Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - How to Build a Successful DTC Healthtech Company: Interview with Nutrisense Co-Founder Dan Zavorotny

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with Dan Zavorotny, co-founder of NutrisenseBefore co-founding Nutrisense, Dan worked as a healthcare management consultant at KPMG, where he advised Fortune 500 companies and three of the top five hospitals in the US. His company, Nutrisense, combines continuous glucose monitoring with personalized dietitian coaching to help people optimize their metabolic health based on real-time data. In this interview, Dan shares the pros and cons of running a DTC healthtech business, creative recruitment strategies, and the importance of early-stage customer feedback. Before we jump into the conversation, I wanted to mention a few things:If you’re into learning from proven medtech and healthtech leaders, and want to know when new content and interviews go live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter. You’ll get access to gated articles, and lots of other interesting healthcare content.Second, if you want even more inside info from proven experts, think about a Medsider premium membership. We talk to experienced life science leaders about the nuts and bolts of running a business and bringing products to market.This is your place for valuable knowledge on specific topics like seed funding, prototyping, insurance reimbursement, and positioning a medtech startup for an exit.In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, here's a link to the full interview with Dan if you'd rather read the summary instead.

So when I, if I'm starting a health tech company, find out the health tech founders who are a little bit ahead. If you go too far ahead, like people, you look at these billionaires, like we have a bunch of founder friends who are way ahead. And they simply don't relate. The market conditions change. The market landscape change, the business change, technology. Everything changed so far. Whatever the lessons they have, a lot of times, they're not as applicable. But someone who's just ahead of you, they just went through this.

They still, the scars are still there. They haven't healed yet. And they truly know how to help. That's a part that I always focus on. Welcome to MedSider Radio, where you can learn from proven medtech and healthcare thought leaders through uncut and unedited interviews. Now, here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey, everyone, it's Scott. In this episode of MedSider, I sat down with C.O. and co-founder of Nutraceans, Dan Zabrottening.

Before starting the company, Dan worked as a healthcare management consultant at KPMG, where he advised Fortune 500 companies in three of the top five hospitals in the country. This company, Nutrisense, combines continuous glucose monitoring with personalized dietitian coaching to help people optimize their metabolic health based on real-time data. Here are few of the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, going direct-to-consumer brings on its unique challenges, but it's critical to disrupting the healthcare industry. A direct-to-consumer model gets you valuable input on real-life everyday problem so you can make meaningful improvements to existing infrastructures in a way that drives the space forward.

Second, get your product into the hands of your customers as early as possible and be open to receiving feedback that could be used to guide the improvement process. Contrary to popular belief, you may not need high-powered clinical studies backing your product before entering the market. Third, the people you work with can make or break your company and there are creative ways to get top talent on board with your mission. And it's important to coalesce a diverse team. Having the exact same mindset and skill set as someone else does not guarantee that a particular candidate is going to be. to be the best addition to your tribe. Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let you know that we recently released the second volume of Medsider Mentors, which summarizes the key learnings from the most

popular Medsider interviews over the last six months or so. Look, it's tough to listen or read every single MedSiter interview that comes out, even the best ones. But there are so many valuable lessons you can glean 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.

If you're interested in learning more, head over to medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes. 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. This includes conversations with experts like Erica Rogers, CEO of Silk Road Medical, Dr. David Albert, founder of Alive Corps, and so many others. In addition, as a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible medtech and health tech entrepreneurs.

Learn more by visiting medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. Again, that's medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. So at the outset of this interview, I recorded your bio, a little bit more of a formal bio. But let's hear it from kind of the proverbial horse's mouth, right? Tell us a little bit more about your professional background leading up to co-founding Nutrisense. Yeah, my professional background similar to most. I came from healthcare consulting, and my job was basically to optimize profitability for hospitals, insurance companies, and medical device manufacturers. That means either grow revenue, find new markets or cut cost. And the one thing that always bothered me without these is the lack of innovation, or it's the marginal innovation or incremental innovation that keeps happening. And even when I saw a lot of companies found in the space, it was always the dilemma of the only people that could really truly really start these companies are people who understand the space really well. And they are many times ingrained of not having innovation. And so then how do they improve? And a lot of times

