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

Sam (@thesamparr) is back from his New York trip to chat with Shaan (@shaanvp) about ideas, trends and businesses. Today, mid-way through we're joined by Julia Cheek (@JuliaTCheek) who is the CEO and Co-Founder of $50M backed EverlyWell, a digital health startup providing at-home medical testing kits and redesigned lab results - which did $40m in sales last year. Topics for today: Sam's time in New York (2:05), Preparing for podcasting and interviews (5:22), Meetup at Sam's Airbnb (8:47), Reality 2020: Shaan's upcoming trip to Israel (12:20), Their thoughts on Corona Virus situation (15:12), Transparent numbers in a business (24:27), New fintech platforms like Pipe.com (32:17), Julia Cheek joins the pod (38:00), Julia's background at Harvard and starting her company (40:20), Her experience on Shark Tank (44:41), How rich are the sharks? (51:31), How much traffic did she get from being on the show (52:56), How her business works (56:10), Sam thinks food allergy testing is BS (58:02), Sexual health is a massive opportunity (1:00:17), Her best customer acquisition channels (1:02:18), Bootstrapping businesses (1:04:12), Turning her idea into reality (1:07:36), Price transparency is the next big thing in healthcare & Insurance (1:12:28), HR Systems (1:16:11) and Stay at home tests (1:17:35). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:10Sam Parr?

  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 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?

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  I did now, yeah, I went and cleared it out.

• 0:33Sam Parr?

  So here's what I want.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  If you haven't got a reply, I thought you did get a reply.

• 0:36Sam Parr?

  So here's what I want people to do. And the reason I'm going to, I want to do this is because I think people like seeing us succeed and they like seeing the journey.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 0:44Sam Parr?

  So you're going to help us succeed. So here's what you do. If you have an iPhone, you're going to 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.

• 1:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we'll bake a Q and A and this will tell us the truth, right? Cause 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?

• 1:21Sam Parr?

  And if you send us your question, ideally send it via Twitter.

• 1:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:26Sam Parr?

  So everyone could see and can comment in that way. It's easy. So just record yourself, what is it subscribing, unsubscribing and then re-subscribing. 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.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  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, you know, I believe this is why podcasters ask people to do this is because this shit actually worked.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  And if it does, here's what we'll do. If this does work and 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.

• 2:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we'll share the data. Yeah, no problem. How was the big stage? You went to New York?

• 2:08Sam Parr?

  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.

• 2:16Shaan Puri?

  Wineing and dining or what?

• 2:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, kinda. 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?

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, everyone knows him as Pomp.

• 2:29Sam Parr?

  Pomp?

• 2:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:30Sam Parr?

  And

• 2:31Shaan Puri?

  Anthony Papalano or something.

• 2:32Sam Parr?

  I did his podcast. It was cool. Did Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast first thing in the morning at eight or nine or 10 a.m. 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.

• 2:45Shaan Puri?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. So you walk in, what, what happens?

• 2:47Sam Parr?

  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 the studio. It's a little quieter, but still pretty badass. Uh, it was awesome, man.

• 2:57Shaan Puri?

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

• 3:00Sam Parr?

  But we had, he knew who I was and obviously I definitely know who he is and he knew who our company was. He, uh, he was totally nice and he was really low key at first. He wasn't like cocaine Gary. He was like

• 3:13Shaan Puri?

  You guys do a little chit chat, small talk beforehand or you just got into it?

• 3:16Sam Parr?

  So here's what happened. We sat down and, uh, there's like an audience. There's like an audience of like 10, maybe five 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.

• 3:31Sam Parr?

  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.

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  Adam, the safety blanket?

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And Gary was like, oh, okay. So tell me about who you are. And, uh, it was good. It was great.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

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

• 3:47Sam Parr?

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

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:51Sam Parr?

  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

• 4:08Shaan Puri?

  What makes you say that? So like?

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  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's the real deal.

• 4:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:14Sam Parr?

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

• 4:16Shaan Puri?

  But what what were the little tidbits that gave you that impression, right? Because I believe that. I'm not saying you're lying.

• 4:22Sam Parr?

  So whenever I go to these offices, 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 could kind of tell if they actually like it.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Sam Parr?

  And when he has 800 employees, so the and 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.

• 4:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:41Sam Parr?

  So you could tell what's legitimate and what isn't once you go in there. In this Hudson Yards office, they had Vayner Media water, bottled water. The office was buzzing. Everyone had nice computers. It wasn't, it's not a startup.

• 4:55Shaan Puri?

  Right. Felt like a legit operation.

• 4:57Sam Parr?

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

• 5:01Shaan Puri?

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

• 5:04Sam Parr?

  I gave myself a C plus.

• 5:06Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 5:07Sam Parr?

  And then, because I was, it was, I hadn't done any reps that day. Like, I did a podcast later that day and I had a rep.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  You were firing.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I was like, all right, I'm on it. 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.

• 5:22Shaan Puri?

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

• 5:31Sam Parr?

  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.

• 5:49Shaan Puri?

  Get out of your head.

• 5:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, get my words going and get in a better, happier mood.

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Sam Parr?

  And that's usually what I do.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 5:56Sam Parr?

  Is that what you do?

• 5:56Shaan Puri?

  Uh, 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, that he, I was watching this documentary of him.

• 6:08Sam Parr?

  Talk with a pencil in your mouth.

• 6:10Shaan Puri?

  Pen in your mouth. Yeah, so this, I tried it and it actually works fantastic. So basically, you take a pencil or a pen, 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. 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 warm up 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.

• 6:52Shaan Puri?

  The other thing is, um, like a quick, uh, physical change. So, um, Like pushups or something? Pushups, a wind sprint, a jumping jack, a scream, music, whatever. Um, I am a big believer that that, that, uh, the fastest way to change the way you feel is through changing your body rapidly. It works. 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. He's in a tank top and he's giving the speech and he, he talks about, he goes, before I get on stage, you know, people always ask me, okay, you're, you're a public speaker. You do, 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.

• 7:36Shaan Puri?

  Their body, 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 didn't remember you were supposed to say. As 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.

• 8:20Shaan Puri?

  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 five people that they hang out with the most. And they're just like, these people are not like me. And we're in their ear balls 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 then I'm here to serve them. And I was like, okay, I do that.

• 8:44Sam Parr?

  Just hearing that has made me feel better.

• 8:45Shaan Puri?

  There you go.

• 8:47Sam Parr?

  Another thing that I did while I was out there is on Sunday night, I tweeted out, so 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 gonna host a meetup and I got 200 replies saying, let's meet up.

• 9:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:14Sam Parr?

  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 the listeners are subscribers, but all subscribers are listeners.

• 9:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  And they, so I met, I think at 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. Like there was no preparation. Like we, all we did, me and Adam landed and 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 two or 300 bucks and go buy us some beer and we'll pay you more money. And that's all we did. And it was awesome.

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 10:00Sam Parr?

  These people are fucking fanatical. It is crazy.

• 10:05Sam Parr?

  It's nuts. It's really odd.

• 10:07Shaan Puri?

  Who was the most interesting person?

• 10:08Sam Parr?

  So many interesting people. One guy, there was this one guy, I, 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 to another.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  Custom electric cars?

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like he, like he was making a, like they took a.

• 10:31Shaan Puri?

  They take a Prius or a Ford?

• 10:32Sam Parr?

  No, they took, yeah, they took like a, some type of pickup truck and made it an electric delivery van.

• 10:37Shaan Puri?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:37Sam Parr?

  For a cannabis company in LA, cause 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's-

• 10:46Shaan Puri?

  Tell me more.

• 10:47Sam Parr?

  Fairchild. Has this guy ever talked to you on Twitter?

• 10:49Shaan Puri?

  No, his name's Fairchild?

• 10:50Sam Parr?

  Hunter Fairchild.

• 10:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, I see this guy on my Twitter all the time.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he, his boss-

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  He sells fake boobs for a living?

• 10:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, his, his boss invented like a better-

• 10:58Shaan Puri?

  Dude, what's in his bio? Cause I've looked at this guy's bio and he's not advertising this, so let's see what-

• 11:03Sam Parr?

  No, it was awesome.

• 11:04Shaan Puri?

  We'll put Hunter on blast.

• 11:05Sam Parr?

  Me and this girl, Aditi, were just sitting down and Hunter came and we were just shooting this 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 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.

• 11:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, me neither, but of course.

• 11:35Sam Parr?

  He came up from Virginia for this.

