#51 - Coronavirus, Being on Shark Tank & At-Home Testing Kits with Julia Cheek

love let me make one quick announcement before we get into it and what i wanna do is i've heard about these people say subscribe subscribe subscribe again alright and i wanna test it so last time we asked our our viewers for more reviews and we now have five hundred and fifty maybe we got five four hundred reviews and in just a couple days you guys are really active so and they all sent me messages i tried to reply to everyone to do i did now yeah went looking that so here's what i haven't got reply i thought you did get reply so here's what i want people to do and the reason i'm gonna i wanna do this is because i think people like seeing us succeed and they like seeing the journey yeah so you're gonna help us succeed so here's what you do if you have an iphone you're gonna go to like the the the menu where you can like turn your wifi and bluetooth off and all that there's a button on the bottom right where you hit record okay record that that's gonna record your screen then go to the podcast app go to my first million click subscribe click and then on unsubscribe and then unsubscribe again send us a video of that happening and if you do also send us a question that you want and we'll answer your question yeah bull bake a q and a and this will tell us the truth right because there's we need to run the experiment we need to know is this how is does this actually work or is this just like a myth and if you send us your question ideally send it via twitter yeah so everyone could see and can comment in that way it's easy so just record yourself what is it subscribing on subscribing and then res subscribing do it a bunch of times record yourself post that on twitter tag one of us or both of us and then on that same thread i'd ask your question and and if you don't have a question that's fine too and then we're gonna look at the charts so we're gonna see what this does to the chart movement i think it's gonna actually boost the chart movement if i if the theory is correct if you know i i believe this is why podcast ask people to do this is because this shit actually work and if it does here's what we'll do if this does work if people keep doing this what we'll do is with only the people who do that we'll like take a creature out of our analytics instead it to them yeah yeah we'll share the data yeah no problem how was the big stage you went to new york yeah so what i did was i went to new york and i originally went to meet with some advertisers of ours and to be wine in dining or what yeah luke yeah kinda doug i'll tell you about it and then i went to be on the gary banner vaynerchuk podcast and then i went to beyond is it pump yeah everyone knows him as pump pop yeah and anthony pop on did hits his podcast it was cool did gary vaynerchuk podcast first thing in the morning at eight or nine or ten am when i got there i was a little groggy for my flight because i took some medicine when i flew it went okay we'll see what happens hold on so you walk in what what happened yeah so i walked in so he has two offices in new york one hudson yards which i've been too before it's buzzing this one was the studio it's a little quieter but it's still pretty bad it was awesome man and you guys know each you don't know each other so it's just like first china but we had he knew who i was and obviously i definitely know who he is and he knew who our company was he he was totally nice and he was really low key at first he wasn't like cocaine gary yeah he was like you guys a little chi hat small talk beforehand or you just got actually so here's what happened we sat down and there's like an audience there's like an audience of like ten maybe five or ten people me it was me and adam on our side and he had non entourage and we sit down and he goes alright go and he looks at me and i was like i looked at adam i will go care gary i think you're interview interviewing he goes oh i am i was like right adam like is that right at adam looked i he goes yeah that's what we set up and adam of a safety blanket yeah at gary was like oh okay so tell me about who you are like and it was good it was great so he's a nice guy that's good to know yeah you know he's an easy target because he's so loud yeah i believe that he is totally legitimate and a really good business person i think his company va is really really hard to run and he said that he was currently the coo and ceo good business and he's totally legitimate he's like because he you can like what what makes you say that so long you could put him in like the donald trump category of a guy who talks a lot and you're like i don't know this kind of real deal he's totally the real deal he just talks a lot but what what were the little tidbits i gave you that impression right because i i believe that i i'm not saying your lying so whenever i curious what i i asked them i go so how do you like working here i always ask employees i asked the front desk i go what what's you know and you could kind of tell they actually like yeah and when he he has eight hundred employees so the and and the office space was it was really expensive real estate there was really nice furniture everything was set up professionally it's a real business right so you could tell what's legitimate and what is it once you go in there in this hudson yards office they had vein media water bottled water the office was buzzing everyone had nice computers it it wasn't it it's not a startup right felt like a legit operation totally hundred percent and kudos knows to him man he's he's talented and you did the podcast you know rate your performance i gave myself a c plus okay and then because i was it was a i had done any reps that day like i did a late a podcast later that day and i had a red fire yeah and i was like alright i'm on it it just was it just fell a little flat but adam and his people said it was one of their favorite ones they've ever done and do you have a little prep team you would do but let's say before you get on stage before you do an interview how do you you know switch the light yeah well i typically will like you know how it is like when we're doing this thing i was in a piss i was in a shitty mood a minute ago and these lights turned on and you're like alright i got a little like yeah like snap out of it and what i do is i talk to the receptionist or i'll talk to the uber driver just to like start get out of your hand yeah get my words going and getting a better happier mood yeah and that's usually what i do okay is that what you do no like everything i'd try to like study and come up with like a framework for how to do it and like a technique and so i picked up two things so i picked up one from conor mcgregor that he i was watching this documentary manager talk with the a pencil in your mouth pen in your mouth yeah so this i tried it and it actually works fantastic so basically you take a pencil or a pen you hold it sort of horizontal sideways you bite on it so it's in your mouth you know sort of going out past your cheeks and then you just talk for one minute and what happens is because the pencils there in your mouth in this awkward position your tongue has to really work to like flick over and under this thing to get to the spot it usually goes to so you end up en way better i don't know if it's placebo i don't know if it really is like an actual warm up for your tongue but this shit works i've recorded myself before and after and i can tell the difference and other how other people listen to it said tell me which one of these sounds better and i don't know whether it's placebo or not that one works for me the other thing is like a quick physical change so push ups or something push ups a win sprint a jumping jack a scream music whatever i am a big believer that that that the fastest way to change the way you feel is through changing your body rapidly it works it's like tony robbins tony robbins says his great youtube video if you go look if you just youtube young tony robbins and it's you know the same guy minus twenty five years and he's in a tank top and he's given the speech and he he talks to about it he goes before i get on stage you know people always ask me okay you're you're a public speaker you do you do a really great job how do you do a great job of this and he goes because i don't make the mistakes most people do goes most people are sitting in a low energy shell your body body posture sucks and then they just get up on stage and they don't warm up like an athlete would never do that and he's like i treat myself like an athlete i get myself in a mental state a physical state and he goes the second thing i do i don't try to memorize what i'm supposed to say because when you try to memorize what you say you're trying to prepare but what's ends up happening is you're mind is then editing it's comparing what you're saying versus what you kind didn't remember you're supposed to say as you give this other whole thing going on in your head that takes you away from the moment third thing and this is the last one he goes before i go up there i convince myself that the audience has to hear this like their lives depend on this information like they need i'm here to help and if i can get this across like even with this podcast for example it's like you know somebody is out there they're commuting they're you know they're they have this idea that they haven't taken action on they're kinda beating themselves up about it or you know they look around at the five people that they hang out with the most and they're just like these people are not like me and we're in their ear balls and they're like oh there are people like me out there and yes i should take some action and yes i should have some fucking energy today and so he's like i just convinced myself that they have to hear this and then i'm here to serve them and i was like okay i'm just hearing the i do that just hearing that has made me feel better there you go another thing that i did while i was out there is on sunday night i tweeted out so when i fly i take a lot of xanax it's the only drug i do i don't do any alcohol and sometimes the night before i'll take it a little bit as well because i really hate flying and so on sunday night i tweeted that i rented this airbnb which i did and i'm gonna host a meetup up and i got two hundred replies saying let's meet up right and that i couldn't do that so i only let twenty trend subscribers come and so the trend subscribers are also not one hundred of you listener or not a hundred percent listeners are subscribers but all subscribers are listeners right and they so i met i think at thirty end up coming and it was fucking awesome it was so cool this one kid flew up from south carolina or something and i treated this on the meetup was monday night i tweeted this on so sunday night like either there was no preparation like we all we did me and adam landed on and a monday morning we went to the mexican place next door and said hey can you bring over enough tacos for twenty people here's two or three hundred bucks and go buy us some beer will pay you more money and that's all we did and it was awesome yeah these people are fucking fan it is crazy it's nuts it's really odd who was the most interesting person so many interesting people one guy there was this one guy i figured his name maybe he's listening he was an older the eldest guy there which is not old but then his fifties or forties and he built was it it builds custom electric cards