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

Let me make one quick announcement before we get into it. And what I want to do is I've heard about these people say subscribe, unsubscribe, subscribe again. All right. And I want to test it. So last time we asked our viewers for more reviews and we now have 550, maybe we got 500, 400 reviews in just a couple of days. You guys are really active. And they all sent me messages. I tried to reply to everyone.

Did you? I did now.

Yeah, I went and figured it out.

So here's what I want. If you haven't got a reply, I thought you did get a reply.

So here's what I want people to do. And the reason I'm gonna, uh, I wanna do this is because I think people like seeing us succeed and they like seeing the journey. Yeah. So you're gonna help us succeed. So here's what you do. If you have an iPhone, you're gonna go to like the, the, the menu where you can like turn your wifi and Bluetooth off and all that. There's a button on the bottom right where you hit record. Okay, record that. That's going to record your screen. Then go to the podcast app, go to My First Million, click subscribe, and then unsubscribe, and then subscribe again. Send us a video of that happening. And if you do, also send us a question that you want and we'll answer your question.

Yeah, we'll make a Q&A and this will tell us the truth, right? Because there's— we need to run the experiment. We need to know, is this how— is it— does this actually work or is this just like a myth?

And if you send us your question, ideally send it via Twitter so everyone can see and can comment. And that way it's easy. So just record yourself sub— what is it— subscribing, unsubscribing, and then resubscribing. Do it a bunch of times. Record yourself, post that on Twitter, tag one of us or both of us, and then on that same thread, ask your question.

And, um, and if you don't have a question, that's fine too. And then we're going to look at the charts and we're going to see what this does to the chart movement. I think it's going to actually boost the chart movement if I— if the theory is correct. I, you know, I, I believe this is why podcasters ask people to do this is because this shit actually works.

And if it does, here's what we'll do. If this does work, if people keep doing this, what we'll do is with only the people who do that, we'll like take a screenshot of our analytics and send it to them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll share the data. Yeah. No problem. How was, uh, the big stage? You went to New York?

Yeah. So what I did was I went to New York and I originally went to meet with some advertisers of ours and to be—

wining and dining or what?

Yeah, yeah, kind of. I'll tell you about it. And then I went to be on the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast, and then I went to be on— is his name Pomp?

Yeah, everyone knows him as Pomp.

Pomp. Yeah.

And Anthony Popolano.

I did his podcast. It was cool. Did Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast first thing in the morning at 8 or 9 or 10 AM when I got there. I was a little groggy from my flight because I took some medicine when I flew. It went okay. We'll see what happens.

Wait, wait, wait, hold on. So you walk in, what happens?

Yeah, so walked in. So he has two offices in New York, one Hudson Yards, which I've been to before, it's buzzing. This one was his studio, it's a little quieter but still pretty badass. It was awesome, man.

And you guys know each other, you don't know each other, so this is like the first time?

First time we met, but we had— he knew who I was, and obviously I definitely know who he is, and he knew who our company was. He was totally nice, and he was really low-key at first. He wasn't— like cocaine Gary.

Yeah. He was like, you guys do a little chitchat, small talk beforehand, or you just got into it? Barely.

So here's what happened. We sat down and, uh, there's like an audience. There's like an audience of like 10, maybe 5 or 10 people. Me, it was me and Adam on our side. And then he had an entourage and we sit down and he goes, all right, go. And he looks at me and I was like, I looked at Adam. I will, I go, Gary, I think you're interviewing me. He goes, oh, I am. I was like, right, Adam? Like, is that right? And Adam looked at, he goes, yeah, that's what we set up.

Adam, the safety blanket.

Yeah. And Gary was like, Oh, okay. So tell me about who you are. Like, and it was good.

It was great. So he's a nice guy. That's good to know.

Yeah. You know, he's an easy target because he's so loud.

Yeah.

I believe that he is totally legitimate and a really good business person. I think his company Vayner is really, really hard to run. And he said that he was currently the COO and CEO. Good business. And he's totally legitimate. He's like, 'Cause he, you can like—

What makes you say that?

Well, you could put him in like the Donald Trump category of a guy who talks a lot and you're like, I don't know, this guy the real deal.

Right.

He's totally the real deal, he just talks a lot.

But what were the little tidbits that gave you that impression, right?

'Cause I believe that, I'm not saying you're lying, but I'm curious what you picked up. So whenever I go to the shops, I ask them, I go, so how do you like working here? I always ask employees, I ask the front desk, I go, what's, you know, and you can kind of tell if they actually like it. Yeah. And he has 800 employees, so, and the office space was, it was really expensive real estate, there was really nice furniture. Everything was set up professionally. It's a real business, right? So you could tell what's legitimate and what isn't once you go in there. In this Hudson Yards office, they had VaynerMedia water, bottled water. The office was buzzing. Everyone had nice computers. It wasn't— it's not a startup, right?

Felt like a legit operation.

Totally. 100%. And kudos to him, man. He's talented.

And you did the podcast, you know, rate your performance.

I gave myself a C+. Okay. And then because I was, uh, it was a— I hadn't done any reps that day. Like, I did a podcast later that day and I had a rep. You were firing. Yeah. And I was like, all right, I'm on it. Uh, it just was— it just fell a little flat. But Adam and his people said it was one of their favorite ones they've ever done.

And do you have a, uh, little prep routine you would do if, let's say, before you get on stage, before you do an interview, how do you, you know, switch the light?

Yeah, well, I typically will, like, you know how it is, like, when we're doing this thing, I was in a piss, I was in a shitty mood a minute ago and then these lights turned on and you're like, all right, I gotta, like, snap out of it. And what I do is I talk to the receptionist or I'll talk to the Uber driver just to like start getting my words.

Get outta your head.

Yeah, get my words going and get in a better, happier mood. And that's usually what I do.

Okay.

Is that what you do?

No, like everything, I try to like study and come up with like a framework for how to do it and like a technique. And so I picked up two things. So I picked up one from Conor McGregor, uh, that he, I was watching this documentary of him.

How do you talk with a pencil in your mouth?

Pen in your mouth.

Yeah.

So, uh, this, I tried it and it actually works fantastic. So basically you take a pencil or a pen, uh, you hold it sort of horizontal sideways, you bite on it. So it's in your mouth, you know, sort of going out past your cheeks and then you just talk for one minute. And what happens is because the pencil's there and your mouth's in this awkward position, your tongue has to really work to like flick over and under this thing to get to the spots it usually goes to. So you end up enunciating way better. I don't know if it's placebo. I don't know if it really is like an actual warmup for your tongue, but this shit works. I've recorded myself before and after and I could tell the difference. Um, and other, I had other people listen to it. I said, tell me which one of these sounds better. And, um, I don't know whether it's placebo or not. It, that one works for me. The other thing is, um, like a quick, uh, physical change. So, um, pushups or something, pushups, a wind sprint, a jumping jack, a scream, music, whatever. Um, I am a big believer that that that the fastest way to change the way you feel is through changing your body rapidly.

That's like a Tony Robbins-ism. Tony Robbins has this great YouTube video. If you go look at— if you just YouTube young Tony Robbins, and it's, you know, the same guy minus 25 years, and he's in a tank top and he's giving the speech, and he talks about— he goes, before I get on stage, you know, people always ask me, okay, you're a public speaker, you do a really great job, how do you do a great job of this? And he goes, because I don't make the mistakes most people do. He goes, most people are sitting in a low-energy shell. Their body posture sucks, and then they just get up on stage and they don't warm up. Like, an athlete would never do that. And he's like, I treat myself like an athlete. I get myself in a mental state, a physical state. And he goes, the second thing I do, I don't try to memorize what I'm supposed to say. 'Cause when you try to memorize what you say, you're trying to prepare, but what ends up happening is your mind is then editing. It's comparing what you're saying versus what you kind of remember you were supposed to say. And so you have this other whole thing going on in your head that takes you away from the moment. Third thing, and this is the last one. He goes, before I go up there, I convince myself that the audience has to hear this. Like their lives depend on this information. Like they need, I'm here to help. And if I can get this across, like even with this podcast, for example, it's like, you know, somebody is out there, they're commuting, they're, you know, they're, they have this idea that they haven't taken action on. They're kind of beating themselves up about it. Or, you know, they look around at the 5 people that they hang out with the most and they're just like, these people are not like me. And we're in their earballs and they're like, oh, there are people like me out there. And yes, I should take some action. And yes, I should have some fucking energy today. And so he's like, I just convinced myself that they have to hear this and that I'm here to serve them. And I was like, okay, I'm just hearing that. I do that.

