Digital Social Hour - His Snoring Led To His Wife Divorcing Him | Alex Neist Digital Social Hour #88

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Alex Neist talks about how he started Hostage Tape and scaled it to a multi-million dollar brand. Alex also reveals the health benefits of taping your mouth at night. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/digitalsocialhour/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Woo, saucy! Zaxby's. So when we're breathing through our nose, like near our sinuses there, we have something that is producing nitric oxide for our body. Nitric oxide is also the same s***, man, that's going to make your d*** hurt. Niagara. Really? Right.

Wow. So you get older guys who if they're breathing through their mouth because they're not producing as much nitric oxide in their body wow that could be a reason for that my snoring was so bad that it really ripped my family apart and led to divorce i do it ripped my family i gotta i went through a divorce because of your snoring no way let me explain why they leave us for anything Go host Wayne Lewis. What up, what up?

And our guest today, Alex Neist. How's it going, guys? How we doing? Good to be here. Doing well. This is the hostage tape. You got it. Hostage tape.

And the no strips now. I'm sporting. I'm doing my Hermosi, right? I've got my nose strip on and uh yeah so what does the nose strip do exactly so what the nose strip does is it opens up the nasal passages just to help encourage that nasal breathing even better because somebody like myself i've got a small little nose so having that extra help, can make a pretty big difference. Really? I always wondered why Hermosy worked. Yeah, he loves wearing those things.

Now, with using that, let's say you use it every day, but when you don't use it, do you feel the difference? Is it addicting? It's addicting because if you're somebody who's active, like I usually go for a run every other morning. I run like four hours or four miles right every other day i do this sauna every day so when i'm doing those things it's really noticeable if i'm getting good oxygen in or not right that's when i notice it the most uh so

i i love wearing it and it feels good but then when i'm not wearing it if i'm just sitting at my desk i don't notice it okay for sure because you know some some products like your body gets so used to using it so when you're not using it it's kind of like you're forced to use it even if you don't want to yeah well it's like wearing mouth tape right you when you sleep with your mouth open like we do you it's something that we just have to keep wearing you might think a lot of people think that you can train your mouth to stay closed so that you can eventually not wear it but i think for most of us the older that we get i don't think that's the case i think you just have to continue to do something to keep your mouth shut yeah yeah so i found you guys on a youtube ad like three

months ago hit you guys up i'm, I was kind of skeptical at first. I'm not going to lie. I feel like that's the word. Why? That's the most common word. Anybody that sees it is like, I'm skeptical. No way. Why though?

Why? Because it's tape on your mouth. Yeah. So this is the package that it comes in. So that's the pouch that it comes in. So we ship the pouches. It's got 30 single use strips in there. You can open them up.

So no, those are the mouth strip, mouth tape. So while you sleep, you put it on. Okay. Yeah. I was skeptical. Oh, okay. And then I started using it and I would wake up feeling different. Like, I'm not even kidding.

I would feel better in the morning. For real? I sleep with my mouth so open, dude. Do you? I don't know. i don't know i don't know okay that's the thing is a lot of us i don't know a lot of us we don't know because when you're asleep you're asleep right i wouldn't know yeah you don't know until you have a partner who's like get the out of the room yeah which is what happens to most of us and what certainly would happen to me. You snore.

With my story. Like, you know, it's the origin story of why I came up with this was my snoring was so bad that it really ripped my family apart. Damn. And led to divorce. Is that bad? I do. You said it ripped my family apart. I got it.

I went through divorce. Because of your snoring. Yes. Yeah, right. Yeah. No way. F*** you not. Let me explain why. Because of your snoring. Yes. Yeah, right. Yeah. No way. F*** you not. Let me explain why.

They leave us for anything. Now, here's the kicker. Right. We're back together now. Because you stopped snoring. I don't snore anymore. Now, certainly, like, we were able to rekindle relationship. Yeah, other things.

So here's the thing. Let me explain why. So, you know, the Gottman Institute talked about this. They've researched couples for years, right? And one of the things that they looked at was, okay, for every negative thing that happens, it's a one to five ratio. So if one bad thing happens, you have to have five positive interactions to offset that. So imagine that when it comes to snoring. It creates a snowball effect.