cars and through the trends group sold fifty cars just another electric call like like he was making like they took a the take prius or they took four they took yeah they took like a some type of pickup truck and made it an electric delivery van oh wow for a cannabis company l because who else me i mean i'm at all types of people one guy who sells fake boobs for living so he sells his only more fair child he this guy ever talked you on twitter no his name fair child hunter yeah yeah i since sky on my twitter all time yeah he his boss sells fake boobs really yeah his his boss invented like a better dude what's in his bio because i've looked at this guy's bio and he's not advertising this so let's oh it was let's see what him he was to be in this girl at did we're just sitting down a hundred came and we were just shooting the shit we're were like how what do you do and then this woman of did she's nice i met her before we were just sitting there and she he's like well i sell breast implants and we're were like what and we just started talking i was like so do you have like a woman who comes with you and like shows you like shows the buyers like you need like sales brochures like how do you have like how you show that your boobs are the best and he was just like walk through this whole process it was crazy i had never heard of such a thing yeah maybe neither either but of course he came up from virginia for this that's great alright cool so you can do more of that or what well you and i need to do more so what we can do is new york that we could get i easily we could have gotten two hundred people yeah so we can do one in new york i think aca cast or whatever we use tells us where people are right we gotta go to canada we gotta go to utah when we shouted out utah i know i still get more the number of these friendly ass utah you know citizens whatever they're called utah reach out all the time like hey when you guys are here i got you so maybe like and it feels good to be taken care of like that it does it feels great maybe great hospitality what's what's month is it february yeah when you end of february we we should do a thing where we could try to hit up like three cities and five days right or maybe maybe a like i got into this thing i don't know i told you about this this thing called reality have you heard of this no so basically you know jewish people have birthright yeah i don't know exactly how many the mechanics of birthright but from what i understand about it if you're jewish you get to go it's paid by the sort of wealthy jewish people around world wealthy christian fundamental christian christians who believe that israel's is the land for jews oh wow okay didn't know that so basically that's a cool thing for jewish people you're shaking your head are you jewish henry but you know about it you just stunned my yeah my i've i've never been more jealous than when my friends go birthright right and then come back it's like this mini study abroad yeah great and so then i was like alright what is this you know how to get more of this so they have this program called reality reality twenty twenty if you wanna look it up and it's basically you could be in these different groups you can be in entertainment it could be in technology you can be in whatever social impact you apply to get in if you get in i've applied i've applied before i got rejected a few years ago this time i applied i got in and it's like a group small group i don't know thirty people forty people that get accepted and get to go it's not all expenses paid but it's like most expenses paid and so yeah anyways if i'm going on this trip late may now and i'm wanna gonna see what this is all about to israel and i've heard of the save if it does is it a thing i don't think it you don't have to be jewish this one's not like it's like a but it's for like you know israel's right you know sort of got a startup up and kind of thought leadership in young people that sort of thing the future leaders i mean it's like not in a bad way it's a propaganda thing it's like to get you into the yeah it's like a program yeah yeah so i'm doing that but my question to you when you going it's late may so first scared of coronavirus may not go i was supposed to go in germany and may so we should talk about coronavirus in a second but secondly why did jews have all the good things why don't other people do this this seems like a great birthright birth rate seems great june and mormons yeah mormons like the same thing but mormons might be better now because they don't drink do mormons have these perks like that like birthright or something yeah they have all types of shit dude they and they're all real good a basketball and jews basketball too i mean they're they're all like real similar very similar for people well the thing i i like is the sort of pay it forward thing i think silicon valley has this a lot where a lot of people who move here they hesitate to reach out people because they're like well why would this person wanna help i you know have nothing to offer but like that is the culture of silicon valley is to pay it forward is to help the like next person who doesn't know anything and i feel like jews have this in their culture i feel like mormons have this in their culture you know i'm indian i don't feel like there's this same it's not as strong for indian people to sort of try to help out the next and i think part it this because there's such a big population you can't afford to it there's like i don't know dogs six million jewish people on earth or something crazy they around the world so i think you know with a small number of people you can offer this like much more high touch help each other model i agree okay do you wanna get into some stuff you wanna talk about coronavirus or you wanna yeah so i'm terrified of coronavirus and you know generically un i'm terrified you know i terrified without information and then i started looking into a little bit more so i don't even know about it can you explain what the coronavirus is yeah so basically there's a couple of these viruses there influenza strains and so the flu the flu yeah so basically a few years ago you probably heard you know sars or swine flu and so you know the very first time i think sars happened there was you know kid got this flu goes to the doctor's office they're like okay this is the flu and kid dies within like a very short amount of time they're like well that was odd that doesn't usually happen so they took a sample and sent it to like the cdc or whoever right like they sent it to some lab to say you know what do you see here there was this was a very unusual case the health deteriorated so quick that's not typical to the flu and what they realized was hey this is a new strain called i think it was like h one and five at the time and it was like this is only ever found in animals this is the first time it's crossed over from animal to human and so that was bird flu when that happened and then so there's been these different sort of very very deadly viruses sars which are which was very very popular mers which happened in the middle east respiratory syndrome is well it's kinda of what these you know middle east respiratory i think syndrome is the what mers stands for in sars is sort of the same thing and so the thing with these was that you know although there's a lot of hoop law around sars in bird flu like sars killed less than a thousand people that's not thousand total fatalities not a big drop in the bucket as far as the death bucket goes on earth yeah coronavirus already killed like three thousand plus people so already much bigger than that the reason it's scary though is actually and and for a while people were like oh don't worry the fatality rate is low fatality rates like i don't know three percent for this whereas for sars it was like super high i don't know i i i don't know think exact number but like majority of people who haven't it die whereas with this three percent means you get it but you have a good chance of living but the big problem with that and the article that i read was called why you're probably why we probably can't contain coronavirus why you probably are gonna end up getting coronaviruses because this virus is extremely contagious but has these has these trademarks that are very problematic so it takes a while for your symptoms to show up so you have it and you carry it for like you know fourteen days without showing symptoms so you'll be spreading this around and not even realizing you have it then once you have it you don't just like deteriorate and like your health doesn't go to shit where they you know you're in the hospital they quarantine you it's like you know starts innocent and it gets worse over time so the infectious period is so much longer that there's basically no way to quarantine this thing there's no way for us to contain this and so what the article was saying was like ironically because it is not as fatal and is not as bad for you right away this thing is gonna be unstoppable most likely case second thing with that was i guess there's four like you know typical strains of the flu which is why you can get your flu shot and still catch the flu every year so guys are these four different strains and the vaccine doesn't cover sort of all all the different variations and and so this guy's case was that most likely this is now just a fifth annual you know strain that we're gonna have to live with and it's just gonna suck it's a very very you know kind of a downer also i'm sure you know sort of the bio nerds out there they're gonna be like no there's fifteen million strains that's right but like that's the summary that i took away and if you wanna just get the point that's the point and so what you have up here is d stuff so like my i looked at my portfolio yesterday is like fuck so lost money yesterday off the stock market so crazy shit's happening all around so generically stock market you know people get paranoid bonds you know people flee of bonds stock goes down that sort of thing other funny stuff happening you know zoom the conferencing software so the stock ticker zoom goes up fifty percent today but shit it's up fifty percent today but wait there's more it's the stock ticker z o o m zoom but that's not zoom actual handle zoom actual handle is z some people are buying the wrong stock because they think people are gonna be working from home and tele conferencing in and so they're buying zoom which does something else altogether a very small cap stock i don't know henry checked what what the stock for z o m actually does got it and it's a tiny stock so it jumped fifty percent today and like you know but you can actually predict this because this happened also at the ipo whoever bought zoom the other thing got a huge pop at zoom ipo because of this so we could've have predicted this one i love when that happened but all kinds of fucked some other things smart friends are basically saying hey if you need for friends my smart friends you know people who actually read the real information and like understand how the world works they were like hey if you need prescription drugs you should start stock because most of it's coming from china and the supply chain globally is fucked so like the world doesn't have that like friend friend of a friend basically how to fuck do stockpile prescription meds basically buy up buyer refills and and so the there's no global plan b for what happens if china gets sick or slowed down we don't have another like supply