Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - How to Build a Delightful Experience for Your Customers: Interview with Somnee CEO Tim Rosa

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with, Tim Rosa, CEO of Somnee, a company developing wearables based on personalized neuroscience to improve sleep quality. Previously, Tim was the CMO at Fitbit, where he played a key role in establishing the health and fitness wearables category. He built the organization’s global marketing function, contributing to the sale of over 140 million devices in 100+ countries. Additionally, he helped drive the company’s IPO and its eventual $2.1 billion sale to Google. Tim has also advised and worked with major brands like Electronic Arts, 2K Sports, ESPN Video Games, and Jasper Health.In this interview, Tim shares insights on building and scaling successful brands based on real customer experiences, keeping messaging clear, and using brand strategy as a business foundation. He also shares why solid data and clinical evidence in OTC products are essential and how he generates value out of ongoing research.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and a curated investor database to help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VI. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Tim Rosa.

You got to win hearts and you got to win minds, right? And how can you do that through a great, through product design, and product design in our categories is both the ID as well as the experience and the journey that you take them on and looked at the category. It was just littered with, like, products were so dorky. I think you're out of a, it was like a sci-fi series or Star Trek series, and it still is. So what I'm doing is really trying to change that and kind of reset the way people think about

neuro tech and neuroscience. Welcome to MedSider, where you can learn from the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind the most successful life science startups in the world. Now here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey everyone, it's Scott. In this episode of Medsider, I sat down with Tim Rosa, CEO of Somni,

who was leading efforts to improve sleep through personalized neuroscience. Previously, Tim was the CMO at Fitbit, where he played a key role in establishing the health and fitness wearables category. He also built the organization's global marketing function, which contributed to the sale of over 140 million devices in 100-plus countries, which is wild. Additionally, Tim helped drive the company's IPO and its eventual $2.1 billion sale to Google. Here, for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, building a brand as you build your company is crucial.

To do this, put yourself in your customer's shoes and analyze every available piece of data, such as forums, customer support logs, and other feedback sources. Develop a product roadmap that addresses any friction points you discover. Throughout the process, ensure your messaging is as clear and simple as possible. Second, a brand is more than just marketing. It's the foundation of your business strategy. Building a brand means creating an experience that connects with your audience. To achieve this, focus on what matters to your customers most.

Stay in tune with consumer trends like the shift towards being more informed and empowered and align your decisions accordingly. Make your brand strategy central to everything for product design to business choices to build loyalty and drive eventual growth. Third, clinical evidence in OTC categories can help you create something that truly changes the game within your industry. Aim to build products that solve real problems and measurable way. Invest in ongoing R&D to refine and adapt your solution continually and prioritize data accuracy and clinical evidence to gain trust and differentiate yourself.

from competitors. Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let you know that the latest edition of Medsider Mentors is now live. We just published Volume 6, which summarizes the key learnings from the most popular interviews over the last several months with incredible entrepreneurs like Dan Rose, former CEO of Limflow, Dr. Stephen Michelson, founder of Ferrapulse, and current CEO of Field Medical, and other leaders of some of the hottest startups in the space. Look, it's tough to listen or read every Medsider interview that comes out, even the best

ones. But there are so many valuable lessons you can pick up from the founders and CEOs that join our program. So that's why we decided to create Medsider Mentors. It's the easiest way for you to learn from the world's best medical device and health technology entrepreneurs in one central place. To check out the latest volume, head over to MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes. And if you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. In addition to every volume of MedSider mentors, you'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. You'll also be able to see all of our playbooks, which are thematically handpicked collections of the most insightful interviews covering topics

like capital fundraising, early stage development, regulatory challenges, reimbursement, M&A, and much more. And last, considering that fundraising could be one of the most daunting tasks for any startup, we curated a database of over 700 VC funds, private equity firms, angel groups, and more, all eager to invest in medical device and health technology startups. Access to this database is a premium member exclusive, so don't miss out. Learn more about Medsider Mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right, without further ado, let's jump right into the interview.

All right, Tim, welcome to Medsider Radio. Appreciate it. I appreciate it. Excited to be here. Yeah, especially giving your background and kind of what you're working on at Somalia. I'm really excited for this discussion. I'm going to be a little bit more health-centric versus kind of like pure-medical stuff. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this interview.