they'll start companies. They saw some new technology. It's already invented by some scientists. And they will start a company with that, but only tiny, like two, three percent of it is improvement of what's already there. And the reason they're able to succeed, actually, interestingly enough, from a financial outcome, they succeed. It's because they have all the network. They have all the connections, right? And what I basically thought about is, how do we just break it, break it to the extreme extent. And I realize that the way you do that is you take a high risk profile where it's, let's kind of ignore the medical industry for a little bit, go directly to consumer. Once we have consumer satisfaction, then it goes back to the medical

industry and say, hey, look how many consumers find value in this. The scientific evidence, proveness is efficacy's there. Hey, let's work together. Alternatively, the improvements are too small and it's not that interesting. And it's not a big enough problem for me to solve. Got it. I love it. I love the aspect of kind of going direct to consumer and then potentially like circling back around and demonstrating and showcasing sort of traction, right? And sort of reintroducing it to. I always tell people like if you, the thing about is, if you look at a lot of the medical industry sales, a lot of it is, hey, how good is your sales team? Was your sales team so good they were able to convince the insurance company, the corporate health

company or corporate wellness program or the medical hospital to buy. And the irony is that they don't always sell the best products. And if we took a look at the regular space outside of consumer health or just health in general, you look at Microsoft, right? And there's a thing called Teams, Microsoft Teams, is one of the worst pieces of software that exists. Yet they're now like 50 times or 100 times bigger than Slack. Why is that?

Because they had the already the sales force. They had the connection. They had everything there. and Slack is now struggling and catching up to them. Even though the product is significantly better, it was the first move of advantage. And this is what we see a lot of times. The incumbents are so ingrained, it is so hard to replace them. So what do you do?

And that's kind of our ambition as well. We look at this a little differently where I care less about whether there's companies succeed or not. I care more about if it gets positive attention in the world where consumers go, wait a minute, that's feasible. Hey, medical industry. Why is that happening? within our industry to really make drastic change, politicians have to be involved.

And only times politicians truly get involved is when masses of people drive for it. Alternatively, you have these micro improvements happening, and micro improvements are too small. We need drastic improvements. Yeah, yeah, certainly distribution oftentimes Trump's product, right, in the healthcare system. And so with that kind of that background in mind, and we'll certainly get into this in more detail, but can I help us better understand nutrients at a high level and really how the idea came came about? Sure. So I was in Silicon Valley for a healthcare conference, interestingly enough, right?

And I ran to one of my friends, who's not my co-founder, and he was wearing a continuous glucose monitor. And I asked him, what are you doing? You're not a diabetic. It's for type 1 diabetics. And he said, I'm hacking my way to improve my health because I've pre-diabetes. And he said, you know anything about this? And it just happened at both my sister's Type 1 diabetic. So I've seen his technology improve for last decade.

While simultaneously, I worked on healthcare consulting. So I knew everything about the way health in general and industry worked. And so I said, yes, I know a lot. But at first, to be totally frank, I said, why would anyone who's not a type one diabetic everywhere? This is so silly. And he said, why don't you just try it? I put in my arm and it just made sense to me. It clicked within a couple hours.

And I started judging my habits from my nutrition to my stress management to even my improvement in sleep and exercise. It's interesting. People don't realize that, but having that mind-body connection, a lot of times it sounds like woo-wo, you know, kind of like fake wood, but having a mind-body connection between like, I ate this, I feel a certain way. And then I see that objectively by something like a glucose monitor or even something where it's, hey, you're always stressed to work, but you used to being stressed to work. And you to you becomes your norm and you don't know any difference. But when you're able to visualize that and understand a number around it, it helps you really understand how to improve. And so I understood these factors now and I said, okay,

well, how do we bring into the market? And he's like, well, you can't really because this is for type 1 diabetics. And that's when I said, well, let me figure out if I can put two weeks notice in, quit my job. We started. And I think the interesting part was, you know, being a little unusual. He said, okay, there's two jobs when you start, either market or build. What do you want to build a market? And I said, well, I know how to do finance, I know strategy, and a profitability, budgeting. And he said, well, you don't need any of that. I'm like, what do you mean? We can budget for ourselves. Like, what? We have no money. There's no product available yet. Right. There's nothing there. There's no like, what are you budget and what do you finance strategy?