Just hearing that has made me feel better. There you go. Um, another thing that I did while I was out there is, uh, on Sunday night I tweeted out, so, um, when I fly, I take a lot of Xanax. It's the only drug I do. I don't do any alcohol and Sometimes the night before I'll take it a little bit as well because I really hate flying. And so on Sunday night I tweeted that I rented this Airbnb, which I did, and I'm going to host a meetup. And I got 200 replies saying, let's meet up. Right. And that I couldn't do that. So I only let 20 trend subscribers come. And so the trend subscribers are also not 100 of you listeners or not 100% of listeners are subscribers, but all subscribers are listeners. Right. And they— so I met, I think, 30 ended up coming and it was fucking awesome. It was so cool. This one kid flew up from South Carolina or something, and I tweeted this on the meetup was Monday night. I tweeted this on Sunday night. Yeah. Like there was no preparation. Like we all— we did— me and Adam landed on Monday morning. We went to the Mexican place next door and said, hey, can you bring over enough tacos for 20 people? Here's $200 or $300. And go buy us some beer and we'll pay you more money. And that's all we did. And it was awesome. Yeah. These people are fucking fanatical. It is crazy. Um, it's nuts. It's really odd.

Who was the most interesting person?

So many interesting people. One guy, there was this one guy, I forget his name. Maybe he's listening. He was an older, the eldest guy there, which is not old, but in his 50s or 40s. And he built, was, it builds custom electric cars. Cars and through the Trends Group sold 50 cars.

Just another custom electric car.

Yeah, like he was making, uh, like they took a—

they take a Prius or they took, um, no, they took—

yeah, they took like a— some type of pickup truck and made it an electric delivery van.

Oh wow.

For a cannabis company in LA. Because, um, who else did I meet? I mean, I met all types of people. One guy who sells fake boobs for a living, so he sells, um, his name—

tell me more—

Fairchild. Did this guy ever talk to you on Twitter?

No. His name's Fairchild? Hunter Fairchild. Oh, Hunter Fairchild. Yeah, yeah, I see this guy on my Twitter all the time.

Yeah, he— his boss—

He sells fake boobs for a living?

Yeah, his boss invented like a better fake boob.

Dude, what's in his bio? Because I've looked at this guy's bio and he's not advertising this, so let's see what's up. No, it was awesome.

We'll put Hunter on blast. Me and this girl Aditi were just sitting down and Hunter came and we were just shooting the shit and we were like, Hunter, what do you do? And this woman Aditi, she's nice, I've met her before. Um, we were just sitting there and she— he's like, well, I sell breast implants. And we were like, what? And we just started talking. I was like, so do you have like a woman who comes with you and like shows you, like shows the buyers? Like you need like sales brochures. Like how do you have— like how do you show that your boobs are the best? And he was just like walking through this whole process. It was crazy. Uh, I had never heard of such a thing.

Yeah, me neither.

But of course he came up from Virginia for this.

That's great. All right, cool. So you can do more of that or what?

Well, you and I need to do more. So what we can do is New York, that we could get, I easily, we could have gotten 200 people. Yeah. So we can do one in New York. Um, I think Acast or whatever we use tells us where people are.

Right. We gotta go to Canada. We gotta go to Utah. When we shouted out Utah that time, I know I still get more, dude, the number of these friendly ass Utah, you know, citizens, whatever they're called, Utahns reach out all the time. Like, hey, when you guys are here, I got you.

So maybe like, and it feels good to be taken care of like that.

It does. It feels great. Maybe hospitality.

Hmm. What's, what month is it? February? Yeah. When you end of February, we should do a thing where we could try to hit up like 3 cities in 5 days, right?

Or maybe, maybe I got into this thing. I don't know if I told you about this, this thing called reality. Have you heard of this? No. So basically, you know, Jewish people have Birthright.

Yeah.

And I don't know exactly how the mechanics of Birthright work, but from what I understand about it, if you're Jewish, you get to go.

It's paid by the sort of wealthy Jewish people around the And they're all fundamental Christians who believe that Israel is the land for Jews.

Oh, wow. Okay, didn't know that. So basically, that's a cool thing for Jewish people.

You're shaking your head. Are you Jewish, Henry? But you know all about it?

You're just stunned? All my friends have gone on it. Yeah, I've never been more jealous than when my friends go on Birthright and then come back. It's like this mini study abroad.

Yeah, it's great.

And so then I was like, all right, um, what is this? You know, how do I get more of this? So they have this program called Reality. Reality 2020, if you want to look it up. And it's basically, you can be in these different groups. You can be in entertainment, you can be in technology, you can be in whatever, social impact. You apply to get in. If you get in, I've applied, I've applied before, I got rejected a few years ago. This time I applied, I got in, and it's like a group, small group, I don't know, 30 people, 40 people that get accepted and get to go. It's not all expenses paid, but it's like most expenses paid. And so, um, yeah, anyways, I've been going on this trip late May now, and I'm gonna see what this is all about to Israel.

And, um, oh, I've heard of this. Seeva does it. Is it a Jewish thing?

I don't think it You don't have to be Jewish. This one's not like birthright.

It's like a—

but it's for like, you know, Israel's, you know, sort of startup and kind of thought leadership and young people, that sort of thing, like future leaders.

I mean, it's like a— not in a bad way, it's a propaganda thing. It's like to get you into the Israel—

yeah, it's like a program. Yeah, yeah. So I'm doing that, but my question to you— it's late in May, so first, scared of coronavirus, may not go.

I was supposed to go to Germany in May.

So we should talk about coronavirus in a second. But secondly, why do Jews have all the good things? Why don't other people do this? This seems like a great— Birthright seems great.

Jews and Mormons.

Yeah, Mormons.

They're like the same thing, but Mormons might be better now because they don't drink.

Do Mormons have these perks like that, like Birthright or something?

Yeah, they have all types of shit, dude. They— and they're all real good at basketball, and Jews love basketball too. I mean, dude, they're all like real similar, very similar group of people.

Well, the thing I, I like, uh, is the sort of pay it forward thing. I think Silicon Valley has this a lot where, um, A lot of people who move here, they hesitate to reach out to people because they're like, well, why would this person wanna help me? I, you know, I have nothing to offer. But like, that is the culture of Silicon Valley is to pay it forward, is to help the like next person who doesn't know anything. And I feel like Jews have this in their culture and I feel like Mormons have this in their culture. You know, I'm Indian. I don't feel like there's this same, it's not as strong for Indian people to sort of try to help out the next. And I think part of it's 'cause there's such a big population, you can't afford to do it. There's like, I don't know, 6 million Jewish people on earth or something crazy and they run the world. So I think, with a small number of people, you can offer this like much more high-touch, help each other model.

I agree. Okay, you wanna get into some stuff? You wanna talk about coronavirus or you wanna—

Yeah, coronavirus. Okay, so I'm terrified of coronavirus. And generically, I'm terrified. I was terrified without information, and then I started looking into it a little bit more.

I don't even know about it. Can you explain what the coronavirus is?

Yeah, so basically there's a couple of these viruses. They're influenza strains.

And so—

And so what you have up here is D2C stuff. So like, my— I looked at my portfolio yesterday, I was like, fuck. So I lost money yesterday off the stock market.

So crazy shit's happening all around. So generically, stock market, you know, people get paranoid. Bonds, you know, people flee to bonds, stock goes down, that sort of thing. Other funny stuff happening, you know, Zoom, the conferencing software. So The stock ticker Zoom goes up 50% today.

Wait, shit, it's up 50% today?

I love it.

So we could have predicted this one. I love when that happens. But all kinds of fucked up things. Some other things. Smart friends are basically saying, hey, if you need— Smart friends? My smart friends, you know, people who actually read the real information and like understand how the world works, they were like, hey, if you need prescription drugs, you should start stockpiling, because most of it's coming from China, and the supply chain globally is fucked. And like, the world doesn't have— who said that? Like, friend of a friend, basically.

But how the fuck do you stockpile prescription meds?

Basically, buy up, buy your refills. And so there's no global plan B for what happens if China gets sick or slowed down. We don't have another like supply chain. And so all kinds of things are suffering.