So you snore, kicks your wife out of the roomore kicks your wife out of the room kicks your girlfriend out of the room or you now she wakes up shout out to today's episode sponsor hostage tape man this stuff's good bro i know i last night i slept with my mouth open i really needed it did i hurt it even uh the increased blood pressure dude it's got a lot of health benefits for sure i've even used it and slept like five, six hours, and I felt so refreshed the next day. When I do that with out-of-mouth tape, I feel terrible. Yeah, it stopped me from snoring too.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I can't wait to get the finished results because I know I actually took a B4 pic, and I want to see what the results are in a couple weeks. I'm going to face changes. Yeah, I've seen some nasty photos of people with, like, fat jaws before. Yeah. And then them using tape.

And it just, everything lines up. It looks so chiseled afterwards. It's actually crazy. Yeah, I can't wait. I'm excited. But I definitely use hostage tape a lot, bro. Yeah. People that are struggling to sleep and, you know, feeling exhausted and snore.

I'd definitely try it out. It's pretty cheap, too. Yeah, and it's really comfortable too it's really very really flexible you just kind of slide it on there we go well there you have it guys hostage tape shout out to them link will be in the bio check them out or she doesn't sleep at all and she resents you that builds up she hates you all the other awful stuff that happens right then one negative turns into two the next morning then three four and five so now think about that five means you have to have 25 positive interactions to counteract that so that one snoring issue snowballs into

so many other things so that's why yes snoring is a catalyst for it which then turns into all these other things okay so in my case i pushed her into the other bedroom like most men there's a lot of men out there just like me who are in their 40s and this is the case they might be sleeping in the other bedroom or their wife is so i pushed her into the other bedroom and then the intimacy just disappeared the resentment built and then just all these other things started to pop up in the relationship that just and then we got a separation and then a divorce so then i moved out and it was at the time that i moved out that i looked at myself and i said okay what do I need to do to improve as a man, as a father?

Because we've got two kids. But then also, how do I improve my sleeping? Because most people like us who we slept with our mouths open and we snored, you kind of don't think there's anything wrong with it, you know? And we think that snoring may be okay, but it's not okay. You shouldn't be snoring. That's not normal and it's not a good thing so i went on amazon like most people right you go on amazon you try to look for what kind of a device or mouth guard is going to work yeah they have a mouthpiece they have a whole bunch of

uh there's tons of them you can find so many different like mouthpieces that you know you get it you put it in the boiling water you put it in your mouth you burn yourself doesn't work too well i can't sleep with nothing in my mouth yeah i don't i've never tried it doesn't sound comfortable yeah yeah well a lot of the ones they make is they they keep your mouth open actually because the point of those is to push your jaw forward because the theory is you push your jaw forward so then you're not closing the airway in the back right but what that ends up doing is for a lot of people it keeps your mouth open so then you end up still breathing through your mouth and then it doesn't solve the problem and then you're drooling all over your pillow right so that didn't work so

it sent me down this rabbit hole of all this other research to find out all right what's really going on here and i stumbled across an article written by James Nestor. James Nestor wrote a bestselling book called Breath. If you haven't read it, you've got to read this book. And in the book, he actually talked about an experiment that he did. He went to Stanford Medical Center. And they did this experiment where they plugged their nose for 10 days. And they were going to record both you know scientifically and anecdotally

what happened so over that 10 days they developed like extremely awful snoring sleep apnea like awful dangerously low levels of like blood oxygen that once they pulled the plugs out they taped their mouths and they breathed through nose. Everything went away within a day or two and they were healthy again. So when I read that, a light bulb went off in my head because I I've been a high level athlete my whole life. Like my background is I played quarterback. I was, uh, I made it to a professional level known as arena football. I wanted to be the next Kurt Warner. I didn't make it. Okay. So I diverted and then I became an entrepreneur and I started some businesses. But that whole time, my whole life, nobody ever taught us that mouth breathing and nose breathing with this thing. Like we didn't

know. Right. So I, I'm in my forties, a high level athlete, not knowing that I should have been keeping my mouth shut when I'm sleeping. Right. And only breathing through my nose. And so I could not believe that this was new information to me. So he talked about mouth taping and I thought, is it really this simple? This sounds so crazy. Like you said it earlier, skeptical. Yeah. Right. Which is what most people's reaction is. So how does it work? Yeah. So our tape, you just pull it and you pop it. Okay.

