Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - This Startup Plans to Save a Million Lives Using Your Toilet | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E7

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Scott Hickle built Throne Science around a startup idea most investors thought was too unconventional: a device that transforms your toilet into a health tracker, monitoring your health as effortlessly as a smartwatch. After nearly 100 investor rejections, he and his team kept refining the product, driven by a mission to detect early signs of diseases like colorectal cancer before symptoms appear. That persistence helped them raise $4 million in seed funding. In this episode, Scott shares how entrepreneurs can validate unconventional products, raise capital despite rejection, and build demand in a market consumers don't yet understand. In this episode, Hala and Scott will discuss:  (00:00) Introduction (01:27) How Throne’s Smart Toilet Device Works (07:56) Throne’s Mission to Detect Cancer Early (17:22) Launching Throne in a New Product Category (23:55) Pivoting Away From a Failed Nurse-Staffing Startup (32:27) How Scott Raised Millions After Pivoting (42:35) Marketing a Product Customers Don’t Understand Yet (49:46) Lessons From Scott’s Costliest Business Mistakes (1:00:03) Throne Science’s SWOT Analysis (1:08:37) Smart Toilet Costs, Pricing, and Margins (1:13:14) Building a Mission-Driven Hardware Startup  Scott Hickle is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, a health technology company building a device that attaches to a toilet and tracks gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and prostate health. Before Throne, Scott and his co-founder, Tim, built a nurse-staffing marketplace called Pineway before pivoting into consumer health hardware. Throne’s long-term mission is to develop technology that can help detect early signs of colon cancer, bladder cancer, and other cancers of the lower gastrointestinal and urinary tracts.  Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing.  Mindstone - Master practical AI skills without the complexity with Mindstone’s AI Competency Programme. Head to experience.mindstone.com/yap and get 10% off.  AT&T - Stay connected with reliable, secure internet built for entrepreneurs. Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com.  Quince - Make your summer wardrobe feel easier. Go to Quince.com/profiting for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. Resources Mentioned: Scott’s Company, Throne Science: thronescience.com  Scott’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scotthickle   Scott’s Instagram: instagram.com/scotthickle/   Scott’s Twitter: x.com/ScottHickle    Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals  Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Passive Income, Online Business, Solopreneur, Networking

Today's episode is sponsored in part by Shopify, Indeed, AT&T business, Northwest Registered Agent, Mindstone, and Quince. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash profiting. Indeed helps you attract interview and hire all in one place. Get a $75-sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at indeed.com slash podcast. AT&T Business delivers reliable business-grade connectivity that gives your team a competitive edge. Switch to AT&T Business at business.ATT.com. Northwest Registered Agent gives you the tools and guidance you need to build a complete business identity.

Visit Northwest Registeredagent.com slash Yap Free and start using free resources to build something amazing. Mindstone helps ambitious professionals master practical AI skills without the complexity. Get 10% off their four-week AI competency program at experience.mindstone.com slash yap. Quince makes your summer wardrobe feel easier with elevated essentials at radically low prices. Go to quince.com slash profiting for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at young and profiting.com slash deals. Last year, 42,000 Americans died in car crashes. 50,000 Americans died of colorectal cancer.

Oh my gosh. All traffic accidents combined. For our generation, it is the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. We are putting cameras and toilets to improve people of health and one day save lives. And that is a new concept. And people need to get comfortable with that. Scott Hickle is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, a company that uses AI-powered toilet technology to track gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and urinary functions.

And what makes this story so interesting is that Scott is building a real business around something most people would rather not talk about. This is a crazy fact. There is a 10% risk. One in 10 people will be diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract at some point in their lives. One in 10. Like, a lot of our friends. You got rejected by 100 investors. Why couldn't they see the vision?

Because for me, when I got introduced to throne, I was like, maybe can I invest? Because everybody should have this on their toilet. I don't understand how investors wouldn't have thought that too. It's a great question. And I think at the end of the day, we are consumer health hardware. And what was your worst product decision? The cost of like getting this wrong could kill the company because if we have to recall these, it's over. So when you're building hardware, you go through a like three-step process.

And that is Scott, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Paula, thanks for having me. It is so exciting to have you here. You're actually one of my friends. you're my boyfriend's best friend. And it's so cool to live in Austin and be around all these amazing entrepreneurs. And I always tell Mike, like,

hey, can I invest in Scott's business? Like, I feel like it's going to blow up. So congratulations on everything you've been building with Throne. You're kind of like a legend in Austin for what you've been building. And just really excited to break it down with everyone for the How We Profit series. That is the warmest intro.

Thank you so much. I love Mike. Love you. Love being in Austin. Love what I do. I'm excited to have this chance. Yeah, so Throne Science is the name of your company, and you essentially have a smart toilet, but it goes like so much more beyond just like a smart toilet device. So in your own words,

how would you describe Throne? Yeah, so Throne is a wearable for your toilet that tracks your gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and for men, your prostate health, hands free automatically every time you go to the bathroom, it's like aura for your flora or whoop for your poop, we joke. But the whole idea is that there is a untapped world of health information in what's happening your gut that you just flush away. And we track that so you don't have to think about it and help you tie the dots between what's happening in your lifestyle and what's showing up in your gut health. And ultimately, our vision is to build not just a wellness device for understanding gut health, but it will ultimately be the first continuous cancer screener looking for early signs

of colon cancer and bladder cancer every time you go to the bathroom. That is amazing. And so when I first heard about this product, I was thinking you were going to make money off the hardware sales. But then actually, my boyfriend Mike has a throne device. And he's talking to me, about how he's like looking at his app and he's like monitoring his progress. And it's actually like a subscription model too, right? That's part of the plan. It's the aura model. So we charge for both the hardware and the subscription. One of the unique things about our product compared to other wearables is like your aura or your Apple Watch, you're going to be the only person wearing that device, right? It's a one-to-one relationship. Whereas with a throne, it's a one-to-mini-mini relationship

and a mini-to-one relationship because you can have up to six members in a home using the same throne. Oh. Or you can use multiple thrones all to one account and it sinks up seamlessly. So everybody has like three, four bathrooms when they have a house. Exactly. So like we have three bathrooms at the office and I have two at home and they all have thrones and it all goes to my account, whichever one I'm using. And so how does throne work exactly at?

From my understanding, it's a camera and a microphone. Yeah. So can I take it out and walk through it? Okay. So basically it's a little device that clips onto the side of your toilet. So you know, the water's down here. And this is a proximity sensor that determines when. someone is standing or sitting in the toilet, and then it uses your phone's Bluetooth to know

this is Scott versus Holla. And then once it identifies who's there, it turns on. And so this camera and microphone's pointing down into this toilet bowl, so it records everything happening inside the toilet. You leave, it turns itself off. And then you walk away and you get a push notification a few minutes later with basically a report card that tells you, here's how hydrated you were, here's what your gut health looked like. And most importantly, it allows you to see the trends over time because your gut is super responsive to changes like diet and lifestyle. For me, it's stress.

Yeah. And it's like frictionless. You just go to the bathroom with your phone already, right? Yeah, most of us. Most of us, most of the time. And so the whole idea is that that is how we identify you. So it stays off for guests. If you have members of your home that don't want it on,

it just stays off for them. So it's like really an elegant solution to tracking gut health for people who want to understand their digestive health better or their hydration better for all. any number of reasons. Yeah, and I know a lot of these, like, microbiome tests are really popular now. You go and you send in your stool or send in your saliva and you get all this information,

but this actually allows you to track a really important part of your health on a daily basis, right? That's exactly right. The whole idea is it's hands-free automatic every time you go instead of a point-time test. So, like, I like to think of Throne as we are to a microbiome test, what, like, your wearable device is to, like, a blood draw or, like, from function or, you know, any of the other big blood draw companies. In the sense that like with your whoop or your aura or your Apple Watch, you are getting, you know, 15 to 20 biomarkers every single day. Same with Throne.