And I have friends that have D2C companies that buy their shit from China. They're backed up. And they're saying, shit.

Yeah. Months, months backed up. I was talking to a supplier yesterday and he was like, even if we come back to work, there's, you know, all the other factories that we depend on, the printing factory, the packaging guys, and they're not coming. Like the workers are just not coming back. 'Cause in most factories in China, the workers don't actually live in that city permanently. So for Chinese New Year, which is when this happened, so Chinese New Year is a month-long holiday.

Yeah. Well, we have a Chinese intern. He told us all about it. He goes, He goes, it's the largest travel day in the world, right? Because every Chinese person, everybody goes home.

And when they go home, they go back to very rural areas. And already there's this problem where they don't, you know, often they don't come back because, you know, they don't want to be living in some other city working in a factory. But with this, people are just not coming back. And so there's no replacements. It's like a very dire situation. Well, and like obviously at a human level, also incredibly dire situation.

So to turn shit into gold, where's the opportunity here? I mean, what's going to happen? Do you think that this is gonna impact, uh, long— have long-term impact with China making shit and you're gonna have to go elsewhere?

I don't know. So there's a question of like, um, so two, two theories. One is for stuff like this, the people who are gonna do really well, they didn't start now. They started something 2 years ago, a blog on being a prepper or whatever. And, um, today's your day, you know, like this is your month. And so I don't think the— I don't know how much I am interested in the sort of like today opportunity. Also just feels kind of fucked up.

We talked about Judy the other day, right? The Judy sort of survival kits or bags. My friend Joe Spicer bought something from, um, like survivorkit.com, and he got an email from them saying, we have 100 times our normal volume, we apologize, but we're gonna make it happen, right? So those— the Judy thing that—

which, uh, the respiratory— those are not in the Judy bag, but the respiratory masks are just like out of stock. You can't get them. And that's like the thing you need is like to protect your nose and mouth.

No one can pounce on that. Yeah. Um, we covered this guy who launched a company called, um, Jude. Is it Judy? Judy. Yeah. Judy. It's an emergency kit.

Yep. An orange, like, emergency backpack. Yeah. Ready to go.

Uh, my wife texted me today and said, let's go and buy a bunch of stuff.

I feel the same way. More people are doing this. Have you ever been in an emergency situation, by the way? Have you ever, like, been in a city when, like, a flood happens or anything like that? It's really bizarre how it feels. No. I was in Hawaii, our honeymoon. There was a hurricane in Hawaii. Oh, I know. The week of our honeymoon. When I was there. And so we went to the grocery store. First we go to the hotel and they're like, hey, um, we have early check-in available. And we're like, well, that's cool, thanks, because we're on honeymoon. And they're like, no, we just have like a lot of open rooms there. I was like, what's going on? They're like, well, have you seen the weather report? Like, there's a hurricane this week. And of course I don't check the weather, so I booked my honeymoon on a hurricane week. And, um, so we go to the grocery store and it's like the zombie attack has happened. Like, all the water bottles are gone. Like, the shelves are empty. People are just checking out like for Cartsworth. It's really like— it's an odd, eerie, eerie feeling when that happens. Yeah, this thing—

my issue— here's an opportunity if someone wants to go for it. You know how Pol— is it— there's Politico Check. That was called PolitiFact. You mean like the fact-checking thing?

Yeah, I don't know what it's called, but it's—

so what you do is like, did Bloomberg really say this? Right. And it goes— that's what I want for coronavirus right now. I don't know what's true and what isn't.

So there's a blog called I believe it's called theprepared.com. It is exactly what you want. It is plain English. It's like, here's the facts, not the overreaction. And by the way, we'll tell you about the overreaction and why it's an overreaction, but here's the facts. What's it called? Presented in a calm, calm way. The site is beautiful. It works great on your phone. I tweeted at the guy who started, I was like, this is a, like, thank you for making this. Yeah. I was like, thank you for making this site. Cuz this is exactly what I need in this situation. It autofilled nicely.

A bunch of people must be going through. I feel like it's, ah, he's selling kits. He's selling kits. Oh, God, this guy's awesome. Cool.

I'm into this. So scary situation. Yeah, scary all around.

Best of luck to everybody. Yes, for sure. Okay. You want to move on or— Yeah, let's move on. Okay. I'll— I have a few interesting things that happened. Cool companies that we could talk about. The first thing is something that has made a huge impact on me, and I think more people need to take advantage of it, which is Transparent Numbers. So basically there's a group of people out there who believe that transparency is good and they share all of their revenue. They share, they share their every metric about their business as deep as everyone's salary, their bank balance, churn, how much it costs to acquire a customer, how much a customer stays on for, everything. Some are a little bit less. Well, they'll share how many customers they have, how much revenue they have, what their bank balance is. More people should follow these businesses. I, for one, am totally against that. I don't think you should ever reveal that. But I'm happy they do. And yeah.

So some examples. So throw them out.

So first of all, my friend Ankur, what's Ankur's last name?

He runs Teachable. I don't remember his last name.

If you Google— can you tell me Ankur's last name? Founder of Teachable. Okay. So he reveals on Twitter the valuation of every Nagpal. Yes. Nagpal. Nagpal. He reveals the valuation of every—

every time they just raised like $20 million at whatever, $200 million, something really good.

And he reveals how much revenue they have, how many customers they have. It's awesome. Yes. I love that. The other guy is Sahil. Sahil from Gumroad. Shitty business. Seems like an awesome guy. He reveals every single month all the— you could Google Gumroad founder Sahil. It's on his Twitter.

If you— he just— he does it in a tweet length. So you don't even have to dive into the books.

It's like, yeah, here's 140 characters. Um, Joel from Buffer, he does this. They actually just switched. So if you go to baremetrics.com or Google Baremetrics, they have like 18 different companies that do this, and it's pretty cool. And Joel from Buffer used to be on there. They're a $22 million a year company, so pretty valuable. And they would reveal everything, everything—

employee salaries, like name, salary, equity, You know, level everything.

And you know what? They're changing. They're showing less and less. Have you talked to them?

Do you know why?

It becomes problematic when you add more people.

Um, yeah, duh. It's like, you know, guy, you know, creates, you know, turns his kitchen into a man cave instead, gets a girlfriend and is like, oh, she doesn't like it. It's like, yeah, no shit, man. Like I could have told you this, like when you bought the plasma and put it on the fridge.

Grow up, Joel.

People don't like their salary being public. What?

So they still do salary, they still do equity.

People get upset when they see their coworker who slacks off and works from home 2 days a week and they see his salary.

Because people don't understand that like different people have different situations.

It's not like— So, so they did it, I think, in a smart way, which is they basically were like, they used it as customer acquisition.

Yeah, it's part of their story because they got their ass kicked by HubSpot. And so they like— I'm sorry, uh, Hootsuite.

And so one more person who's doing it and his business is way better than Buffer.

I love this guy's business.

That seems high to $2 million a month.

You said $2 million. That's for sure. That's how much they do.

So they're doing $2 million. No, that part's that. So $24 million a year. So $24 million. You think they're worth what? 10 times, 10 times that. Okay.

Maybe it's growing like a weed. Maybe people don't switch from their email platform. Yeah.

It'll all depend on the retention. So can you pull up, actually, can you open it, open up their, their metrics? So just, just Google like, like baremetrics dashboard or something. I forgot what the URL is, but it's like something.baremetrics.com and it's like their whole company. It's like, here's how many new customers we got. Here's how many people churned this month. It's like all of their graphs and you can use it for your company.

He even showed how much profit they make. I think it's like ConvertKit.

It's like, yeah, here it is.

You got to zoom in. There you go.

So this, I don't know if this is their business or this is like the example thing, but it's like monthly recurring revenue, net revenue, fees. Yeah, that's not it. This is somebody else's business.

You got to do ConvertKit. Yeah, do ConvertKit bare metrics. Type in ConvertKit revenue.

Maybe if you can't spell. I also use ConvertKit. I actually, I pay for a subscription because I'm like, this product is so fucking powerful. I don't actually have many sequences set up. I have a sequence of one email right now, which is not a sequence. It's just an email.

But I think it's a great product. I love ConvertKit. I love Nathan. Nathan's a great guy. Nathan's only 26 or 27 years old.

