be really careful before you say $100,000.

All these things. Yeah. Exactly. It was very expensive. And so when you're building hardware, you go through a like three step process, design validation testing, electronic validation testing, and product validation testing, you can't skip it. It's actually electronic then designed then pee.

And you can't skip any steps, but it takes like a year to go through manufacturing because they

don't want you having any mistakes because catching them after the fact is so expensive. So we're very lucky to have a very professional manufacturing group that we're partnered with. I'll say actually for the beta product, the not waterproof? Yeah. Was terrible because like we knew that like if I got peeed on it, that would kill the product. But we didn't realize was that the humidity of just sitting above the toilet would also kill the product. And so like

the average lifetime of one of those beta devices like six months before it would short out.

“Got it. And that's why you do betas, but for removing to mass production like,”

also just you know, we really like the cost of like getting this wrong could kill the company because we have to recall these. Yeah. So you took it the lesson in that is like take your time, find a professional manufacturing partner, learn processes, have a coach. Yes. Don't waste your money. Move fast, break things only works when the cost of breaking things is like near zero. What would you say your biggest marketing flop was so far? Instagram. We spent way too much

money on Instagram to learn the lesson that Instagram is a horrible fit for our stage of awareness because I'll give you a really specific example here. There's a company, are you familiar with

nude the like laser hair removal product? And it costs like basically the same as our products.

$400. It's direct to consumer. And it's laser hair removal and it really works. And the founder of nude is a good friend. And he was like, oh, well, here's how we market. And you know, we were like, oh, let's just go copy and paste that playbook. Because you know, on paper, we look very similar. It's a white device for roughly the size for $400 like similar audience for like, let's just go do what they do. And what we realized after like two months and you know,

losing $100,000 is that way to second, laser hair removal has been around for two decades.

“It's not a new category. Exactly. And like, well, you all you need to see is a before and after.”

And you're like, oh, I get what this is about. And women's been a lot on beauty. Like they're happy to shell out 400 bucks because going to a medical place to do it is 400 bucks a session. Exactly. And so the whole idea is like, there's this preexisting awareness, like there's this framework called stage of awareness where people are unaware and then they're problem aware and then they're solution aware and then they're product aware and they're brand aware and they know about you.

And then all they need that last stage when they're most aware is just a nut, right? Like what's the deal? What's the look that's going to get me in? And for laser hair removal, anybody in the market, for laser hair removal, like, hey, everyone's aware of that market. Yeah. And then if you're in the market, you're probably aware of the leading brands. You probably know there's at home there. It laser hair removal. And now you're just waiting for like that sale, you know, like, you know, to your point,

I'm going to spend $400 on this anyway. Next time there's a $50 coupon, like, I'm in. Yeah. Totally different marketing challenge than ours. And then was an expensive mistake.

“What is the most unexpected thing that happened so far in your journey, creating throne?”

I have been amazed at the deeply intimate conversations that I've gotten to be a part of too, because of the health implications of what we're building, right? Like, there's so many people with inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, or IBS. And when they find out, I'm building a gut health tracker. They start talking to me like, I am their doctor. And they'll share their most intimate, and they'll tell me things like, I don't talk to anyone about this,

but because you're so in this area, I'll tell you. And it's like, there's an NPR podcast episode on a visibility called poop friends. And the whole podcast just talks about how like, you're most innermost circle of friends of the people you can talk about your poop with. And what I found, I didn't plan for this, but like, I get to be strangers poop friend. And like, there's something deeply special about that. Yeah. Ironic as it sounds, like,

people, you know, because like, think about someone who has IBD, like,

my gut health journey, because there were days, my doctor told me to keep a stool long, which is humiliating. And I would like go 40, 50 times a day. And I knew exactly how many

“tiles were on my bathroom floor, because that's how much time I was spending the bathroom.”

And to have something that would track all that for me is why I didn't have to, would have been like, spared me so much humiliation. And like, for her to open up to me, and she was like, she's like, can I give you a hug? Like, I'm so excited to success. And like,

yeah, that's incredible. You know, like, it's just like, been such a beautiful window into humanity.

And like some of the most intimate parts of humanity. I don't know, it's very special. Okay. What was the most unexpected financial thing that you encountered? Probably every founder you talked to will share this and you even kind of alluded to it earlier, having a team that was too big, but like the number one thing that eats away at your balance sheet is head count. And like they say higher slow fire fast.