chain and so all kinds of things are suffering and i have friends that have d companies that buy their shit they're back and they're saying shit yeah months months back i was talking to a supplier yesterday and he was like even if we come back to work there's you know all the other factories that we depend on the printing factor the packaging guys and they're not coming like the workers are just not coming back because in most factories in china the workers don't actually live in that city permanently so for chinese new year which is when this happened so chinese new year is a month long holiday yeah well we they all chinese he tells all about it he goes he goes it's the largest travel day in the world right because every chinese person everybody goes home and when they go home they go back to very rural areas and already there's this problem where they don't you know often they don't come back because you know they don't wanna be living in some other city working in a factory but with this people are just not coming back and so there's no replacements it's like a very dire situation well and like obviously a human level also incredibly dire situation so to turn shit to gold where's is the opportunity here i mean what's gonna happen do you think that this is gonna impact have long term impact with shiny china making shit and you have to go elsewhere i don't know so there's a question of like so two two theories one is for stuff like this the people were gonna do really well they didn't start now they started something two years ago a blog on being a prep or whatever and and today is your day you know like this is your month and so i don't think the i don't know how much i am interested in the sort of like today opportunity also just feels kinda fucked up we talked about judy the other day right the judy sort of survival their bags i my friend joe spies bought something from like survivor kit dot com and he got an email from them saying we have a hundred times our normal volume we apologize but we're gonna make it happen right so those the judy thing that which the respiratory mask long time the those are not in the judy bag but the respiratory masks are just like out of stock you can't get them and that's like the thing you need is like to protect your long gone no one can pounce on that yeah we covered this guy who launched a company called is it a judy judy yeah judy it's a emergency kit yep an orange like emergency backpack ready to my wife texted me today and said what's going buy a bunch of stuff i feel the same way more people are doing this have you ever been in an emergency situation by the way have ever like been in a city when like a flood happens or anything like that it's really bizarre how it feels no i was in hawaii our honeymoon there was a hurricane in hawaii oh a week of our honeymoon when i was there and so we went to the grocery store and first we go to the hotel and they're like hey we have early checking available and we're like well that's cool thanks because we're honeymoon and they're like no we just have like a lot of open rooms there i was like what's going on they're like well have you seen the weather report like there's our herd this week of course i don't take the weather so i book my honeymoon on a hurricane week and so we go to the grocery store and it's like the zombie attack has happened like all the water bottles are gone like the shelves are empty people are just checking out like four cart worth is really like it's a odd eerie eerie feeling when that happens yeah this thing the my issue here's an opportunity if someone wants to ago for is do you know how pull is it there's a political check that was called political political fact you mean like the fact checking thing yeah i don't know what's called by always so what you do is like did bloomberg really say this right and it goes that's what i want for coronavirus right now i don't know what what is it so there's a blog called i believe it's called the prepared dot com it is exactly what you want it is plain english it's like here's the facts not the over reaction and by way we'll tell you about the over why it's an over reaction but here's the facts what's presented in a com calm way the site is beautiful it works great on your phone i tweeted at the guy i was like this is a like thank you for making this yeah i was like thank you for making this site because this is exactly what i need in this situation it auto filled nicely bunch of people must be going i feel like it's he's selling kits he's selling kits oh god this guy's awesome cool i'm into this so scary situation yeah scary all around best of luck to everybody yes for sure okay you wanna move on or yeah let's move on okay i'll i have a few interesting things that happened cool companies that we could talk about the first thing is something that has made a huge impact on me and i think more people need to take advantage of it which is transparent numbers so basically there's a group of people out there who believe that transparency is good and they share all of their revenue they share they share their every metric about their business as deep as everyone's salary their bank balance churn how much it cost to acquire customer how much a customer stays on for everything some are a little bit less we'll they'll share how many customers they have how much revenue do they have what the bank balances is more people should follow these businesses i for one and pull against that i don't think you should ever reveal that but i'm happy they do and i yeah and so some examples so they're so first of all my friend encore what's on encore last name he runs teachable i don't remember his last name if you go google on can you tell me on encore dot that same founder of teachable okay so he reveals on twitter the valuation of every round what is it knock paul yes nat say it knock paul knock paul he reveals the evaluation of every right every time they just raised like twenty million bucks yeah at whatever two hundred something really good and he reveals how much revenue do they have how many customers they have it's awesome yes i love that the other guy is saw hill sa hill from gum road shitty business it seems like an awesome guy he reveals every single month yeah all the you could google gum road founder sa hill it's on just twitter if you he just he doesn't have a tweet lancer sitting answer you don't even have to dive into the books like yeah here's some forty characters joel from buffer he does this they actually just switch so if you go to bare metrics dot com or google bare metrics they have like eighteen different companies that do this it's pretty cool and joel from buffer used to be on there they're a twenty two million dollar year company so pretty valuable and they would would would everything everything employee salaries like name salary equity you know level everything and you know what they're changing that they're showing less and less because have you talked to him you know why it becomes problematic when you add more people yeah duh so like you know guy you know creates you know turns his kitchen into a man cave instead gets a girlfriend and he's like oh she doesn't like it it's like yeah no shit man like i could've told you this like when you bought the plasma and put it on the fridge grew up yeah people don't like their salary being public what so they still do salary it and they still do equity people get have when they see their coworker who slacks off and works from home two days a week and they see his salary because people don't understand that like different people have different situations it's not like so so they did it i think in a smart way which is they basically were like they use it as customer acquisition yeah it's part of their story because they got their ass kicked by hubspot and so they like alright hoo sweet you know this has become a bit of a playbook for small business to business saas companies which is look you know acquisition of customers is hard what if my customer is a small business owner what a small business what would bring a small business owner to me what content could i put out there that would make a small business owner account so instead of saying seven tips to have more effective meetings they were like here's our here's our p and l for this month and sure enough a lot of people wanted to see that so a lot of people discovered their product through this and so you know maybe this lines up totally with their values and that's why they did but i definitely it was a great way for people to discover their business i didn't use buffer but i read all their shit and if anybody ever needed a solution like buffer i was like oh buffer you should use buffer why because otherwise i wouldn't have even known about them and so this was a pretty counterintuitive thing that they did and they were the only ones doing it and so you always get paid when you're the only one doing it if it's juicy yeah and so and one more person who's doing it and that his business is way better than buffer i love this guy's business so it's my friend nathan barry i've met nathan a while ago and nathan has this company called convertkit they do close to two million in monthly recurring revenue so twenty four million he owns one hundred percent of it right it's probably a hundred to two hundred million dollar company like it's really valuable because once customers are locked in it's basically a mailchimp competitor it's an email that seems high two two million a month you sent that's for that's how much they do so so the do two million no that part that so so twenty four million a year so twenty four million you think they're worth what ten times ten times that okay maybe they're grown like a wheat maybe don't switch from their email platform yeah it all depend on the retention so can you pull up actually can you open open up their their metrics so just it's high just google like like bar metrics dashboard or something i forgot what the url is but it's like something dot bar metrics dot com and it's like their whole company it's here's how many new customers we got here's how many people churn this month it's like all their graphs and you can use it for your company he even showed how much profit they make i think it's like convertkit kit it's it's like yeah here it is you gotta zoom in there you go so this i don't know if this is their business or this is like the example thing but it's like monthly recurring revenue net revenue fees yeah that's not this is somebody else's business you gotta do convertkit kit yeah do convertkit kit bare metrics type been convertkit kit revenue maybe if you can't can't spell i also use convertkit i i actually i pay for a subscription because i'm like this product is so fucking powerful i don't actually have many sequences set up i've i have a sequence of one email right now which is not a sequence it's just an email but i think it's a great product i love convertkit i love nathan nathan is a great guy nathan is only twenty six or seven years old we talked to we talked about the idea of doing a drip sequence to build a newsletter for women going through pregnancy and like week by week and i had a friend or sorry no i have random listener to reach out on twitter was like i'm doing this here's my kind of unique asset i have to go about this and how wish i set this up and i sent him to convertkit i was dude your problem is gonna be solved in like you know the next ninety minutes what are people leaving bare metro something why can't you find