And then when you want to dive deeper, you can go get a microbiome test or a blood test. I don't get you 120 biomarkers, but like that's a one time point in time test and you have to pay for the next one a year later. Yeah. So what can Throne measure today and what do you hope it measures like in the near future? That's a great question. So four categories today, gut health. So, like, when you think about it, take a step back, what does gut health mean?

It's patterns, right? If you were having regular healthy bowel movements, that's good gut health. Yeah. Anything outside of that, you know, too loose, too firm is not good, you know, constipated or diuretic. And those are defined by patterns. Like, you don't know how your gut health is just by looking at one sample. And that's, you know, microbiome test can tell you what's living your stomach,

but it doesn't tell you how your gut health is over time and how that's changing. So we look at stool frequencies, stool consistency, or form on the Bristol stool scale. We look at color, volume, buoyancy, which can tell you about fat content. And then the next big category is we look at your hydration. Yeah. So every time you go to the bathroom, we can measure your P

and look at the color and volume and the clarity of your P. And that tells you about hydration or what's called estimated urine osmolality. And, yeah. You become a real poop expert. Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. I did not think that I would grow up to be this. but like seven-year-old me is stoked right now.

And so then we look at what we call bathroom habits, so your timelines on the toilet. So the two most relevant there are the time to first evacuation, is the technical term again. That is a proxy for constipation or urgency. And then the other big one is your total time you spend on the toilet is highly correlated hemorrhoid risk. And so we can send you a push notification and say,

hey, stop doom scrolling. And then the last big category is for men, and you were asking about the microphone earlier, when you pee standing up as a man, because it has to go straight into the middle of the water, we can turn the acoustics of that P stream into what's called a urinary flow rate curve, and that flow rate curve is the most important marker for prostate health.

And that is a men's health metric, only men have prostates, so it kind of works out that the science and the physics of it all meshes together. But, you know, something like 50% of men by age 50 and 80% of men by age 70 have enlarged prostates that make it harder to pee. And this is a great way of measuring that. Wow, that's so interesting. So it can already do so much. And I know colorectal cancer is something that you feel really passionate about in cancer in general.

So how do you imagine something like Throne helping with cancer detection? So that's our ultimate mission as a company, is to build the smoke detector for colon cancer, bladder cancer, basically any cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract whose earliest manifestation is microscopic blood in your waist. So let me take a step back and just share some of the numbers because it's like, Actually, mind-blowing. So, last year, 42,000 Americans died in car crashes. 50,000 Americans died of colorectal cancer, right? Oh, my gosh.

All traffic accidents combined. Jeez. And still, like, 20% more died of colon cancer. And that's just in the United States. Around 900,000 people globally died of colon cancer last year. And it is the only cancer in the United States whose incidence is rising. The only one. Every other cancer is on the decline, except for colorectal cancer.

It is now, it used to be for, like, our first. parents' generation, they thought of it as like an old person's disease, right? For our generation, it is the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. And the crazy pernicious shape of this disease is that on average, it takes seven to 10 years before it was called a pre-cancerous polyp, like a little wart on the inside of your colon. Yeah. It takes seven to ten years before that becomes a malignant tumor. That's actually a cancer. So it's very preventative. Exactly. And like if you got a colonoscopy every year and they looked for those, warts on the inside of your colon, you would never get colorectal cancer. The only reason people

die of cancer, by the way, one in three people diagnosed with colon cancer dies from it because we wait too long. Yeah, it's too late of a stage. Exactly. Like the earliest way that people can identify colorectal cancer is by looking for, it's called fecal occult blood. So that's microscopic blood. That's the occult part. It's invisible to the naked eye in your stool. And we are building a future version of this device. And our mission is to build a version of this device that is looking for that fecal-cult blood and able to identify the patterns of bleeding in your stool because there's so many things that can cause blood in your stool, right? Hemorrhoids. Yeah, hemorrhoids, fissures, fissurlus, ulcers, viral infections,

like, you know, got food poisoning or, like, drink too much alcohol. There's so many things, but, like, the important thing is looking at the pattern over the course of months. If you can look at a pattern over the three, six months and see that it's increasing, you know, day every day, week over week, that is totally different than something that's like, you know, comes and it goes. And that is definitely worth throwing. up a yellow flag. And so that's ultimately where this is headed. It's like, I believe that product belongs in every toilet in the world. Yap Bam, seven days. That's all it took me to go from idea to a $500 million storefront. No tech team, no coding, just my LinkedIn knowledge,

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slash profiting. Yeah, think about all these wearable devices and how popular they are. And I feel it could be like something that's mandatory in everyone's home because it's such like a huge, like your poop is a really big health indicator. It's universal and human. Like people don't talk about but like that's also just like such a uniquely Western attitude, right? Like I give a TED talk about this last year, but like the idea that poop is taboo is like a relatively new thing in human history. Right? And we're flushing away all this amazing. health data. Exactly. And the advent of the toilet was actually like a great sanitation innovation that saved hundreds of millions of lives. Like the deadliest diseases in the 18th and 19th centuries

were diarrheal diseases, dysentery and cholera. And so looking at poop was like one of the most important diagnostic tools we had for most of human history, especially recent history. And then the introduction of the toilet pushed that out of sight and out of mind. And that all converged with the Victorian era when like, you know, we had prim and proper attitudes and modesty. and you're talking about privates was like not allowed. And so now we're at a point where, like, you know, Dr. Curran, our chief of science has this beautiful phrase where he says, people are dying of embarrassment. Oh my gosh, it's so true, especially certain cultures and women. That actually just reminded me of a really crazy story.

I know somebody, their parents were very conservative, their mother was very conservative. And her breast was literally, like she had breast cancer, and her breast was oozing and she was too embarrassed to go to a doctor and even show them her breast. rest. And she passed away very shortly because they caught it so late because she was so embarrassed to have to go to the doctor and talk to him about that. But how great is it to have like a device in your home that can flag to you? So even if you are a little bit embarrassed about talking, but at least you can go to the doctor knowing something is flagged. Exactly. And I think there's a statistic on this that I think is really important, which is, so Aetna, the big health insurance company, sends out a million prophylactic, so like preventative

what's called fit test, fecal immunochemical, which is testing for that fecal cold blood, but you have to collect a sample and send it off to the mail. And people hate doing that, as you might imagine, right? Yeah, yeah. It is not a user-friendly experience. No, like that's a horrible thing to have to do.

The return rate on those fit tests is like three to six percent, like microscopic, right? Like, so people don't end up actually doing it. Yeah, they sit down 100, they get like three or six back. Oh, wow. Yes. The other side of this, though, is Colorgard, which makes a more advanced test that also looks at not just for microscopic blood,

but is also looking for like DNA mutations in your stool associated with colon cancer. Same thing that you have to collect a sample and send it off to a male. They get a return rate of like 66% because that's prescribed by your doctor and they're like barking down your neck telling you like, take this thing, you can save your life. And I think there's a really like, you know, negative interpretation of that, right? Which is like still one in three people won't take this thing that their doctor says

this could save your life. On the other hand, when your doctor says this could save your life, it increases compliance by an order of magnitude, 10 times more people send these back when their doctors are saying, hey, please do this. And to me, that just says there's so much power behind probable cause, right? When you show someone, and to your point, having this in your toilet every day that's telling you useful things about hydration and how your diet's impacting your gut health, and one day it says, hey, by the way, like, there's a yellow flag here. Like, you should be aware of this and like don't be embarrassed like it's not embarrassing it's human it's natural and like this is a crazy fact there's a 10% risk one in 10 people will be diagnosed with a cancer of the lower

GI or urinary tract at some point in their lives like one in 10 like yeah a lot of our friends that's really sad it's sad but it's also like it's universal it's human and it's random and we shouldn't be embarrassed about it and we should talk about it because to your point like when you wait too long I can't, especially with colon cancer, which is like, you know, breast cancer is like, I can understand how that is private and, you know, taboo culturally, but like colon cancer is even like, even more taboo. There's so many stories about particularly, like, put to your point, women, men, it's universal, but like people are.