We talked about the idea of doing a drip sequence to build a newsletter for women going through pregnancy and like week by week. And I had a friend, or sorry, no, I had a random listener reach out on Twitter, was like, I'm doing this. Here's my kind of unique asset I have to go about this. And how should I set this up? And I sent him to ConvertKit. I was like, dude, your problem is gonna be solved in like You know, the next 90 minutes.

Um, what are people leaving Baremetrics? Why can't you find it? Here you go. 1.7 million. Oh, is that it? Does it— what's the URL? Oh yeah.

So 1.7 million monthly recurring revenue. And you could just look at the— it'll say churn. So annual run rate doing $20 million a year, which is up 1.7%. That's gotta be how much this month. Revenue churn, 5.1% per month. That's not bad.

That's not great either. Well, it's because it's a small to medium business.

Like if you're churning 5% a month, that's like, what's his— what's the net growth? So 5% a month is the churn. What's the new business every month? 1.5%. It's 1.5%. Yeah. So he's net negative then per month.

No, I think that that churn, that growth, that growth number takes into account churn. I see.

Okay. Gotcha. Oh, okay. That's the—

but this is because it's the average revenue. It even says so. They make on average $60, uh, is it $60 a month per user? Right. Um, and so the thing on the right, small to medium business gonna have a lot, it's gonna have higher churn compared to other SaaS.

But dude, if you're, if you're a real sicko, you could just look at the livestream on the right and see every minute when somebody pays them, it'll say like right now it says $29 paid by, you know, you know, anonymous company. Um, dude, he's got a lot of failed payments here. You get on that, Nathan. What's going on? You can't be failing. It's 3 out of the 12 payments here have failed.

4. He has a chart that says which ones fail. So these, these companies are badass. I— you wouldn't do it?

No, I think— what about a part of what you do? The email list size, the revenue?

I don't want to share anything publicly. Well, I'll say like 8 figures or something. No, I just don't think it brings a lot of good either.

You know when a company's trying to raise or sell their business because like 2 months before all these articles will come out just like Handing over information. Why is that happening? Because they want to raise their round or they want to sell their company within the next 6 months. I don't—

can you go to the next, go back to the Google Doc? No, I'm not a fan of it. Uh, one time when I did my first conference when I was younger, it made like $60 grand in profit, and I told everyone in the blog post, and I hated the attention, so I'm never gonna do that again. Um, okay, so let's talk about pipe.com. You know pipe.com?

I saw this and I was like, dude, this is awesome. I was— I came to I came to our little scratchpad to write it down and you already had it written down.

Right. Awesome. Awesome business. So I have so many thoughts. All right. So, uh, a couple of things. First, the financial infrastructure. What's, what's really going on here? The financial infrastructure for software companies and tech businesses is being rebuilt. So we already had investors, right? Angel investors, seed investors, uh, Series A investors, blah, blah, blah. But then you have a bank for startups, Mercury, started by, you know, some successful founders from Heyzap. They started Mercury. It's supposed to be a bank designed for startups. And then you have things like Brex or Ramp, which we talked about, which is like business credit card designed for startups because the legacy institutions don't understand how to value these companies, how to assess risk, or how to like fund and finance these companies. Then you have things that are, um,, you know, like marketplaces where you can buy and sell, to buy and sell online businesses, like Quiet Light Brokerage or wherever. You have due diligence firms that pop up that specialize in software businesses like Centurica. Then you have, you know, guys like Pipe, which basically say, great, you know, you have a cash flow problem, but you have steady, we know you have a predictable book of business. We will give you the cash up front, and we'll take a vig off the top of that. And so I think these are all really smart businesses, each one at a different part of the, the financial stack for software technology companies.

Or, or the one problem with these is, or, or that is there's a lot of, there's a lot of competition. Yeah. I think the aggregate will be, so for example, this is also happening on the customer side, right? So, um, companies like Affirm or Sezzle or Afterpay. That's consumer. Yeah. That's on the consumer side. But same, same idea, which is like they're trying to provide different financial instrument that like the traditional, um, financial company, like the, the current sort of incumbents aren't really figuring out how do we help e-commerce companies, sort of, how do we help merchants, um, you know, turn their, their products into monthly payments for their customers? But Affirm came out and did it. And, you know, FastPay— or sorry, not FastPay, Afterpay. I think Afterpay is like an $8 billion company or something like that in Australia. Uh, Affirm is a multi-billion dollar company here doing the exact same thing, and they're all fighting over these merchants.

I love this shit, man. I say fuck the big banks. I fucking hate them. Yeah, I hate them so much. I hate having to talk to a They don't understand me. They don't understand what we're doing.

Um, I, so hype.com's out. I'm loving those things. Yeah. One thing.

Hey Henry, there's a guest downstairs. Would you mind letting her in? And she's going to join us for like the next segment. Julia, what's up? Hi, how are you?

Doing well. Thanks for having me.

You're already in my good books because you actually listen to the podcast. Not all the guests do. I do my homework.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Yes, I have a— there's a bunch of employee fans. Great. They found out and it was— I mean, like, they've been really gunning for me to have a chance.

Shout out to them. Do you have like that, like, corny name for your employees? Like Everly Wellians? Literally. It. Oh my God, okay, is that really it?

Well, but then everyone's like, hey, did you just like come up with that? Cuz that is not that great. Um, and so I think like, you know, someone better with words was like, how about just Everlys? And I'm like, oh, that's better.

That sounds much better. We've shifted it to that. Do you guys have this for The Hustle? Do you have like Hustlonians or some shit like that?

Say no.

Yeah, no, you're fired actually if you say something like that at The Hustle.

No, we Just people.

Yeah, exactly. We, you know, with Bebo, somebody tried to like do that and I was like, thank God there's not a nice one because I don't want this as like a thing. Yeah, Bieber's, that would have been it. By the way, I'm followed by Justin Bieber on Twitter. No big deal. For real? Yeah, so crossed 10,000 followers and Justin Bieber follows me. I DM'd him, he did not reply. How many people does he— it's got to be one of those bots that just follows people. Follow, I don't know. Henry, Justin Bieber, number of followers, we'll find out. Uh, the only way this can go is down for me where he follows millions of people.

It's not a low number, my friend.

It's not a low number. Yeah. Okay. 300,000. I'm one of the top 300,000 friends of Justin Bieber. So let's just leave it at that.

That's better than I would've thought. I thought the number was gonna be like 10 million. So, for what it's worth.

Okay. So speaking of, so you have, uh, so you're Julia Everlywell is your company name. Uh, but your name's Julia Cheek. Yes. That's a cool name. Thank you. Um, I hate my last name. And so I'm always thinking like of, you know, just totally rebranding it to something cool. But then I know people will be like, did you just change your last name to try to sound cool? Which is probably the least cool thing you could do.

I kind of got the opportunity to do that. I decided I had a choice to do Julia Taylor maiden name, or if I wanted to, when I got married, take on Cheek. Yeah. And it was just sort of— I did it.

You did it. Okay, great. And so for people listening who are like, okay, great, who is this person? Why are they joining the show? Give us the like 30 seconds about what's interesting about you.

Yeah. So I'm Julia Cheek. I'm the founder and CEO of EverlyWell. We are based in Austin. We are about to celebrate our 5-year anniversary, which is hard to believe. Probably the most interesting thing about me starting this company is I started a company in the blood testing space, um, in the direct-to-consumer space, coming with no entrepreneurial background or healthcare background whatsoever. Right. Um, and had every kind of X in the box of why you wouldn't—

Right. You were a consultant, right?

I was a management consultant. Yeah, where? I went at Deloitte, went and got my MBA, had a really traditional Harvard, had a really traditional corporate—

Sam's all about the pedigrees. Yeah, I hate it, I don't care. Sam's like, Harvard, okay, I'm in.

Yeah, there's definitely some interesting ties I think that turned me on to being an entrepreneur when I was there, but certainly like I was really on the corporate path, um, and then had this idea when I was working at MoneyGram and left my job to do it and I can confidently say 100% of people who know me was like, "This is definitely gonna fail.

There's no way it's gonna work." So what's the company do?

What do you mean you never got your results? Like you personally didn't receive it?

I personally didn't receive it.

But the doctor looks at it.

No coronavirus, but fish pounds for the $40 million.

Especially for the healthcare entrepreneur, and we have to learn not to do that.

We were just talking about coronavirus. Do you guys sell coronavirus tests?

Yeah, you know, if we did, I think we'd— I wouldn't be here right now. I'd be doing something else. But, um, but I'm hopeful. There's progress, as we learned today from Gilead and a couple other companies. I'm hopeful someone's close on it. So, but no, we don't have it, unfortunately.