That's right. So I said, okay, I'll build. What do I build? He's like software. You know how to write software? I'm like, nope. He's like, all right, well, you got to market. And I said, well, I still need to learn that. And he's like, oh, well, I can do that one or that one. And it quickly hit me, oh boy, did I just quit my job for a cool idea, but I don't actually know anything how to run a company? And it was one of those, you know, do or die kind of moments or sink a swim or what is I? You know, they would say, and so it was really about, all right, let's figure out how to market on the internet. And I just typed on Google, how to market an internet. And I think it was a blog that came up with hundreds of options. And I just went through one at a time and said, which ones can I figure out? And then within two weeks, figured out a little bit, I got us to about, I think, $5,000 after two weeks in revenue on the internet. And the next month

it was like 10, next month 30, next one 50, and just kept going up and up and up. And now we're about 165 people full time. Wow. Wow. Okay, wow. I didn't realize the team was the team was that big. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. That's awesome. So classic kind of like entrepreneurial like startup story for sure. And so if I let's say I've known. never heard of Nutrisense, right? And there's probably a fair number of people in my audience that maybe, well, I've lightly heard of it. They probably definitely heard of CGMs or continues glucose monitors. But if I'm, let's say I know, I know nothing about it, Nutrisense. What's the elevator pitch? What, why? The other pitch is this. We really take several factors. We take

a digital solution with analytics that we've created, a confused glucose monitor, and we add expert advice from a dietitian. We bundled it all together. And we bundle it all together. And we'll help people understand their health in real time so they could both prevent disease from ever happening in the first place, as well as help them manage if something is a problem already, like insulin resistance, like pre-diabetes, PCOS. And so we have this range of folks for anywhere from pre-diabetics to Olympic athletes to people trying to lose weight. If you think about glucose, glucose is really that measurement.

That's a proxy for many things. So if you have high stress, your cortisol. goes up and glucose will jump up, right? If you're not sleeping well, your glucose will be thrown off. If you have actually poor nutrition or you have insulin intolerance, also your glucose will be out of whack. Again, ideal case scenario, we could track these different hormones in real time. Unfortunately, technology is not there yet. I do believe it's going to come into future. However, in the meantime, this is a proxy that helps you understand some of these factors. Got it. Got it. So if I'm a consumer of the Nutrisense product or program, I get a C.

GGM, I get an app that provides, you know, an analytics layer or information later. Help me understand what the data means. And then a health coach or a nutritionist to like help me, help me make decisions, help me through that process. Exactly. I always talk about like we basically created a My Fitness Pal on steroids. People know My Fitness Pelt. A Food Tracker app has been around for like a decade. We basically created that on steroids where it's not just, oh, look, you tracked your macros.

This is you ate something. You see in real time immediately how you respond to that. Is that good or bad for you? And also how good or how bad? And then the dietitian comes in, and we basically did is we scale the health professional. So if you think about it right now, you go to a doctor's visit and you wait and you drive there, you send a waiting room for 30 minutes, they come out, they look you for two minutes and they leave. And they tell you go take blood work and I'll call you a month later or two weeks later.

We've done in the back end where dietitian sees your data in real time nonstop. So all they're doing is looking your data nonstop and providing you feedback all the time of how to improve. So it's not the old school way of like, hey, it looks like you're pre-diabetic or you're overweight. What do I do when a doctor says, exercise more and eat better? What does that mean? And you have these trends of people saying, heterogeneous is the best diet in the world. And someone says, vegan is the best diet in the world. And people are fighting back and forth.

We take that completely out. We actually don't know which is the best diet for everyone. We know the best diet for you specifically. And that's the key. People forget that due to our microbiome, our genetics, our sex, like our culture back, ground. It's like, the foods we eat are so different. And we see this, you know, we look at like to the Irish population versus the African versus the Asian population. And the foods they've consumed and genetically meant to consume just respond completely differently, right? And so people

completely forget that factor. Yeah. It gets to be more fasting when you look at the female versus male side of things, right? Historically, like fasting is one of the thing, popular concepts. Everyone just popped up and everyone's like fast, fast, fast, everyone's been talking about intermittent fasting. Interestingly enough, all the studies prove it's so good for you. But then when we, we, look at the data, and this is now just real life data before it even published, thousands of men do it. It's like effective on like 99% of men. Once you start looking at women, it has more negative effects than positive effects. Because naturally their bodies are meant to keep a little bit more fat for production. And on top of that, the stress after 18 hours of fasting for women

causes such a coralsol response. So your body actually starts storing more fat and causing more issues. And so people a lot of times are like struggling with fasting because of this. And Nobody talks about those things. And you start seeing us in real-life data. It's fascinating. Got it. Got it. Yeah.