It's just like embarrassing, right? It's embarrassing to say that something's wrong with you down there and, and yeah, it's scary. But hopefully you are kind of de-tableness. booing everything that's going on with our poop health. 100%. And that's one of our secondary missions is like, A, we want to build this product and get it out in the world, but B, we want to make it okay for people to talk about it because it's totally not a, like, embarrassing thing. It's human and universal and it's like, everyone does

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

And that is a new concept. And people need to get comfortable with that. Yeah. And I know that when you first had this idea, you and your co-founder went to Trader Joe's and he started asking people at the grocery store how they felt about a camera in their toilet. What was some of the concerns of privacy that people have?

And what made you realize, okay, like, I think we could make this happen and people could be okay with this. Man, that is a deep cut. That's an amazing recall on your part. So, yeah, that's exactly what, like, we thought this was a crazy idea at first. And then we had to go out and convince ourselves that, like, no, this actually has legs and people will do this. And a huge part of that, we ran some surveys on, like, Facebook and Survey Monkey. And those surveys kept coming back and people were interested. but we were like, no.

Like, are they sure they're okay with the camera and the toilet? Just like pixels on a screen. I didn't know those people, right? And so we were like, we got to go look in some people's eyes and like actually confirm that like we're not losing our minds here. So we went outside of Trader Joe's. And of course we asked people, do you wearables? Like, how do you track your health?

And then we'd ask them, okay, like would you be interested in tracking your gut health, your hydration and like almost universally. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, a shocking amount of people have gut health issues that they would like more insights into. And then we'd always ask him at the end, okay, but now let's say we're doing this with a camera in your toilet

and the lens is facing down. Yeah. How do you feel about that? And not a single person was offended by that. They're like, oh, the lens is facing down, who cares? They're like, you do what you got to do. Exactly.

Like, I don't, you know, there's nothing special about that. And what we found is that people assume other people will have an issue with it, but then you ask, like, how do you feel about it? They're like, oh, I don't care.

And like, that's a really, really interesting psychological thing where everyone assumed that other people will be more worried about it than they are, but then they themselves are not worried about it, but that's true of almost everyone. So you were able to convince yourself, so this was a good idea. I want to talk about fundraising, and I know you got rejected by 100 investors, so we definitely want to talk about your fundraising. But first, let's talk about the origin story, because it's quite a cute story, and you also pivoted from an original business. So from my understanding, you actually were making a joke. Boys Night Poker game and you guys were talking about what are the worst ideas you ever

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

And my co-founder, Tim was like, no, no, no. Like, the actual, like, legitimate answer to this question is smart toilets. I was like, oh, that's so good. Like, clearly you name that company Throne and put a leaderboard on it, and there's your go-to-market. You came up with the name Throne. Immediately. It's the perfect name.

Yeah, it really is. And so, fast forward, Tim and I ended up working together. we joined a company that was selling crypto or music royalties on the blockchain. So it was like a crypto company. And very 2021 era of technology, very fun. But we wanted to leave and go do something a little bit more grounded in reality. And so we both come from healthcare families. My dad's a medical device inventor.

My mom is a geriatrician. It's like a primary care physician for, you know, aging adults. And Tim has a mom and three sisters that are all nurses. And so, you know, this was like peak COVID. right, 2022. And nurse staffing was a, that was the problem in healthcare. And so we're like, let's go build a healthcare staffing marketplace, like Uber for nurses, basically.

Yeah. But like treats the nurses really, really good because that seemed to be one of the big problems is that all the nurses felt like they were treated like cattle and not people or like just numbers on a page, but not, you know, there's no humanity behind it. We're like, let's go do that. And so we went and built a whole two-sided marketplace. This is before you can vibe code stuff. So like Tim actually like, you know.

Hand-coded. Exactly. All, like, hand-rolled this whole thing. Fast forward, we went and raised our first million dollars from previous investors in my last company and friends who told me they wanted to invest when we started a company. That was quick. And then we tried to launch that company. And like, this was, you know, now early 2023 and COVID was ending. And the nurse staffing crisis was ending with it. And that was just like six weeks into you creating this business, right? It was just six weeks. We had one facility. So we got like 90. nurses to sign up in like two months. Yeah, just under two months. Okay. And that was amazing.

Our nurse recruiter was a killer. And then the actual like sales of getting facilities to sign up for the platform, they'd been burned by so many temp staffing agencies of the past three years. It was a very cut-throw business. Yeah. And most importantly, as COVID was ending, the like burning need for like all hands on deck was kind of going away and people were moving back into like full-time roles. And so one of these facilities that we had under contract was like, oh my God, we just made our first full-time for the first time in two and a half years. And I was like, you raised money. You were telling everybody about this idea.

It takes a lot of like, I guess, confidence, um, courage to be like, I was wrong. Here's your money back. Like, we're not doing this anymore. Did you feel like embarrassment or, or, I mean, it's actually really smart that you pivoted. But some people wait way too long. So like, how did you know like, okay, I'm pulling the plug.

I'm moving forward. I think about this a lot. If we had started the nurse staffing business six months beforehand and gotten just like a little bit of traction, you would have been stuck in that business. It would have killed my soul. Yeah, you would have been, and you probably would have stayed in it for like years, like chasing the initial rush. So it's just like the fact that in hindsight, the fact that it wasn't meant to be and the timing

of it all is just like the biggest blessing. And like, this is so clearly what I was put on this planet to do. This is my passion. And I stumbled backwards into it just by pure luck. Yeah, so you guys had this joke at the poker night. And then two years later, it came full circle when you went and tried to go get, basically, you were telling your investors like, we're not doing this nursing idea anymore. And it just happened organically.

Tell us that story. I had to go back to all my investors and say, hey, this nurse staffing thing's not going to make. We're going to spend the next couple months, we let go of the whole team. We're spending two months figuring out what comes next. And if we can't figure something out by the end of summer, we're just going to give you your money back. and we had like a whole list of 30 ideas. Throne wasn't even on that list. We spent a lot of time.

We were looking for more serious ideas, right? Were you telling your investors like these are the ideas that we have to pivot? No, we just told them like, we know this is not the right idea. We have a list of, you know, a bunch of ideas. We're going to spend some time exploring all these. And if we can find the right one, great. We're going to go do it. And if not, we'll give you your money back.

Got it. Okay. But like, and everybody was, we had one investor asked for their money back. And that was like painful. but okay, fair enough. We had everybody else was like, let us know what you're chasing next. They probably trusted you more

because we're like, these guys are not afraid of, you know, going back on their word, learning something new. They probably liked you more. So two good stories came out of this. One is one investor offered to host us

at his ranch in California. He was like, come back to California, let's spend some time brainstorming. So we booked our flights. By the time we got out there like a week and a half later, we'd kind of just like

decided throne might be the thing. And we hadn't committed to it yet. We hadn't gone to Trader Joe's, but we had this idea of like, wait, the smart Twitter thing might actually be good. And he, like, sits us down. He's like, I hate hardware. But if you think this is the right thing, I got your back. And he's invested more since then.