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

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

• 11:40Sam Parr?

  Well, you and I need to do more. So what we can do is New York, we could get, I, easily we could have gotten 200 people.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Sam Parr?

  So we can do one in New York. Um, I think Acast or whatever we use tells us where people are.

• 11:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. We gotta go to Canada, we gotta go to Utah. When we shouted out Utah that time-

• 11:56Sam Parr?

  I know, I still get more messages all the time.

• 11:57Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 12:06Sam Parr?

  So maybe like-

• 12:07Shaan Puri?

  And it feels good to be taken care of like that.

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  It does.

• 12:10Shaan Puri?

  It feels great.

• 12:10Sam Parr?

  Maybe-

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  Great hospitality.

• 12:11Sam Parr?

  Hmm, what's, what month is it? February?

• 12:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, end of February.

• 12:15Sam Parr?

  We, we should do a thing where we could try to hit up like three cities in five days.

• 12:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:20Sam Parr?

  Or maybe, maybe a little longer.

• 12:21Shaan Puri?

  I got into this thing, I don't know if I told you about this, uh, this thing called Reality? Have you heard of this?

• 12:25Sam Parr?

  No.

• 12:25Shaan Puri?

  So basically, uh, you know how Jewish people have birthright?

• 12:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  And I don't know exactly how the mechanics of birthright work, but from what I understand,

• 12:32Sam Parr?

  I know all about it.

• 12:32Shaan Puri?

  If you're Jewish, you get to go, it's paid by the sort of wealthy Jewish people around the world.

• 12:38Sam Parr?

  And wealthy Christians, fundamental Christians, Christians who believe that Israel is the land for Jews.

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

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

• 12:46Sam Parr?

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

• 12:49Shaan Puri?

  You're just stunned?

• 12:52Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 12:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  And so then I was like, all right, um, what is this? Uh, 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 could 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 applied, I 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,

• 13:31Sam Parr?

  Oh, I've heard of this. Seva does it. Is it a Jewish thing?

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  I don't think it, you don't have to be Jewish. This one's not like Birthright.

• 13:37Sam Parr?

  It's like a, uh,

• 13:38Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 13:45Sam Parr?

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

• 13:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like a program. Yeah.

• 13:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Shaan Puri?

  Um, so I'm doing that, but, um, my question to you,

• 13:56Sam Parr?

  When? When are you going?

• 13:56Shaan Puri?

  It's late May. So first, uh, scared of coronavirus, may not go. Um,

• 14:01Sam Parr?

  I was supposed to go to Germany in May.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 14:09Sam Parr?

  Jews and Mormons.

• 14:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Mormons.

• 14:11Sam Parr?

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

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

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

• 14:19Sam Parr?

  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. It's a very similar group of people.

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  The thing I like is the sort of pay it forward thing. I think Silicon Valley has this a lot where a lot of people who move here, they hesitate to reach out to people because they're like, well, why would this person want to 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 is because there's such a big population, you can't afford to do it. There's like, I don't know, six million Jewish people on earth or something crazy and they run the world. So I think, you know, with a small number of people, you can offer this like much more high-touch, help each other model.

• 15:11Sam Parr?

  I agree. Okay. You want to get into some stuff? You want to talk about coronavirus or you want to?

• 15:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, coronavirus. Okay. So I'm terrified of coronavirus. And, you know, generically, I'm terrified. You know, I was terrified without information. And then I started looking into a little bit more. So there's

• 15:25Sam Parr?

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

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

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

• 15:32Sam Parr?

  The flu?

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  Flu. Yeah. So basically, a few years ago, you probably heard, you know, SARS or swine flu. And so, you know, the very first time I think SARS happened, there was, you know, a kid got this flu, goes to the doctor's office. They're like, okay, this is the flu. And kid dies within like a very short amount of time. They're like, well, that was odd. That doesn't usually happen. So they took a sample and sent it to like the CDC or whoever, right? Like they sent it to some lab to say, you know, what do you see here? There's, this was a very unusual case. The health deteriorated so quick. That's not typical to the flu. And what they realized was, hey, this is a new strain called, I think it was like H1N5 at the time. And it was like, this is only ever found in animals. This is the first time it's crossed over from animal to human.

• 16:15Shaan Puri?

  And so that was bird flu when that happened. And then, so there's been these different sort of very, very deadly viruses. SARS, which are, which was very, very popular. MERS, which happened in the Middle East, respiratory syndrome is what's kind of what these Middle East respiratory, I think syndrome is the, what MERS stands for. And SARS is sort of the same thing. And so the thing with these was that, you know, although there's a lot of Hoopla around SARS and bird flu like SARS killed less than a thousand people. Less than a thousand total fatalities. Not a big drop in the bucket as far as the death bucket goes on earth. Yeah. Coronavirus already killed like 3,000 plus people. So already much bigger than that. The reason it's scary though is actually and for a while people were like, oh, don't worry.

• 16:56Shaan Puri?

  The fatality rate is low. Fatality rates like, I don't know, 3% for this. Whereas for SARS, it was like super high. I don't know. I don't think the exact number, but it's like majority of people who have it die. Whereas with this, 3% means you get it, but you have a good chance of living. But the big problem with that, and the article that I read was called, why you're probably, why we probably can't contain coronavirus. Why you probably are going to end up getting coronavirus is because this virus is extremely contagious, but has these has these trademarks that are very problematic. So it takes a while for your symptoms to show up. So you have it and you carry it for like, you know, 14 days without showing symptoms. So you'll be spreading this around and not even realizing you have it. Then, once you have it, you don't just like deteriorate and like your health doesn't go to shit where they, you know, you're in the hospital, they quarantine you.

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you know, it starts innocent and it gets worse over time. So the infectious period is so much longer that there's basically no way to quarantine this thing. There is no way for us to contain this. And so what the article was saying was like, ironically, because it is not as fatal and is not as bad for you right away. This thing is going to be unstoppable. Most likely case. Second thing with that was, I guess there's four like, you know, typical strains of the flu, which is why you can get your flu shot and still catch the flu every year. So guys, there's these four different strains and the vaccine doesn't cover sort of all the, all the different variations. And, um, and so this guy's case was that most likely this is now just a fifth annual, you know, strain that we're going to have to live with and it's just going to suck.

• 18:24Shaan Puri?

  It's a very, very, you know, kind of a downer. Also, I'm sure, you know, sort of the bio nerds out there are going to be like, no, there's 15 million strains. That's all right. But like, that's the summary that I took away. And if you want to just get the point, that's the point.

• 18:36Sam Parr?

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

• 18:44Shaan Puri?

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

• 18:59Sam Parr?

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

• 19:01Shaan Puri?

  But wait, there's more. It's the stock ticker Z O O M, Zoom. But that's not Zoom's actual handle. Zoom's actual handle is Z M. So people are buying the wrong stock because they think people are going to be working from home and teleconferencing in. And so they're buying Zoom, which does something else altogether. It's a very small cap stock. Uh, I don't know. Henry, check what, what the stock for Z O O M actually does.

• 19:23Sam Parr?

  God bless.

• 19:23Shaan Puri?

  And it's a tiny stock, so it jumped 50% today and like, you know, but you could actually predict this because this happened also at the IPO. Whoever bought Zoom, the other thing, got his huge pop at Zoom's IPO because of this.

• 19:35Sam Parr?

  I love.

• 19:35Shaan Puri?

  And so we could have predicted this one.

• 19:37Sam Parr?

  I love when that happens.

• 19:38Shaan Puri?

  But all kinds of fucked up things. Some other things, uh, smart friends are basically saying, hey, if you need.

• 19:43Sam Parr?

  Smart friends?

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  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, uh, 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.

• 19:58Sam Parr?

  Who said that?

• 20:00Shaan Puri?

  Um, like friend, friend of a friend, basically.

• 20:02Sam Parr?

  But how the fuck do you stockpile prescription meds?

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  Uh, basically buy up, buy your refills and, um, and so the, 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.

• 20:18Sam Parr?

  And I have friends that have D to C companies that buy their shit.

• 20:21Shaan Puri?

  They're backed up.

• 20:22Sam Parr?

  And they're saying, shit.

• 20:24Shaan Puri?

  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 because 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.

• 20:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, we.

• 20:46Shaan Puri?

  They all

• 20:46Sam Parr?

  Chinese intern, he tells us all about it. He goes, he goes, it's the largest travel day in the world.

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:51Sam Parr?

  Every Chinese person.

• 20:53Shaan Puri?