it oh here you go one point seven million oh is that it does what's the url yeah so one point seven million monthly recurring revenue and you could just look at the it'll say churn so annual run rate doing twenty million in a year which is up one point seven percent that's gotta be how much this month revenue churn five point one percent per month that's not bad that's not great either well it's because it's a small to medium business like if you're turning five percent a month that's like what's his what's the net growth so five percent a month is the churn what's the new business every month one and a half percent it's one a half percent he's net negative then per month no i think that that churn that that growth month that growth number takes into account churn i see okay gotcha oh okay that's the but this is because it's the the average revenue kinda even says so they make on average sixty dollars is it sixty dollars a month per user right and the thing on the right a medium business gonna have a it's gonna have higher churn compared other saas but dude it if you're if you're a real sick you could just look at the live stream on the right and see every minute when somebody pays them it'll say like right now says twenty nine dollars paid by you know you know anonymous company dude he's got a lot of failed payments here you get on that nathan what's going on you can't be failing three out of the twelve payments here failed four it he has a chart that says which ones failed so these these companies are are badass i so you wouldn't do it no i think what about a part of what you do but email list size the revenue i don't wanna share anything publicly well i'll say like eight figures or right something no i just don't think it brings a lot good either you know when a company trying to raise or sell their business because like two months before all these articles will come out just like handing over to the handing over information yeah why why is that happening because they wanna raise the router they wanna sell their company within in the next six months i don't can you go to the next back to the google doc no i'm not a fan of it at one time when i'm when i did my first conference when i was younger it made like sixty grain in profit and i told everyone in the blog post and i hated the attention so i'm never gonna do that again okay so let's talk about pipe dot com needle pipe dot com i saw this i was do this is awesome i was i came to the i came to a little scratch bed to write it down and you already had it write down okay so here's what here's here's let me set the stage here so when you have a subscription business i'm talking about software subscription but maybe it could work for all types of stuff what happens is you do one of two things the first is you say alright you signed this deal and you owe us two hundred dollars a month and so that is a twenty four hundred dollar a year subscription service and the company that is your customer will pay you two hundred dollars a month what a lot of companies prefer to do but this is actually a lot harder is they say alright you signed one year contract let's get all of your payment upfront right now that here's the balance here is do you want or this is what people think they can either get more customers and allow them to pay monthly right or they can get less customers but allow them to pay annually and get all that cash flow upfront and what what's it called pipe what they do pipe dot com if you have a business like convertkit and they have a history of three years and it says look every month our churn rate historically is five percent pipe can go okay so you have all these customers paying you each month let's just don't know how they discount it but they probably they'd probably discounted it a lot so they d rate risk it and this to say well let's just assume that you're gonna have twenty percent monthly churn right we're just gonna we'll give you all that money up upfront and you owe us as the money comes in with a little bit of interest right awesome awesome business so i've have so many thoughts alright so couple things first the financial infrastructure what's what's really going on here the financial infrastructure for software companies and tech businesses is being rebuilt so we already had invest right angel investors seed investors series a investors blah blah but then you have a bank for startups mercury started by you know some successful founders from hay they started mercury it's supposed to be a bank designed for startups and then you have things like b or ramp which we talked about which is like business credit card designed for startups because the legacy institutions don't understand how to value these companies how to assess risk or how to like fund and finance these companies then you have things that are you know like mark places where you would buy and sell to to buy and sell online businesses like quite like brokerage or wherever you have due diligence firms that pop up that specialize in software businesses like center then you have you know guys like pipe which basically say great you know you have a cash flow problem but you have steady we know you have a predictable book of business we will give you the cash up upfront and we'll take a vague off the top of that and so i think these are all really smart businesses each one at a different part of the the financial stack yes for we software technology fast pay we use it it's it's it's pipe but for media publishers and pipe has raised seventy million in funding they're kind of stupid because we use them and and we have a million millions of dollars in credit from them and we won't leave them because it's a wonderful service but the reason why they're kinda stupid is because the market's a lot smaller right than software and the numbers are a lot smaller right i think pipe will be a multi billion dollar company yeah or or the one problem these or that is there's a lot a lot of competition yeah i think the aggregate will be so for example there's also happening on the customer side right so companies like a firm or says or after pay consumer yeah that's on the consumer side but same same idea which is like they're trying to provide different financial instrument that like the traditional financial company like this the current sort of incumbents aren't really figuring out how do we help e commerce companies sort of how do we help merchants you know turned their their products into monthly payments for their customers but a firm came out and did it and you know fast pay or sorry not fast pay after pay i think after pay is like a eight billion dollar company or something like that in australia a firm is a multi billion dollar company here doing the exact same thing and they're all fighting over these merchants i love this shit i say fuck the big banks i fucking hate them yeah i hate them so much i hate having to talk to our rep they don't understand me right they don't understand what we're doing so ish sean are the producer and editor for the podcast he had an idea so i asked him one day because i you know i have him on a sort of my right hand man so sometimes i just ping him with just random questions i said what's the biggest idea in your head right now i was like you know what's the biggest startup up idea you got and you know he's twenty twenty one years old i don't know exactly how old he is busy young guidance so he goes well i've been a you know freelancer contractor for you and many other people for for last few years and he's like why doesn't a a sort of fast pay or pipe exist for contractors like i have my invoice just give me the money now and then you wait to like when the company pays you take it and you take five percent it's a big idea off the thing and i've actually heard this idea a few times before of like you know my my wife was a in you know a consultant for you know and so she always got paid like this on a thirty or sixty day cycle and she's she would have you know twenty grand sitting in outstanding payments if she could just get the twenty grand you know headache free she would take nineteen fifty you know should take nineteen thousand out of that just to get the money now and not have to keep following up via email to be like hey have you paid it yet and like all that stuff and so the problem seems real and this is more of a question to the audience of like what what am i wrong about what don't i get about this idea like a great idea on the surface what's the problem with this idea because i've heard it band around a a few times over the years it's not a not a like super niche idea i think a lot of people could have this idea so what's wrong with it and i think that you can learn just as much from common ideas that don't work as you can from great ideas that do work if you start to identify why does this seemingly good idea not work why have people tried and failed over and over again there's a lot to learn as an entrepreneur yeah i'm digging that i so hyped dot com's out i'm loving those things yeah one thing hey henry there's a guest downstairs would you mind letting her in and she's gonna join us for like the next segment julia what's up hi how are you doing well thanks for having me already my good books because you actually listen to the podcast not all the guests do as do you might homework work yeah there you go yeah yes that's all i i have a there's a bunch of employee fans great they found out and it was i mean like they've been really gun for me to have a shout out to them do you have like that like corny name for your employees like emily well or literally my god changed that really it yeah well but then everyone was like hey did you just like come up with that because that is not that right and so i think like you know someone better with words just like how about just ever least let me go that's right that sounds much better we've shifted it to that do you guys have this start a hustle do you have like plus or some shit without say no yeah no you're fired actually if you say something like that at hustle no we right this people yeah that we you know with be somebody tried to like do that and i was like think god there's not a nice one because i don't want this no as like a thing yeah bieber that would have been it by the way i'm followed by justin bieber on twitter no big deal real yeah so cross ten thousand followers and justin bieber follows me i dm him he did not reply how many people it's gotta be one of those bots that just filed people they follow i don't know henry justin bieber a number of followers we'll find out the only way this can go is down for me where he follows millions of people it's not a loan number for my friend it's not a ever yeah okay three hundred thousand i'm one of the top three hundred thousand friends of justin bieber so let's just leave it at that have thought i thought the number was gonna be like ten million so the ones okay so it's speaking name so you have so your julia every well is your company name but your name is julia cheek yes that's cool name thank you but i hate my last name and so i'm always thinking like of you know just totally rebranding it to something cool but then i know people will be like did you just change your last name to try to sound cool which is probably the delete cool thing you can do i've got the opportunity to do that yes because i decided i had a choice to do julia taylor made if i wanted to when i got married tate on cheek yeah and it was just where did it you did it u okay great and so for