And he and his wife are just like some of our biggest supporters. They were early beta users, which have been just amazing. And then another investor came back and he was like, I have been waiting to invest in smart toilet companies for my whole career. I just haven't found the right one, but like, please go build that thing. And it turns out, like, another nurse staffing platform, you know, there's a dime a dozen of those, but like a legitimate smart toilet platform that can promise to improve health and save the lives of millions of people is like a much bigger mission. And like my biggest learning in all of this is the size of the mission is directly proportional to the quality of the people you're

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

It's like money is the after effect of everything that they're doing. Totally. And like I have reoriented around this mission. It's something a whole so sacred. and if it works, inevitably, this will make money. But like, we are here in service of a larger mission that is there are, you know, tens of millions of people with chronic digestive diseases and tens of millions of people with chronic urinary tract conditions and like a life-saving mission for cancer prevention. Like that is the type of thing that people can rally around. So you pivoted.

Yeah. What's your advice to all the young improfaters tuning in who may have raised money or they booted? strapped a company and it's been, you know, a year or so and they haven't gotten traction, what is your advice about pivoting, whether to pivot or stick through it? For us, we pivoted. I think in general my advice is life is too short to spin your wheels. If it's not working, go find something that's going to work. There is zero shame. The whole beauty of America is that we get second chances and third chances and fourth chances and fifth chances. I have started so many businesses. And this is finally the,

one that stuck, go do that. I agree. It's like once you find something that actually has traction, like for me, I have YAP media. It's been easy since day one. I had a failed. Like I had a blog site that I couldn't monetize and I had an event business that like I barely made money and I had too many employees. And now I have YAP media and it's like everything is so much more like effortless because it's like the right market where it's like scalable, right? And it's got all this that's just like working for me organically and naturally. And I feel like that's what people really need to find is something that, like, works more effortlessly than not. 100%. When you find that thing that actually suit you like a glove, it's the most motive.

You wake up every morning, like, so excited to go do what has to be done. Whereas, like, when you are swimming upstream, it's exhausting. And that's how it was with the nurse staffing is, like, we saw that we were going to be swimming up a freaking waterfall. Yeah. It's like, you don't have to, you've got choice. Yeah. You've got choice. Even when you raise money on a specific idea, like you proved, you've got choice where you can just go back to your investors and explain it and see if they want to ride with you or not. And as long as you have these conversations with integrity and candor and say, hey, we gave it a college try.

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

Yeah. So you raised $4 million, or a little bit over $4 million in your first round for throne. That was our seed round. Those were your seed round. I'm not a VC back company, so I don't know like what round is what, but you tell us. So we raised a $1.2 million pre-seed. That was Pineway, the nurse staffing. And then we pivoted to throne immediately.

Okay. And then we raised like $500,000. and $250,000. We're raising on safes, right? Which are these like convertible notes. Basically, it's a very quick and easy way for investors to invest in the company. Without you haven't involved too many lawyers. And it's, you know, instead of it taking...

What is that called? It's called a safe. A safe. It's a simple agreement for future equity. And there's a standard template on Y Combinator's website that everybody in technology uses. And so you can go to an investor and they say, yes, I will put in, you know, $250,000, on a $10 million cap. Okay.

And it's quick and easy and you get the money the next week or the next day. So we raised like $750,000 on safes and then we went out to raise our proper seed round and we raised $4 million in that round.

And by that point, we had like a prototype. So it wasn't this. It was very proud of how attractive this is. It looks pretty nice. It's very sleek. Yeah, what we had before this, the prototype was like this big

and like the camera in the toilet was like massive. And it wasn't waterproof So, like, you know, one instance of bad aim, it was all over. Wasn't waterproof. That's hilarious. But it was enough to show that, like, we could build hardware and the app worked. And, like, we had the whole experience.

Like, we could kind of, you know, paint the vision of where this was happening. And that was when you were raising the $4 million. Exactly. Okay. But, like, seeing is believing, right? Like, showing up with, like, the actual thing built was so important. And so we raised that money. But let's pause there.

Okay. You got rejected by 100 investors. Oh, yeah. It's gut-ranging. Why couldn't they see? see the vision because for me, when I got introduced to Throne, I was like, can I invest? Because everybody should have this on their toilet. I don't understand how investors wouldn't have thought that too. It's a great question. And I think at the end of the day, we are consumer

health hardware. And any venture capital investor, most of them are allergic to like one of those three categories. Okay. Much less like the convergence of those three categories. Right. So why? Why? Are they just like hard? They're hard categories? Consumers are notoriously hard category. Healthcare is a notoriously hard category.

And like VC specialize it in consumer or healthcare, but like very few do consumer healthcare. Then hardware is also a notoriously hard category. Yeah, it's expensive. The quick money is in like B2B SaaS or like, you know, the big money now is in like these foundational AI labs. Yeah, the AI company is. Exactly.

And so this is much riskier. And a lot of investors like kind of saw the vision. At that point, also, we had no progress on blood detection. We just had, like, a notion that, like, we think we should be able to identify microscopic blood using these advanced imaging techniques. And, you know, here's some papers we can point you to, but we hadn't built anything like that ourselves yet. And so we had, like, proven out, like, the basic technology, but, like, the advanced stuff

that's, like, you know, ultimate. Because I think everyone agrees with the premise that, like, life-saving. But they're like, can your thing actually do that? Exactly. And, like, at that time, it couldn't. And we just got very lucky, again, like, going back. to the size of the mission, one of our, not one of, our lead investor in that round, when she offered to invest, I was like, why? You know, like, I can feel your excitement and

your passion for what we're building. Where does that come from? And she shared, you know, my husband died of cancer in his early 50s, and all I can think about is, like, what could we have done to catch it sooner? And again, just like, thank God she was put in my life, you know? Yeah, so people who aligned with the mission, even if you weren't, they were, they, yet invested. And then what was the difference between people that you cold outreach to versus people you were introduced to? How is that different in terms of fundraising? So Mark Andresen has a very famous perspective on this, which is that if you are a serious founder, it is your job to find a way to get in touch with me. Because if you can't go through the hoops of getting

in touch with me, and it's not that hard, then how are you going to break through? through all of the walls that it takes to build a company into something successful. So I ran a very disciplined process. I had a spreadsheet. I've had my wish list of like, here are all the investors that I want to get introduced to. Here's the firm they're at. Here's the specific investor I want to invest in. Here's the other similar companies like whoop aura, eight sleep levels that they've invested in. So I know why I want to get in touch with them. Here's the list of all the people that I have mutual contacts to who might be able to introduce me to that person. That's really smart. I got coached on this by Eric

Bond, who's an investor at Hustle Fund. When he caught wind that I was about to go fundraise, he called me. He was like, do not fundraise yet until I coach you through how to do it. And he walked me through this master class. And then he was like, and then you have your list of all of the other founder friends you have. And you get on a call with every single one of them and say, hey, who are the investors you can introduce me to? And you keep a list of all them.

And so, you know, like, let's say you holla give me five names. He's like, great, keep track of all that. And then this is important, the sequencing of it, because you want to build momentum in a fundraise. You want the, you know, the valley to be talking about you. Because investors chirp. And it was like very specific about you get this whole list compiled, but you don't let people make introductions for you yet. And then you say on the same day, like make it a Thursday, like go to all 500 people or it's more like 50 people, but like go to all 50 people and say, hey, here's the five people you told me you could introduce me to. And here's the eight people you told me you could introduce me to.

like here's my blurb, please send this to these eight people. So it's like a blitz. Exactly. It's a blitz. And then you get a bunch of these double opt-ins coming back in saying, I'd love to meet Scott. I'm like, oh, no, I'm going to pass. Like a lot of people just passed, right?