  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 cut, you know, often they don't come back as, 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.

• 21:10Sam Parr?

  Well.

• 21:10Shaan Puri?

  And like, obviously at a human level, also incredibly dire situation.

• 21:14Sam Parr?

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

• 21:25Shaan Puri?

  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 two years ago, a blog on being a prepper or whatever. And 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 feels kind of fucked up.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  We talked about Judy the other day.

• 21:48Shaan Puri?

  Right. The Judy sort of survival kits or bags.

• 21:50Sam Parr?

  I, my friend Joe Spicer bought something from, um, like survivorkit.com and he got an email from them saying, we have a hundred times our normal volume. We apologize, but we're gonna make it happen.

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:01Sam Parr?

  So those, the Judy thing that which, uh,

• 22:04Shaan Puri?

  The respiratory masks, th- 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.

• 22:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's long gone. No one can pounce on that. But, um, we covered this guy who launched a company called, um, Judy, is it Judy?

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  Judy, yeah.

• 22:21Sam Parr?

  Judy, it's a emergency kit.

• 22:23Shaan Puri?

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

• 22:27Sam Parr?

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

• 22:30Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 22:40Sam Parr?

  No.

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  I was in Hawaii, our honeymoon, there was a hurricane in Hawaii.

• 22:43Sam Parr?

  Oh, I laughed right when you, when I was there.

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  And so we went to the grocery store. And at 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. Cause we're honeymoon. And they're like, no, we just have like a lot of. Open rooms.

• 22:56Sam Parr?

  There.

• 22:57Shaan Puri?

  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 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 four carts worth. It's really like, it's an odd eerie eerie feeling when that happens.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this thing, my issue, here's an opportunity if someone wants to go for it, is you know how poll, uh, is it, uh, there's Politico check? That was called Politico fact.

• 23:30Shaan Puri?

  You mean like the fact checking thing?

• 23:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 23:32Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what it's called, but yeah.

• 23:33Sam Parr?

  So what you do is like, did Bloomberg really say this?

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:36Sam Parr?

  And it goes, that's what I want for coronavirus right now. I don't know what true and what is it.

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 23:53Sam Parr?

  What's it called?

• 23:54Shaan Puri?

  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, because this is exactly what I need in this situation.

• 24:07Sam Parr?

  It autofilled nicely. A bunch of people must be going to.

• 24:10Shaan Puri?

  I feel like it's.

• 24:10Sam Parr?

  Ah, he's selling kits. He's selling kits. Oh, God, this guy's awesome. Cool. I'm into this.

• 24:16Shaan Puri?

  So scary situation. Um, yeah, scary all around. Um, best of luck to everybody.

• 24:22Sam Parr?

  Yes, for sure. Um, okay, you want to move on or?

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's move on.

• 24:26Sam Parr?

  Okay, um, I'll, I have a few interesting things that happened. Uh, 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. Um, 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, um, 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. Uh, more people should follow, uh, these businesses.

• 25:08Sam Parr?

  I for one am totally against that. I don't think you should ever reveal that, but I'm happy they do and I.

• 25:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So some examples, so throw them out.

• 25:15Sam Parr?

  So first of all, my friend Encore, what's Encore's last name? He runs Teachable.

• 25:21Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't remember his last name.

• 25:22Sam Parr?

  Um, if you Google, can you tell me Encore's last name? Founder of Teachable. Okay, so he reveals on Twitter, the valuation of every.

• 25:31Shaan Puri?

  Round.

• 25:32Sam Parr?

  What is it?

• 25:32Shaan Puri?

  Nagpal.

• 25:33Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 25:35Shaan Puri?

  Nagpal.

• 25:35Sam Parr?

  Nagpal. He reveals the valuation of every.

• 25:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:40Sam Parr?

  Every time.

• 25:41Shaan Puri?

  They just raised like 20 million bucks at a whatever.

• 25:43Sam Parr?

  200, something really good. And he reveals how much revenue they have, how many customers they have. It's awesome.

• 25:48Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 25:49Sam Parr?

  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.

• 26:00Shaan Puri?

  It's on his Twitter. If you, he just, he doesn't have a tweet lane, so you don't even have to dive into the books.

• 26:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Shaan Puri?

  Here's 140 characters.

• 26:06Sam Parr?

  Joel from Buffer, he does this. They actually just switched. So if you go to bearmetrics.com or Google bearmetrics, 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 were.

• 26:21Shaan Puri?

  They did everything.

• 26:22Sam Parr?

  Everything.

• 26:23Shaan Puri?

  Employee salaries, like name, salary, equity, you know, level, everything.

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  And you know what? They're changing. They're showing less and less.

• 26:32Shaan Puri?

  Have you talked to him? Do you know why?

• 26:33Sam Parr?

  It becomes problematic when you add more people.

• 26:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Duh.

• 26:39Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 26:52Sam Parr?

  Grow up, Joel.

• 26:56Shaan Puri?

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

• 26:58Sam Parr?

  So they still do salary, they still do equity.

• 27:00Shaan Puri?

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

• 27:05Sam Parr?

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

• 27:09Shaan Puri?

  So, so they did it, I think in a smart way, which is they basically were like, they used it as customer acquisition.

• 27:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's part of their story because they got their ass kicked by HubSpot.

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  And so they like.

• 27:19Sam Parr?

  Sorry, Hootsuite.

• 27:20Shaan Puri?

  You know, this has become a bit of a playbook for small business to business SaaS companies, which is, look, you know, acquisition of customers is hard. If my customer is a small business owner, what a small business, what would bring a small business owner to me? What content could I put out there that would make a small business owner come? So instead of saying seven tips to have more effective meetings, they were like, here's our, here's our P and L for this month. And sure enough, a lot of people wanted to see that. So a lot of people discovered their product through this. And so, you know, maybe this lines up totally with their values and that's why they did it.

• 27:50Sam Parr?

  But I just come off.

• 27:51Shaan Puri?

  Definitely it was a great way for people to discover their business. I didn't use Buffer, but I read all their shit. And if anybody ever needed a solution like Buffer, I was like, oh, Buffer, you should use Buffer. Why? Because otherwise I wouldn't have even known about them. And so this was a pretty counterintuitive thing that they did. And they were the only ones doing it. And so you always get paid when you're the only one doing it, if it's juicy.

• 28:13Sam Parr?

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

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  I love this guy's business.

• 28:19Sam Parr?

  So it's my friend Nathan Barry. I've met Nathan a while ago. And Nathan has this company called ConvertKit. They do close to 2 million in monthly recurring revenue, so 24 million. He owns 100% of it. It's probably 100 to 200 million dollar company. Like it's really valuable because once customers are locked in, it's basically a MailChimp competitor. It's an email.

• 28:39Shaan Puri?

  That seems high. 2 million a month, you said?

• 28:41Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's for sure. That's how much they do.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  So they're doing 2 million a month? No, no, that part's, so 24 million a year. So 24 million, you think they're worth what?

• 28:48Sam Parr?

  10 times.

• 28:49Shaan Puri?

  10 times. Okay.

• 28:50Sam Parr?

  It's grown like a weed. People don't switch from their email platform.

• 28:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it all depend on the retention. So can you pull up, actually, can you open, open up their, their metrics?

• 28:57Sam Parr?

  Their retention is high.

• 28:58Shaan Puri?

  Just Google like, like Bearmetrics dashboard or something. I forgot what the URL is, but it's like something.bearmetrics.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 their graphs and you can use it for your company.

• 29:12Sam Parr?

  He even showed how much profit they make.

• 29:14Shaan Puri?

  I think it's like ConvertKit. It's like, yeah, here it is.

• 29:17Sam Parr?

  You gotta zoom in. There you go.

• 29:18Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 29:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's how it is.

• 29:25Shaan Puri?

  This is somebody else's business.

• 29:26Sam Parr?

  You gotta do ConvertKit.

• 29:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, do ConvertKit Bearmetrics.

• 29:29Sam Parr?

  Just type in ConvertKit revenue. Maybe if you can't spell.

• 29:32Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 29:44Sam Parr?

  I love ConvertKit. I love Nathan. Nathan's a great guy. Nathan's only 26 or seven years old.

• 29:50Shaan Puri?

  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. It 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 going to be solved in like, you know, the next 90 minutes.

• 30:13Sam Parr?

  What, are people leaving bare metrics? Why can't you find it?

• 30:15Shaan Puri?

  Here you go. 1.7 million.

• 30:17Sam Parr?

  Oh, is that it? What's the URL?