And then just to kind of circle background on the product again, so you obviously have developed the app and built out a network of nutritionists and health coaches. But the CGM, you're not actually manufacturing a CGM. We don't like a CGM. We're taking the devices that are out there right now. Got it. We do leverage, there's one more piece. We leverage a third-party doctor network to write medical prescriptions off of these states.

Got it. Because they're currently under the scope of. medical prescribers and type 1 diabetics got it got it okay cool well that i think that that helps um you know lay a foundation for the rest of the conversation and which which and and and probably uh you know serves as a nice segue into my next my next conversation which is around your success going direct to consumer and before i asked the the question i remember seeing this this linked in post this is probably like maybe a month ago maybe i don't know two three weeks ago something like this and it was from um i can't remember who who posted it but i believe

they mentioned some comments around like, I will put a stake in the ground that medical device companies should not be going direct to consumer. And I remember thinking, that's like, I 100% disagree, right? I mean,

granted, there's caveats, of course, right? But most med tech or health tech companies that go direct to consumer and fail, it's not because the channel doesn't work. It's not because consumers aren't interested.

It's because you probably don't have product market fit. Or there's something else going wrong fundamentally with the business. And so let's start there because you've had a tremendous amount of success. The program is super compelling, right? You're leveraging a medical device in a CGM, but like you're you're building out sort of the, the adjacent kind of like the product to actually make it actionable for a consumer. So like let's let's start there. Talk to us a little bit more about just that model and kind of what you've learned since founding Nutrisense. And then like what the large opportunity that's ahead kind of going direct to consumer. Yeah. So I mean,

I think the first part is addressing like going direct consumer yes or no. The thing about going to consumer, if somebody's going to shell out cash from their pocket, you have to constantly convince them this is good. Like, you're actually providing value. The moment you stop providing value, people cancel and they ask for the money back, right? When you go B2B and your company, you're prepaid for the whole year or has a 10-year contract, even if it's okay, you're still going to use it. Or you might drop it, but you just buy sign up, you forget it's not your money.

So it forces us to truly create innovation that hasn't existed before, right? So from a product perspective, you're becoming a product-like company more than anything else. Even if there is difficult to hear, and this is what we're talking about product market fit. You may, people who talk about the, you may actually have product market fit, but the distribution does get complex, right? Especially as we see now the challenges with iOS 14 coming out. And it's hard to target the right consumers. And I know if you guys have been following, but Facebook, Google, all these online digital companies are starting increasing. seeing their cost acquisition for customers, so they're not letting you target as effectively.

That is a complexity, right? So the question becomes a lot of times not as much you have product market fit. That's one of the next early steps, but also are you able to market effectively to write people? When you sell a contract to B2B, yes, your business is successful, but you actually have value ad product. Here, the challenge is, if you do have value ad because people are paying you, can you market them on a dollar efficient perspective? So it's a little bit of a little a different challenge. And that's a challenge that you have less control over, right? It's much harder to predict because once you get, if you think about, you know, if you reach out to 100 people, you have five conversions, then you know if you just add more people, you get more conversions.

Here you don't have that. So that, that is a dilemma that exists. I agree. But my belief, again, is that whether we succeed, pushing us forward or we don't. In many ways, as long as you're advocating for the world to become a better place, other people who may have more leverage, more connections, they'll have to step up. Because what happens, we've seen this not, by the way, insurance comes comes to us, and they're saying, like, hey, we saw this and we're pushing other big corporations to do this too. They were never even thinking about this, but now we're saying Nutrason's doing it, right?

And yes, maybe, like, and these corporations reach out, like, how do you guys do it? Because they're not as fast, they're now as mobile. And yes, maybe they'll end up beginning a big contract, we don't. But it's forcing them to go to the next level. It's force them to innovate. And it's making those conversations happen earlier and faster because a lot of the decision makers in these other places, they just simply don't know what's feasible, right? It's because we're talking about this incremental, incremental improvement that we talked

about earlier. They just think about how do I make 5% better, 10% better? When you make that leap of like, hey, let's just completely change this. Because our ambition really look at it as this way. We'd like to over time be your health professional in your pocket, right? Theoretically, we think over 80% doctors don't need to happen, right? Like, what is it, 89 million Americans pre-diabetic? Why?