Like, it was like, not a fit. I'm like, by the way, that's like my second favorite investor. My first favorite investors are the ones who give me money. My second favorite investors are the ones who say up front, not a fit. My third and distant least favorite investors are the one who waste a bunch of time and then say no. So you blitz everyone. And then you get all these return companies. in and you schedule them so that you have like, you know, your tier two investors are the first

calls you take so you can like warm up your pitch. Because like when you're, if you do this right, you're pitching, you know, five, six, eight times a day and you're responding to what their faces are showing, right? Yeah. The questions and, you know, you can, like, you get your story right after you practice. You figure out like what story you're telling, what data points, what questions people ask. And I'll tell you, a huge learning for me about the story is so many people gave me the well-intended advice to start with the big vision first and then pitch how we get there. Yeah. And so the original pitch was we're building the smoke detector for colon cancer. And the way we get there is step one, we build this device that tracks God Health and Hydration.

And what I found after pitching that 80 times is that when you pitch, here's the $10 billion thing. And here is, you know, the step by step process for how to get there. Gen 1 is not a medical device. this is a health and wellness device, people are like, well, why do you go straight for that? Yeah. It's like, you're setting yourself back. But when you say, hey, we're building this device that tracks got health and hydration. And by the way, eventually, the mission is to become the smoke detector for colon cancer, and we think we know how to get there.

And that's the note that you end on. Instantly more compelling. So you went out to these investors and you were pitching, but you did have a lot of setbacks. So talk to us about the 100 nose that you got. What were they concerned about? privacy, people didn't believe that there was a market for this device. People didn't think it was technically feasible to do a smoke detector for colon cancer that could look for fecal occult blood or microhumaturia. People, you know, worry about the ick factor. Like, there's so many reasons.

Someone says no. And at the end of the day, like, it doesn't really matter to you as a founder, like, why they said no, just take the no and move on. I will say the hard part about fundraising is like it is emotionally gutting. Just like any sales job, right? Exactly. And like, the only thing I can compare to if you've never worked in sales or like done fundraise is like dating. But the difference is like, you know, if you're dating really active, it's like one,

maybe two dates a week and you get rejected from those, like this is like eight a day. And like, you're so emotionally invested in this because it's your baby. Yeah. And like to your point, someone says, no thanks. And then you have to jump on the next call. Like, all right, let me tell you why this is the greatest thing ever. it is such a emotional roller coaster. It's really hard to describe.

But now you've got an amazing leadership team. You've got somebody from WOOP on your executive team. How did that change the perception of everything that you're doing? My co-founder and chief product officer is the former co-founder and chief technology officer from Woop. Oh, wow. I didn't realize he was the co-founder of WU. Yeah. So John Capitouloub, dropped out of Harvard his sophomore year to go-found Woop.

He built that from 2012 to 2022. He left after a decade, and he is now my co-founder and chief product officer. He, along the way of Building Whoop, was diagnosed with pan colitis, which is the worst form you can have of assertive colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. And so he's very passionate about gut health and continuous health tracking. Perfect. Couldn't be a better fit. I literally don't think there's a more perfect person on the face of the planet from what

we're doing than John. That's amazing. And so he joined us originally as an angel investor, and then we made him an advice. and then he added him to our Slack group, and he was like in every conversation. Like, could not help himself. Yeah. I was like, John, you're gonna come join us full time?

And he was like, I think I'm good. And then a few months later, he was like, yeah, I think I should come to you guys full time. That's amazing. I'm so happy for you. It's so great when you have like a leadership team that you just feel like so locked in with. Let's talk about the marketing.

So you guys are officially launched. You launched in March. Yes, March 10th. You took it to the Consumer Electronics Show. Yeah. So CES went in January. We were there with some preview devices. We didn't actually have, like, devices rolling off the assembly line until the end, beginning

of March, and that's when we were able to ship them. CES was an amazing experience. 500 people a day coming by the booth talking to you. Like, there's a lot of amazing innovation happening in the world of consumer electronics. Did that make it feel real for you that moment? Because I remember seeing images and stuff, and it was just like, oh, wow, like, this is really a thing. Did it feel like a real, like, turning point for you? When you talk to like literally probably, me personally,

130, 150 people a day and you see the switch flip in their minds where they come in skeptical about like, what is this thing on the toilet with the flowers in it? Because we put the flowers in it because people come and talk to you when they're like, well, what's what are you doing the flowers in the toilet? But then you say, hey, like, no, this is actually to help you connect the dots between your diet, your lifestyle, was happening in your gut health. People think about it and they go, oh, wow, like either I need that,

or I know someone who needs that. How did you generate interest for throne? Like, what are your marketing strategies right now? What has not worked and what is working? Great question. So definitely, by far, the best thing that works for us is referrals. Word of mouth. Word of mouth is the number one thing.

People use the advice. It's a very sticky product. People, like, there's this ratio called a Dow Mao, which is, like, of your people who used the product in the last month, how many have used it in the last day? and on average we're like 0.6, which is phenomenal. So you build habits. Exactly.

It's very habit-forming because it's frictionless, right? And people use the product on average four or five times a day and they check the app every time they go because you want to see what's my hydration score. And like, you know, you wake up dehydrated. You get better hydration score at 11 a.m. And you love to see your scores move up into the right. Who doesn't love up into the right?

Yeah, gameifying it. Referrals is a big mover for us. The other big one is we've gotten a lot of press. and we've had some viral moments on like TikTok and Instagram, those have been great for us. What hasn't worked for us is like paid meta-marketing. Like paid ads. Paid ads, exactly.

So paying for TikTok and Instagram reels doesn't work new as well because if a influencer who you gave a free device to posts about it or a journalist who you already trust posts about it, like that's a totally different thing than a brand that you maybe have never heard of, putting an ad on your feed, and you're like, this is interesting, what's the thing on the toilet? But, you know, we can show you the statistics. Most people watch like six seconds of a 30-second reel.

Yeah. And so they just really have only the faintest glimpse of what we're actually doing. And there's so many legitimate questions people have that aren't answered by the time they get to our website. And so what we're doing now, going back to like what our marketing is, what's working, is we're building a long-form content engine because we know that's how you build a category. And this is a brand new category. One of the best examples of this is a company called Levels that was the first to put continuous glucose monitors, those like sticky patches. Oh, those like circle.

Exactly. I see them everywhere. Yes. So Levels was the first company to put those on non-diabetics. And like half the level team is here in Austin. And so I'm good friends with their former head of growth who now is our VP of Growth. Oh, cool. Look at you building that rock star team.

Again, like this big mission attracts great people. And Levels grew their use. to like 330,000 subscribers in an average watch time of 15 minutes. And you think about like, that's a ton of great attention and great traffic that when someone goes from that YouTube page to levels, they know infinitely more about what that company is, what the product is, what they're about than if they'd come to them through a paid ad. So you're really just witnessing that your consumers need to be educated. They need to have like a real reason because it's not cheap, right?

It's like 400 bucks. This is not an impulse buy. So it's like it's not an impulse buy. You've got to really help them understand like why they need this and educate them. And you've been feeling like the long form content is what's pushing the needle. How about influencers that they already trust? Has that been working? Yeah.

So our chief of science is Dr. Curran who has like the biggest following of any GI doctor on the internet. And when he posts, we see huge spikes in our traffic. Like I don't know if you've watched his content. He's just a gifted speaker about health issues. Health is one of those things that anybody can talk about. It's universal, but also, like, when you start getting into, like, real medicine and, like, human anatomy and physiology and, like, how these systems work under the hood, it is so complex. And to talk about those subjects that are deeply interesting, but make it also educational and entertaining at the same time is, like, a gift. Influencers can, when they're really trusted, they reduce the time to buy, right?

Or like the thought or the risk associated with spending $400 on something because you trust that influencer so much. A good idea for you would be whitelisted ads. So do you know about this? Oh, yeah. So that's something that we know we're going to experiment with. We're redoing the website right now and doing all our lifecycle marketing so that when we start spending on ads again, it's we are doing more efficient capture on the back end of it. But yes, white list is high on my to do. So basically this is like something that I've noticed is becoming way more popular because I'm in the influencer marketing space, right?