• 30:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so 1.7 million monthly recurring revenue. And you could just look at the.

• 30:24Sam Parr?

  It'll say churn.

• 30:25Shaan Puri?

  So annual run rate, doing 20 million in a year, which is up 1.7%. That's gotta be how much this month. Revenue churn 5.1% per month.

• 30:34Sam Parr?

  That's not bad.

• 30:35Shaan Puri?

  It's not great either.

• 30:36Sam Parr?

  Well, it's because it's a small to medium business.

• 30:39Shaan Puri?

  Like if you're churning 5% a month, that's like, what's the net growth? So 5% a month is the churn. What's the new business every month?

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  One and a half percent.

• 30:48Shaan Puri?

  One and a half percent. Yeah, so he's net negative then, per month.

• 30:51Sam Parr?

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

• 30:56Shaan Puri?

  I see. Okay, gotcha. Okay, that's the.

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  But this is because it's the average revenue even says, so they make on average $60, is it $60 a month per user?

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:08Sam Parr?

  Small to medium business, it's gonna have, it's gonna have higher churn compared to other SaaS. But dude, if you're.

• 31:13Shaan Puri?

  If you're a real sicko, you can just look at the live stream on the right and see every minute when somebody pays them, it'll say like right now it says $29 paid by, you know, anonymous company. Dude, he's got a lot of failed payments here. Get on that, Nathan. What's going on? You can't be failing. It's three out of the 12 payments here are failed. Four.

• 31:30Sam Parr?

  He has a chart that says which ones fail. So these, these companies are badass. I.

• 31:35Shaan Puri?

  So you wouldn't do it?

• 31:37Sam Parr?

  No, I think.

• 31:37Shaan Puri?

  What about a part of what you do? The email list size, the revenue?

• 31:42Sam Parr?

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

• 31:50Shaan Puri?

  You know, when a company is trying to raise or sell their business because like two months before, all these articles will come out, just like handing over, handing over information. Um, why, why is that happening? Cause they want to raise their, or they want to sell their company within the next six months.

• 32:04Sam Parr?

  I don't, can you go to the next, go back to the Google Doc? No, I'm not a fan of it. Uh, at one time, when I, when I did my first conference, uh, 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 going to do that again. Okay. So let's talk about pipe.com. You know, pipe.com?

• 32:20Shaan Puri?

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

• 32:26Sam Parr?

  Okay. So here's what, here's, here's, let me set the stage here. So when you have a subscription business, uh, I'm talking about software subscription, but maybe it could work for all types of stuff. What happens is you do one of two things. The first is you say, all right, you sign this deal and you owe us $200 a month. And so that is a $2,400 a year subscription service. And the company that is your customer will pay you $200 a month. Um, well, a lot of companies prefer to do, but this is actually a lot harder is they say, all right, you signed one year contract, let's get all of your payment upfront.

• 33:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:01Sam Parr?

  Now the, here's the balance here is do you want, or this is what people think. They can either get more customers and allow them to pay monthly.

• 33:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  Or they can get less customers, but allow them to pay annually and get all of that cash flow upfront. And what, what's it called?

• 33:15Shaan Puri?

  Pipe.

• 33:16Sam Parr?

  What they do is if you have a business like ConvertKit and they have a history of three years and it says, look, every month our churn rate historically is 5%, uh, pipe can go, okay, so you have all these customers paying you each month. Let's just, I don't know how they discount it, but they probably, they probably discounted a lot. So they de-risk it and this will say, well, let's just assume that you're going to have, uh, 20% monthly churn.

• 33:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:38Sam Parr?

  We're just going to, we'll give you all that money upfront and you owe us as the money comes in with a little bit of interest.

• 33:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  Awesome.

• 33:44Shaan Puri?

  Awesome business. So I have so many thoughts. All right. So a couple of things. First, the financial infrastructure, 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 HAZAP. 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.

• 34:23Shaan Puri?

  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, um, 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, uh, we will give you the cash upfront and we'll take a vig off the top of that. And so I think these are all really smart businesses, um, each one at a different part of the, the financial stack.

• 34:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 34:55Shaan Puri?

  For software and technology companies.

• 34:56Sam Parr?

  Fast pay. We use it. It's, it's, it's Pipe, but for media and publishers and Pipe has raised 70 million in funding. They're kind of stupid because we use them and we have a million, millions of dollars in credit from them. And we won't leave them because it's a wonderful service. But the reason why they're kind of stupid is because the market's a lot smaller.

• 35:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:14Sam Parr?

  Than software and the numbers are a lot smaller.

• 35:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:17Sam Parr?

  I think Pipe will be a multi-billion dollar company.

• 35:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Or, or the one problem with these is

• 35:22Sam Parr?

  Or that.

• 35:23Shaan Puri?

  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 Cecil or Afterpay.

• 35:33Sam Parr?

  Consumers.

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  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 a firm came out and did it and you know fast pay or sorry not fast pay after pay I think after pay is like a eight billion dollar company or something like that in Australia. A firm is a multi-billion dollar company here doing the exact same thing and they're all fighting over these merchants.

• 36:06Sam Parr?

  I love this shit, man. I say fuck the big banks. I fucking hate them. I hate them so much. I hate having to talk to our rep. They don't understand me.

• 36:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:14Sam Parr?

  They don't understand what we're doing.

• 36:15Shaan Puri?

  So Ishaan, our the producer and editor for the podcast, he had an idea. So I asked him one day because I, you know, I have him on as sort of my right hand man. So sometimes I just ping him with just random questions. I said, what's the biggest idea in your head right now? I was like, you know, what's the biggest startup idea you got? And you know, he's 20, 21 years old. I don't know exactly how old he is, but he's a young guy. And so he goes, well, I've been a, you know, freelancer contractor for you and many other people for, for last few years. And he's like, why doesn't a sort of fast pay or pipe exist for contractors? Like I have my invoice. Just give me the money now and then you wait to like when the company pays, you take it and you take 5% off the thing.

• 36:56Shaan Puri?

  And I've actually heard this idea a few times before of like, you know, my, my wife was a, you know, a consultant, you know, and so she always got paid like this on a 30 or 60 day cycle and she's, she would have, you know, 20 grand sitting in outstanding payments. If she could just get the 20 grand, you know, headache free, she would take 1950, you know, she would take 19,000 out of that just to get the money now and not have to keep following up via email to be like, hey, have you paid it yet? And like all that stuff. And so the problem seems real and this is more of a question to the audience of like, what am I wrong about? What don't I get about this idea? Seems like a great idea on the surface. What's the problem with this idea? Cause I've heard it bandied around a few times over the years. It's not a, it's not a like super niche idea. I think a lot of people could have this idea. So what's wrong with it?

• 37:41Shaan Puri?

  And I think that you can learn just as much from common ideas that don't work as you can from great ideas that do work. If you start to identify, why does this seemingly good idea not work? Why have people tried and failed over and over again? There's a lot to learn as an entrepreneur.

• 37:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm digging that. So pipe.com is out. I'm loving those things.

• 38:00Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 38:10Shaan Puri?

  How are you?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Doing well. Thanks for having me.

• 38:11Shaan Puri?

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

• 38:15Speaker 02

  I do my homework.

• 38:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  Oh, she said she listens?

• 38:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Yes. I have a, there's a bunch of employee fans.

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  Great.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  They found out and it was, I mean, like, they'd been really gunning for me to have a chance.

• 38:26Shaan Puri?

  Shout out to them. Do you have like that, like corny name for your employees like Everly Wellians?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  That is literally it.

• 38:32Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God. Okay.

• 38:33Sam Parr?

  Is that really it?

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Well, but then everyone was like, hey, did you just like come up with that? Cause that is not that great. And so I think like, you know, someone better with words is like, how about just Everly's? Oh, that's better.

• 38:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. That sounds much better.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  We've shifted it to that.

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  Do you guys have this for the hustle? Do you have like Fusilonians or some shit like that?

• 38:51Sam Parr?

  Say, no.

• 38:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 38:52Sam Parr?

  No.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  You're fired, actually, if you say something like that at the hustle.

• 38:56Sam Parr?

  No, we're just people.

• 38:59Shaan Puri?

  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. Cause 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.

• 39:11Sam Parr?

  For real?

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So cross 10,000 followers and Justin Bieber follows me. I DM'd him. He did not reply.

• 39:17Sam Parr?

  How many people does he?

• 39:18Shaan Puri?

  It's gotta be one of those bots that just follows people.

• 39:20Sam Parr?