But I always like to start here. I mean, with your, you know, maybe give us a kind of an elevator style overview of what you were doing leading up to taking on the CEO role at Somni. Yeah. So I started my career in brand advertising on the agency side, worked out organic and attic, then was accruited over to the video game industry, particularly on the sports video game side. So I worked at Sega Sports, ESPN video games. We got acquired by Take 2. I launched the 2K sports brand. So MBA 2K was actually my baby and really helped build my career. So spent about a decade in the video game industry, ended up at electronic arts and EA Sports. And then I got a call from this tiny little startup called Fitbit. And they asked me to take people off of the couch that I put them up and spent just under a decade at Fitbit.

And so grew Fitbit from a tiny little startup. It was the first marketing leader, built that, built the team, built the three, your strategy, recruited the whole marketing organization, had a lot of wins. We got credit for building the category of wearables, but there were other incumbents like Nike and Jawbone, et cetera. We just did a great job building the brand and kind of took a different approach than everyone else. Had a lot of success, took it public. It was the biggest IPO in history for a consumer electronic company at that time. That was a lot of fun. First time ever. I've always worked for public companies, but taking a company public is quite an experience.

It's ringing the bell with the New York Stock Exchange is there's nothing like it. But grew the company. We went from the U.S. to over 100 countries. During my tenure, we sold just over 140 million devices. Went from startup to top 20 consumer brand for three years in a row. And yeah, had a lot of success. Ultimately, we ended up selling the company to Google. And I took some time off and then got a call from Vinod Kossela and Dr.

Matt Walker about this little company out by UC Berkeley called Somni. And so, you know, that's an quick overview of my background. I'm missing a lot. But, but yeah, that's the story to getting up to, leading up to Somni. Yeah, that's great. Well, they get into some of this in more detail. But, yeah, thinking about your sort of trajectory at Fitbit, you know, we're recording this on Zoom, but you look good. I mean, like, you know, no gray hairs.

I would have expected, like, launching the device in like 100 countries, you know, there'd be a little bit more. Oh, you have a bunch of it's been a few years. I mean, it, it crushed me. I mean, it was blood, sweat, and tears. I gave it everything I had. It was, I mean, it was an incredible journey. I'm so proud of it. So proud of the team, what we were able to accomplish against huge companies.

I mean, we really truly invented a new category of products. And, you know, our vision was to change healthcare and really try to save lives. And I feel like we did, you know, as for wearable 1.0, we did a, you know, a great job in achieving that. But yeah, taking time off, you know, after the sale and getting in a CrossFit and really focusing on my surfing and yoga and just mental health, physical health, you know, lost like 15 pounds. I mean, it's funny. You work at a fitness company, but working and traveling around the world nonstop, things catch up with you. So, yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so you're seeing on the sidelines a little bit, you know, taking a little break on

And you're leading, like your LinkedIn, I think says adventure capital, which is pretty pretty cool. But talk to us a little bit about why you decided to make the move to Someday and maybe weave in kind of what you're what you're working on, right? For those that aren't familiar with the. Yeah. Well, I'll take a quick step back. I'll talk about Fitbit. So at Fitbit, obviously, we, you know, educated the world about the 10,000 steps. But the reality was we're the first wearable to launch with sleep tracking.

So, you know, we'll call it generally. sleep trends because it's not truly, there's no wearable that's downstream from the head that it's truly doing sleep tracking. But we did launch sleep tracking. So we created a lot of awareness around the mystery of sleep with general population consumers. We also rolled out some of the first sleep sensors, so like SPO2 sensors, et cetera. So I was very familiar with the category of sleep. It was the most engaged feature with all of our customers. So I knew the size of the category. We were always looking at how can we close the loop. So being a general diagnostic, you always want to make the connection back to an outcome in using either a program or therapeutic. So as part of M&A,

we were looking at buying companies like 8Sleep and Bed Jad and sleep clinics, et cetera, et so we could close that loop. So it was very familiar with the therapeutic side and whatnot. So cut to, you know, getting this call from Vinod Kosovo. and Dr. Matt Walker about this company. Obviously, Matt Walker is, you know, world-renowned sleep scientists from UC Berkeley. You know, he literally wrote the book on Sleep, Why We Sleep, International Bestseller. Knew about Matt, but to be honest, I wasn't as familiar around the technology and the science. I did the research.