Are those one-time purchases, the $40 million? Um, no, it's—

I mean, it's a combination of new customer acquisition and repeat. We have a really healthy repeat business because a lot of our tests are things like cholesterol.

But it's not recurring is what I mean.

It's not recurring. We do have, um, at our enterprise contracts that are recurring. Got it. For Medicare. Right. But it's a mix of what I would call one-time repeat and then actual recurring contracts, which is, there's challenges, there's good and bad. I think when you have a one-time heavy business up front, you have to build a good set of unit economics from the get-go so that you're not just optimizing on this like promise of payback. Right. Right, so that's been good for us. On the other hand, we've had to be super super disciplined in a way that I think some have been.

Right. And so you're based out of Austin. You do this D2C at-home test that then gets sent to a lab, a partner lab. They analyze it. You get the full report. It's like, here's everything. Here's what's interesting about this. You can share it. Uh, it's like the way that it should be. Like if you didn't even, you didn't have to like invent this. If you just asked a layperson, you're like, how should this work? That's the description. And then you just made that like happen in real life. Uh, the other thing that's interesting is you were on Shark Tank. I was. So as a fan of reality TV, me and Sam both watched The Challenge, probably the trashiest reality show.

But tonight's the season finale of the Netflix one. Of which one? No, the one where they get married after living in a room.

Love Is Blind. Yeah. Wait, didn't it all come out already? Didn't they just release it today? Today? No, I'm at episode 3 of that one. Um, good show. It's pretty awesome. Pretty good show. Uh, have you seen it? I haven't seen it yet. Do you know the premise?

I do know the premise. They put people in Yes, it's actually pretty cool as a series.

Yeah, they have to get married or you get cut off the show. Like, literally, you don't even get like eliminated Survivor style. They just edit you out. Like, you're just not shown ever again if you didn't propose. And so what ends up happening is it's 10 days behind a wall. You talk to this person and you're speed dating basically behind a wall. So you're kind of like deciding who you like. Yeah. And then someone proposes through the wall. So they're like, can you come close to the wall please? I'm on a knee now, and I want to ask you to marry me. And then, but the thing is that I thought that's where the show would end, but then they put them in the real world together, and they're like, all right, you're going to get married in 30 days and see what happens. And it's pretty interesting stuff. So good job, Netflix.

Shout out to them. How are you asking her about Shark Tank?

Because tell me about how it came about. You applied many times, one time. How did you get on?

Yeah. So Shark Tank was an— honestly, I didn't even know what it was. Huge fan of the show. I also am a huge fan of my own experience, and that's not, I think, what everyone has to say. But I always tell people, I think it can be a really game-changing thing for entrepreneurs, um, if you do it the right way. It is a lot of freaking work. Ton of work. So I—

once you're on or before you're on? Before you're on.

Okay. Um, so I would say, like, so I— we aired in November of 2017.

Go to the beginning.

How'd you even audition? Like a 9-month process of, I would say, the year of 2017 80% of my year was just talking really good things. So we applied, um, it's a— and by we, me, um, it's like a 50-page written application online, or no, it is printed and written out. I tried to like use a PDF editor.

I mean, it takes forever.

Yeah, like, you know, it was like a decade ago.

So you write this whole thing up?

I write this whole thing out. I will be honest, I was, I was, um, a finalist at TechCrunch Battlefield in 2016. The producer scout from— gotcha.

So they reached out, maybe they reached out.

Oh, that's cool. Um, so it's kind of like if you're thinking about American Idol maybe, which I would never be, but you, you either can get contacted and sort of in the front of the audition, or you kind of—

you wait in line.

Yeah. So it's not that I had necessarily a better chance, but I did get shortcut into the application process. So filled that out. The application probably takes 40 hours. Um, and then you have to sign all their contracts and basically sign your identity and image away, um, to able ABC for in perpetuity. But, um, and then from there you do a voice interview with producers, you do a video interview as well with the application, then another video interview of your pitch. And then from there the producers work with you for about 4 months to get it right. Like, what is your story? What is your brand? What is your structure? Crazy. Ultimately, you're— what I think people don't realize, it's a human interest story. It's a human interest story. You are there to make good reality TV. But it is your decision. The producers will help you and advise you, but this is your gig, and it's up to you to decide how you want to display yourself on TV. Um, but so do you still remember your— not to air you—

do you still remember your opening? Because you probably drilled it like a thousand times.

I did, I did. And I will tell you, I thought I was like really good and comfortable at public speaking, and then I did this and I was like, okay, I was really bad. And now, now I, I feel comfortable.

Did you raise money from them?

Um, I did. So I signed Signed, or I shook on the largest deal ever for a female entrepreneur valuation. Wow. So yeah, with Lori Greiner, she is on board. She's been tremendous.

Um, because of QVC or what?

For me, it was really at the time we had no brick-and-mortar retail presence, and I knew that that was a priority for us to create a product that was like actually accessible and ubiquitous. And that's actually, hindsight, been a really good move for us. But I felt that she would be invaluable in helping us to get— does she help those stores? Yeah, she really helped with packaging and branding and making something that's accessible. When you're trying to like sell a testing kit where either people think it's a DNA kit, right, or they have no idea what it is, right, um, being able to differentiate that when you have like 10 seconds to grab something. How much of a check did she write? Um, so the deal we shook on was—

why do you keep saying shook? Because there's the shake on it and then there's the actual deal.

What's the actual deal? I can't I can't disclose that. Oh, come on.

However, it was different. Yes, it was better or worse? Better for the company, and it's probably better for Lori.

And better because— why does the deal change? So normally there's like, they do diligence and they might change it, probably for their favor. You're saying it went better for you guys? It went better.

How does it improve? After you shake on the deal on the show, um, a fair number of those deals— I think it's something like over half— never come to fruition at all. And then another quarter or so actually change, and then another quarter get done at the terms that I've had a bunch of friends say they screw them.

Yeah, I think it's true.

These sharks, each shark has a different approach. So like, I— they're totally— you then go into their management company, right? So you're going into Mark Cuban companies or Lori Greiner's companies. And so it's not a— I don't know what each shark's process is. I can say Lori's was super fair. They go through very detailed diligence on everything. But, but you know what the show actually does does diligence on you. They have a venture analyst on board, so they run diligence on you before you ever pitch. What was your valuation, um, that you guys agreed on? I pitched, I, my valuation was $20 million post-money.

And how much did she invest? So that was— or how much did they agree on?

And was it like, uh, you know, hey, deal offer on the spot, or do you have this like long pause where you're like, can I think and write this down?

Well, in my case, every Shark was out, and I actually knew I wanted either Lori or Mark— sorry, Lori or Mark Cuban. And so I was really excited about it, and so I really did want to work with her, and it was a good deal. So I actually sat on the show because you're supposed to negotiate. I said, because it makes good TV. Yes. And so I said, I know I'm supposed to negotiate, but I want to take this deal. Right. So I didn't. You do have— it is really what you see. Like you can exit, you can talk about it with your partner, you can call a lifeline or a friend. Um, they may edit that out or whatever else, but you can take a minute to think about it.

What's something people don't, don't see or don't realize that is different from having actually gone through it versus watching it?

What's a, what's one difference? I think people know it's edited. I don't think people realize how long the actual time filming can be from when you walk in and walk out to like what they edit down to 5 minutes.. So it varies, but mine was probably an hour and they edited it to 7 minutes. Some people's have gone on up to 2 to 3 hours, some are 15 minutes. Right. And so I think, you know, it's edited to a degree, but I don't think you realize how much discussion actually happens with Lori investing her own money.

She is investing her own money. So then does she have a fund or is it literally just hers? It is in a fund structure, but it's her capital. How much do you think she's worth?

You know, I don't know. I will say she is a prolific salesperson in the sense that like the top 3 or 4 companies from Shark Tank, and I mean companies that have done like a quarter of a billion in sales, um, each— Squatty Potty. Yeah, those— she has a relationship with each of those companies and is invested in each of those companies. Um, so I suspect quite a bit, not to mention her own patent portfolio and the success she's had with products.

She has a great team. But do those pay cash I mean, who cares if you— I mean, it's important, but if you own equity in that business, it's not an exit.

Yeah.

So I don't know, where is her cash coming from?

I don't know. I don't know.