  Follow?

• 39:21Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 39:29Sam Parr?

  It's not a low number, my friend.

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  It's not a low number. Yeah. Okay.

• 39:32Sam Parr?

  300,000.

• 39:33Shaan Puri?

  I'm one of the top 300,000 friends of Justin Bieber. So let's just leave it at that.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  I would have thought. I thought the number was gonna be like 10 million. So.

• 39:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So speaking of, so you have, uh, so you're Julia Everly Well is your company name. Uh, but your name's Julia Cheek.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:47Shaan Puri?

  That's a cool name.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 39:49Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  I kind of got the opportunity to do that.

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  I decided I had a choice to do Julia Taylor Maidenhead.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Or if I wanted to, when I got married, take on Cheek.

• 40:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  And it was just sort of, I did it.

• 40:11Shaan Puri?

  You did it.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 40:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. And so for people listening who are like, okay, great. Who's this person? Why are they joining the show? Uh, give us the like 30 seconds about what's interesting about you.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, uh, I'm Julia Cheek. I'm the founder and CEO of Everly Well. We are based in Austin. We are about to celebrate our five 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.

• 40:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  And had every kind of X in the box of why you wouldn't.

• 40:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. You were a consultant, right?

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I was a management consultant.

• 40:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  And I went at Deloitte, went and got my MBA, had a really traditional Harvard. Had a really traditional corporate path.

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Sam's all about the pedigrees.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  I hate it. I don't care. Sam's like Harvard. Okay, I'm in.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  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 a hundred percent of people who know me was like, I'm definitely gonna fail. There's no way it's gonna work.

• 41:17Shaan Puri?

  So what's the company do?

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, uh, when I was five years ago, when I was working at MoneyGram, I had a bunch of all these unexplained health symptoms. This is super common, which you hear from women in their late twenties and their thirties is they have chronic fatigue, aches and pains. They're not taken seriously at doctors. And so, um, I went to five or six different doctors on good health insurance and each of them ran different blood tests. I never got my results. Um, I paid over twenty-five hundred dollars out of pocket. Nothing material showed up or was communicated to me.

• 41:46Shaan Puri?

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

• 41:49Speaker 02

  I personally didn't receive it.

• 41:50Shaan Puri?

  The doctor looks at it.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Or even if they called me, like I missed the call, nobody ever called, they said, well, probably a few things abnormal. Well, like, what does that mean? You tested a hundred different things. Like, just because something's not totally out of whack doesn't mean there's not interesting or useful information there. So, um, I sat down and I looked at the health insurance landscape and I thought, man, people are gonna have to start paying for all this in a more meaningful way than we are today. And I'm at least confident that my cohort of women between like twenty-five and forty-five can't get the testing that they need.

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  And I think I can solve that. And so it really started out, honestly, not that it wasn't a big vision, but it was a little bit like if you, if you think about the first group you're solving a problem for, that's what we launched for. So today we have thirty-five different tests on Everlywell.com, on Amazon, Target, CVS, Kroger. Um, we work with Humana and we offer consumer initiated testing for everything from STI testing, heart health, food sensitivity, et cetera.

• 42:42Sam Parr?

  Basically, is it every test?

• 42:44Speaker 02

  It's like ninety percent of common test coverage.

• 42:47Sam Parr?

  Did you raise money?

• 42:48Speaker 02

  The doctor. I've raised over fifty million dollars from

• 42:50Sam Parr?

  Five zero, you said?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Five zero, from west and east coast VCs. That was after, obviously, having like three rounds of clawing my way through

• 43:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Funding and then suddenly things did get easier. And we actually grew from zero to, see, we did forty million in sales last year.

• 43:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  Our third year in operation.

• 43:09Sam Parr?

  Is that all?

• 43:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay, no coronavirus, but fist pound for the

• 43:12Speaker 02

  No coronavirus, yeah, no.

• 43:13Shaan Puri?

  For the forty million.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Especially for the, uh, for the healthcare entrepreneur and we have to

• 43:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Have to learn not to do that, so.

• 43:18Sam Parr?

  We're, we're talking about coronavirus. Do you guys sell coronavirus tests?

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, if we did, I think we'd, I wouldn't be here right now.

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  Right, yeah, you'd be busy.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  There's 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.

• 43:32Shaan Puri?

  And so

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Unfortunately.

• 43:34Sam Parr?

  Are those one-time purchases, the forty million?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Uh, 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.

• 43:44Sam Parr?

  But it's not recurring, is what I mean.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  It's not recurring. We do have, um, enterprise contracts that are recurring

• 43:48Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  For Medicare.

• 43:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Uh, but it's a mix of what I would call one-time repeat and then actual recurring contracts. Uh, which is, there's challenges, there's good and bad. I think when you have a one-time heavy business upfront, 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.

• 44:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Right? So that's been good for us. Um, on the other hand, we've had to be super, super disciplined in a way that I think some have been.

• 44:15Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so you're based out of Austin, you do this D to C at-home

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:20Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  I was.

• 44:45Shaan Puri?

  So as a fan of reality TV, me and Sam both watched The Challenge, probably the trashiest reality show that there is.

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  Well, tonight's the season finale of the Netflix one.

• 44:52Shaan Puri?

  Of which one?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Of The Circle.

• 44:54Sam Parr?

  No, the one where they get married after living in a room.

• 44:56Shaan Puri?

  Love is Blind?

• 44:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  But didn't it all come out already? Didn't they just release it?

• 45:00Sam Parr?

  Today, today.

• 45:01Shaan Puri?

  I'm at, I'm at episode three of that one. Good show.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  It's pretty awesome.

• 45:05Shaan Puri?

  Pretty good show. Have you seen it?

• 45:07Speaker 02

  I haven't seen it yet.

• 45:08Shaan Puri?

  Do you know the premise?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  I do know the premise. They put people in rooms and they don't see each other.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  Yes, so it's actually pretty cool as a experiment.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Oh, they have to get married.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. 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.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:32Shaan Puri?

  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, you know, ask you to marry me. And then, but the thing is that I thought that's where the show would end, but then they like 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.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 45:50Shaan Puri?

  So, good job Netflix, shout out to you.

• 45:51Sam Parr?

  What were you asking her about?

• 45:52Shaan Puri?

  I was actually, Shark Tank, because, um, tell me about how it came about. You, you applied many times, one time, how'd you get on?

• 45:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Shark Tank was an, honestly, I am a 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 friggin' work, ton of work.

• 46:14Shaan Puri?

  Really? Once you're on or before you're on?

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Before you're on.

• 46:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 46:18Speaker 02

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

• 46:21Shaan Puri?

  Go to the beginning, how'd you even audition?

• 46:23Speaker 02

  I know, but it was like a nine month process of, I would say the year of 2017, 80% of my year was just Shark Tank really the thing. So we applied, um, and by we, me, um, it's like a 50-page written application.

• 46:36Shaan Puri?

  Online or?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  No, it is printed and written out. I tried to like use a PDF editor.

• 46:41Sam Parr?

  It takes forever.

• 46:42Speaker 02

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

• 46:43Shaan Puri?

  So you write this whole thing out?

• 46:45Speaker 02

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

• 46:51Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha, so they reached out maybe?

• 46:53Speaker 02

  So they reached out.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 46:55Speaker 02

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

• 47:03Shaan Puri?

  You wait in line, yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  So it's not that I had necessarily a better chance, but I did get shortcut into the application.

• 47:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  So filled that out. The application probably takes forty hours. And then you have to sign all their contracts and basically sign your identity and image away to ABC for in perpetuity. But 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 four months.

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

  To get it right.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Like what is your story? What is your brand? What is your script?

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  That's crazy.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Ultimately, your, what I think people don't realize.

• 47:42Shaan Puri?

  It's a human interest story.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  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. But.

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  So do you still remember your? Do you still remember your opening? Cause you probably drilled it like a thousand times.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  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 feel comfortable. Did you raise money from them? Um, I did. So I signed or I shook on the largest deal ever for a female entrepreneur evaluation.

• 48:18Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  So yeah, with Lori Grenier. She is on board. She's been tremendous.

• 48:22Shaan Puri?

  Because of QVC or what?

• 48:24Speaker 02

  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, I'd say, 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.

• 48:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Or they have no idea what it is.

• 48:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  Um, being able to differentiate that when you have like ten seconds to grab some. How much of a check did she write? So the deal we shook on was. Why do you keep saying shook?

• 49:00Shaan Puri?