I looked at it and, you know, looked at the clinical study, but I needed to try it. So, like, everything throughout my career, I only work at it. a company if I'm the end customer and I believe in the product or I know I can improve the product. So I also had adult insomnia. So throughout my whole experience at Fitbit and beyond, I was always taking THC and CBD gummies to help me fall asleep. I've since learned through Matt and the scientists at our company that was bad, but that's what I did. And so I was I was a little bit suspect and I said to Vinod and to Matt and the team and Dr. Knight, look, I want to go through the journey. If it works, then, you know, we'll talk about it. So I got the device. I fell asleep in my third

session. I fell asleep with the device on, which you're not supposed to do. So I was like, holy shit, this actually works. This is amazing. But it had multiple pieces. The ID wasn't very good. The app was confusing. It was scientists speaking to scientists. The website was confusing. Basically the whole thing, you know, it was like the opposite of Fitbit, right? We built this massive brand. We created generalized diagnostic. These guys had no brand, no consumer understanding, but they had amazing science and technology and this incredible science team behind it.

So I said, look, the only way I'll come on board as your CEO is if you let me reset the whole company from brand into literally every single touchpoint and then relaunch or roll. out all new products for consumers, for employers, and then move, move us into healthcare. So that's the story arc of how I ended up here. Yeah. And just describe the product. We'll lean to it in the show notes for this particular interview for those listening that don't get to the write-up on MedSider.

It's SomniSleep. So SOME-E-E-E-Sleep.com. Somnysleep. But for those that don't get to the website are just kind of listening in, like, give us like just a super, kind of high-level. overview of the product itself. Yeah, so Somni was started by four renowned neuroscientists from UC Berkeley and they patented and pioneered a unique approach to helping you fall asleep. So essentially they invented a, we call it a smart sleep headband. You wear it on your forehead before you go to bed.

You wear it for 15 minutes. It has lab grade technology built into it. Prior to Somni, you had multiple devices. You had to go in a sleep lab to use this technology. We brought it together. So we're using EEG to map your brain. It establishes a baseline. Then we have AI and ML models that personalize neurostimulation. So we do TES neurostimulation. And basically what we're doing is we're trying to silent the noise in your brain and also enhance the brain rhythms that help you fall asleep. And what's really unique about the product is that it's everything's personalized. So previously there are a lot of generalized current devices that are out there. But like everything else in life, it's all about personalization.

So most of our IP is around that, the personalization aspect, because every body, every brain, every day is different. And so what we're doing is it takes about two to five or seven sessions to establish a baseline. once we have the baseline, we really move into personalization and optimization, and that's where you get the full benefit. It's not, you know, it's not a pill. It takes, you know, it takes some time to go through the process. But for those that really are struggling with sleep, it's a game changer. And so we have a lot of CEOs and executives that have used the current version of the products and have had tremendous success with the product. So we're really excited about what we're doing and, you know, that how. that's how it works but what it ultimately does is it cuts the time to sleep in half so sleep onset and then we limit the disruptions throughout the course of the evening so sleep maintenance and then we

obviously improve the overall quality of sleep and so you know my my end goal is right now if you go to the doctor and you say you have a sleep problem or you have insomnia the first thing they do is they prescribe you know a sleeping pill like ambient or tradstone depending on your situation, side effects, addictive. They're, you know, as Matt says, they're like a baseball bat to the brain. What we're doing is natural. The language of the brain is electrical frequency. So, you know, we're using that.

It's safe. The technology we use has been around for about 20 years. How we use it is what's unique to this company. So that hopefully gives you an overview of what we're doing. It does. And it's your, I mean, this is an, you're in full scale commercialization at this point, right? I can go to the website. I can buy it.