Yeah. And that is just actually great advice. It is. And we have been very careful to be very lean. And that has saved us. Like, we would not have survived. Good, you know, think about like, we pivoted in 2023 and launch our product in 2022. Yeah, two years or so. Yeah, two and a half years of being like heads down in the trenches without a product. And like for most of that time, the team was four people. And now how big is the team? Nine people. So yes, you've been really conservative

about hiring. Incredibly, and it's because and actually another surprising financial reality is that when you find experts, they are cheaper and work faster. Yeah, they're worth like three or four people. For example, for us, for like the specific types of engineering, we need it for this, like optical engineering. We got burned by two product development firms that like, I hate them. They they market to and they like their business dev guys sell you on like, oh, like we've got this

crack team of like A players and then they end up staffing with like C players who are literally learning how to code on the job. So they got they like it's like a beans rich. Exactly. And that happened to us twice. And we're like, okay, like no more of that, we need to go like actually find the engineers themselves who have this explicit specific set of expertise. And we would found those people. They worked faster. They got the work done in a week instead of a month.

And their rate was lower because you're not paying for like a project manager on top of this whole thing and like they're not learning on the job. It was mind blowing to me that you could work with someone who was 10 times more talented and pay half as much. So basically, you went to hired them directly rather than working through an agency. Funny enough, we found an agency who's model was more lined with that. So there are some agencies because like the typical like agency model

is they have people on staff and they need to staff all of those hands, right? They can't have

“idle hands. And so that's why they tell you on the 18 and the 18 ends up supervising work,”

but it's done by the BBC team, the junior people. And we found an agency who's a whole model is we don't have any employees. We have a network of freelancers and we will match you with as many freelancers as you want to interview with and we just take a cut on whoever you end up working with. Cool. That's a great model. It's a great model and like I wish I knew that existed a year before. Yeah, what would you say was the slowest decision that you made or a decision you made too slowly?

Just hired the wrong people, let them sit in the role for too long, drag my feet on it, like you know within it, really you know within a week. It's someone who's going to work out. Like, yeah, you tell yourself like, all right, I'm going to watch how this warms up and then like

it never does. It just never does. And it always feels better once they're gone, right? It's like

the impact is immediate and you feel so down for offensive health, my better it feels and like that that definitely the biggest mistake is like we had just the wrong people in the wrong chairs. My dad's an entrepreneur and he told me this years ago, he was like, look like when you set up the build a company, you tell yourself and you tell your investors and you tell your team, like I am building a world class team. And when you find yourself in the position of having

“someone on the team who's not world class, you have to let them go because you either let them go”

or you are a liar. That's such a good lesson. Okay, so let's play something I call SWAT Sprint. Okay, we're going to go over all your strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats which I'm pretty interested in learning about. So what would you say are your biggest strengths right now

at Throne? We have an amazing team. We have a strong brand. We have a product that works. It's

super sticky people love it. Those are the biggest ones definitely. It's like the product works.

product team because like you know, we've had a very small team for this last few and a half years,

but it was all product and engineering. It was like overpowered and we just had under invested

“marketing because we hadn't you know launched yet. I think when your biggest strengths is like”

you're silly marketing. Like the fact that you called it Throne and like you're such a personal bull guy and like I feel like it's just going to be a really funny brand and I feel like you're making something really serious, really like hard at it and I feel like that's a big strength. I appreciate that. And that's exactly what I mean by brand. It's like it's a tight rope walk because on the one hand, yes, this is poop and it's funny and it's you know lighthearted and

levity and like you can't not have like puns in every conversation. Yeah, I mean it's so easy. I was I like introduced you to Naveen Jane because I was like that would be such a great contact for you and even in the email, I found myself like being like this is a match made in bathroom heaven. Like you just can't see. You can't help yourself. And then on the other hand, to your point, it's serious and like you know people who have conditions that like really impact their

gut health like their worst days are really bad. And so like navigating that with appropriate

“like yeah, you don't want to be like insensitive. Exactly. And like but that's something that I think”

our team does really well in part because like so many people on our team are personally affected or know and like we're all just people. So next is weakness. What do you feel like are your biggest weakness is right now? If you'd asked me six weeks ago, I would have told you maybe eight weeks ago, I would have told you marketing. Like that was definitely the biggest thing like we didn't have now we have the right people. And so it's going to take probably two, three months to ramp up

the full marketing engine and get everyone working, you know, and symphony together. And yeah, we have one person is going to be shooting the content of the person. That is the content that it's posting and distributing the content like that doesn't happen overnight. Yeah. But it's all right now or I would say that's still our weakness is marketing, but we have momentum. Yeah. So exciting. I mean, you don't have a podcast studio. Yeah. I can't wait to find out more about