  Because there's the shake on it and then there's the actual deal.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  What's the actual deal? I can't disclose that. Oh, come on. However, it was different. Yes.

• 49:08Sam Parr?

  Better or worse?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Better for the company. And it's probably better for Lori.

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  It went better for us.

• 49:20Shaan Puri?

  How does it improve?

• 49:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:34Sam Parr?

  I've had a bunch of friends say they screw them.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:36Sam Parr?

  The sharks screw these.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  Each shark, 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 Gernier's companies. And so it's not a, um, 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 diligence on you. They have a venture analyst on board. So they run diligence on you before you ever pitch.

• 50:02Sam Parr?

  What was your valuation that you guys agreed on?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  I, I pitched, I, I, my valuation was 20 million post money.

• 50:09Sam Parr?

  And how much did she invest?

• 50:10Speaker 02

  So that was a.

• 50:11Sam Parr?

  How much did they agree on?

• 50:12Speaker 02

  It was a line of credit deal at an eight percent interest rate for five percent of the company.

• 50:16Shaan Puri?

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

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Well, in my case, every shark was out and I actually knew I wanted either Lori or Mark Green, uh, 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.

• 50:44Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  Um, and so I said, I know I'm supposed to negotiate, but I want to take this deal.

• 50:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  So I didn't, um, 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. They may edit that out or whatever else, but you can take a minute to think about it.

• 51:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, something people don't, don't see or don't realize that is different from having actually gone through it versus watching it. It, what's a, what's one difference?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  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 five minutes. So it, it varies, but mine was probably an hour and they edit it to seven minutes. Some peoples have gone on up to two to three hours, um, 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.

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  Was Lori investing her own money?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  She is investing her own money.

• 51:34Sam Parr?

  Um, so then, does she have a fund or is it literally just hers?

• 51:38Speaker 02

  It is in a fund structure, but it's her capital.

• 51:41Sam Parr?

  How, what, how much you think she's worth?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know. I will say she is a prolific, um, salesperson in the sense that like the top three or four companies from Shark Tank, and I mean companies that have done like a quarter of a billion in sales.

• 51:55Sam Parr?

  Each?

• 51:55Speaker 02

  Squatty potty. Yeah, it, 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.

• 52:09Sam Parr?

  But do they, but, but do those pay cash? I mean, who cares if you, I mean, it's important, but if you own equity in

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:15Sam Parr?

  That business.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  And there's not an exit.

• 52:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so

• 52:17Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 52:18Sam Parr?

  Where is her cash coming from?

• 52:19Speaker 02

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

• 52:20Sam Parr?

  I'd be very curious.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Sam's gonna get to the bottom of this. Yeah. I'm curious. Well, cause I also

• 52:24Sam Parr?

  I agree with that checks.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Well, and I also don't know. She takes that Saudi money. Each deal is different, right? So like she does it, just like 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 know she has put all of these companies on the map from Scrub Daddy to Squatty Potty, these companies that have incredible consumer Right. She delivers. Now she delivers. Yeah.

• 52:46Sam Parr?

  I've got a squatty potty.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  So, you do? I'm telling you, I think every, it seems to me actually, I don't have one, but it does seem, I, I mean, it does seem very popular. Apparently. So.

• 52:56Sam Parr?

  How much traffic did your site get?

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So we got This back three years ago? It was, it was November.

• 53:03Sam Parr?

  Which would be even better than now, cause there's more tra, uh, people watch TV more than.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Right. And it aired the night before Cyber Monday. It was Thanksgiving weekend. It was, couldn't have been a better day. Although my core team, they were wonderful. They canceled all their Thanksgivings. It was, you know, a lot of work, but, um, what, we got about thirty times our normal traffic, but we had an interesting experience. We didn't have this tremendous, like huge spike the night of in terms of purchases, but we ended up doing about a million dollars in sales, which at the time was a tremendously large number for us, um, in like the four day period after

• 53:35Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Um, the show. So there's been a little bit of this interesting thing for us that I haven't heard many other companies have, which is we doubled. Oh, like we doubled in that week on a run rate standpoint, and then we continued doubling the next month, and we never had that decline.

• 53:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  But we didn't have this spike in like the three hour period that we aired.

• 53:54Sam Parr?

  Well, how much traffic, do you know how much traffic it was?

• 53:56Speaker 02

  A million.

• 53:57Sam Parr?

  A million uniques in twenty four hours?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, and we did, I mean, we had to, I mean, at the time, we were not set up for that scale. Now we don't even have to think about it. We know, we've always been on, um, uh, on, um,

• 54:09Sam Parr?

  Woocommerce?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Not Woocommerce, not Shopify, um.

• 54:12Shaan Puri?

  Big Commerce.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  We've built on it now and like totally customized it, uh.

• 54:16Shaan Puri?

  Something else.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  I know, but it's one of the big ones that actually I think we should have gone to Shopify, but we didn't.

• 54:21Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  So, I should, now I shouldn't name them because it's gonna sound bad.

• 54:24Shaan Puri?

  Right. Shout out to Toby from Shopify.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 54:27Shaan Puri?

  I like to think he's listening.

• 54:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um.

• 54:30Shaan Puri?

  Might be. We're trying to get him on.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  I was gonna say that valuation, right?

• 54:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. He also streams on Twitch. Great guy.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so we saw a really good traffic increase, but it was, 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, kind of a slow burn. So, um, that was what it was with us. But we did not crash, um, which was essential.

• 54:55Sam Parr?

  Do you, did you, I have a bunch of questions. Do you have some?

• 54:57Shaan Puri?

  I have some, not about Shark Tank, though.

• 54:58Sam Parr?

  Me neither.

• 54:59Shaan Puri?

  Close the chapter on Shark Tank.

• 55:01Sam Parr?

  Um, I, I know enough about Shark Tank now.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  There may be a, uh, there may be an upcoming, an upcoming thing there, so.

• 55:07Shaan Puri?

  Your comeback as one of the glory children.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Potentially, potentially. We are actually in two years, we're the number, I think we're number ten on the all time best selling list.

• 55:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:15Sam Parr?

  What's number one? Squatty Potty?

• 55:16Speaker 02

  The socks, and then Squatty Potty.

• 55:18Sam Parr?

  What's the socks?

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Bombas.

• 55:19Sam Parr?

  Oh, they were on there too?

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, number one.

• 55:21Shaan Puri?

  I didn't realize that.

• 55:21Sam Parr?

  God damn.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  Two hundred and fifty million in sales.

• 55:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Shaan Puri?

  Shit.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 55:25Shaan Puri?

  I'm wearing Bombas right now, I think.

• 55:27Sam Parr?

  You have Bombas?

• 55:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I, I went on Twitter, I said, what's the best sock money can buy? When we sold the company, I was like,

• 55:31Speaker 02

  People love it.

• 55:32Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna buy unlimited of the best sock. That was the thing I'd always told myself.

• 55:35Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 55:36Shaan Puri?

  When I become a millionaire, unlimited best socks. And Bombas was like, what everybody said.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Do you love that?

• 55:40Shaan Puri?

  Um, yeah, I love them, but I need more. That's all. Like, I ran out.

• 55:44Sam Parr?

  I'm involved.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I bought the, whatever the, like, sixty pair or whatever, but like, I think I need like five hundred pairs of socks, like laundry.

• 55:52Sam Parr?

  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 thirty of them, and one pair of socks, and I own fifty of them.

• 56:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Sam Parr?

  So I never matched socks.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:02Sam Parr?

  It's the greatest hack ever.

• 56:03Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 56:04Sam Parr?

  I've been doing it since I was eighteen.

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  Should we?

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Applaud.

• 56:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I got a question for you.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:12Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  So this, uh, people are often surprised how many people we get to take their blood at home.

• 56:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  But that's often what it requires. So like most of our testing is pricking your finger to draw a small sample of blood. 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.

• 56:45Shaan Puri?

  Your method?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Yes, Quest, LabCorp, all of the labs have dried blood spot testing.

• 56:50Shaan Puri?

  What does that mean in line?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Just means you're pricking a finger and you're dropping blood onto a treated paper.

• 56:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Or a treated device that is then, uh, the blood is then drying.

• 57:00Sam Parr?

  But you guys aren't doing the test.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  We're not.

• 57:02Sam Parr?

  You're a, you're a middle person.

• 57:04Speaker 02

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

• 57:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:11Sam Parr?

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

• 57:13Speaker 02

  No, I don't take offense to it.

• 57:15Shaan Puri?