Okay. And now here's a big differentiator with why our tape is what it is. It's flexible. Okay. Yeah, it is. Yeah. So cover a big lip like mine. So, well, when you do it, what you want to make sure you do is you kind of push your lips inward a little bit right and then you put it on yeah okay right exactly there you go

so now we design this to be comfortable and strong all right because most people think it's it's tape right how is that any different than just regular paper tape? Well, the problem with regular paper tape, it's really rigid and it's not comfortable at all to have on. So we're going to cover this part of your mouth, this part of your body that is very fight or flight and you have a reaction. We wanted it to be the most comfortable tape on the planet that you're not going to have a reaction to it so it's comfortable it's flexible secondly it's got to be strong because a lot of men wear facial hair right and a lot of regular tape doesn't hold the best with beards or mustaches and all this stuff that's that's there right yeah but it's also got to be strong enough to hold strong jaws because i know for me even if I put just a little bit of strip

of tape, which some people do, it doesn't hold. I needed to cover my whole mouth. Right. And also to even for like people who wear CPAPs, like these are great for CPAP. What's a CPAP? So CPAP is when people have like a sleep disorder, like a sleep breathing disorder, like sleep apnea, where their breathing stops periodically throughout the night. So it's like what you and I have, but at a much worse level. And most people who are overweight have sleep apnea, where they'll wear a mask that then is assisted breathing. So they get these tubes that like kind of blow air into their nose that help get them the air that they need but the issue with that though is a lot of people who wear

cpaps don't keep their mouth shut so then the machine doesn't work as well as it could it's just blowing in and out so then they need to really keep their mouth shut and so the tape helps them do that too right but um but yeah so that was kind of the origin of mouth taping was like oh my gosh i got a mouth tape so when i did it the first time i'd love to hear your reaction too but when i mouth tape for the very first time i was anxious right putting tape over your mouth makes you go wait am i gonna wake up yeah am i gonna it feels almost stuff well i thought it felt would feel suffocating just yeah it doesn't um but so when you're asleep no the better question is what about during the day yeah like what wearing this on your mouth during the

day what are you practicing at at that point are you just focusing on just uh nose breathing yeah so so there's a couple of things to think about during the day one is well number one we shouldn't be mouth breathing at all unless we're talking or eating that's the only time we should be so when you start to mouth tape you start to become very aware of what you're doing during the day so when you're sitting at your desk we're working you start to become aware of oh i should shut my mouth because a lot of us tend to go like this and we don't realize it yeah so you become more aware of that but then also we've got a lot of people who wear when they work out they'll put

mouth tape on on a run or at the gym to again really encourage that nasal breathing right because let's talk about why nasal breathing and mouth breathing is so different yeah let's talk about the science behind this because this is really fascinating and i'll keep it really simple so there's this relationship to oxygen and co2 that's important and what most of us don't know is that co2 is way more important than we think so what happens is is the more co2 we have in our body that triggers the release of oxygen into our muscles to be used for energy okay so that important distinction means that if i'm mouth breathing i'm exhaling so much air at a faster rate that i'm getting rid of too much co2 so i'm lowering the amount of co2 in my body which then means my body doesn't have enough to trigger

oxygen release so then I'm not actually getting enough oxygen energy into my muscles okay but here's the thing you feel better like you feel like when you breathe through your mouth that you're getting everything you need because as the co2 level in your body lowers your air hunger your feeling of needing to breathe lowers so you feel better even though it's a mind right so now nose breathing that slows your breathing down so now you're not exhaling as much co2 so it's keeping a good level of co2 than to have that trigger of oxygen getting released in your muscles wow

so that's a really kind of simple example of why this and this is so different. Okay. So running. So that feeling we feel when we're running to breathe out of our mouth is not the correct way of breathing. No, not at all. Now, okay. Here's the thing. There are certainly times where if you're seriously going after it, you might need to open your mouth and breathe and definitely gets more air in.'s certainly a time for that okay but for the most part no no for the most part you want

to be breathing through your nose wow and what does that does what does it do for the lung size does it does the lungs expand more are your lungs getting bigger because you're using your nose well you're definitely you're able to fill your lungs up and keep more air in there. So another thing is because I'm governing how much I'm breathing in and out now, I'm able to get air in and keep more air in there longer. So then it's not going in and out so fast. Again, so that your body can actually use it and trigger it. So all of us are lacking in the exercise area. Here's a couple more things on that, right?