people listening who are were like okay great who's was this person why are they joined in the show give us the like thirty seconds about what's interesting about you yeah so i'm believe chic i'm the founder and ceo of ee well we are based in austin we are about to celebrate our five year anniversary which is hard believe probably the most interesting thing about me starting this company is i started a company in the blood testing space in the direct to consumer space coming with no entrepreneurial background or or health care background whatsoever right and had every kind of x in the box of why you would you were a consultant right i was a management consultant where and i went at deloitte went got my mba had a really traditional harbor had a really traditional corporate seems all about the pe yeah i hate it i don't care sam's like harvard okay i'm in yeah there yeah there's definitely some interesting ties think that turned me on to being an entrepreneur when i was there but certainly like i was really on the corporate path and then had this idea when i was working at money graham and left my job to do it and i can confidently say a hundred percent of people who know me was like i definitely gonna fail there's no way it's gonna so what's the company do yeah so when i was five years ago when i was working at money graham i had a bunch of all these une unexplained health symptoms this is soon common which you hear from women in their late twenties and their thirties as they have chronic fatigue aches and pains they're not taking seriously at doctors and so i went to five or six different doctors on good health insurance and each of them were in different blood tests i never got my results i paid over twenty five hundred dollars out of pocket nothing material showed up or was communicated to me what do mean never got your results you personally didn't receive it person but the doctor looks at even if they called me like i missed the call no ever called they said call different things abnormal well like what does that mean you tested a hundred different things like just because something's is not totally out of whack doesn't mean there's not interesting or useful information there so i sat down and i looked at the health insurance they've even i man people are gonna have to start paying for all this in a more meaningful way than we are today and i'm at least confident that my cohort of women between like twenty five and forty five can't get the testing that they need right and i think i can solve that and it really started out honestly not that it wasn't a big vision but it was a little bit like if you if you think about the first group you're solving a problem for that's what we launched for so today we have thirty five different tests on really dot com on amazon target cvs k we work with human and we offer consumer initiated testing for everything from s testing heart health food sensitivity etcetera basically is it every test it's like ninety percent of common test cover for did you raise money the doctor i've raised over fifty million dollars from five zero you five zero from western east coast vcs that was after obviously having like three rounds of claw my way through right funding and then suddenly things did get easier and we actually grew from zero to see we did forty million in sales last year yeah wow our thirty year operations is that okay no coronavirus but fish pounds for the yeah four for the forty nine for the for the healthcare entrepreneur and we have to have to learn not to do that talk about coronavirus do you guys sell coronavirus yeah you know if we did i think we've i wouldn't be here right now really crazy do something else but but i'm hopeful there's progress as we learned today from gilead and a couple other companies i'm hopeful someone's close on it and certainly so unfortunately are those one time purchases the forty million no i mean it's a combination of new customer acquisition and we have a really healthy repeat business because a lot of our tests are things like cholesterol is that recurring is what i mean it's not recurring we do have enterprise contracts that are recurring got it for medicare right but it's a mix of what i would call one time repeat and then actual recurring contracts which is there's challenges there's good and bad i think when you have a one time heavy business upfront you have to build a good set of unit economics from the get go so that you're not just optimizing on this like promise of feedback right right so that's been good for us on the other hand we've had to be super super disciplined and a way that i think some event right and so you're based out austin you do this d c at home yeah test that then gets sent to a lab a partner lab they analyze it you get the full report it's like here's everything here's what's interesting about this you can share it it's like the way that it should be like if you didn't even you didn't have to like invent this if you just asked a lay person you're like how should this work right that's the description and then you just made that like happen in real life the other thing that's interesting is you were on shark tank i was so as a fan of reality tv means sam both watched the challenge probably the trash reality show the sees a finale of the netflix one of which one no the one where they get married after to living in the room love his blind yeah but didn't it all come out already then they just released today today no i'm i'm at episode three of that one good show it's pretty off pretty good show have you seen it i haven't say it yet do you know the premise i do know the premise say for people in rooms and the they yes so it's actually pretty cool as a six experiment have to get married yeah yeah they half to get meredith or you get cut off the show like literally you didn't even get like eliminated survivor style you just edit you out like you just not show never again if you didn't propose lit ends up happening is it's ten days behind a wall you talk to this person and your speed dating basically behind a wall so you're kinda like deciding who you're like yeah and then someone proposes through the wall so they're like can you come close to the wall please i'm on a knee now and i wanna you know ask you to marry me and then but the thing is that i thought that's where the show would in but then they like put them in the real world together and they're like alright you're gonna get married in thirty days and see what happens and it's pretty interesting stuff okay so good job netflix shout asking her about i shark tank because tell me about how it came about you you applied many times one time how'd did you get on yeah so shark tank was an honestly i am a huge fan of the show i also a huge fan of my own experience and that's not i think what everyone has to say but i always tell people i you you can be a really game changing thing for entrepreneurs come if you do it right way it is a lot of freaking work ton of work really i once you're on or before you're old before you're on okay so i would say like so i we aired in november twenty seventeen go to the beginning had you even know like a nine month process of i would say the year of twenty seventeen eighty percent of my year was just sure i can't the today so we applied it's and by we me it's like a fifty page written application it's online or no it is printed and written now out and i tried to like use a pdf editor it takes forever yeah like you it was like a decade ago so you write this whole thing out rifle this whole thing out i will be honest i was i was a final sentence a tech french battlefield in sixteen the producers scout around gotcha so they reached out maybe so they reached out that's cool so it's kind of like if you're thinking about american idol maybe which i would ever be but you're you either can get contacted a sort of front at addition or you kind of blind line so it's not that i had necessarily a better chance but i did get shortcut into the right process so filled that out the application project is forty hours and then you have to sign all their contracts and basically sign your identity and image way to abc for in perpetuity but and then from there you do a voice interview with producers you do a video interview as well with the application then a another video interview of your pitch and then from there the producers work with you for about four months to get it right like what is your story what is your brand what is your share crazy ultimately your what i think don't realize that a human interest story it's a human interest story you are there to make good reality tv but it is your decision the teachers will help you and advise you but this is your gig and it's up to you to decide how you wanna display yourself in non tv but so do you still remember your not to area do you still remember your opening because you probably drilled it like a thousand times i should i did and i will tell you i thought i was like really good and comfortable at public speaking and then i did this and i was okay i was really bad and now now i i've raise money from them i did so i signed or i shook on the largest deal ever for a female entrepreneur evaluation wow so yeah have with laurie she is on board she's been tremendous because of q or one for me was really at the time we had no brick and mortar retail presence and i knew that that was a priority for us to create a product it was like actually accessible and ubiquitous and that's actually i'd say been a really good move for us but i felt that she would be invaluable and us to get does she help those stores yeah she really helped with packaging and branding and making something that's accessible when you're trying to like sell a testing kit where either people think it's a dna kit right where they have no idea what it is right being able to differentiate that you like ten seconds to how much of a attracted did she right so the deal we shook on was why do you keep saying shook because there's the shay on it and then there's actual deal what's the actual deal i can't disclose that oh however well different yes it was or worse better for the company yeah and it's probably better for laurie and better because why does the deal change so normally there's like they do diligence and they might change it probably for their favor but you're saying it went better for you guys it went better how does it improve after you shake on the deal on the show a fair number of those deals i think it's something like over half never come to fruition at all and then another quarter or so actually change and then another quarter get done at the terms that i had a bunch of friends say they screw yeah the charge i think it grew these sure each shark has a different approach so like i they're totally you then go into their management company right so you're going into mark cuban companies or laurie your nearest companies and so it's not a i don't know what each shark process is i can say lori some super fair they go through very detailed diligence on everything but but you know what this show actually does diligence on you they have venture analyst on board so they run diligence on you before you ever pick what was your valuation that you guys agree don't i i pitched i my valuation was twenty million post money and how much did she invest so that or how much did they agree on whatever a line of credit deal at an eight percent interest rate for five percent of the company and was it like so you know hey deal offer on the spot or do you have this