  So like that's the most important part.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Right, and, and I think, you know, it's interesting when you're like, oh, you're just a middleman or you're just marketing. But I really view us more as, okay, the labs are our manufacturing partners.

• 57:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:26Speaker 02

  You don't buy things directly from manufacturers typically, right? You buy them from a brand.

• 57:30Sam Parr?

  And who's your provider?

• 57:31Speaker 02

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

• 57:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  So.

• 57:50Sam Parr?

  Of the 50 million.

• 57:50Shaan Puri?

  That's what everyone grows up wanting to be. The worldwide leader in dried blood spot testing.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  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, that stamp, especially with. All the failures that have happened.

• 58:03Shaan Puri?

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

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:06Shaan Puri?

  Take it away.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  I'm excited.

• 58:09Sam Parr?

  I think that a lot of them are bullshit.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:12Sam Parr?

  Am I right or wrong? Or what do you think?

• 58:15Speaker 02

  I think it depends.

• 58:16Shaan Puri?

  We talked about this earlier.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  No, it's important and it's um.

• 58:20Sam Parr?

  But they do every test, though.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  They do every test.

• 58:23Sam Parr?

  It's okay if I don't buy one of them.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:33Sam Parr?

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

• 58:35Speaker 02

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

• 58:42Sam Parr?

  I compared the intolerance test to chiropractor.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 58:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:47Sam Parr?

  I was like, I think that it sounds good, but but it doesn't work.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  You know, it's interesting. We have become associated, this food sensitivity testing in general has become associated with Everly Well, which I suppose is like I'm proud of from a brand standpoint, but on the other hand, um, it's been going on for over 30 years and there's thousands of doctors that do both IG, IgG, IgA testing um, 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 have 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 contest, 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.

• 59:33Speaker 02

  It should be used with an elimination diet. It is not a be all end all. It's a guidance. Um, it is something, it is our test where we have more people quantitatively say it's changed their lives than any other test. Um, but and there's good research around it for that use. What there's not good research around is saying like it's, 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. Um, 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. Um, and I think it's great that Everly Well 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.

• 1:00:17Sam Parr?

  What category of tests do you think are, is the biggest opportunity for you?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Sexual, what 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 thirty-nine and forty-nine dollars. 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, two hundred and...

• 1:00:50Sam Parr?

  Who's the leading, the leading company in this space for STIs?

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  At home. STIs.

• 1:00:55Sam Parr?

  I keep saying STDs.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:01:08Sam Parr?

  So who's the biggest in the space for digital?

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  For at home?

• 1:01:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  It's, I would say it's probably us just from branding standpoint. There's a couple of companies that specialize.

• 1:01:17Sam Parr?

  You guys in revenue? Wow.

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  Which, to be clear, should tell you how under-resourced and served this opportunity is.

• 1:01:25Sam Parr?

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

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Yes, this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Again, if we're gonna rev, lots of other people can come into this space. There's a specific company that only does STI testing, but they haven't been well-funded. They've struggled. And we really believe that this is not only how you can best close public health gaps, you also can get people on board to then use testing it from home over their lifetime for any other health issue as well. People don't want to go into a clinic. You don't want to go, period. Right. And our solution, you actually can not only get your results, but then you can diagnose and treat through an independent physician if you have a positive, if it's a relevant STI that can be treated. So it's a full-service solution. And what you're looking at right now is we have a really good business, but if you look at the price sensitivity,

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  there's a certain age group that's gonna be willing to pay two fifty to go get a test versus going to a clinic.

• 1:02:18Sam Parr?

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

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Profitably on first touch. That's great. That is, for me, we're in Austin. I'm a first-time founder. We're building a sustainable business. We didn't go out and raise money on this. premise of just negative contribution margin and then hoping

• 1:02:37Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:02:39Sam Parr?

  No way, search.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Uh, well, it depends. Search for different categories, but search has a ceiling. It does have a ceiling, even with

• 1:02:46Sam Parr?

  But if you search STD test online, you'd need that shit right now.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, or food allergy.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  For that category, certainly, search is great for us, but Facebook slash 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.

• 1:03:07Shaan Puri?

  And what, TV now, or no?

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Uh, 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.

• 1:03:27Sam Parr?

  Is all that 50 million going into marketing spend?

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:36Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Well, we have a regulatory and compliance team.

• 1:03:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  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 studies 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 like a healthy marketing engine and not just be dependent on this like paid social

• 1:04:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  thing that we were the last few years.

• 1:04:12Sam Parr?

  Could you have bootstrapped this?

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  No, and that I think is a really

• 1:04:14Shaan Puri?

  I feel like you would have if you could have.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  I would have if I could have. It's a really important question, though.

• 1:04:19Sam Parr?

  If you just said like, you're a marketing company, I'm like, oh, okay, so just white label this thing. Do you see 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.

• 1:04:32Shaan Puri?

  What was, what were some of the challenges beyond the like, you know,

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, for

• 1:04:35Shaan Puri?

  send traffic to a landing page and order this like white labeled product?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Right, so we don't white label. We actually fully end to end constructed. And our kits 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 five years ago, that was not as easy from a like a UX standpoint as it is today.

• 1:05:13Sam Parr?

  So a doctor interprets all of the results?

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  An independent physician.

• 1:05:17Sam Parr?

  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 I use Wellness FX and they do a blood test and they just say like you.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  They also use a doctor.

• 1:05:27Sam Parr?

  No shit? Really?

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 1:05:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that wouldn't be.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:57Shaan Puri?

  And so when you're at the beginning.

• 1:05:59Speaker 02

  It is similar to Wellness FX, except it's home kits. And Wellness FX really kind of stayed on the Quantified Seltzer brand and never was able to scale.

• 1:06:06Sam Parr?

  That business totally fizzled.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Sam Parr?

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

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  But it's interesting. I mean, there have been a lot of companies, many, especially after Shark Tank. I would put it in the two dozen range that launch an Instagram, create a pretty logo, have a kit. And then about six months to 12 months later, you never hear from them again.

• 1:06:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:06:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:06:44Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:06:51Sam Parr?

  You compare it to, you have to compare it to others that are similar to you.

• 1:06:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:06:54Sam Parr?

  For your industry. If you're a bank and you have a 60 MPS, you're the best bank on earth. If you're a 60, but you're like a movie, then it's like.

• 1:07:01Speaker 02

  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 zero to a negative.

• 1:07:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. Don't measure.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  Right. Right, and so we feel good about our product ratings, four and a half out of five 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.

• 1:07:34Shaan Puri?

  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, you know, you do this test and you're like, this is crappy.

• 1:07:49Shaan Puri?

  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 behind the stated story is like, you know, more of the real story. And our, our audience is very entrepreneurial, and they feel this on a daily 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 of 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 going to do this?

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  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, you know.

• 1:08:26Shaan Puri?

  It's not a lie.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  We moved to Austin in a U-Haul, all those things are true. But there's a few things, my husband and I, and our dog. There's a few things that I think are important. It's not like I woke up one day and was like, oh, I'm going to 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 Firth Box, you had Guilt a few years before, Stitch Fix, Oscar. I had two unicorn founders in my section alone. And at the time, Grab Taxi out of Korea, and then.

• 1:09:06Shaan Puri?

  Grab's huge.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Who was, oh, Kuping.

• 1:09:08Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  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 two years on the weekends in my spare time, not making any money, but going through different industries, different business models, advising different companies on their business plans and seeing like what would really stick.

• 1:09:35Sam Parr?

  Do you have all that research saved?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  I do, but it's really like, I look back, it's kind of boring.

• 1:09:40Sam Parr?

  That's sent to me.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  I don't know. I will, I will send it, but it's, it's like I, I would be very literal in 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 go and actually do, given my background.

• 1:09:56Sam Parr?

  What were the other ones?

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:10Sam Parr?

  Hey, you just described how, so you're, you're two for two from a company ideas.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  To, to be clear, it's, I don't know. I don't know if I took an idea from them or if I, if I actually came up with it.

• 1:10:20Sam Parr?

  You're two for two.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  But, um, you know, the match with Everlywell was not necessarily one where you'd be like, oh.

• 1:10:25Sam Parr?

  Wasn't obvious.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  Right. It was not obvious, but, um, it was the one where like, I realized really early on, this is a decade long thing.

• 1:10:33Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  So if it actually works, you're in it.

• 1:10:35Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Couple of years. I mean, until I had this health experience in twenty fifteen and then I kind of matched the two together. So this was early twenty fifteen. I ended up incorporating the company June eighteenth, twenty fifteen, and then I left my job in August.