I have a podcast network. I grow and monetize like 45 shows. And more and more brands want to actually put their own money behind our creator's posts. So it's like the creator puts up a post. You know, they might have talking points or whatever it is. It grows organically. But then the brand actually puts paid ads money behind it. And that's what a whitelisted ad is for those who don't know. So that's really cool. So is there any other branding, marketing tactic that you've been leaning into? The other big one for us is just long-form editorial, like written content. And the two reasons for that is, A, traditional SEO. But the other big one is AI search. And we've had a surprising number of customers come to us because they found out about us through chat GPT. Wow.

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

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

Scott, what was your worst product decision? That's a tough question because the reality is with hard. Like there's the hardware side of the product and then there's a software side of the product. In the software side of the product, the cost of making a mistake is very low because you can go and fix it the next day, right? Like it's just go update the code. With hardware, the cost of making a mistake is very high because like best case scenario, you recut the molds that the plastic is molded in. Yeah, so you've got to be really careful before you say, go produce all these things. Yeah.

Exactly. It was very expensive. And so when you're building hardware, you go through a three-step process, design validation testing, electronics validation testing, and product validation testing. You can't skip. It's actually electronics, then design, then P. And you can't skip any steps, and it takes like a year to go through manufacturing because they don't want you having any mistakes because catching them after the fact is so expensive. So we were very lucky to have a very professional manual. manufacturing group that were partnered with. I'll say actually for the beta product. The not waterproof was terrible because we knew that if a guy peed on it, that would kill the

product. What we didn't realize was that the humidity of just sitting above the toilet would also kill the product. And so like the average lifetime of one of those beta devices like six months before it would short out. Got it. And that's why you do betas before we move into mass production. Like, also just, you know, we realize the cost of like getting this wrong.

could kill the company because we have to recall these. Yeah. So you took it. The lesson in that is like, take your time. Find a professional manufacturing partner. Learn processes. Have a coach. Like, don't waste your money.

Move fast, break things only works when the cost of breaking things is like near zero. What would you say your biggest marketing flop was so far? Instagram. We spent way too much money on Instagram to learn the lesson that Instagram is a horrible fit for our stage of awareness because I'll give you a really specific. example here. There's a company, are you familiar with nude, the, like, laser hair removal product? And it costs, like, basically the same as our product. $400. It's direct to consumer, and it's laser hair removal, and it really works. And the founder of Nude is a good friend.

And he was like, oh, well, here's how we market. And, you know, we were like, oh, let's just go copy and paste that playbook. Because, you know, on paper, we look very similar. It's a white device, roughly the size, $400, like, you know, similar audience. We're like, let's just go do what they do. And what we realized, you know, after like two months and, you know, losing $100,000 is that, wait a second, laser hair removal has been around for two decades. That's not a new category. Exactly.

And like, all you need to see is a before and after. And you're like, oh, I get what this is about. Yeah. And women spend a lot on beauty. Like, they're happy to shell out 400 bucks. because going to a medical place to do it is $400 a session. Exactly. And so the whole idea is like there's this pre-existing awareness,

like there's this framework called stage of awareness where people are unaware and then their problem aware and then their solution aware and then their product aware or their brand aware and they know about you. And then all they need at that last stage when they're most aware is just a nudge, right? Like what's the deal? What's the hook that's going to get me in? And for laser hair removal, anybody in the market for laser hair removal, like, hey, everyone's aware of that market.

Yeah. And then if you're in the market, you're probably aware of the leading brands. You probably know there's at-home laser hair removal. And now you're just waiting for like that sale. You're like, you know, to your point, I'm going to spend $400 on this anyway. Next time there's a $50 coupon like, I'm in. Yeah. Totally different marketing challenge than ours.

And that was an expensive mistake. What is the most unexpected thing that happened so far in your journey, creating throne? I have been amazed. at the deeply intimate conversations that I've gotten to be a part of two because of the health implications of what we're building, right? Like, there's so many people with inflammatory bowel disease,

Crohn's and ulcerative colitis or IBS, and when they find out I'm building a gut health tracker, they start talking to me like I am their doctor. And they'll share their most intimate, and they'll tell me things like, I don't talk to anyone about this, but because you're so in this area, I'll tell you, And it's like, there's an NPR podcast episode on Invisibilia called Poop Friends.

And the whole podcast just talks about how, like, your most innermost circle of friends are the people you can talk about your poop with. And what I found, I didn't plan for this, but like, I get to be strangers poop friend. And like, there's something deeply special about that. Yeah. Ironic as it sounds, like, people, you know, because like, think about someone who has IBD. Like one woman stopped me at a conference and she was like, I wish I'd had this product when I was going through my gut health journey because there were days. My doctor told me to keep a stool long, which is humiliating. And I would like go 40, 50 times a day.

And I knew exactly how many tiles were on my bathroom floor because that's how much time I was spending in the bathroom. And to have something that would track all that for me. So I didn't have to have been like spared me so much humiliation. And like for her to open up to me and she was like, can I give it? you a hug. Like, I'm so excited this exists. Yeah, that's incredible. You know? Yeah.

It's just, like, been such a beautiful window into humanity and, like, some of the most intimate parts of humanity. I don't know. It's very special. Okay. What was the most unexpected financial thing that you encountered? Probably every founder you talked to will share this, and you even kind of alluded to it earlier having a team that was too big.

But, like, the number one thing that eats away at your balance sheet is, headcount. And like they say, higher, slow, fire, fast. Yeah. And that is just actually great advice. It is. And we have been very careful

to be very lean. And that has saved us. Like, we would not have survived. You know, think about, like, we pivoted in 2023 and launched our product in 2026. Yeah, two years or so. Yeah, two and a half years of being like heads down in the trenches without a product.

And like for most of that time, the team was four people. And now how big is a team? Nine people. Yeah, so you've been really conservative about hiring. Incredibly. And it's because, and actually another surprising financial reality is that when you find experts, they are cheaper and work faster. Yeah, they're worth like three or four people.

For example, for us, for like the specific types of engineering we needed for this, like optical engineering. we got burned by two product development firms that like I hate them they they market to you and they like their biz dev guys sell you on like oh like we've got this crack team of like a players and then they end up staffing with like C players who are literally learning how to code on the job so they got they like it's like a bait and switch exactly and that happened to us twice and we're like okay like no more of that we need to go like actually find the engineers themselves who have this explicit specific set of expertise. And we found those people. They worked faster. They got the work done in a week instead of a month. And their rate was lower because you're not paying for like a project manager on top of this whole thing and like they're not learning on the job. It was mind-blowing to me that you could work with someone who was 10 times more talented and pay half as much. So basically you went to hire them directly rather than working through an agency.

Funny enough, we found an agency whose model is more aligned with that. So there are some agencies, because the typical agency model is they have people on staff, and they need to staff all of those hands, right? They can't have idle hands. And so that's why they sell you on the A team, and then the A team ends up supervising work, but it's done by the B of the C team, the junior people. And we found an agency whose whole model is we don't have any employees.

We have a network of freelancers, and we will match you with as many freelancers as you want to interview with, and we just take a cut on whoever you end up working with. Cool. That's a great model. It's a great model. I wish I knew that existed a year before. Yeah. What would you say was the slowest decision that you made or a decision you made too slowly? Just hired the wrong people, let them sit in the roll for too long, drag my feet on it. Like, you know within, really, you know within a week if someone is going to work out.

Like you tell yourself like, all right, I'm going to watch how this warms up. and then like it never does. It just never does. And it always feels better once they're gone, right? It's like the impact is immediate. And you feel so dumb. It's offensive, how much better it feels. And like that's definitely the biggest mistakes.