like long pause where like can i think and write this down well in my case every shark was out and i actually knew i wanted either lori or mark sorry laurie or mark cuban and so i was really excited about it and so i really did wanna work with her and it was a good deal so i actually sat on the show because you're supposed to negotiate i said because it makes good tv yes and so i said i know i'm supposed to negotiate but i wanna the steal right so i didn't you do have it is really what you see like you can exit you can talk about it with your partner you can call a life or a friend they may edit that out or whatever else but you can take a minute to think about it well something people don't see or don't realize that is different from having actually gone through it versus watching it what's a what's one difference people know it's edited i don't think people realize how long the actual time filming can be from when you walk in and walk out to like what they edit down to five minutes so it it varies but mine was probably an hour and they added it to seven minutes some people have gone on up to two to three hours summer are fifteen minutes right and so i think you know it's edited to a degree but i don't think realize how much discussion actually happens with laurie investing her own money she is investing her own money so then does she have a fund or is it literally just hers it is a fun structure but it's her capital how work how much you think she's worth you know i don't know i will say she is a prolific salesperson in the sense that like the top three or four companies from shark tank and i mean companies that have done like a quarter of a billion in sales each squad quality yeah it those she it has a relationship with each of those companies and is invested in each of those companies so i suspect quite a bit not to mention her own patent portfolio and the success she's products but great but do those pay cash flow i mean who cares if you i mean it's important but if you own equity in yeah that business not an exit yeah so i don't know where is her cash coming i don't know i don't know i'd be very sam gonna get to the bottom yes i i know green bad checks well and i also don't she takes that saudi money not still is different right so like she doesn't it just like an any b deal is different right she's negotiating a deal with me different i don't know what what terms are you know with the rest of her companies i do know she has put all of these companies on the map from scrub dot to squat pot these companies have incredible consumer she delivers she delivers yeah i've got a swat so you do i'm telling you i think ever seems actually i don't have them but it does seem right i mean it does seem very popular here apparently so so how much traffic did did you're cycle oh yeah so we got this back three years ago it was it was november we would be even better than now because there's more in we watch tv more than right and it aired the night before cyber monday it was thanksgiving weekend just couldn't have been a better day all of my core team they were wonderful they canceled all their thanksgiving was you know a lot of work but what we got about thirty times our normal traffic but we had an interesting experience we didn't have this tremendous like huge spike the night of in terms of purchases but we ended up doing about a million dollars in sales which at the time was a tremendously large number for us in like the four day period after right the show so there's been a little bit of this interesting thing for us that i haven't heard many other companies which is we doubled like we doubled in that week on a run rate standpoint and then we continue doubling the next month and we never had that decline right but we didn't have this spike in like the three hour period that we aired yeah well how much traffic do you know how much traffic it was a million a million unique since put hours yeah so and we did i mean we had to i mean at the time we were not set up for that scale now we we're using job about it we know we where we've always been on on woo converse not woo ecommerce not shopify big converse also we've built on it now and like totally customized it something else not i know but it's one of the big ones it actually i think we should have gone to shopify but we didn't gotcha so i should now i shouldn't name them because it's gonna sound bad right shout out to toby from shopify yes exactly but like to think he's listening yeah so might be we're trying to get them i was gonna say that valuation right yeah that value you know all streams on twitch great guy yeah so yeah so we saw really good traffic increase but it was it was a very different pattern and lori warned us about that she said some companies it's like they sell out a meeting immediately italy and some companies it's just the slow kinda slow so that was what it was with us but we did not crash which was essential do you did you i have a bunch of questions do you have some i have some not about shark tank though i'm in meeting close the chat on shark tank i'm i i know enough about sorry take yeah there may be yeah there may be an upcoming and there so you're become back as one of good glory children potentially potentially we are actually in two years with the number i think we're number ten on the all time bus selling list right number one sw pot socks and then squat pot what's the sock bomb oh well they're on there yeah that got there two hundred and fifty million in sales yeah shit yes i'm wearing bob things yeah have us yeah but i i went on twitter said what's the best sock money can buy when we sold the company i was love i'm gonna buy unlimited of the best sock yeah i was the thing i'd always tell myself that's cool when i make become a millionaire unlimited best socks and bomb bus was like what everybody said love that yeah i love them but i need more that's all too like i ran out in involved yeah yeah i i bought the whatever the like sixty pair or whatever like i think i need like five hundred pairs of socks like laundry you know that's like when the best hacks you could do is when i did was i bought i only have one pair of underwear but i own like thirty of them and one pair of socks that i own fifty of them yeah so i never match socks yeah it's the greatest hack ever yes i've been doing since eighteen should we a on of so i i got a question for you since let's say i buy the product what do i actually do at home when i take this as like physically what is this what do i have to do so this people are often surprise how many people we get to take their blood at home but that's often what it so like most of our testing is prick your finger to draw a small sample of blood summer are saliva summer are you're in but obviously there's a reason why they normally take your blood at a lab it's because you can analyze the most number of markers and the the broadest assortment of markers using blood so it's dried blood spot testing it's like a very frankly old school model your method yes best lab core all of the labs have dried blood spot testing what does that mean in line this means you're just to finger breaking a finger and you're dropping blood onto a several paper right or a treated device that is then the blood has then drying but you guys aren't doing the not we're a you're a middle person we are a middle person which if you were a vc responding to me back in twenty sixteen i was a marketing company right that's what that's gonna say but i didn't want you to take a place the customer relationship so like that's the most important part right and i think you know it's interesting when you're like oh you're just a middle man you're just marketing but i really view us more as okay the labs are our manufacturing partners right you don't buy things directly manufacturers typically right who buy from a brand right who is your provider so we have seven a france partner labs we work with probably the the one that runs the majority of our business is perk and elm which is a publicly traded life sciences company they're huge they're global and they've been really a good partner to scale and they have a lot of credibility they're the worldwide leader in dry blood clot testing right so of the fifty million but everyone grows up wanting to be the world worldwide dry blood spot testing i know that you know what like for us in our space and we're in the medical space it's really important to have that that stamp especially with so all the failures so i really want you to hear sam's thoughts on food allergy you're testing sam yeah i wait i'm excited i what's i think that a lot of them are bullshit yeah am i right or wrong or what do you gonna be yeah i think it depends and we talked about this earlier it's important and it's but they do every test though so do every test it's okay if i don't buy one of them you know it's interesting well first of all so to correct you there's a major difference between a food allergy and celiac disease and then a food intolerance or if few that's what i'm referring to is intolerance okay so but just for you know listeners any get as important because even doctors just say allergy and sensitivity is the same thing i i compare the intolerance test to chiropractor interesting yeah yeah okay i was like i think that it sounds good but but it doesn't work you know it's interesting we have become associated this food sensitivity testing in general has become associated with well which i suppose is like i'm proud of from a brand standpoint but on the other hand it's been going on for over thirty years and there's thousands of doctors that do both g igg g iga testing around the us and most people that you talked to if you've talked to them about food intolerance so yeah i had that done at my epidemiologist i had done it nutrition or at my general practitioner it has to be used in a specific contest context to be valuable and so i do think that is why it's really important that you educate people and out should be used it should be used with an an elimination diet it is not a deal all end all it's a guidance it is something it is our test where we have more people quantitatively say has change their lives than any other test but and there's good research around it for that use but there's not good research around is saying like it's a it diagnoses you with an allergy it can just be used as kind of a black and white guidance of what you shouldn't shouldn't eat that's absolutely not true so i think there's a lot of misinformation i think there's a lot of different types of testing and the nomenclature gets mixed up the things it shouldn't be used for and i think it's great that really well has been known as a brand for that but honestly we're offering a test that has been around for decades and needs to be used in the right way if we can take the lead in educating people and what that should be then we'll do that what category of tests do you think or is the biggest opportunity sec what we call it actual health s yeah and there's several reasons for that one right now our tester are too highly priced because the lab itself is expensive for us to run the test we price roughly right now our single are a really good price between thirty nine and forty nine dollars it's also hsa and fsa covered so for some people that's a great solution but many people for obvious reasons wanna a comprehensive test and that test is i think two hundred who's the leading the leading company in this space for s what s i i guys i keep saying std if str at school high