The other thing is, so the air that we take in, and so like when you have your mouth open at night and you feel like your mouth is dry and you just feel like shit when you wake up, well, it's because this air that we're breathing in right now, when it goes into our mouth, it's cold, it's dry, it's dirty with all sorts of bacteria and like just other in it that it goes into our lungs and our lungs can't use that that very well okay so

when it goes into our nose it's going up through these turbinates right these mechanisms in our nose to number one get filtered from the hair and the mucus so it filters out all the right it's like filtering dirty water into clean water that can be used better it's like a burrito totally right totally like that and then also it's humidifying it and warming up the air so that when it gets into our lungs our lungs can actually use it better and it's more efficient to turn that into oxygen that we can use for energy. Wow. Right? Now, one more thing. Nitric oxide.

So when we breathe in through our nose, like near our sinuses there, we have something that is producing nitric oxide for our body. Nitric oxide is also the same shit, man, that's going to make your dick hard with Viagra. Really? Right. Wow. So you get older guys who if they're

breathing through their mouth they can't get their dick up right because they're not producing as much nitric oxide in their body wow that could be a reason for that so now closing your mouth helps you produce nitric oxide for your body which definitely helps that thing and just helps all these other things in our body that needs nitric oxide production. It's insane. I didn't know. So if I wanted to practice just while I'm up using this, what would be the time frame? Is it one hour, 30 minutes, two hours? I can say if I just go on the walk.

My walk is usually an hour and a half. So you could do it on the walk. I think that would be a great time to do it. So I think what's important about that is for for people who are new to mouth taping. Yeah. And are anxious. Yeah. That's a good time to go.

OK, I'm going to go on a walk or I'm going to sit down and do some emails. I'm going to put some tape on my mouth to help ease my anxiety. Right. So do that then it helps you feel better because we'll get a lot of people who they'll subconsciously rip it off at night because they're anxious about it me oh did you do that a few times yeah yeah i'll just wake up without it on i'll be like what when did i take that off yeah because you probably early on the first few days you wore it, you probably just were like that

and didn't realize it because your body is thinking fight or flight because you have this thing on your mouth. Yeah. So on a walk, doing emails, and then after a few days of wearing it, you're going to feel much more calm about, oh, okay, I feel good. And the tape itself, it's the strongest comfortable mouth tape on the planet man it's gonna feel good what about sauna what's that sauna yeah totally sweat kind of peel it off or no um excess sweat can definitely start to peel off the edges but i wear my nose strip in the sauna

every day and then i'll go and i'll do a workout and I'll go do a run. And it's still as, you know, it's still on here really good. And how does this change your face? That's a good question. Because it does, it will change the structure of your face, right? So what changes the structure of people's face is the mouth breathing. So it's definitely more of an issue on younger children. So if you have a younger child who is mouth breathing at night and they're constantly doing this then over the course of you know their whole younger adult

life because their their skull and their their face is still growing yeah right that that can drastically affect how their skull and their face and everything looks as we get older it's a lot harder to change your face but it certainly helps right it can certainly help like posture right people who tend to mouth breathe they might like put their head forward and like sulk their shoulders whereas if you breathe through your nose you'll have a tendency to stand more tall with your shoulders back more wow wow so i mean there's so many questions so um it's pretty it's yeah it's very crazy yeah and i love the word you used earlier with people being very skeptical but i think the biggest thing i would say to people is just try it yeah it's something you could easily try with any any tape you have at home for right now but i think i think at the end of the day it's identifying if you mouth

breathe at night because if you don't okay well then mouth tape's not for you most people do though i feel like the older you get yes i'm starting to think so uh so there's like a bunch of health benefits and nose breathing over mouth breathing. Oh, it's insane. And the bad breath and tooth decay for mouth breathers, right? Right. So what happens there is when you sleep and you have your mouth open, you have a bunch of bacteria, like good natural bacteria in your mouth that's good right so when you leave it open all that stuff gets killed and then your mouth dries out and then your bad breath goes off the charts and then that also affects your your