It's actually, I mean, it seems pretty reasonable. It's like 300 bucks. at least, yeah, 29, and then there's like a monthly membership that looks like as well. Yeah, so pretty, pretty, pretty formal. Yeah. It occurs everyone to check it out. This is such a huge category, the sleek category. So you mentioned Dr. Matt Walker a few times.

I remember even back in my juve days, this is kind of what he was, I think, kind of like his popularity was really starting to increase. He was like on pods, like, you know, on Robbins pod, et cetera. And I think maybe I tried to reach out to him a few times. But it didn't get a response. But it's like, if I was a really good producer, if I had a producer, if I had a producer for bedside, I pull up like a before and after with Matt Walker. It's like before sonny, he kind of looks like an academic a little bit. And then after he's like chat, you know, at least at least he's like, you know, a different guy. It's like post post-somnia device.

But anyway, kind of joke to decide. I think that's a good overview. And maybe we'll spend the next 20 or 30 minutes kind of going going a little bit deeper into some of these some of these kind of functions, right, that you've, you know, insights that you picked up on not only your, your, your previous journey at Fitbit, but also kind of some of those. and you hope to pull into an insomnia over the next several years as well. So with that said, first one on the docket, as you mentioned this already, Tim, but kind of first kind of major initiative in joining the company was sort of like almost like a rebrand, right? If you, I don't know if you want to call it a rebrand, but like almost a rebuild, if you will,

of the brand, the product, etc. And for for other CEOs that are maybe in a similar boat, right? Maybe they just took on this role and it's a great, great product, good category, but they need to kind of go through a similar type of exercise. One or two things that kind of stand out that are like, this is where I'd always start. Or what are some of those things that kind of service or in terms of recommendations for other folks that are in soon? I mean, there's definitely no silver bullet. But what I do, I basically, you know, I am the end customer.

So what does that experience like? I'm scrubbing all of the, I'm going through all the forums. I'm looking at all of our customer support logs. I'm reading feedback from customers. I'm looking at everything. So I'm trying to look at all the data that's out there and understand what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses?

So for me, what I've learned, especially coming out of Fitbit, I mean, but this is no matter what business you're in, whether it's consumer, enterprise, healthcare, whatever. It's you really need to understand who's your end customer and what is that experience. What are the friction points? So really mapping that out,

So looking at the data, mapping out the friction points, and then building out a roadmap, a PRD roadmap that addresses that. So, you know, when I came on board, you know, like I said, I went through the same experience. It was amazing science and technology, incredible team, but it was just way too much friction. Even in the communication of the service itself, it was really confusing. You know, I said, look, we, my mom in Michigan needs to understand what the hell we're talking about. And that's the bar. And it's really about how do you communicate what's happening to layman consumers, not diminishing any of the science or anything like that. Obviously,

it in the day, it needs to work. But you also need to validate what you're doing. You need to be able to communicate in a way that's easy for more of a general population consumer to understand. Because my end goal is to sell this to general population consumers around the world, not just the U.S. And stepping back, we talked a little bit about Fitbit, but that was part of the success of Fitbit. When we launched Fitbit, we were competing against Nike and they had the fuel band and, you know, fuel points and no one knew what the hell that was. There was no emotional connection to it. And what we did, the beauty of Fitbit was we oversimplified the experience.

We leaned into 10,000 steps. We really tried to make that user experience as simple as possible to get you hooked and get you to understand what was happening and bring that delight in that excitement. And so that's something that I think is absolutely critical, especially in health care. So understanding what are your friction points and then eliminating them and bringing delight and joy to that user experience. And sometimes it's as simple as beautiful design, communicating things in a way that's very easy to understand, and then adding layers to that because obviously you're going to have people

that want more information. We work with a lot of other institutions right now. And so making sure that we have data that is easily understood, not just by consumers, but also by scientists. So hopefully that answers your question. No, it does. It does. And you mentioned the word like simple, right, a few times there. And I think that always stands out to me because oftentimes it's easy, like when we're thinking about, you know, either iterating on a product or, you know, a new idea that we have, et cetera, like, it's easy to just add another feature or add this feature. All this feature is going to be awesome. Everyone wants this new feature. And it's like, oftentimes the most simple product will win, right? Not necessarily the one that has like