Like we had just the wrong people in the wrong chairs. My dad's an entrepreneur and he told me this years ago. He was like, look, like when you set out to build a company, you tell yourself and you tell your investors and you tell your team, like I am building a world-class team. And when you find yourself in the position of having someone on the team who's not world class, you have to let them go. Yeah. Because you either let them go or you are a liar.

That's such a good lesson. Okay, so let's play something I call SWAT sprint. Okay. We're going to go over all your strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats, which I'm pretty interested in learning about. So what would you say are your biggest strengths right now at Throne? We have an amazing team. We have a strong brand. We have a product that works.

It's super sticky. People love it. Those are the biggest ones, definitely. It's like the product works. The team is outstanding. We're building a world-class marketing team to match our world-class product team. Because, like, you know, we've had a very small team for this last three and a half years, but it was all product and engineering. It was like, but like overpowered.

And we just had underinvested marketing because we hadn't, you know, launched yet. I think one of your biggest strengths is like your silly marketing. Like the fact that you call. called it thrown and like you're such a personable guy. And like I feel like it's just going to be a really funny brand. And I feel like you're making something really serious, really lighthearted. And I feel like that's a big strength. I appreciate that. And that's exactly what I mean my brand is like it's a tightrope walk. Because on the one hand, yes, this is poop and it's funny. And it's lighthearted and levity. And like, you can't not have like puns in every conversation.

Yeah. I mean, it's so easy. I was, I like introduced you to Neveen Jane because I was like, that would be such a great contact for you. And even in the email, I found myself, like, being like, this is a match made in bathroom heaven. Like, it's so easy. You can't. You can't help yourself. And then on the other hand, to your point, it's serious.

And, like, you know, people who have conditions that, like, really impact their gut health, like, their worst days are really bad. And so, like, navigating that with appropriate, like, reverence. Yeah, you don't want to be, like, insensitive. Exactly. And, like, but that's something that I think our team does really well, in part because, like, so many people on our team are personally affected or no, like, we're all just people. So next is weakness. What do you feel like are your biggest weaknesses right now?

If you'd ask me six weeks ago, I would have told you, maybe eight weeks ago, I would have told you marketing. Like, that was definitely the biggest thing that we didn't have. Now we have the right people. And so it's going to take probably two, three months to ramp up the full marketing engine and get everyone working, you know, in symphony together. And we have one person who's going to be shooting the content, another person is letting the content, and that are posting and distributing the content. that doesn't happen overnight. Yeah. But, and so right now, I would say that's still our weakness is marketing, but we have momentum.

Yeah. It's so exciting to feel it coming together. I mean, you're building out a podcast studio. Yeah. I can't wait to find out more about that. Opportunities. What are your biggest opportunities? Our biggest opportunity is all the stuff that we're already talking about with marketing,

right? You've got such a big market to kind of tackle. And we, exactly. We just like. How big is the market? Let's talk about like this product, right? Like tracking the basics of gut health. The most motivated people are people with IBS and inflammatory bowel disease.

IBS is like 35 to 50 million Americans, depending on who you ask, probably 45 million Americans caps out. IBD is another 3 million Americans, so it's called that like 45 to 50 million Americans. And then people with urinary tract conditions is another roughly 50 million Americans. And then like everybody should track hydration. And like anybody who wears an aura ring or a whoop would benefit from tracking their hydration and their gut health and seeing it. Like, I just ran an analysis yesterday, like, of the last, like, 420 days of my gut health and

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

And there's just so many interesting physiological lessons at the intersection of like sleep and hydration and gut health and stress and gut health and diet. Like the market's really everybody? Yeah, so you're like, it's pretty much everyone. Do you know how many toilets are in America? Like, did you do research like at that level? Like, what were the things that you researched? That's a great question.

It was more understanding like who has a motivation. We think about it more. Like, GLP ones too, right? Exactly. That's a huge one. Like so many, Camille, a lot of our investors have told us, like, oh, I've tried GLP ones. And, like, I am getting wrecked by the digestive side effects.

And it's interesting. GLP ones, like, will change people's digestive in both constipation and diarrhea. It can, like, tip you in either direction. Yeah. And so, like, I think that's a huge market for us. So, like, medication, what is that called? Like, medification effects, like. Yeah, side of fact. Yeah. And so that's a huge opportunity for us. So there's like, everybody has episodes of bad gut health in their life. And at the end of the day, I don't think you should drive, you should like drive your life based on what your wearables are telling you, right? Like, that's a common critique of wearables as people say like, oh, you shouldn't live your life based on what your recovery score is or your sleep score was. And I agree, right? Like, but it is nice to have check engine lights on your car that tell you like, hey, this might be worth.

looking into and just raising things to your awareness that you wouldn't think about because you couldn't feel it. Okay, let's move on to threats. Talk to us about the competition. What is, what is threatening to you? So there are several startup competitors. This is like a very interesting space that's like weirdly heated. Were you like the first one and then people followed? So we came up with this idea all on our own, but once you got into it, we found that there have been several attempts at this, different attempts. Some people have tried to do whole toilets. Some people have had tried to do just iPhone apps. And there's a whole universe of like poop tracking phone apps.

And the reality is like that's not going to ever catch on because people are going to take pictures of their poop with their phone because the user experience is bad. You have to like go and then like take a picture before you wipe. And that's like awkward. Yeah. And so having a like that's what motivated the hardware is like making this truly frictionless and effortless. And so there are a few companies that are trying to do this.

Our biggest competitor is Kohler. They're, you know, massive privately. Yeah. one of the most popular toilet brands in the world. They do like a billion dollars a year in revenue. They're privately held. They have their own town in Wisconsin named after them. That's our headquarter is Kohler, Wisconsin.

And they released a product very similar to ours, like a few months before we did. And totally caught us half guard. Damn. We knew they'd been working on something like this. They acquired a company out of Israel, like years ago, but, you know, went zero dark 30, didn't hear anything from them. where we've been very public since basically day one about like here's what we're doing here's who we are here's what we're building here's the mission they they took a very different approach and their product

is beautiful but it's not hands free it's not effortless it has like a one-week battery life which means you have to charge it every week that's a lot of maintenance for your toilet a lot of maintenance yours is once every 30 days right that's what we advertise in practice we find the average battery life is 56 days oh cool which is like six charges a year that's awesome yeah there's you know it limits your session to five minutes. So they're just like... You have a better product. I'm very proud of the product.

And better branding. I think that's the key. Like, I think your way of going against the big dogs is going to be community. Yes. And branding and personality and mission and your team. Like, that's what I think is going to help be really good. We have a lot of personality. And then there's a bunch of little startups that are trying to do things.

And like, I don't know how real those are, you know? Like, we've seen a bunch of them at the conferences. but, you know, I know for fact, one of them copied our design of our beta device because it looks identical. We're just like, all right, good luck. But they made it black. And we're like, okay, well, you know, and like, you know, we saw them pre-order devices from us and we're like, skip. Honestly, I think the biggest threat is not a competitor. It's that we fail to educate this market.

Like the only way this really fails is not a competitor comes in and kills because like right now we're all trying to create this market. And I think this is a market that's big enough. The same with, like, health trackers, right? That's so smart. It's like there's so many watches. Exactly. Yeah. There's Garmin and Coros.

There's so many brands that. So you're not afraid of having a competing brand. It's like, almost like proof that it's worth it to keep doing it. 100%. My biggest hope was that Kohler would come out and spend hundreds of millions of dollars educating the market and we would get to ride their coattails. Oh, that's such a great point. Yeah.

If you're listening, please do that. I can help you spend that money. I love it. Let's go back to money. So this is called Howley Profit. I want to understand what are your biggest costs associated with creating a hardware device for health like this? Like what were your biggest cost centers? People, right?