teeth so then your teeth start to decay and so dentists will be one of the people right who they'll they'll tell you you should mouth tape more dentists will encourage people to mouth tape than i think other medical professions that i've seen just because they're working on the mouth more than anybody and so they're definitely people who um of all the people that reach out to me like on instagram because our instagram's gotten pretty big now yeah that if everybody that reaches out we get the most dentists really say i love what you guys are doing this is fantastic can i get hostage tape to be able to give to people in our in our practice wow so and then as far as athletes football players basketball players boxers how do they

benefit from it from a training standpoint well how does it work for them i mean being a former player myself i mean i can attest to this i played my whole career and i didn't even know the biggest thing here is recovery right from a sleeping perspective yeah so i think too many athletes ignore sleep and ignore how much recovery, like how important that is for recovery for them. Right. Right. And so by actually breathing properly, now they're getting the rest, the recovery that they need to be able to get up the next day, go train, go play and be able to perform. I think that's the most important thing, at least from the mouth taping part of it but then like during the day if they're training or you know playing a game or whatever if they're using nasal strips right like our hostage nose strip to open that up now they're getting more air in

better air in uh from their nose and how are you able to go about the marketing because i see you guys on social media everywhere a lot of businesses struggle to market their product how were you able to go about the marketing? Because I see you guys on social media everywhere. A lot of businesses struggle to market their product. How were you able to pull that off? So I think, well, let's talk about the name, Hostage State. Because I think that's one of the biggest questions that people ask is, why the hell would you call it Hostage State? Yeah.

Right? It's a thumb stopper. And that's why we did it. So I love Liquid Death. a thumb stopper and that's why we did it so i love liquid death i loved their approach to how they did this anti-marketing concept of getting people's attention and they have a bigger mission of what they're trying to do just like we do right so i knew that the the really the story goes back to when i first started mouth taping i used to warn my kids that and anybody else around me that hey i'm going to put some tape on my mouth when i go to bed you know it's going to look like i'm being held hostage so don't freak out so i'm like okay well the obvious is that we look like hostages when we're wearing

tape that's the obvious right but the other side of the coin is actually we're tapping in to this core emotion that people feel. Your girlfriend or wife feels held hostage by you. You feel held hostage by poor sleep and you don't know what to do. Right. So it's feeling held hostage by this thing. Right. And we knew people are going to see hostage and they're going to go what the is this right it's going to get their attention and it's going to be memorable right and it's

very polarizing so we're going to get people that absolutely love the branding play and are attracted to us and then we're going to get people who hate it and that's good that's what we want right a great brand attracts all the great people that we want to represent us. And then it's going to get rid of all those other ones that don't want to be it. Gotcha. So just being kind of controversial basically is what you think helped out? Very, yeah, very controversial. And then what we started to do was really lean into this gary v method of creating content so my co-founder ben he is our creative so i knew when we started this that i needed to have the media side of it be part of it i wasn't gonna farm it out to an agency okay we're gonna be part of who we are right so that we're always creating content in-house because it was everything we needed

that was how we were going to grow and continue to do we had to do because i'm nobody i'm not like you know alex harmosi or like some other big person that everybody knows or is getting plenty of organic reach right so we're creating at least five pieces of content every day that we're putting out on all of our platforms so we're putting all those out and then we stack them and we stagger them. So they kind of look like different pieces, even though we're doing the same pieces, just staggering when we post them on all the different platforms.

And then I learned how to do Facebook ads myself. So me being an entrepreneur, I looked at Facebook and I said, this is how we're going to scale from a marketing standpoint, because this is where everybody, it's the best place to do it, right? It's the best dollar spend that I can get. So I wasn't going to farm that out too. I was going to learn it. So I learned how to do Facebook ads in six months. And then I just scaled the hell out of it and so we started spending six figures wow a month you spend six figures a month we spend high six figures a month on facebook ads and that's why