I'd be very— Sam's gonna get to the bottom of this. I don't know, because I also agree with that.

Checks. Well, and I also don't—

she takes that Saudi money. Each deal is different, right?

So like, she does it just like in any VC deal is different, right? She's negotiating a deal with me, that's different. I don't know what, what terms are, you know, with the rest of her companies. I do I do know she has put all of these companies on the map, from Scrub Daddy to Squatty Potty, these companies that have incredible consumer products.

She delivers.

She delivers, yeah.

I've got a Squatty Potty. You do?

I'm telling you, I think it seems to be actually— I don't have one, but it does seem— I mean, it does seem very popular, apparently.

So how much traffic did your site get?

Oh yeah. So we got—

This is back 3 years ago?

Yeah, well, how much traffic— do you know how much traffic it was?

A million.

A million uniques in 24 hours? Yeah.

And we did, I mean, we had to, I mean, at the time we were not set up for that scale. Now we have a lot of people talking about it. What were you using, Shopify? No, we've always been on— WooCommerce? Stripe, not WooCommerce, not Shopify. BigCommerce? We've built on it now and totally customized it. Something else. I know, but it's one of the big ones that actually I think we should have gone to Shopify, but we didn't. Gotcha. I should— now I shouldn't name them because it's going to sound bad, right?

Shout out to Toby from Shopify.

Yes, exactly. I like to think he's listening. Yeah.

So might be. We're trying to get him on.

I was going to say that valuation, right? Yeah. That value.

So he also streams on Twitch. Great guy.

So yeah. So we saw really good traffic increase, but it was an— it was a very different pattern. And Lori warned us about that. She said some companies, it's like they sell out immediately. And some companies it's just a slow, slow burn. So that was what it was with us. But we did not crash, which was essential.

Do you— did you— I have a bunch of questions.

Do you have some? I have some. Not about Shark Tank, though. I mean, close the chapter on Shark Tank.

I know enough about Shark Tank now. There may be a— there may be an upcoming—

Oh, oh, oh, you'll come back as one of the glory children.

Potentially. Potentially. We are actually in 2 years, we're the number— I think we're number 10 on the all-time all-time best-selling list, right?

What's number one?

Squatty Potty socks. And then Squatty Potty.

What's the socks? Bombas.

Oh, they were on there? Yeah, I didn't realize that.

Goddamn, $250 million in sales. Yeah. Shit.

Yes, I'm wearing Bombas right now, I think. Yeah, you have Bombas? Yeah, I went on Twitter, I said, what's the best sock money can buy? When we sold the company, I was like, I'm gonna buy unlimited of the best sock. That was the thing I'd always told myself. That's cool. When I become a millionaire, unlimited best socks. And Bombas was like what everybody said. Do you love Um, yeah, I love them, but I need more. That's all. Like I ran out. Yeah. Yeah. I bought the, whatever the like 60 pair or whatever, but like, I think I need like 500 pairs of socks, like laundry.

You know, that's like one of the best hacks you could do is what I did was I bought, I only have one pair of underwear, but I own like 30 of them and one pair of socks and I own 50 of them. Yeah. So I never match socks. Yeah. It's the greatest hack ever. Yes. I've been doing it since I was 18. Should we applaud?

Um, okay, so I got a question for you. So let's say I buy the product, what do I actually do at home when I take the test? Like physically, what is—

what do I have to do? So this, uh, people are often surprised how many people we get to take their blood at home, but that's often what it requires. So like most of our testing is pricking your finger to draw a small sample of blood. Um, some are saliva, some are urine, but obviously there's a reason why they normally take your blood at a lab. It's because you can analyze the most number of markers and the broadest assortment of markers using blood. So it's dried blood spot testing. It's like a very frankly old school model. Your method? Yes. Quest, LabCorp, all of the labs have dried blood spot testing.

What does that mean in Latin?

It just means you're pricking a finger and you're dropping blood onto a piece of paper. Several. Right. Or a treated device that is then, the blood is then drying.

But you guys aren't doing the test. We're not. You're a middle person.

We are a middle person, which if you were a VC responding to me back in 2016, I was a marketing company. Right.

That's what I was going to say, but I didn't want you to take offense.

But no, I'm just—

They own the customer relationship, so like that's the most important part.

Right. And I think, you know, it's interesting when people are like, oh, well, you're just a middleman or you're just marketing. But I really view us more as, okay, the labs are our manufacturing partners, right? You don't buy things directly from manufacturers typically, right? You buy them from a brand.

Right. Who is your provider?

So we have 7 different partner labs we work with. Probably the, the one that runs the majority of our business is PerkinElmer, which is a publicly traded life sciences company. They're huge, they're global, and they've been really a good partner to scale, and they have a lot of credibility. They're the worldwide leader in drug Blood spot testing, right?

So of the 50 million, what everyone grows up wanting to be, the worldwide leader in dry blood spot testing.

I know, but you know what, like for us in our space and we're in the medical space, it's really important to have that stamp, especially with all the failures.

So I really want you to hear Sam's thoughts on food allergy testing.

Sam, take it away. I'm excited. Let's go.

I think that a lot of them are bullshit. Yeah. Am I right or wrong or what do you think?

I think it depends. We talked about this earlier. No, it's important and it's— But they do every test though. They do every test. It's okay if I don't buy one of them. You know, it's interesting. Well, first of all, so to correct you, there's a major difference between a food allergy and celiac disease and then a food intolerance or a food sensitivity.

That's what I'm referring to is intolerance.

Okay. So, but just for listeners, I think it is important because even doctors just say allergy and sensitivity is the same thing.

I compared the intolerance test to chiropractors. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I was like, I think that it sounds good, but it doesn't work.

You know, it's interesting. We have become associated— this food sensitivity testing in general has become associated with EverlyWell, which I suppose is like I'm proud of from a brand standpoint, but on the other hand, it's been going on for over 30 years and there's thousands of doctors doctors that do both IgG, IgA testing around the US, and most people that you talk to, if you've talked to them about food intolerance, they'll say, "Oh yeah, I had that done at my allergist," or, "I had it done at a nutritionist," or, "At my general practitioner." It has to be used in a specific context to be valuable, and so I do think that is why it's really important that you educate people on how it should be used. It should be used with an elimination diet. It is not a be-all end-all. It's a guidance. It is something, it is our test where we have more people quantitatively say it's changed their lives than any other test. But, and there's good research around it for that use. What there's not good research around is saying like it diagnoses you with an allergy. It can just be used as kind of a black and white guidance of what you should and shouldn't eat. That's absolutely not true. So I think there's a lot of misinformation. I think there's a lot of different types of testing and the nomenclature gets mixed up for things it shouldn't be used for. And I think it's great that EverlyWell has been known as the brand for that, but honestly, we're offering a test that has been around for decades and needs to be used in the right way. And if we can take the lead in educating people on what that should be, then we'll do that.

What category of tests do you think is the biggest opportunity for you? Sexual—

well, we call it sexual health, STIs. Yeah. And there's several reasons for that. One, Right now our tests are too highly priced because the lab itself is expensive for us to run the test. What's the price roughly? Right now our single marker STDs are a really good price, between $39 and $49. It's also HSA and FSA covered, so for some people that's a great solution. But many people, for obvious reasons, want a comprehensive test, and that test is I think $200 and—

Who's the leading company in this space for STD testing? STIs. I keep saying STDs. It's STIs.

That's our old school high school thing they told us.

Yeah, sexually transmitted infections is the correct nomenclature. We call it sexual health testing because we think that this is something people should just be proactive about.

So who's the biggest in the space for digital? For at home?

Yeah. I would say it's probably us just from branding standpoint. There's a couple of companies.

Sorry, I mean in revenue. You guys in revenue?

Wow. Which to be clear should tell you how underserved it is. Underserved this opportunity is.

Because shouldn't that be like a multi-billion dollar revenue business?

Are you acquiring customers profitably on first touch, or do you hope to lose money on them on the first touch and then hopefully come back?

And it's what, Facebook? Facebook's the main channel or?

No way, search. Well, it depends. Search for different categories, but search has a ceiling.

It does have a ceiling even when I have thousands. But if you search STD test online, you need that shit right now.

Right. Yeah, or food allergy.

So for that category, certainly search is great for us, but Facebook/Instagram was for a long time our largest acquisition channel, and both by force,, and by proactively moving away, we've really diversified, which has been a good move for our business.