And a lot of it is we as Americans are the best food marketers in the world and sometimes very bad food marketers. Think about it. This is a disease of poor decisions around health and lifestyle. People didn't have type 2 diabetes 100 years ago. Unrary care is an idiot, but it's such a small percentage population. Now it's one in three. And so how do we feel with the model and try to get people to understand it's ahead of time? And if that happens, the entire business of health care changes.

Right. For my last time I read is that U.S. healthcare system is the number one industry in U.S. And it's mind-blowing, why? What? We spend more poor capital than anyone else, and yet people get getting sicker. And a lot of it is just letting people see their data, letting people own the data. You know, I think the biggest, again, the biggest obstacle here is the game we're really playing consumers.

You get into brand as a company where people just come to you and they have a problem, right? Versus you run out of money. Right. And that's a game you're really playing. Versus, if you sold B2B contract, you sold one, you know you have a billion in a revenue year. Okay, we can't sell a second one. Great. Cut half your cost.

Here you have to constantly re-innovate, read market, retarget, re-show value over and over and over. And this is like every month you have to come and show more value, more value, more value. Got it. Yeah, I totally agree. And I've got another follow-up question kind of on the same topic. But it reminds me of a, I think it was another podcast I was listening to an Andrew Wilkinson who runs Tiny Capital. he was a guest and he mentioned, I think they were actually talked about CGMs. I'm not sure if he, if he's a Nutrisense customer or not, but they were talking about CGMs.

And he was like, you know, I think everyone in America just needs to understand that like by default, they're probably pre-diabetic, right? And it's in large part because the food system, you know, right? I mean, it's just, it's incredibly hard to find or eat high quality food, nutrient-dense food on a consistent basis, right? So I think you're spot on that, you know, this is a huge, is a huge need, right? People just don't understand this. But on that note, so kind of just, I guess, to close a loop on this kind of D to C kind of topic or direct to consumer topic,

what would your answer be to that person I mentioned earlier on LinkedIn that posted, you know, companies that operate in the healthcare space should not be going, should not be going direct to consumer? You know, what's your response to that? And, you know, do you agree? Obviously, I presume you disagree with that statement, but like, why so? You know, what was, talk to us a little bit more about just the opportunity that's to be had by, you know, positioning your product, you know, first and foremost to consumers. I think it's easy. If you want to disrupt an industry, you have to go consumer. Specific in a healthcare, if you want to disrupt it. If you want marginal improvements, you should go B2B. It is a significantly much harder task to accomplish,

and it's what you're here for. If your entire, if your value proposition is to make as much money as possible and increased likelihood of your company succeeding, great. If your value proposition is to leave the dent in the world, then you go consumer. Because the amount of products that fail go in a B2B, and they could be great, but no one ever finds out about them is enormous. Here, this is the irony of this. Even if we fail, we still succeeded because if you have 100,000 people try our product and they love it, and then some B2B company wins because they have more connections, and they get a product that subpar, they'll always come back and say, hey, I want a product like that one. and they're pushing a B2B company now uplevel their skills. And that's what we're trying to force.

We're trying to force industry forward. Because the way I look at it, like, worst case scenario, you all had a great ride and we made some improvements, right? I mean, we could be, I think you know, Scott, like, we could be having our corporate jobs hanging out and not be very stressed out. The reason why we're sacrificing our health a lot of times work in 16 hours days to make a change. There's jobs to pay way more for way less work. Yeah. But we do this because you were a little crazy, right? but also the same time, we're passionate by what we do.

I have never had a job where on Sunday, I can't wait until Monday. Like, I'm so excited because I get to, my entire team gets to leverage our resources to actually go forward before. It's always waiting until Friday, waiting until Friday. And my people that message me on like Sunday night, like, I'm excited for Mario is enormous. I highly doubt a lot of B2B companies are doing it. Right, right. I love the framework that if you, that, and it's relatively simple, right?