you and many other people are like i can't stop seeing these hostage tape ads because they're everywhere i get it on youtube actually a lot people underestimate the power of uh social media marketing yeah yeah well it's because they don't understand how to do it like facebook ads is complex yeah to a point but then once you learn it it's easy yeah yeah yeah agreed you know so there's just that base foundation of understanding it and then um but then also too it's scary for people when you think oh my god I'm gonna spend thousand dollars a day but it's like yeah we spend thirty thousand dollars a day but I know what we're gonna get back on our ads yeah on the ROI is like you make you make your money right back yeah as long as you know that right and you know I

know what I'm gonna get back right on my ad spend and I know how that's gonna translate down the road on like LTV because at least for us this is a it's a product that people buy and use it every night and guys like us I mean we're gonna be using hostage state for so you're foreseeable future so yeah it's a very evergreen product yeah and what's the actual cost for and many did it get? Very low. It's a very – we have about – I'll put it to you this way. We have about 80% gross margin on this. Wow.

And then after everything else is said and done, we're about 50 to 60 net. Holy crap. Those margins are insane for e-commerce. So how much are people actually paying for it? So if you buy one pouch, it's $25. Okay, for a pouch. For one pouch. And there's 30 in there.

One month supply. So one month supply, right? One a day. And then what we do is we actually bundle them all together in a bunch of ways. So really, a lot of people will come on and they'll buy a month on supply with the idea of like, OK, is this going to work? I got to try this out. And we tell people, look, you've got a money back guarantee. So there's no risk.

You can try it out. So they try that out. And then if they're doing like we've got a quarterly subscription where they'll get three pouches every three, four months. Or a lot of people buy in bulk. They'll buy a year's supply. Because I severely discount the unit price of them. If you're going to buy a year's supply of it, it's totally worth it. I think at that point, $15, $16 a pouch for a year's supply versus $25 if you just bought a month's supply. And then with... Subscription-based subscription based yeah we do have a subscription but believe it or not what we're seeing so we had

a subscription on all of our products all of our bundles right but we found when we removed the subscription on the yearly so we have a month month try, a quarterly subscription, and then a bulk year. When we remove the subscription, more people are buying. Really? Yeah. So more people are buying now knowing that I think there's a stigma around subscription

being charged. I think people are the objective of monthly payments that people kind of stray away from. I think they need to change the word from subscription. Yeah, they might have to. Yeah, subscription sounds so like money every month. I think it's just like become a crew member or become part of the squad.

I think because we've packaged it in a year and we've increased the aov right but we've it's such a good value for them that i like that and i'm keeping it simple like i don't want to give them too many options making it too complicated because you know like you've got too many options a lot of times people freeze they don't know what to pick then so and are you going with the approach of sticking with your core products or you're going to release future products? Yeah, we've got more products. And certainly this nose strip is our next big release. And so it just came out, I think, last month.

And I mean, we've already almost sold out of these already. In fact, I mean, we've even sold out of our Malte twice this year already. Like none. Yeah, twice. Wow. sold out of our mouth tape twice this year already like none yeah twice wow so i've had to i mean i buy i get 20 000 units 20 000 pouches a week of these things coming in wow but then i've got the no strips now and um what's happening is so people are buying mouth tape and then they're adding on no strips because they're they're seeing the value of oh keeping my mouth shut and then also helping increase yeah i'm gonna start wearing the no strips now yeah i've got a bunch for you yeah i'm excited to try those out

um i might have so many questions you can i can see you got the gears i know there's so many questions people like this is when it when it comes to this product because it's so unique and i've never like seen it before and me even trying it i can kind of feel myself more so focusing on the nose breathing versus the mouth so you don't even realize how much you're actually breathing out of your mouth throughout the day or just in general you know i used to do it a lot man yeah without noticing my girl would tell me i'm like what like during the day you just be like while i'm working while i'm playing basketball well i still do it during fall i feel like it's hard not to during it's hard yeah if you're like seriously trucking up and down the court there's a point where like

you kind of have to but try it i i challenge you that next time you get out there try keeping your mouth shut as much as you can really during the game you just see wow i can't imagine running though because I used to be a distance runner. Okay. And I breathed through my mouth the whole time. So what I noticed when I started to learn how to really breathe through my nose when I would run, because I run about four miles every other day in the morning, I developed a cadence of how I would go.

And so when I have a cadence of like that, then it helps me keep it like on track with my steps. Okay. Because otherwise it's hard to find a cadence where you feel like, oh my God, I can't do it, you know? Yeah. So how does this help with singers? Singers?