And what, TV now, or no? Some TV.

We've had mixed success with— we, again, because we are on this profitable unit economics from the beginning, um, play, we, when we can't fully measure attribution and ROI on first purchase, sometimes it's hard for us to want to invest. So we've had mixed success with TV, but we do believe it's important for brand building and category education.

Is all that $50 million going into marketing spend?

No, no. Engineering, product, clinical. A lot of it goes into clinical and medical affairs.

But you're not doing the clinical. So what's the, is it the kit, making sure the kit is as robust as it should be or what?

Well, we have a regulatory and compliance team, right? That ensures that either the lab partners we're working with or new lab partners that we're making sure that they're meeting the highest quality standards. We're starting our own research study ways to prove outcome data, which will take time, but we think is really important. We do have, obviously, a healthy paid marketing budget, but we're trying to hire more in-house around content, SEO, organic, and those pieces as we start to actually build out a healthy marketing engine and not just be dependent on this paid social thing that we were the last few years.

Could you have bootstrapped this?

No, and that I think is a really—

I feel like you would have if you could have.

I would have if I could have. Important question though.

If you just said like you're a marketing company, I'm like, oh, okay, so just white label this thing, right? DCA it and put this cute millennial pink on it and then just start buying traffic. What, where's the, I mean, that's it. That's how simple it sounds.

What was, what were some of the challenges beyond the, like, you know, yeah, well for me, send traffic to a landing page and order this like white labeled product, right?

Right. So we don't white label, we actually fully end-to-end construct and brand our kits, um, and really what the lab does is run the sample. That's the goal of the lab. But there's also a really complex product from an engineering standpoint. So not only creating obviously what is somewhat basic, an e-commerce site, but then a results platform that is able to speak with a third-party physician network, translate lab results that were often really messy, and then be able to say that in a meaningful way to consumers. And 5 years ago, that was not as easy from a, like, a UX standpoint as it is today.

So a doctor interprets all the results? An independent physician. Why couldn't they do something where they just, like, say, like, the normal ranges, and if you are in range or out of range? So, like, I use Wellness FX, and they do a blood test, and they just say, like— They also use a doctor. No shit, really? It's for regulatory reasons.

It's to make sure that you basically have a doctor in the process of saying, okay, I made sure that this test test is appropriate for you. I've made sure that if there are critical values, so for example, if you took our STI test and you had an abnormal, you would have a physician call you and talk you through next steps and offer you a telemedicine consult.

Yeah, because that wouldn't be right.

And so there, there are checks and balances in place. You don't always have to interact with the doctor if it's just a normal result, but there's certain like levels of escalation.

And so when you're at the beginning, it is similar to monosubtext.

It's with its home kits, and Wellness FX really kind of stayed on the quantified self or brand and never was able to scale.

That business totally fizzled. Yeah. Wellness FX. I thought it was gonna be awesome. It's all right though. I use it, but it's not like that successful.

But it's interesting. I mean, there have been a lot of companies, many, especially after Shark Tank, I would put it in the 2 dozen range, that launch an Instagram, create a pretty logo, have a kit, and then about 6 months to 12 months later, you never hear from them again. Right. And it does speak to the power of brand marketing and experience. I mean, our NPS is a 60. We have a world-class customer base. I think in this case, first mover advantage really helped us in the category. It doesn't cause us to keep winning, but it mattered a lot here.

Right. So I'm not an NPS— I'm not super savvy with NPS, but is 60 good? I thought 60 would be sort of like middle of the road.

It all depends on what you compare it to. You have It's compared to others that are similar to you. Yeah, sure. For your industry. If you're a bank and you have a 60 MPS, you're the best bank on Earth. You're killing it. If you're a 60, but you're like a movie, then it's like, eh.

Yeah, exactly. World class would be like 80 or above, right? So certainly it's below that, but I think how we view it is we look at other healthcare services and most are around a 0 to a negative. Right. Don't measure. Right. Right. And so we feel good about it. Product rating is 4.5 out of 5 stars on average. And so we do look at that and say, okay, this has to be qualified. It's a very favorable VC metric, one that I think has sometimes limited actionability or limited kind of data-driven decision-making around what do you do with it. But we like it in terms of saying, okay, just benchmark.

Yeah, it's a good benchmark. So when you were starting this, and because I'm thinking my sister is a management consultant, my wife is a management consultant, and you have this idea, you're sitting at Deloitte, and you have this personal experience where, you know, you do this test and you're like, this is crappy. Um, that's what I'll call like every entrepreneur has the stated story, which is like, you know, I was trying to get a test and I just, you know, was so frustrated and therefore I decided to create a solution. And, um, behind the stated story is like, you know, more of the real story. And our, our audience is very entrepreneurial. Um, and they feel this on a day-to-day basis. They have these ideas. They also have doubts. They want to vet the idea. So tell me, like, that from the moment you had the idea, that first couple weeks, you know, what was, what was going through your mind? What were you doing? And what got you over the point where you're like, okay, I'm actually gonna do this?

Yeah, I think this is important because I— it is the real story, right? So I'm like, oh, I just had this idea, and I—

right, it's not a lie. We moved to Austin in a U-Haul.

All those things are true. Um, but there's— who's we? You think my husband and I, um, and our dog. Uh, there's a few things that I are important. It's not like I woke up one day and was like, oh, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing. So I did go to Harvard, and I was in this weird time. It was during the recession in 2009 when everybody in my class and the class above me were becoming entrepreneurs. And so you had Rent the Runway, you had Birchbox, you had Gilt a few years before, Stitch Fix, Oscar. I had two unicorn founders in my section alone. And at the time, uh, GrabTaxi Taxi out of Korea, and then, um, Grab's huge. Who was— oh, Coupang. Okay, uh, both in my section, right? So at the time it didn't feel that unique, but I was being exposed to this day in and day out, and so I had this kind of roadmap for how to go about it once I started thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. And so I— the reality is I probably spent 2 years on the weekends in my spare time not making any money but going going through different industries, different business models, advising different companies on their business plans, and seeing like what would really stick. Do you have all that research saved? I do, but it's really like— I love that. To me, it's kind of boring. I don't know, I will, I will send it. But it's, it's like I would be very literal and how I would go about evaluating all these ideas. And honestly, EverlyWell was probably the craziest and the worst of the ideas for me to I would actually do given my background.

What were the other ones?

Um, no, I mean, it was like travel, um, luxury resale, something like what The RealReal is doing. Um, I mean, house decorating curation online, like all kinds of different spaces where there's probably opportunity in any of those.

Hey, you just described Houzz, so you're 2 for 2 for the dog company ideas.

To be clear, it's, you know, I don't know if I took an idea from them, right? I actually came up with it. But, um, you know, the match with Everlywell was not necessarily one where you'd be like, oh, she's right. It was not obvious. But, um, it was the one where like I realized really early on, this is a decade-long thing, right? So if it actually works, you're in it.

So you did it right away after you did this exercise? You sort of started it or no?

A couple years. I mean, until I had this health experience in 2015, and then I kind of matched the two together. So This was early 2015. I ended up incorporating the company June 18th, 2015, and then I left my job in August.

Did you think of yourself as an entrepreneur? You said you were on the corporate path, but it sounds like you had dabbled in the idea of being an entrepreneur. Did you think of yourself that way?

I didn't. Both my parents are lawyers. I didn't realize, one, that being an entrepreneur was actually a career choice and a path that you could become good at. Didn't necessarily mean financial success. You could be a serial entrepreneur and actually make that a career. And I also frankly didn't have a lot of confidence. So it was interesting at Harvard because I kind of looked around and thought, I think I'm just as smart as all these people who are like really founding successful companies, right? So maybe I can do it too. And I honestly did it just to see if I could do it. I never— I like, I truly couldn't even imagine having made a million $1 billion in sales. And so I'm not sure I necessarily thought about what it would look like today. I just thought it was a really big opportunity and something that I wanted to see if I could go do, and that was how I made the decision, is I thought I'm passionate, I think it's a major thing. I was in the fintech space, and I thought that was already really oversaturated by 2015. There's tons of apps, et cetera, and so I knew that this was an area I wanted to care about. Turns out it wasn't. I know, turns out I was a little wrong about that, but, But, and, and, you know, I do think Wellness FX is an example where I think they were just ahead of their time. They were too early on the curve, right?