all these other features. It's just like the simplicity of a product. It could be disruptive in it, in and of itself. Yeah. And that's not taking away from complication. There's obviously beauty and simplicity, but there's a lot going on behind the scenes to get it there. And I think, again, And that's been my experience and a part of my journey of what I've seen work. And so when I came on board, that was, you know, was like, okay, look, we are making this way too complex for people. I don't even understand what you're saying. And I, they have create, you know, the wearable category, especially around sleeper, you know,

myself and my team and create that education. And so we need to take a step back. And so that's what I spent. I've been with a company for about 10. 10 months now. And most of that has been this reset of the brand, the reset of literally every single touchpoint and really trying to simplify that, communicate what's happening, what we're doing, why we're doing it, how it works. And the thing I'm more excited about is what's ahead. Because, you know, since I came on board, you know, I've reset, as I said, reset everything,

you know, brought on new ID firms, hire new CMs. moved everything out of China. And really, I'm excited for the new product roadmap that we're actually building towards. So, you know, the somni that you see today is definitely not the somni of the very near future. So we have some really exciting things ahead. And I think, again, I'm all about like, how do you bring people in? How do you seduce them? You know, I say this all the time, but you got to win hearts and you got to win minds, right? And how can you do that through a great, through product design through, and product design in our categories is both the ID,

as well as the experience and the journey that you take them on. And, you know, looked at the category. It was just littered with like products. We're so dorky. Like you're out of a, it was like a sci-fi, you know, sci-fi series or Star Trek series.

And it still is. So what, what I'm doing is really trying to change. change that and kind of reset the way people think about neurotech and neuroscience, because there is a lot more education that's out there, a lot more research. I also talk about this, that one of the benefits of the pandemic was that we went from the Kardashians as influencers to doctors and

scientists like Andrew Huberman and Peter Atia and certainly Dr. Matt Walker, providing education, sharing and giving access to all this amazing research that's happening around the world and talking about it from a science perspective and sharing that with consumers. So I think that that really started to open people's minds to what's out there and also just understanding how you validate certain technologies and whatnot. But I think that was certainly a blessing coming out of the pandemic. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. No doubt. I was actually having this chat with a MedTech, BC, gosh, it's probably a couple weeks ago now. But we were talking about this idea of consumers' appetite to

just own more of their health, right? Taking them more responsibility, be accountable, more, et cetera. And it was kind of within the context of how much are they willing to pay for something, in essence. And I was like, well, I mean, probably probably product dependent, category dependent, et cetera. I said, but like one fruit point is the fact that you've got all of these long form podcasts that you mentioned, right? Andrew Huberman and Peter Tia, like these are long, these are long podcasts. They're actually quite like sophisticated a lot of the content. And people are listening to them. Like they're wildly popular, right? If that tells you anything, that's like a really, really strong signal, you know what I mean?

that this is like this whole like kind of idea of just people consumers you want to come consumers consumers of health like they're just there's a huge appetite you know as long as it's like packaged up in a way that to your point makes makes sense but the other thing that I stood out and I'm going to get to a few other questions here but that that that's down to me in your and kind of hear you riff a little bit was um the fact that when you first came into somni you like you got what sounds like you get pretty close to the customer right like you you read through comments and forums you read, you know, feedback on reviews, et cetera. And that always stands out to me. I remember when I first went, quote, quote, quote, in-house when I was with, with Cavity and we moved to Minneapolis.

And I could always tell, like, the best marketers, the best engineers, et cetera, they're always the ones that would routinely go out into the field, right? To be close to positions, to be close to, like, stakeholders, they just got it, right? They just understood it to, understood kind of the problems, the friction, the challenges to a whole other level versus those that kind of, you know, sat behind a computer all day, you know. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, it's absolutely critical. No matter what your job function is, is understanding the pain points of your end customer. And then how do you iterate and even stack rank at the MVP for your PRDs in each of your gates and your phases.