school yeah because they totally transmitted infections is got nomenclature we call it sexual health testing because we think that this is something people should just be active about so who's the biggest in the space for digital for at home yeah it's i would say it's probably us just from branding standpoint there's a couple companies sorry i mean in revenue you guys in revenue file yeah which to be clear should tell you how under services and served this opportunity be like a multi billion dollar revenue business yes this is a multi billion dollar opportunity i'm gonna again if we're gonna rip lots of other people can come into this there's a specific company that only does sci testing but they haven't been well funded they've struggled and we really believe that this is not only how you can invest close public health gaps you also can get people on board to then use testing it for home over their lifetime for any other health issue as well people don't wanna go into a clinic you don't wanna go period right and our solution you actually can not only get your results but then you can diagnose and treat through an independent solution if you have a positive if it's a relevant s sci that can be treat it so it's a full service solution and what you're looking at right now is we have a really good business but if you look at the price sensitivity there's a certain age group that's gonna be willing to pay two fifty if you go get a test versus going to a clinic are you potentially are you acquiring customers profit on first touch or do you hope to do you lose money on them on the first touch and then hopefully come on first touch shop that is for me we're in austin i'm a first time founder we're building a sustainable business we didn't go out and raise money on this premise of just negative contribution margin and then hoping and is what facebook facebook's the main channel or it no way sir well it depends search for different categories that search has a ceiling it it does have a ceiling even when you std tests online you need that shit right now right we're so for that category certainly search is great for us but facebook slash instagram was for a long time our our largest acquisition channel and both by force and by proactively moving away which really diversified which has been a good move for our business tv now or no some tv we've had mixed success with we again because we are on this profitable unit economics from the beginning play we when we can't fully measure attribution an roi on first purchase sometimes it's hard for us to want to invest so we've had to mixed success with tv but we do believe it's important for brand building yeah category education is all that fifty million going into marketing spend no no engineering product clinical a lot of it goes into clinical and medical errors but you're not doing the clinical so what's the is it the kit making sure the kit is as robust as it should be or what well we have a regulatory and compliance team right that ensures that either the lab partners we're working with or new lab partners that we're making sure that they're meeting highest quality standards we're starting our own research studies to prove outcome data which will take time but we think it's really important we do have obviously a healthy paid marketing budget but we're trying to hire more on how around content seo organic and those pieces as we start to actually build out like a healthy marketing and shouldn't not just be dependent on this like paid social right thing that we were in the last few could you bootstrap this no and that i think is a like you would if you could out i would have if i because mean if it's really important question though if you just said like you're a marketing company i'm like oh okay so just white label this thing right do you see it and put this cute millennial pink on it and then just start buying traffic what where's the i mean that's it it that's how simple it sounds what was what were some of the challenges beyond the like you know yeah well for send traffic to landing page and order this like white label product right right so we don't white label we actually fully end to end construct brand our kits and really what the lab does is run the sample that's the goal of the lab mh but there's also a really complex product from an engineering standpoint so not only creating obviously what is somewhat basic an e commerce site but then a results platform that is able to speak with a third party physician network translate lab results that were often really messy and they'd be able to say down in a meaningful way to consumers in five years ago that was not as easy from a like a ux standpoint as as it is today so a doctor interprets all the results an in that position well i couldn't they do something where they just like say like the normal ranges and if you are in range or out a range so like i i use wellness fx and they do a blood test and they just say like you they also need a doctor no shit really it is for regulatory reasons it is to make sure that you basically have a doctor in the process and saying okay i'm made sure that this test appropriate for you i've made sure that if there are critical values so for example if you took test and you had an abnormal you would have a physician call you and talk you through next steps and offer you a telemedicine cost yeah so that wouldn't be right and so there there are checks and balances in place you don't always have to interact with the doctor if it's just a normal result but there's certain like levels escalation and so so when you're at the beginning it is similar to us it's up to home kits and wellness of setbacks really kind of stayed on the quantified self brand and never was able to scale yep business totally fizz yeah wellness fx i thought was it's alright though i use it but it's like that's successful but it's interesting i mean there's been a lot of companies many especially after shark tank i would put it in a two dozen range that launch in instagram create a pretty logo have a kit and then about six months to twelve months later you know never hear from yeah right and it does speak to the power of brand marketing and experience me our n mps is a sixty we have a world class customer base i think in this case first mover advantage really helped us in the category it doesn't cause us to keep winning it mattered a lot here right so i'm not a mps i'm not super savvy with mps but it's sixty grand i thought sixty would be sort of like all the i'm middle all of road you compare it to you got yeah to compare it to others that are similar to yeah for your industry if you're a bank and a sixty mps or the faster like on earth scale if you're a sixty but you're like a movie then like yeah the exact world class to be like eighty or above right so certainly it's below that but i think how we view it as we look at other health care services and most around zero to a negative right don't measure right right and so we feel good about our product rating four and a half out of five stars on average and so we do look at that and say okay this has to be qualified it's a very favorable vc metric one that i think has sometimes limited action ability or limited kind of did data driven decision making around what you do with it but we like it in terms of saying okay just benchmark a good benchmark right so when you were starting this because i'm thinking my sister is a manager consultant my wife is a manager consultant and you have this idea you're sitting at deloitte and you have this personal experience where you know you do this test and you're like this is crappy that's what i'll call like every entrepreneur has the state story which is like you know i was trying to get a test and i just you know was so frustrated and therefore i decided to create a solution and but behind the state story is like you know more of the real story and our our audience is very entrepreneurial and they feel this on a daily basis they have these ideas they also have doubts they wanna vet the idea so tell me like that from the moment you had the idea that first couple weeks you know what was what was going through your mind what were you doing at got you over the point where we're like okay i'm actually gonna do this yeah i think this is important because i it is new real story right i'm like oh i just had this idea and i right you know not a lot moved you moved austin and a new haul all those things are true but there's a few thing my husband and i and our dog but there's a few things that i think are important it's not like i woke up one day and was like oh i'm gonna go do this crazy thing so i did go to harvard and i was in this weird time it was during the recession in two thousand nine when everybody in my class in the class above me were becoming entrepreneurs and so you had rent the runway you had purge box you had guilty fears years before stitch fix oscar i had two unicorn founders in my section alone and at the time grab taxi out of korea and then grabs huge who was oh good okay both in my section right so at the time it didn't feel that unique but i was being exposed to this day in a day out and so i had this kind of road roadmap for how to go about it once i started thinking about becoming an entrepreneur and so i the reality is i probably spent two years on the weekends in my spare time not making any money but going through different industries different business models advising different companies on their business plans and seeing like what would really stick do you have all that research saved i do but it's really like i out to me it's kinda of boring got to me oh know i will will send it but it's it's like i i would be very literal and how i would go about evaluating all these ideas and honestly i really well was probably the craziest and the worst of the ideas for me to go and actually do given my background what about the other ones no i have to it was like travel luxury resale something like what the real real is doing i mean house decorating curation online like all kinds of different spaces where there's probably opportunity in any of you just described what house so you you're you're super shoe pot company ideas to be clear i don't know don't know if i took an idea from them right i if i actually care about that but you know the match with really well was not necessarily one where you'd be like wasn't right it was not obvious but it was the one where i realized really early on this is a decade long thing right so if it actually works you're in it so you did it right away after you did this extra size you sort of started it or not a couple years i mean until i had this health experience in fifteen and then i kind of matched the two together so this was early twenty fifteen i ended up incorporating the company june eighteenth twenty fifteen and then i left my job in august and did you think of yourself as an entrepreneur you said you're on the corporate path but sounds like you had dabble in the idea of being entrepreneur i did you think of yourself that way i didn't both my parents are years i didn't realize one that being an entrepreneur was actually a career choice and a path that you could like become good at as necessarily mean financial success you could be a serial entrepreneur and actually make that a career and i also frankly did have a lot of confidence so it was interesting at harvard because i kinda looked around and thought i think i'm just as smart as all these people who are like really founding successful companies