Head count. Head count, number one. And for the first two and a half years of the company, it was just developing the product. And that's still by far our biggest cost center. As we continue to ramp up our marketing engine, it's going to move. into marketing. Okay. And a big part of that is going to be, you know, we're hiring headcount for marketing,

but we're also going to be spending more on marketing projects, right? You know, like, you mentioned the podcast studio earlier. We're building out our own podcast studio that's going to look not quite as fancy as this, but we're very excited about it. And the whole idea there is, like, one of our biggest challenges as a company is people see this product when they receive the product. They're like, wow, this feels like something Apple or Microsoft would have made. And like, that is the highest praise possible, but they're surprised.

because our marketing is not yet at the level of Apple or Microsoft. And the whole point of marketing is to set people's expectations. And if your expectation is like, whoa, this is better than I expected, that means our marketing failed. And so we have to level up and spend more on marketing. So we're redoing the website, redoing all of our email flows. Like literally the last thing I saw in my car before I came out here, I got a text, it was screenshots of our new emails. And it's like, oh, that's why you spend money on marketing, you know.

Marketing makes everything easier. It just elevates you in such a real way and like for something. Especially at your price point, right? Not that it's so expensive, but it's not cheap. So it needs to seem like premium. Yes. And like I say this all the time. Like the consumer is used to buying Apple.

Yeah. You know, like if you're buying, if you're spending $400, it better feel like it's worth $400. Yeah. It's got to have some weight to it. Yeah. So would you tell us how much it costs to make? Yeah. It costs us about $130 to make.

And then you're selling it for about $400. 400. Yeah, so it's about a 70% gross margin on the hardware itself, and then we charge a $6 a month membership. And you're doing annual memberships, too? Yes, I think that's $70 a year or $6 a month. Okay. What do you think is going to make more money in the long term, like the hardware device or the subscriptions? That is a great ultimate. It's going to be the hardware device for us, right? Yeah, because people will buy multiple hardware devices in their house. We'll upgrade. In the future, we'll do upgrades. Like so many people, like, I have an aura ring on, and so many or a customers get the next orring just because they love orring and they want the latest and

yeah that's so true so it's like you're going to it's going to be like the iPhone you're going to get a new one every three years or something exactly and we're going to add new sensors to this we'll eventually do like things like you know we're talked about adding gas detection we're going to do the you know one day we'll have multispectral imaging that'll be able to do you know blood detection like you know those are going to be real innovations and like I'm so excited about those I love this I feel like we've had such a great conversation I I'd love to talk about how somebody else, of course I don't want anybody competing with Throne, and I think there's enough competition in the space, but somebody else who has a mission-based

company that is like a hardware-based device, how could they copy you? Like, what are the first steps that they should take? The first thing you should do is just reach out to me. I'm Scott at Throne Science.com, and I'm happy to hear about your idea and help you however I can. I think the first step you should take is make a prototype. Our first prototype was a raspberry pie, which is like a cheap $40 hobby as computer in a Tupperware jar, like a little bucket that we would tape on top of people's toilets and had one button on it and it was record and you'd have to push it again to turn it off. And there was a little light that blinked when it was on. And we put that, we plugged a little

webcam like with a 3D printed enclosure so we could like... Who made it? Us. You and your co-founder. Me and my co-founder, Tim. That had to have influence from your dad who was like a medical device inventor. Like do you, like, I feel like that's not normal to like want to actually create the prototype or so. I mean, so I knew the process for my dad. I've watched him, you know, be a medical device inventor since I was like, you know, that tall.

Yeah. But we just had this deep intuitive sense that like we have to see this work. We have to actually understand like how people interact with this product, even if it's a inferior version of the product. Like, you know, fun fact, the first time I pitched that this would be hands-free was on an investor call. And Tim pulled me aside afterwards. He was like, what do you mean it's going to be hands-free? Like, we've never talked about that before. And I was like, oh, well, I'm pretty sure we can make it hands-free with like these types of sensors and you can do Bluetooth.

He was like, no. And of course, it's hands-free now. So build a prototype. Build a prototype. And in the healthcare space, like, what kind of things should they validate first? Like, how can they determine whether it's like something to actually go after? Like you decided that this was a new category you're going to invent. If somebody has some other healthcare device, like what were some of the considerations that

you had before you actually went full steam ad? So we did three things that were really helpful. Number one is we ran meta ads at like a landing page just to understand like could people sign up for an email list around this concept. And this was back in 2023 when like landing pages you would make on Wix or Squarespace. It wasn't like you couldn't vibe code a beautiful landing page. Like, it would be a very different experience now. You could do this in like two hours now.

So go through up a landing page, point some meta ads at it, and just see if people will sign up for like less than $5 an email. The next thing you do is every single time somebody emails or signs up for email, send them an email that says, hey, I'm blah, blah, blah, and here's, you know, the product we're building. Why did you sign up for this? Like open into question. What are you hoping to get out of this?

Get that customer feedback. Yeah. Exactly. And then how. Engage in those. conversations and we have like hundreds of those and that was I called it our wall of love because like we heard from so many people all these different use cases that I was like oh wow like this is actually something the world wants and that was a huge piece of it and then the last piece is built the

prototype and put it in people's hands and see how they interact with it yeah is your ultimate goal to sell this company no my I want to run this company for the next 20 years of my life like I want My mission is to save a million lives personally. And the math on that is basically saving 50,000 lives a year over the course of 20 years adds up to a million lives. And I think if we scale this to the scale that it belongs globally, like, you can't do that in the United States alone, right? Like 50,000 lives a year would be every single one with colon cancer and like roughly 100,000 lives a year when you can include other cancers with a lower GI in urinary tract. But like let's say we start saving lives in like five years, right? We get through FDA.

We're like in a place where we can actually mark this as a life-saving device. Then we go global. Yeah. And like 900,000 deaths a year globally. And like, you know, that'll probably be closer to a million by the time we're at that point. And let's say we can save, you know, 10% of those. Like, that adds up fast. And so I think if I do my job, right, I will get to be doing this for the next 15, 20, 30 years of my life.

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

as a money-making opportunity. And I think about that at least every week, most days, just because there are really hard days and there are like strings of really hard days. and companies don't die because of competition. They don't die because of co-founder disputes. They die because you gave up on the company. Like you can run out of money and find ways to make the company work again. And the only reason you give up on the company is because you're spiritually, you're not there anymore. And like when you're in a hole for two and a half years building a product, like it's really easy to have a bad day or two.

And I learned somewhere in that time that the most important thing for the health of the company was for me to maintain my own health, both mentally, physically. Because if I'm not healthy, then I will not show up and bring my A game to company building and being a leader. And when I show up and I'm healthy, happy, have good energy, positive, stoked about what we're doing, everything else follows. I love it. Scott, before we go, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? So we are at ThroneScience.com. We're at Throne Science on Instagram, Twitter, every social media channel. And then I'm personally at Scott Hickle.

It's Pickle but with an H-I-C-K-L-E, ever that you would find people on social media. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. Oh, thank you. Well, yeah, fam, that's how Scott Hickle and Throne Profit. And I just love this series because it opens up so many real-life lessons hidden inside every business story. I learned so much every episode. And today, Scott showed us that some of the biggest opportunities come from problems most people overlook, avoid or feel too uncomfortable to talk about.

What started as a joke between friends on a poker night became a mission-driven company helping people better understand their health through behavior we all share every day. Throne is quite literally saving lives with every flush. Thanks for listening to Howley Profit Wednesdays, the Young and Profiting series where real entrepreneurs share real numbers, real margins, and the real sports. story of how their businesses actually work. I'm Halataha, and I'll see you next time.