that opportunities. What are your biggest opportunities? Our biggest opportunity is all the stuff that we're already talking about. Yeah, you got to be about such a big market to kind of tackle and we exactly and we just like how big is the market? Let's talk about like this product, right? Like cracking the basics of gut health. The most motivated people are people with IBS and inflammatory

bell disease. IBS is like 35 to 50 million Americans, depending on who you asked probably 45

million Americans caps out. IBD is another 3 million Americans. So it's called that like, you know, 45 to 50 million Americans. And then people with urinary track conditions is another roughly 50 million Americans. And then like everybody should track hydration and like anybody who wears an or ring or a whoop would benefit from tracking their hydration and their gut health and seeing it like I just ran an analysis yesterday. Like of the last like 420 days of my gut health and hydration

against my woop metrics. And I'll be able to show that like my gut health is hugely impacted by my stress. Yeah. And you can see that like the days I have stress, I have bad gut health. Same thing like my hydration and my recovery, I expected my hydration to dry my recovery more. But on the days that I am dehydrated, it really hammers my recovery even more. It's less of an effect on good days, but a huge detriment on bad days. And there's just so many interesting

physiological lessons at the intersection of like sleep and hydration and gut health and stress and gut health and diet. Like the market's really everybody. Yes, you're like it's pretty much everyone. Do you know how many toilets are in America? Like did you do research like at that level? Like what were you think they researched? That's a great question. It was it was more understanding like who has a motivation. We think about it more like can't we want to, right? Exactly. That's a

huge one. Like so many can't really a lot of our investors have told us like, oh, I've tried GLP ones and like I am getting racked by the digestive side effects and it's interesting. GLP ones like well changing people's digestive in both constipation and diarrhea can like tip you an either direction. Yes. And so like I think that's a huge market for us. For the medication, what is that called? Like medication effects like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Side effects. Yeah. And so

that that's a huge opportunity for us. So there's like everybody has episodes of bad gut health in their

“life. And at the end of the day, I don't think you should drive, you should like drive your life”

based on what your wereables are telling you. Right? Like that's a common critique of wereables as people say like, oh, you shouldn't live your life based on what your recovery score is or your sleep score was. And I agree, right? Like, but it is nice to have check engine lights on your car that tell you like, hey, this might be worth looking into and just raising things to your awareness that like you wouldn't think about because you couldn't feel it. Okay, let's move on to

dots. Talk to us about the competition. What is what is threatening to you? So there are several startup competitors. This is like a very interesting space that's like weirdly heated and

well, you like the first one and then people fall out. So we came up with this idea all on our own.

Some people have tried to do whole toilets. Some people have had tried to do just iPhone apps.

And they're the whole universe of like poop tracking phone apps. And the reality is like,

that's not going to ever catch on because people are going to take pictures of their poop with

“their phone because the user experience is bad. You have to like go and then like take a picture”

before you wipe and that's like awkward. Yeah. And so having like that's what motivated the hardware is like making this truly frictionless and effortless. And so there are a few companies that are trying to do this are biggest competitor is cooler. Their, you know, massive, popular toilet brands in the world. They do like a billion year or a billion dollars a year in revenue. They're privately held. They have their own town in Wisconsin named after them. That's our headquarters

is colder Wisconsin. And they released a product very similar to ours. Like a few months before we did. And totally caught us have guards. We knew they'd been working on something like this. They acquired a company out of Israel like years ago. But you know, when zero dark 30 didn't hear anything from

them where we've been very public since basically they want about like here's what we're doing.

Here's who we are. Here's what we're building. Here's the mission. They, it's a very different approach. And their product is beautiful. But it's not hands-free. It's not effortless. It has like a one-week battery life, which means if the charge every week, that's a lot of maintenance. Yeah, it's a lot of maintenance. Yours is once every 30 days, right? That's what we advertise in practice. We find the average battery life is 56 days. Oh, cool. Which is like six charges a year. That's awesome. Yeah.

There's you know, it limits your session to five minutes. So they're just like you have a better product. I'm very proud of the product. I'm better branding. I think that's the key. Like I think your your way of going against the big dogs is going to be community. Yes. And branding and personality

“and mission and your team. Like that's what I think is going to help me really good. We have a”

lot of personality and that's yeah. And then there's a bunch of little startups that are trying to do things and like I don't know how real those are. You know, like we've seen a bunch of them at the conferences, but you know, I know for fact, one of them copied our design of our beta device because it looks identical. We're just like, all right, good luck. But they made it black and we're like, okay, well, yeah. And like, we saw them pre-order devices from us and we're like, uh, skip.