right so maybe i can do it too and i honestly did it just to see if i could do it i never i like i truly couldn't even imagine having made a million dollars in sales and so i'm not sure i necessarily thought about what it would look like today i just thought it was a really big offer unity and something that i wanted to see if i could go do and that was how i made the decision as i thought i'm passionate i think it's a major thing i was in the fintech space and i thought that was already really overs saturated by twenty fifteen tons of apps etcetera and so i knew that this was area it turns out it wasn't about i know it turns out i was a little little around around that but but and and you know i do think wellness setbacks is an example i think they were just ahead of their time they were too early on the curve right i think that the folks started or like scientists or something like that or they're they're in the industry and i actually think that's a weakness you have to kinda be a marketer first or you don't have to be but if it's a consumer you you you you have to have that part of you you gotta be aggressive you have to at you were you were an outsider right yeah for this completely what opportunities have you uncovered where you tell people man just so you know like there's this huge problem in this industry i think it can be solved and what are adjacent things observed because i'm a total outsider but i but but when i hear about the these type of businesses i'm like it's like it's if you can like solve a a handful of problems it's so easy to crush it price transparency which may seem obvious and i think there's a lot of companies that talk about in healthcare care doing price transparency but they don't actually do it and even the digital startups trying to do it they can't actually tell you what something will cost in health care so we just go outside of insurance so that we can actually tell people what something will cost but if you were able to do this in a really big way and say hey we can accurately tell your cost commitment for the service i think you would crush it what within the insurance system within insurance interest but i think there's a much much larger growing acceptance of consumers are happy to pay for something in health care as long as they know what they're gonna get and what it costs right and so i don't know that it has to be with interest have this hsa and fsa space that's exploding in terms of people on fsa and hsa plans and then what they're using those dollars for i think there's an interesting play there and what does that look like what's an example like if you started it of a company throw brought a half baked yeah oh that's okay that's what we do man if you could be a so if you had physicians as you said okay i'm going to have you pay fifty dollars anytime you see the physician we're gonna own a pharmacy and any of your drugs are gonna be transparent priced and you can't use a coupon everything is the same price and it's all generic and then if you say okay and then i wanna be able to get you know testing done and then they can tell you the pricing on that but here's a problem with it you have to actually own the supply chain and the service these should be vertically you have to be vertically agree to do this because it's other otherwise fucking a nightmare i know but my plan is almost build the system external to the system right and you can do this at affordable pricing and reason health care is so expensive is because you're adding cost to the system through the insurers right and those contracts and you get the bills you're getting the bill for whatever they didn't wanna cover but that was intended like the provider build the insurance company what they hoped the insurance company would pay not at all what it costs what else it just have to be let be help here care it could be whatever competing personal you discovered along the way for example only started our company we realized that like paying freelancers is i was like wow didn't realize how hard that was so like along the way where you've like where you're your entrepreneur are you the type to eat do you notes ask come of and get solved so for example like three years ago two years ago on on black friday we had a bunch of compliance limits with our banking system on spend in facebook so i was like gosh i wish there was of products where you could actually get like a cash dance advanced or social media app what are you using for that now now we're big enough to where we don't have to use a product like a b but we just started talking about or like clear like jeremy it right so but at that time if those solutions have been around we absolutely would've been able to take advantage of them and said of course they came out i was ago that we've been a really good idea but we really hit a bunch of challenges with that and it it really can bring down businesses and then i think you know other places are how do you make like as as you think about doing a start up i mean the amount of time you spend on contracts and hr and legal and temp digitizing i mean there's so much cost in the system that i would love to take out of in health care and highly regulated industries it's really hard to do things quick dirty and cheap and it's un so what do you guys use for your company's health or your company's hr system for our system like pay i mean velocity pay velocity he's really like we used to use gust but these really kind of heavy clunky systems that look like they're you know for fortune five hundred companies and there's nothing great between like gust and then the next step up that you need for all of your right this administration people all and why do you use that why yeah versus augusta yeah because the services start they couldn't get all the functionality it's like more sophisticated more enterprise yeah it's more enterprise did the jump between like hey you're less than fifty people to like hey we need something much more sophisticated and scalable is and and that's because you're paying all these physicians what that's an independent network but we are paying all of our people and we have about so these intimate physicians are they doing this on the side of their normal practice are these freelancers or typically not yet they work for another company they're typically summertime ninety nine but yeah between these structures and there's a lot of these structures be it a normal telemedicine company or these kind of separate entities and they typically are either full time employees like doctor and demand entirely employed all their doctors right or some of them so like him is using one of these third parties to employ doctor i don't know if they're using a third party or if they have their own but those third parties exist those are those third parties exist that's a are you in or out on the him row and you're in i'm in okay heavily oh nice and you know i think they've done especially ro has done a nice job of publishing their decision making criteria around prescribing and how they weigh risk and how they have i think responded to a lot of the criticism in this space those companies are good for us because people still don't realize that you can get a medical product whether it's a prescription or a test consumer initiated it online and have it at home and so it helps just say yeah goes to done yeah i did my eye test at home you know because why would i wanna go to the eye doctor if i could put my phone ten feet away simple contacts and so the first time you do that you're like okay cool yeah i'm not gonna leave home if i don't have to so next time i have a problem great food sensitivity let me let me use another at home product i do think it's a lifestyle yeah and and for me like i'm on one of the hers face for or red prescription for skin skincare for wrinkles and not just saves me time for having to go a dermatologist where they're trying to get a mail order pharmacy to get me to reorder anyway right be clear it's not like him and hers created some model that's how physicians well this they're a marketing company too yeah for sure i just we were talking about have you heard a legacy it's for sperm company you like that or not oh it's a this is a controversial one because of the marketing practices would imply that there's more of an issue than there is mh what's does that mean that's like on we we we diagnose you with the problem and then you buy our solution well they just store your sperm too though oh i think the the concern in the health space around this particular problem has been the percent of men that actually need this is so minuscule but their advertising practices make claims that make it sound but why wouldn't you wanna store your sperm if it costs so so this is where so here's what we believe is really well so for example we get a lot of questions around well like how dangerous is it for people to be over testing their cholesterol well my opinion is you can buy as much coca cola as you want on the shelf if you're over eighteen you can buy as many cigarettes as you want and those things actually do you harm and you still have independent thought and agency of making those decisions and so cholesterol testing or sperm freezing if that's what you wanna do and you're gonna pay for it then that's your right to do it and so i'm i'm with you but i think you have to then still have a fine line like we have to be as ever really well as him and ro and legacy all these companies it be super careful the claims you're making and how how kind of what scare tactics you're taking for people to wanna buy it because there is going to be some backlash eventually from the ftc and there will be some regulatory kind of engagement on this it's just lagging right now and that's what happens with regulations they catching up later i love those businesses because i can't imagine having it go the doctor and do that yeah like this just sucks yeah so it's pretty bad that's good i mean and that's that's exactly what the model differ that's exactly why when i talk about the opportunity with sd sci testing i think it's same with that huge it's because people don't that you actually what whatever what i doing in general is we're getting people to comply with something they don't wanna do otherwise so like forty per you wanna you wanna get tested but you wanna be like hey i i'm doing yeah not just sci people just don't get it done right the requisition from their doctors so particularly man exactly yeah so the assumption the data shows about forty percent of that doctor's issue never get completed so yeah i treated it like a suggestion it's like oh i i should do what this says i have to take business away from loud park request we just have to help people actually get done what they need to right and on top of that you know that'll obviously i think make the private as well what's the most common s t chlamydia oh gosh i actually don't know for mister tis but i think it's chlamydia are you guys we couple those together and that's our that's our top selling it's chlamydia so everybody yeah who's listening we want you to get your self tested for chlamydia go to ever well dot com yeah dot com yes and order your test today julia chi thanks for for coming do you wanna give people a way to follow you find you know hang out with you more how how should people get more of these thoughts jess julia t cheek on twitter and private on instagram i'm trying to do that yeah brett yeah feel free alright thank you for coming by appreciate it thank you