Yeah, singers. I think for singers, it probably helps you not dry your mouth out and dry your throat out. That's probably where I think it would help there for sure. What's next for you guys? We're just continuing to scale, man. We're growing like crazy. And certainly, we've got a lot of opportunities certainly we've got a lot of opportunities of, I've got a lot of investors coming at me.

I've got a lot of high level, like influencers coming at me who want to partnership or be a part of the business. Some of them I won't name, but I've got some people who like, they absolutely love what we're doing and want to be all in on it. But honestly, we're just going to continue to keep scaling,

keep going where we're going. And the sky's the limit i love it so you own 100 still yeah so it's so my partner and i ben we're 50 50 partners so we're we bootstrapped it i used the cash that i got from my previous company that i had sold and so completely bootstrapped no outside money but did it cost a lot to bootstrap at first i mean relatively speaking like to most people yeah yeah but for for most of us business guys it was you know normal amount of money just to get started get enough inventory get enough spend on facebook to get it rolling and then I think fortunately for us, it was lightning in a bottle with the branding of what we've created. Because I think that's what we have is, yes, we have an amazing product.

We have a product market fit. I think absolutely with the mouth tape. But it's this branding that we picked that I think has really hit with people. And then we just really took off from December to February is when it really skyrocketed. This year? Yeah. So we launched in March of last year.

So we've only been around for a month, I'm sorry, a year, and two, three months now. Wow. And so those first few months, you're trying to figure it out, and you're making mistakes, doing different things. and then when we finally figured out our facebook um ads and that method then it really just took off and then you started seeing it everywhere so what what other parts of the body do you feel like you're going to make products for so i think we're without kind of rebuilding any of we're focusing on sleep, really.

Okay, okay. Yeah, so anything that's like our primary focus is how do we improve people's sleep in a very non-invasive way? You know, that doesn't mean spending a shit ton of money on surgeries. Or what are some small, easy wins that people can do to improve sleep? So we do also have a blindfold. It's called our hostage blindfold that you can add on and use and we'll have other products too that who knows maybe we'll have some you know earplugs maybe we'll have some kind of blankets how does the blindfold help so you were saying earlier how you like things pitch black i mean right in my house i don't like hearing anything gotta be silent so huberman talks about this a lot of and even matt walker of how we have to keep darkness keep our eyes in complete darkness otherwise the light affects our

our sleep cycles right so when your sleep cycles get affected and interrupted because of the light that's coming in then you just don't get sleep wow so the blindfold helps keep everything dark so that you can go in and out of those sleep cycles that you need to get through yeah so for some people they swear by wearing a sleep mask right me personally i don't i don't need to wear one but you know there's plenty of people who do and so we thought this is an easy upsell win that all right we can give people a really great comfortable eye mask to go along with their their hostage state yeah i even went as far as painting a wall in my room black oh did you really wow black wall serious dark in my room bro at night you can't see nothing. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's like when you have your phone at night. I mean, having that phone and that blue LED light beaming in your eyes before you go to bed can be so bad. Because what it does, I believe what it does is it reduces the production of, I think, melatonin in your body. And the melatonin is what helps start to kind of calm you down at night and helps you fall asleep. So the light immediately stops the production of melatonin,

so then your body has a harder time falling asleep. But you can also dim the phone too. You're supposed to actually dim it at night all the way down. It's like dark mode or something? Yeah, you dim it all the way down. I got those glasses too. Yeah. Oh, you've got

the blue light blockers is that like the the dave asprey ones or whatever i just bought them on amazon okay yeah because when i work on my computer or phone late night i like to put those what i've done on all my devices is every single one of them i've turned all the blue light down so they're all i have they all have a red tint oh you could do that on computers yeah so i got to figure that out so on your mac Mac, you can just go in. In fact, it's got a dark mode, just like on your iPhone. Yeah. It's got the same dark mode on your Mac that you can use too.

Nice. Alex, I've learned a lot, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah. It's great to be here. Any closing comments? Don't let bad sleep hold you hostage. Wayne?

Hi. Hostage tape hostage tape guys check them out it's definitely a nice little hack to get better sleep see you guys next week peace