Diving into the Innovative World of Water Management with Sutro Founder, Ravi Kurani

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today I'm joined by Ravi Kirani, who's joining me from Germany, although he's normally based in San Francisco. And we're going to talk about water and the water business that he's built called MySutro.

Ravi, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Jim. It's my pleasure.

Well, it's my pleasure because, you know, water is a hot topic. If— can I say hot topic about water?

I'd say so.

Look, water is everywhere. It's ubiquitous, as we know, and it's a life force. But it also needs to be protected and purified. And you're going to help us to understand how you've built MySutra into a business by pivoting from one way you're trying to sell water products to India, now selling into the 14 million pool market in America, and how you've overcome some of the obstacles. And even then managed to sell the business in the midst of raising money. So, Ravi, tell us about MySutro. What can people expect from this business?

Yeah, entirely. So, Sutro today is a floating laboratory is what I like to call it. It floats in your swimming pool or hot tub and it remotely measures your water chemistry, right? It's a chemical tester. People like to think that we're a filter. We're actually a tester. It's connected to an app, which is either on Android or iPhone, and it tells you exactly what to do and when to do it for your swimming pool. So, for those people that own swimming pools, you have to test your water, right? If you've seen one of those green, nasty pools that are filled with algae, that's what happens when you don't properly manage water chemistry. And so, Sutro's simple vision for the swimming pool market is to help people and tell them what to do and when to do to make sure that their water is blue. The kind of longer scale or the larger strategy here of what we've built is a platform to measure water chemistry. And so if you kind of zoom out for a second and think about where water is used around the world, you'll think about agriculture, you'll think about drinking water, cooling water towers that are used to cool our buildings in some of the largest cities in the world. animal feeding operations, right? The cattle, the pigs that we have have these big lagoons where there's wastewater. All of this water needs to be treated, measured, and then figured out what to do with. And so that's what we've built is Sutro wants to be at the center, at the nexus of where water is used in applications that we use every single day. So that's the kind of long and short of what Sutro is.

Ravi, thank you for that. And look, I'm sharing with the people that are watching, uh, the site— MySutro is the website, but Sutro is the product itself.

And it's a, it's a water testing robot, I think you call it, isn't it, Ravi? But let's just talk about the business as it started, because you had to pivot, didn't you, from the original, uh, if you like, business proposition to a new one. I'd like to talk about that because there was a communication challenge in, in that pivot as well. So tell us what happened.

Yeah, entirely. So Prior to jumping into the pool and spa market, I used to be at a venture capital fund in India. And one thing that we noticed was there was a lot of water-related deals, right? And a lot of people were doing water filtration, but nobody was actually looking at the quality of the water. And so, a water filter is only good as what the application needs it for. For example, if you have a swimming pool, you might need really high chlorine. However, you don't want to use that chlorinated water to water your plants that you're growing grapes on for wine, or you don't want to use high nitrate water for your drinking water that you're going to drink, you know, before you go to bed. And so, in that, we started to realize that there's a big gap in the water sensing market, understanding what's happening with water. And we built the first prototype of the sensor and tried selling it to the Indian government, which is the dumbest thing a startup can do. You're going to die waiting just as a startup in getting even one product into the market. And so, we came back to the United States, flipped the product around, and my background was in swimming pools and spas. So, I was the son of some immigrant parents that came from India. Dad used to have a chain of pool and spa supply stores in Los Angeles. So, growing up in sunny Southern California, I knew everything about pools. And so, we flipped the technology around, started selling it to the swimming pool and spa market with the vision to go into the drinking water, agriculture, and food and beverage markets later. And so, that's kind of how we ended up pivoting the technology.

You know, and Ravi, having set up a business myself in India, in Bangalore, I absolutely know it's not a place to dive into, India, is it really? You can really drown quite quickly if I carry on the metaphor.

But Ravi, you had the business going to India, you know, with, I imagine, a sort of a purpose to help the filtration and the purification. But selling sort of pool products to the wealthy is a little bit different, isn't it? How did you address that positioning of the company to your team, for example, and maybe to investors? enter the market?

Yeah, when we first started Sutro, we always had this vision of being in multiple water industries. We always knew that we were going to be a platform for water. It just became a question of which industry were we going to tackle first. And when we first came at it from the drinking water standpoint, you know, that was very altruistic. Everybody was on board. Not that nobody is not on board today. It's just there was a it was a bit of a pivot to understand that we needed to be profitable and sustainable as a business. And it would be no use to anybody if we died on the vine trying to sell drinking water technology to India. We'd get to nowhere, right? We wouldn't even get to one. And so, that became just kind of a real philosophical question of, let's go ahead and just try to see where the market does take us. And we can actually focus on how to make the business profitable and sustainable first. use those profits, use the mileage that we put on the proverbial product, and then go ahead and scale into these other technologies as and when we see fit. And the interesting thing is, is this year, we're now beginning to do that, right? So now we're in year 5 of actual launch of the product. And we're starting to see real interest from markets in agriculture, from commercial markets, from drinking water, to begin scaling this technology. And so I think, you know, in the next 1 or 2 years, we should see that initial vision of the product start to come to fruition.