Honestly, I think the biggest threat is not a competitor. It's that we fail to educate this market. Like the only way this really fails is not a competitor comes in and kills because like right now we're all trying to create this market, right? And I think this is a market that's big enough the same with like health tracker. Right. You got to watch it. It's like so many launches. Exactly. Like yeah. There's Garmin and Corros. There's so many brands that so you're not afraid of having a competing

brand. It's like, oh, almost like proof that it's worth it to keep it. 100% my biggest hope was that Colour would come out and spend hundreds of millions of dollars educating the market. And we want to get to ride their hotels. Oh, that's such a great point. Yeah. If you're listening, please do that. I can help you spend that money. I love it. Let's go back to money. So this is called Halley Profit. I want to understand, what are your biggest costs associated with creating a

hard word device for for health like this? Like, what were your biggest cost centers?

The people right? That count had count number one and for the first two and a half years of

company, it was just developing the product. And that's still my far our biggest cost center. As we continue to ramp up our marketing engine, it's going to move into marketing. Okay. And a big part of that is going to be, you know, we're hiring headcount for marketing. But we're also going to be spending more on marketing projects, right? You know, like, we're mentioned the podcast studio earlier. We're building out our own podcast studio. That's going to look not quite as fancy

as this, but we're very excited about it. And the whole idea there is like one of our biggest challenges as a company is people see this product when they receive the product and they're like, wow, this feels like something Apple or Microsoft would have made. And like, that is the highest praise possible, but they're surprised because our marketing is not yet at the level of Apple or Microsoft. And the whole, the whole point of marketing is to set people's expectations.

And if your expectation is like, whoa, this is better than I expected, that means our marketing failed. And so we have to level up and spend more on marketing. So we're redoing the website, redoing all of our email flows. Like, literally the last thing I saw in my car before I

“came out here. I got a text. It was screenshots of our new emails. And this like, oh, that's why”

you spend money on marketing. You know, just marketing makes everything easier. It just elevates you. So it's a real way. And like for something, especially at your price point, right? Not that it's so expensive, but it's not cheap. So it needs to seem like premium. Yes. And like, I say this all the time. The consumer is used to buying Apple. Yeah. You know, like if you're buying, if you're spending $400, it better feel like it's worth $400. Yeah. It's got to have some weight to it. Yeah.

So would you tell us how much it costs to make? Yeah. Cost is about $130 to make. And then you're

charge a $6 a month membership. And you're doing annual membership, too. Yes. I think that's $70 a year or $46 a month. Okay. What do you think is going to make more money in the long term? Like the hardware

device or the subscriptions? Mm. That is a great. Ultimately, it's going to be the hardware

device for us, right? Yeah. Because people buy multiple hardware devices. Exactly. In the house. Well, upgrade, the, you know, in the future will do upgrades. Like so many people, like I haven't ordering on. And so many or are customers get the next ordering just because they love ordering. Yeah, it's like the latest. Yeah. That's a trick. So like you're going to, it's going to be like the iPhone. You're going to get a new one every three years or something. Exactly. And we're going to

add new sensors to this will eventually do like things like, you know, we're talking about adding gas detection. We're going to do the, you know, one day we'll have multi-factor imaging that will be able to do, you know, blood detection, like, you know, those are going to be real innovations. Yeah. And like, I'm so excited about those. I love this. I feel like we've had such a great conversation. I'd love to talk about how somebody else, of course, I don't want anybody competing

with Rome. And I think there's enough competition in the space. But somebody else who has a mission-based company that is like a hardware-based device. How could they copy you? Like, what are the first steps that they should take? The first thing you should do is just reach out to me. I'm Scott at Throne Science. I'm happy to hear about your idea and help you, however I can.

“I think the first step you should take is make a prototype. Our first prototype was a Raspberry”

Pie, which is like a cheap $40 hobbyist computer. Okay. In a Tupperware jar, like, a little bucket that we would tape on top of people's toilets and had one button on it. It was record and you would have to push it again to turn it off. And there's a little light that blinked when it was on. And we put that. We plugged a little webcam, like, with a 3D printed enclosure. So we could, like, "Who made it?" Us. You and your co-founder Tim. You and my co-founder Tim?

That had a tattoo of influence from your dad who was a medical device inventor. Like, I feel like, that's not normal until, like, want to actually create the prototype yourself. I mean, so I knew the process from my dad and watched him be a medical device inventor since I was, like, you know, that tall. Yeah. But we just had this deep intuitive sense of, like, we have to see this work. We have to actually understand, like, how people interact with this product.