Well, I think the folks who started are like scientists or something like that, or they're, they're in the industry, and I actually think that's a weakness. You have to kind of be a marketer first, or you don't have to be, but if it's a consumer brand, you, you have to have that part of you. You got to be aggressive. You have to, um, as you were, you were an outsider, right, to this industry completely. What What opportunities have you uncovered where you tell people, man, just so you know, like there's this huge problem in this industry. I think it can be solved. Yeah.

What other adjacent things have you observed?

Because I'm a total outsider, but when I hear about the, these types of businesses, I'm like, it's like, it's, if you can like solve a handful of problems, it's so easy to crush it.

Price transparency, which may seem obvious. And I think there's a lot of companies that talk about in healthcare doing price transparency, but they don't actually do it. And even the digital startups trying to do it, they can't actually tell you what something will cost in healthcare. So we just go outside of insurance so that we can actually tell people what something will cost. But if you were able to do this in a really big way and say, hey, we can accurately tell you your cost commitment for this service, I think you would crush it.

Within the insurance system? Within insurance.

But I think there is a much much larger growing acceptance of consumers who are happy to pay for something in healthcare as long as they know what they're gonna get and what it costs, right? And so I don't know that it has to be within insurance. You also have this HSA and FSA space that's exploding in terms of people on FSA and HSA plans and then what they're using those dollars for. I think there's an interesting play there.

So what does that look like? What's an example? Like, if you started it—

of a company, throw out a half-baked Yeah, that's okay, it's what we do.

You should be vertically integrated.

You have to be vertically integrated to do this because otherwise, fucking nightmare. I know, but my point is you almost build a system external to the system, right? And you can do this at affordable pricing. The reason healthcare is so expensive is because you're adding cost into the system through the insurers, right? And those contracts when you get the bills, you're getting the bill for whatever they didn't want to cover. But that was intent— like, the provider billed the insurance company what they hoped the insurance company would pay, not at all what it costs. What else? Um, it doesn't have to be—

it doesn't have to be healthcare, it could be whatever.

It could be personal life you've discovered along the way. For example, uh, when we started our company, we've realized that, like, paying freelancers is— I was like, wow, I didn't realize how hard that was. So, like, along the way where you've, like, you've where you're entrepreneurial.

Are you the type that do you keep a little notes app?

Some of them get solved. So for example, like 3 years ago, 2 years ago on Black Friday, we hit a bunch of compliance limits with our banking system on spend in Facebook. So I was like, gosh, I wish there was a product where you could actually get like a cash advance for social media.

What are you using for that?

Now we're big enough to where we don't have to use a product, like Abraxa.

Right, we just started talking about that. Or like ClearBank would do this.

Or like ClearBank would do it, right.

So, but at that time, if those solutions had been around, we absolutely would have been able to take advantage of them. And then of course they came out, and I was like, oh, that would have been a really good idea. But we really hit a bunch of challenges with that, and it really can bring down businesses. And then I think, you know, other places are how do you make— like, as you think about doing a startup, I mean, I mean, the amount of time we spend on contracts and HR and legal and templatizing, I mean, there's so much cost in the system that I would love to take out of it. In healthcare and in highly regulated industries, it's really hard to do things quick, dirty, and cheap, and it's unwise.

So what do you guys use for your company's healthcare, uh, your company's HR system? For our system, like Paylocity. Paylocity.

These really, like, we used to use Gusto. Uh, but these really kind of heavy clunky systems that look like they're, you know, for Fortune 500 companies. Um, and there's nothing great between like Augusto and then the next step up that you need for all of your benefits administration and payroll.

And why do you use that? Why? Yeah. Versus Augusto? Yeah.

Because the services start, they couldn't get all the functionality.

It's like more sophisticated, more enterprisey.

Yeah, it's more enterprisey, but the jump between like, hey, you're less than 50 50 people to like, hey, we need something much more sophisticated and scalable is painful. And that's because you're paying all these physicians. That's an independent network, but we are paying all of our people. Um, and we have about—

so these independent physicians, are they doing this on the side of their normal practice? Are these freelancers or typically not?

They work for another company. They're typically some are 1099, but typically in these structures, and there's a lot of these structures. Be it a normal telemedicine company or these kind of separate entities. And they typically are either full-time employees, like Doctor on Demand entirely employs all their doctors. Right.

Or some of them are— So like Hims is using one of these third parties to employ doctors. I don't know if they're using a third party or if they have their own. But those third parties exist?

Those third parties exist. That's a—

Are you in or out on the Hims row? In. You're in? I'm in. Okay. I'm heavily in. Oh, nice.

And, you know, I think they've done— especially Ro has done a nice job of publishing their decision-making criteria around prescribing, um, and how they weigh risk and how they have, I think, responded to a lot of the criticism in the space. Those companies are good for us because people still don't realize that you can get a medical product, whether it's a prescription or a test, consumer-initiated online. And have it at home.

And so it helps just, I think, yeah, yeah. I did my eye test at home, you know, because why would I want to go to the eye doctor if I could put my phone 10 feet away? Simple contacts. And so the first time you do that, you're like, okay, cool. Yeah, I'm not going to leave home if I don't have to. So next time I have a problem, great food sensitivity, let me, let me use another at-home product. I do think it's a lifestyle.

Yeah. And for me, like, I'm on one of the HERS face, or retinol prescription for skincare and for wrinkles. And that just saves me time from having to go to the dermatologist where they're trying to get a mail order pharmacy to get me to reorder anyway. Right. To be clear, it's not like Hims Hers created some model. That's how physicians and derm—

Well, they're a marketing company too. Yeah, for sure. I just, we were talking about, have you heard of Legacy? It's for sperm company. You like that or not?

Oh, it's a, it, this is a controversial one because of the marketing practices that imply that there's more of an issue than there is.

Mm-hmm. Um, what's that mean? That's like a lot of, we, we diagnose you with the problem and then you buy our solution.

Well, they just store your sperm too though.

I think that the concern in the healthcare space around this particular problem has been the percent of men that actually need this is so minuscule, but they're advertising advertising practices make claims that make it sound—

but why wouldn't you wanna store your sperm if it costs so much?

Well, so this is where, so here's what we believe is that really well. So for example, we get a lot of questions around, well, like how dangerous is it for people to be overtesting their cholesterol? Well, my opinion is you can buy as much Coca-Cola as you want on the shelf. If you're over 18, you can buy as many cigarettes as you want, and those things actually do you harm, and you still have independent thought an agency of making those decisions. And so cholesterol testing or sperm freezing, if that's what you want to do and you're going to pay for it, then that's your right to do it. And so I'm with you, but I think you have to then still have a fine line. Like we have to be as EverlyWell, as Hims and Ro and Legacy and all these companies, you have to be super careful about the claims you're making and how, how kind of what scare tactics you're taking for people to want to buy it because there is going to be be some backlash eventually from the FTC, and there will be some regulatory kind of engagement on this. It's just lagging right now because that's what happens with regulation— it catches up later.

I love those businesses because I can't imagine having to go to the doctor and do that. Yeah, like, that just sucks. Yeah, it's pretty bad.

It's a good— I mean, and that's, that's exactly what the model is there for. That's exactly why when I talk about the opportunity with SDI testing, I think it's real.

Same with that. Huge.

It's because people don't— you actually, what EverlyWell is doing in general is we're getting people to comply with something they don't want to do otherwise. So like 40%—

because you want to, you want to get tested, but you don't want to be like, hey, I, uh, I'm doing it.

Yeah. People just don't get it done. Right. The requisition from their doctor.

So particularly men. Exactly.

It's like, oh, I, I should do what this says.

I have to take business away from Loudcore and Quest. We just have to help people actually get done what they need to. Right. And on top of that, you know, that'll obviously, I think, make the pie bigger as well.

What's the most common STI? Chlamydia.

Oh gosh, I actually don't know from a statistic, but I think it's chlamydia. Are you guys— we couple those together and that's our, that's our top selling scheme.

It's chlamydia. So everybody Who's listening, we want you to get yourself tested for chlamydia. Go to EverlyWell.com and order your test today. Julia Cheek, thank you for coming. Do you want to give people a way to follow you, find, you know, hang out with you more? How should people get more of these thoughts?

Yes, @JuliaTCheek on Twitter and private on Instagram. Try and keep that separate. Yeah. Yeah, feel free.

All right, thank you for coming by. Appreciate it. Thank you.