Ravi, okay. And I think, you know, it was Rockefeller, wasn't it, as well, who said there's no point in having charity. It needs to be a sustainable business that generates funds that can do good work. Otherwise, it's not sustainable. So absolutely, yeah, absolutely makes sense there.

Ravi, then just tell us, Sutro, interesting name. What's the genesis of the name?

Yeah, it was a tip of the hat to of the largest public swimming pools in San Francisco, which are called Sutro Baths. And I used to actually live very close to there and we would take walks to Sutro Baths. It's right on the— right in a place called Lands End, which is actually at the westernmost point of San Francisco that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Really, really beautiful spot if anybody does go to visit California, San Francisco. But it's a tip of the hat to the largest public swimming pools in the world.

Okay, wonderful. So it's a lovely origin story. And I guess that idea of freshness and everything that goes with San Francisco and the Pacific as a brand.

Ravi, you started to build Sutro. You mentioned, I think there are some 14 million pools in America and you've got an installed base, I think now some 20,000 for your, do you call them robots, the Sutros, or do you call them Sutros?

Well, we call them Sutro. But inside, they are a robot entirely.

Okay.

And what do they do then, these robots?

Yeah, so the way that it works actually, if you do want to pull up the website, I can show you kind of the internals of the sutra really quick.

Yeah, let's have a quick look here at the— here we go—

how it works.

Well, it keeps wanting to So if you just click on that How It Works page.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing. Okay, that's— here we go.

I think that's still on the main page.

Yeah, it's not. Okay, okay, Robbie, that's not working because every time I do that, it's going to Okay, yeah, no issues at all.

I can talk through it. So the sutra—

Hold on, let's just hold on just a second there, Mark, because I do want to do that. But Ravi, because I'll edit that out, it's a shame, but when I'm pressing, when I'm trying to do it— well, let me try it on my other one on a different browser.

Okay, it didn't like it in Safari. It didn't work, by the way.

Oh, all right.

Okay, here you go. I'll introduce that question again.

Ravi, you know, just tell us then the sutro, the The Sutro Monitor, as it's called.

I've got it up on the screen for people that are, you know, watching and people that are listening. You just go to mysutro.com. Um, just take us through what, what it actually does then, this, this robot in your pool.

Yeah, entirely. So the kind of, um, actually this is a perfect picture on that, on that ad. Um, that's about the size of a Sutro. It's about the size of your forearm. And this first picture over here actually shows the Sutro as it's fastened to a piece of railing in the pool. So it just floats there freely. And this next picture is kind of the Sutro as it's opened up. So there's 2 cores that are inside the Sutro. There's this piece that you see on the top, which is the internal core, and then the outside, which kind of acts as a submarine, which almost, you know, keeps it buoyant and floating. The majority of our science or technology is located in this test cartridge, which is at the bottom lower half of the screen right there.

Yeah.

We pulled from the medical industry and they use a technology called microfluidics, which is really, really tiny fluids, right? Microfluids. In microfluids, what we do is we've taken a regular test kit and we've shrunk it down to basically 1/50th of the size of what you otherwise would do if you are using a regular liquid test kit. And inside there, what happens is the exact same thing that you do as actually a human, right? You take a sample of water, you put some sort of reactant chemical inside there, and the water changes color. And basically what you do as you're— as a human looking at this is you would then measure what the actual color is. And that's what the actual robot does. It literally doses a very small amount of liquid and it uses computer vision to actually measure what the color is. It goes through a bunch of complex stuff in the cloud, and then you have a very simple app that gives you a thumbs up or a thumbs down or red light, green light, yellow light to tell you exactly what's wrong with your water chemistry and what to do.

Robbie, so you've managed to put a robot in the water that then gives you a visual representation of, you know, the well-being of your water.

That's correct.

Is that right?

That's 100% correct.

Yeah. Ravi, that's fantastic.

And I can see you've got an app.

So what role does the technology in the hand play in terms of the customer experience for Sutro?

Yeah, it's actually an interesting question. 99% of our CX or customer experience is actually done on the app because the robot only does so much, right? It does a very complex function when it's floating in your water, but you need something that you can actually understand, digest, interact, and see the insights from the data. And so, a lot of the work that we do is actually on the app now, right? At the very beginning, it needs to tell you what the health of your pool is, right? Do you have a pH that's good? Do you have a pH that's bad? And then, there needs to be one more level of abstraction that tells you what you need to do to fix that water chemistry. And so that's a lot of what the app does is it makes it very simple. So you can just look at it in a very quick format and it'll tell you exactly what chemical to put in your pool of the chemicals that you actually have inside your water to make sure that the health is the way that it should be.