Even if it's a inferior version of the product. Like, you know, fun fact. The first time I pitched that this would be hands-free was on an investor call. And Tim pulled me aside afterwards. He was like,

"What do you mean it's going to be hands-free?" Like, we've never talked about that before. And I was like,

"Oh, well, I'm pretty sure we can make it hands-free with, like, these types of sensors and you can do Bluetooth." He was like, "No." And, of course, it's hands-free now. So, build a prototype. Build a prototype. And in the healthcare space, like, what kind of things should

“they validate first? Like, how can they determine whether it's something to actually go after?”

Like, you decided that this was a new category. You're going to invent. If somebody has some other healthcare device, like, what were some of the considerations that you had before you actually went full steam ahead? So, I did three things that were really helpful. Number one is we ran meta-ads at, like, a landing page. Just to understand, like, could people sign up for an email list around this concept? And this was back in 2023 when, like, landing pages, you would make on Wix or Squarespace.

It wasn't like, you couldn't vibe code of beautiful landing page. It would be a very different experience now. So, you could do this in, like, two hours now. So, go throw up a landing page, point some meta-ads at it, and just see if people will sign up for, like, less than $5 in email. The next thing you do is every single time somebody email or signs up for email, send them an email that says, hey, I'm blah, blah, blah. And here's, you know, the product

we're building. Why did you sign up for this? Like, open into question. What, what did you pull up to get out of this? Feedback, yeah. And then, how engaged in those conversations? And we have, like, hundreds of those. And that was, like, I called it our wall of love, because, like, we heard from so many people, all these different use cases that I was like, oh, wow, like, this is actually something the world wants. And that was a huge piece of it. And then the last

piece is, we'll build the prototype and put it in people's hands and see how they interact with it. Yeah. Is your ultimate goal to sell this company? No, I want to run this company for the next

20 years of my life. Like, I want my mission is to save a million lives personally. And the

math on that is basically saving 50,000 lives a year over the course of 20 years, adds up to a

“million lives. And I think if we scale this to the scale that it belongs, like globally, like,”

you can't do that in the United States alone, right? Like, 50,000 lives a year would be every single one with coal and cancer. And like, roughly 100,000 year, a lot of year when you can include other cancers of the lower GI and urinary tract. But like, let's say we start saving lives in like five years, right? We get through FDA, we're like in a place where we can actually mark this as a life-saving device. Then we go global. Yeah. And like 900,000 deaths a year globally. And like, you know,

that'll probably be closer to a million by the time we're at that point. And let's say we can

I will get to be doing this for the next 15, 20, 30 years of my life. I hit that number and like,

then you're good. Yeah. I love that. What advice you have for founders out there or want to be founders, who have a big idea, they might be creating a category, but, you know, they're gearing up to actually start their journey. What is your best advice from them? So the best advice I have for other founders came from a different founder. He told me entrepreneurship is a exercise in spiritual growth,

“masquerading as a money-making opportunity. And I think about that at least every week, most days.”

So it's because there are really hard days. And there are like strings of really hard days. And

companies don't die because of competition, they don't die because of co-founder disputes, they die because you gave up on the company. Like, you can run out of money and find ways to make the company work again. And the only reason you give up on the company is because you're spiritually, you're not there anymore. And like, when you're in a hole for two and a half years, building a product, like it's really easy to have a bad day or two. And I learned some more in that

“time that the most important thing for the health of the company was for me to maintain my own health,”

both mentally, physically. Because if I'm not healthy, then I will not show up and bring my a game to company building and being a leader. And when I show up, and I'm healthy, happy, have good energy positive stoked about what we're doing, everything else follows. I love it. Scott, before we go, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? So, we are at thronescience.com. We're at thronescience on Instagram, Twitter, every social media

channel. And then I'm personally at Scott Hickle. It's pickle, but with an age. So, HICKLE,

ever that you would find people on social media. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on

“young and profiting podcast. All of thank you. Well, yeah, fam. That's how Scott Hickle and Throne”

Profit. And I just love this series because it opens up so many real-life lessons hidden inside every business story. I learned so much every episode. And today Scott showed us that some of the biggest opportunities come from problems most people overlook, avoid or feel too uncomfortable to talk about. What started as a joke between friends on a poker night became a mission-driven company, helping people better understand their health through behavior. We all share every day. Throne

is quite literally saving lives with every flesh. Thanks for listening to Hally Profit Wednesdays, the Young and profiting series where real entrepreneurs share real numbers, real margins, and real story of how their business is actually work. I'm Hally Ta and I'll see you next time.