It's, if you really want to disrupt something, going direct to consumer, is often going to be the best way to do that, right? It's a good framework. And I totally agree with you, man. I've been out of kind of the corporate game for, gosh, I mean, probably close to 10 years now. And I don't, I mean, I don't know if I could, I mean, I'd be a hard pressed to ever go back. You know what I mean? I don't recall a Sunday where I was actually looking forward to the Monday, whereas, you know, in the opposite scenario,

when you're actually involved in kind of early, early stage stuff, it's definitely a lot more energizing. Hard work, hard work. But yeah. And we see this, I mean, like, even with, you know, like if you look at what Elon Musk to do with Tesla, for example, I know it's a different industry, but same thing. He stepped away from car dealerships because they were selling car dealers. It was B2B and those guys took care of everything, right? And now of a sudden he goes direct consumer. He has to make the consumer satisfied.

If he doesn't, business gone. What is it going to do after that? Right. And it forces innovation because people, I mean, he wasn't, he didn't invent electric cars. They've been around, but they really didn't take off. Why is that? and then he's forced, he's basically forced an innovation upon others. Like you can agree, exactly.

You can agree, disagree as politics. You can agree to disagree whether other cars are better or not. There's many arguments behind each side. But all of a sudden, B. Dubu, for GM, all of a sudden, their cars dramatically got better. How did that happen, right? Right. You know, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, like all these oil companies are making

green products. Like, he is pushing him toward that. And so the way I look at him as well, like, whether Tesla ends up becoming, you know, people always argue is it valuable, is it not? I mean, is it over speculation? It's possible. Again, we can go different directions, but he is pushing the world in the right direction and it's making other companies feel like I need to compete, I need to catch up because

they're going to start losing market share and they have, that's the irony about this all. All those other companies dramatically improved. Wait, what did that innovation come from all of a sudden? Because consumers came said, I want a Ford, but as good as Tesla. Yeah, totally. No, I'm right there with you. And I think he's probably doing the same thing at Twitter, right?

He's demonstrating that you can probably do more with less, you know, again. So repeating kind of the same sort of philosophy of raising the bar, you know, and everyone else's sort of needs to catch up. So let's look. I think I want to make sure this is one point I would make clear, and I think it's for all entrepreneurs in general, is the part that it took me a little bit, the biggest lesson I got of all entrepreneurship was that it's actually completely

fine if a company fails. and that you have to accept that fact that it's okay, as long as you're providing innovation in the future forward way. And that's the part people always struggle. They're like, oh, my God, what if it fails doesn't work out? What if someone else copies you? Fine, let them copy you. But you pushed it forward.

And that's the part that took me a long time to accept as a founder. And that's the part that actually paralyzes most people from moving forward, making progress. Once you accept that factor, it's much easier to actually almost feel like relieved and take stuff forward. Yeah, that's such a good point because I mean, I'm sure you have the same type of conversations with, you know, with friends or people in your network that are still at, in, you know, in a corporate environment and want to make that jump, right? Want to want to go do a startup or whether they start the company themselves or join one. And they're waiting for like, they're waiting for like the perfect opportunity, right? Or like they're over analyzing a scenario.

It's like you just have to expect. And a lot of times this is just learned through, you know, by doing it, right, and failing to your point. But just you almost have to set the expectation that, I mean, I mean, like, this is likely going to be, like, like, this is likely going to fail, right? Much higher likely that is going to fail. But to your point, I'm going to push, you know, I'm going to raise the bar myself. I'm going to push things forward and, you know, learn a lot, learn a lot along the way. Definitely more so than I otherwise would have.

So I love, I love kind of your philosophy around that. So on that note, like, we're recording this in early 2023. Take us back to like, you know, five years ago when you were, you know, you were, you were first getting this, you know, the semblance of this kind of this product together. because I'm making the assumption, I think is probably accurate. The NeutroSense product that you're offering consumers today looks very different than what that, what it looked like back in early 2018. So the reason I bring this up is that a lot of entrepreneurs, like they just, they get stuck in this early phase, right?

Where they're trying to either perfect their idea or maybe they don't know how to basically get enough insights from customers, right, whether it's, you know, it's clinicians or consumers to like just get some semblance of an. MVP going. So take us back to that time and like, you know, would you do anything different? Or what do you think you got right in those early days? Or, you know, if you had the chance to kind of rewind, would you do anything differently? 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,

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