• 1:10:53Shaan Puri?

  And 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?

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  I didn't. Um, both my parents are lawyers. Um, I didn't realize one, that being an entrepreneur was actually a career choice and a path that you could like become good at. That doesn't necessarily mean financial success. You could be a serial entrepreneur and actually make that a career. Um, 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.

• 1:11:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:11:27Speaker 02

  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 dollars in sales. And so I'm not sure I necessarily thought about what it would look like today. Um, 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.

• 1:11:58Sam Parr?

  Turns out it wasn't.

• 1:11:59Speaker 02

  I know. Turns out I was a little, little wrong about that, but, um, 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?

• 1:12:08Sam Parr?

  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.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  If it's a consumer brand.

• 1:12:19Sam Parr?

  You, you, you, you have to have that part of you. You gotta be aggressive. You have to, um, as you were, you were an outsider, right?

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  Yes, completely.

• 1:12:27Sam Parr?

  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.

• 1:12:37Shaan Puri?

  What other adjacent things have you observed?

• 1:12:39Sam Parr?

  Because I'm a total outsider, but I, but, 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.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  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, um, 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.

• 1:13:14Shaan Puri?

  Within the insurance system.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  I don't, 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 going to get and what it costs.

• 1:13:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  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, um, I think there's an interesting play there.

• 1:13:42Sam Parr?

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

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Of a company?

• 1:13:45Shaan Puri?

  Throw out a half-baked pitch.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Sam Parr?

  That's okay. It's what we do.

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Man, if you could be a. So if you had physicians and you said, "Okay, I'm going to have you pay fifty dollars anytime you see the physician, we're gonna own a pharmacy, and any of your drugs are gonna be transparently priced, and you can't use a coupon, everything is the same price, and it's all generic." And then if you say, "Okay, and then I wanna be able to get, you know, testing done," and then they can tell you the pricing on that, but here's the problem with it, you have to actually own the supply chain and the services chain. You have to be vertically integrated. You have to be vertically integrated to do this, because otherwise...

• 1:14:24Sam Parr?

  Sounds like a fucking nightmare.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  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, and when you get the bills, you're getting the bill for whatever they didn't wanna cover, but that was intended, like, the provider billed the insurance company what they hoped the insurance company would pay, not at all what it costs.

• 1:14:49Sam Parr?

  What else?

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:53Sam Parr?

  Just maybe things that you've discovered along the way, for example, when we started our company, we realized that, like, paying freelancers is, I was like, "Wow, I didn't realize how hard that was."

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Sam Parr?

  So, like, along the way, where you've, like, where you're entrepreneurial.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  Are you the type that do keep a little notes app that's like... Yeah, but some of them get stopped, so for example, like, three years ago, uh, two years ago, on, on, uh, Black Friday, we had 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. A cash advance for social media advertising.

• 1:15:26Sam Parr?

  What are you using for that?

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  Uh, now, now we're big enough to where we don't have to use a product like a Braxara. Right.

• 1:15:32Sam Parr?

  We just started talking about that.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  Or like ClearBank could do this, yeah. Right, so, but at that time, if those solutions had been around, we absolutely would've been able to take advantage of them, and then, of course, they came out, and I was like, "Oh, that would've been a really good idea." Yeah, good business idea, yeah. Yeah, but we really hit a bunch of challenges with that, um, 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, 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.

• 1:16:11Sam Parr?

  So what do you guys use for your company's health or your company's HR system?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  For our system?

• 1:16:16Sam Parr?

  Like?

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  We use like Payloc, I mean Paylocity.

• 1:16:19Sam Parr?

  Paylocity?

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  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 a Gusto and then the next step up that you need for all of your

• 1:16:34Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  administration payroll.

• 1:16:35Sam Parr?

  And why do you use that?

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  Why?

• 1:16:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Speaker 02

  Versus a Gusto?

• 1:16:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:42Shaan Puri?

  It's like more sophisticated, more enterpris-y.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more enterpris-y, but the jump between like, hey, you're less than 50 people to like, hey, we need something much more sophisticated and scalable is painful.

• 1:16:54Sam Parr?

  And that's because you're paying all these physicians?

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Well, that's an independent network, but we are paying all of our people, um, and we have.

• 1:17:02Shaan Puri?

  So these independent physicians, are they doing this on the side of their normal practice? Are these freelancers or?

• 1:17:07Speaker 02

  Typically not, they work for another company. They're typically, some are 1099, but

• 1:17:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 02

  typically in these structures, and there's a lot of these structures, be it a normal telemedicine company or these kind of separate entities. Um, and they typically are either full-time employees, like doctor on demand, entirely employs all their doctors.

• 1:17:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  Um, or some of them are

• 1:17:26Sam Parr?

  So like Hims is using one of these third parties to employ doctors?

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  I don't know if they're using a third party or if they have their own.

• 1:17:32Sam Parr?

  But those third parties exist?

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Uh, those third, those third parties exist.

• 1:17:35Sam Parr?

  That's a

• 1:17:35Shaan Puri?

  Are you in or out on the Hims, Ro?

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  In.

• 1:17:38Shaan Puri?

  You're in?

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  I'm in.

• 1:17:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  I'm heavily in.

• 1:17:40Shaan Puri?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  Um, 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,

• 1:18:09Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 1:18:28Speaker 02

  I do think.

• 1:18:29Shaan Puri?

  It's a lifestyle.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and for me, like, I'm on one of the hers, um, face, uh, or, uh, 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.

• 1:18:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  To be clear, it's not like him's and hers created some model. That's how physicians.

• 1:18:51Sam Parr?

  Well, they're, they're a marketing company too.

• 1:18:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:18:53Sam Parr?

  I, I just, uh, we were talking about, have you heard of Legacy? It's for sperm.

• 1:18:58Speaker 02

  Company.

• 1:18:59Sam Parr?

  You like that or not?

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:19:07Sam Parr?

  Hmm. What's that mean?

• 1:19:09Shaan Puri?

  That's like, we, we diagnose you with the problem and then you buy our solution.

• 1:19:13Sam Parr?

  Well, they just store your sperm too, though.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  I think the, the concern in the healthcare space around this particular problem has been the percent of men that actually need this is so miniscule, but their advertising practices make claims that make it sound.

• 1:19:28Sam Parr?

  But why wouldn't you want to store your sperm if it costs so such?

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  So this is where, so here's what we believe is out really well. So for example, we get a lot of questions around, well, like, how dangerous is it for people to be over testing 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're still have independent thought and 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. Um, and so I'm, I'm with you, but I think you have to then still have a fine line. Like we have to be as ever really well as him's and Row and Legacy and all these companies, you have to be super careful about the claims you're making and how

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  how kind of what scare tactics you're taking for people to want to buy it. Uh, because there is going to 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 regulations. It catches up later.

• 1:20:28Sam Parr?

  I love those businesses because I can't imagine having to go to the doctor and do that.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Sam Parr?

  Like, that just sucks.

• 1:20:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Sam Parr?

  That's pretty bad.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:42Sam Parr?

  Same with that.

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:51Sam Parr?

  Because you want to, you want to get tested, but you don't want to be like, hey, I uh,

• 1:20:54Shaan Puri?

  I'm doing, yeah.

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  It's not just STI. People just don't get it done.

• 1:20:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  The requisition from their doctor. So.

• 1:20:59Sam Parr?

  Particularly men.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. To the assumption, the data shows about 40% of tests that doctors issue never get completed. So.

• 1:21:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I treat it like a suggestion. It's like, oh, I, I should do what this says.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  We have to take business away from LabCorp and Quest. We just have to help people actually get done what they need to.

• 1:21:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  And on top of that, you know, that'll obviously, I think, make the pie bigger as well.

• 1:21:22Sam Parr?

  What's the most common STI? Chlamydia?

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh. I actually don't know from a statistics, but I think it's chlamydia.

• 1:21:28Sam Parr?

  Are you guys?

• 1:21:29Speaker 02

  We couple those together. And that's our, that's our top selling scheme.

• 1:21:33Sam Parr?

  It's chlamydia.

• 1:21:33Shaan Puri?

  So everybody who's listening, we want you to get yourself tested for chlamydia. Go to everlywell.com, dot com.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:21:42Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Yes. Julia T Cheek on Twitter and private on Instagram. Try and keep that.

• 1:21:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, feel free.

• 1:21:59Shaan Puri?

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

• 1:22:01Sam Parr?

  Thank you.