To me, that's absolutely critical. I mean, at the end of the day, you need to bring joy and delight, especially now customer acquisition is so expensive. I mean, you know, especially given the political situation right now, but just it costs a lot to build a consumer brand these days. And so, again, that was one of the success of Fitbit was we created so much joy and delight for consumers that drove word of mouth, that built community. We are bringing, you know, creating tools to bring your family and your friends and creating challenges and bringing just simplicity to that and driving that word of mouth. So I think that is absolutely critical, especially when you're on the consumer side. But again, it doesn't matter where you're at, you know, especially in healthcare. I think there's a whole switch happening right now in healthcare. It was always about getting your

deal done with, you know, whomever getting into a healthcare category or moving into an employer deal or whatever. But what people always fail to realize is you're not getting, especially these days, you're not getting paid unless the consumer, the end consumer, or that employee uses your product and goes through the journey and has a good experience. Right. And so that same person is driving whatever, pick your car or using an iPhone or using, you know, a great service throughout their day to day. And so there's an expectation. So I, I love seeing that there's this this shift back to brand. And, um, you know, again, you know, I put brand at the center of everything. It's like customer data and then how does that feed into brand? And brand to me is business

strategy. It's not fluffy. It's not like design execution. Brand is literally how you build culture. It's how you recruit teams. It's how you make stage gates. It's how you literally make all your decisions. That's what brand is. And people that don't understand brand. And people that don't understand brand. And you know, you have a lot of, I think I rent a stat that I think it's like 73% of Fortune 500 CEOs come from either CF, you know, financial or an operations background. And like under 5% come from like a marketing background. And it just, it kind of blows me away a little bit because, you know, when you don't understand brand, you see it as an expense. But it's a cost center. But it's, it's really, it's about business strategy.

So you're seeing this whole shift in the healthcare industry around how do you build brand and think about not just the B2B process, but the other side of that, which is who is the end customer and how do we build a delightful experience for them. Yeah, no doubt. Eventually kind of like we're in the throes of political season, not a great time to optimize per cack, right? But it reminds me of, you know, Rand Fishkin, the founder of Maas, and now he's running, is it Spark Toro, I believe, is the nobody I'm not sure if he know Ram, but he's like, he's a great marketer. He had this blog post, that's probably a couple months ago at least that, like, marketing is turning back to like the 80s and 90s, in essence, right? Where companies have to focus on a holistic brand, right? It's not, I can't just like, you know, I can't just optimize a creative on Instagram, you know, and win. It's like, you have to think about all of these touchpoints and the entire journey that your end user goes to road. Essentially with the cookie situation. Yeah. No, it's, it's really frustrating. But at Fitbit, I created this incredible customer acquisition engine where we tied everything

into our CRM, all of our customer data. We had this flywheel going to the top of our funnel for, you know, identifying segment. It was all automated and it was absolutely beautiful. And it was a big part of our success. And a shout out to Mark Benioff because he really helped us. He invested in our company. We got sales for free and we use that as our base, as our CDP. We built the whole company on on Salesforce, but the are most of the company, I should say, on

Salesforce. But now you are losing a lot of the through because of the issues with, you know, obviously mobile and cookies and whatnot, you're losing a bit some really important chunks of data that can't manage and optimize for it. It breaks down. So your point of like the, this, you know, move the moving. back to the 80s and the 90s when we really didn't have access to all these data sets is absolutely bought on. And it really goes back to how do you build a brand and how do you win hearts and

win minds and create that excitement and create that delight? Because if you don't, you're going to get crushed. And consumers really have the power to decide whether they like you or they want to break you. So you need to win them. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. I, I, I, I think this is, I mean, obviously we're talking about most of this within the context of commercialization. But like, even if you're, you know, if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm not, we're not going to, you know, we're in development still. We're, we're, we're, we're clinical stage and we're not going to, you know, start selling our product for another couple of years. Like, there's still, there's touch points like throughout that journey where you can begin to build this brand right to your company. And, you know, and like, really not.

There, there goes touch. Yeah. Haven't at that point. You're, you're screwed. You know. Honestly, you are screwed. If you have not thought about that, I mean, I think in threes, you know, everything is about like stack rank, your MVP in threes. My plans are three-year windows.

Anything beyond that is bullshit. Really thinking about like, okay, what is your three-year plan and how do you work backwards from that? Hey there, it's Scott. And thanks for listening in so far. The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. You'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Renee Ryan, CEO of Cala Health,

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