And Ravi, does it connect to a system, an ERP system somewhere that helps people to reorder the chemicals that they need, presumably from your dad's stores?

Entirely.

That's actually one of our earlier models and we, very quickly realized that it's cannibalistic to the industry to take away pool stores' chemical revenues. And so, one of the things we're actually, again, pivoting the technology to, you know, that's one of the decisions we actually made that we ended up backing away from was instead of making this full-stack ordering platform, a pool store's livelihood, such as my dad's store's livelihood, was in the chemicals that they sell. And so, what we do now actually is we're in the process of building out a system that lives at the pool store that can communicate with the robot in that pool store's customer's pool, right, which is our customer. And what we do is we actually then connect the dots to allow people to buy chemicals back at their pool store, thus supporting local businesses and helping people in their local neighborhoods actually keep their businesses alive. Okay.

Yeah, that's wonderful. So, you're not trying to go down the Amazon, disintermediate everybody in the supply chain, business model, but you're leaving, you're leaving other local businesses in, in— also, people will need the pool cleaner anyway, won't they, to go in and actually play that role? Exactly. So, um, now, Ravi, Sutro, I can see how that works, um, and that's wonderful.

Tell us a little bit about how you built the brand. I mean, you've talked about the CX coming with the app, but, you know, you've got to get those people first, and also about how when you were raising money for the business, it changed the nature of the ownership of the business.

Yeah, entirely. So alongside your first question of brand building and how we actually marketed and go to market, the pool owner in general is a premium customer, right? People that have pools are generally more wealthier. In thinking about the pool customer, you have to make sure that you're First of all, catering to the proper demographic that you want to. And so, that's kind of lesson number one that we realize is you can't spray and pray, right? If you're going to be spending ad dollars on Facebook or Google to acquire a customer, it's much more efficient to figure out who the actual core demographic is down to, is it mom or is it dad? Is it the son that influences the product for dad to buy? If you understand all of these customer behaviors, your ad has to be so pinpointed to that son who's then going to influence his dad to buy the product if that's your customer journey before you just go and start putting ads out saying, buy a Sutro, it's going to help your pool be the best pool ever. So, that's kind of lesson number 1. The second thing that we did when we started marketing the product was we knew that we wanted to cater to a premier or a premium clientele. And so, if you look at the website, it's It's very chic, it's very premium. It looks like it's inspired from 1920s Art Deco. And so, we want to just kind of really have this premium feel to the product. And the kind of third piece that we had to do was you need to build social proof. When you're a startup, you don't have a product in market and people don't know that it exists. That's problem number one. And then secondarily, for those those quote-unquote laggards that come after those early evangelists, people that first buy the product, there has to be enough social proof. You know, right here you can see we have a 4.8 stars. We have to get those reviews and we have to incentivize people and build such a delightful product to those early users such that they're going to leave comments on our website and on Amazon and on, you know, Google, such that other people when they come in will see that, oh, this product does make sense. People are using it and I should buy it as well. And that's a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem when you're first launching a product, because you need to find people that really, really, really have a problem. You need to give them that solution to the problem, and then you need to be so good at solving that problem that they're gonna then leave a review for other people to buy it. And so, it's really being cognizant of that, building community very early on with users that are gonna leave those reviews such that you can then get follow-on sales.

Ravi, and quickly then, how did you get those early adopters then?

Because as you say, it is a chicken and egg.

How did you get those? Yeah, you have to find them. So, in the Sutro product, the first people that we hypothesized will purchase the product are going to be what I would call pooled, right? They're probably chemists, they're IT people, they work in tech. And so, where we found these people was actually a forum called Trouble Free Pool. There's a forum with, I think, over 80,000 or 50,000 people on there that are pool geeks. They literally have these pretty detailed conversations around water chemistry and water monitoring. And so, we built and we sourced our first few users from Trouble Free Pool, and we needed to make sure that the users from Trouble Free Pool would be so happy in using the product that they would go back and recommend it to these other pool geeks. Because if the world of pool geeks like your product, then the world of, you know, that are not pool geeks will definitely like your product as well.

How interesting.

Is that on which platform?

Pool Geeks?

Well, it's a forum called troublefreepool.com, TFP.

Oh, so it's actually a website. It's not Facebook, it's not Discord.

No, it's an entirely— it's a blog site that looks like it was built in, you know, 1990. But it's a very, very, very active Um, forum.

Oh, how interesting. And so you engage with those people. Which platform have you used for the reviews? Have you used like FIFO or Trusted Advisor? What have you used?

Yeah, we use a Shopify plugin called Stamped. Um, it's called Stamped UGC, user-generated content. It helps you not only do post-purchase, um, surveys for users such that you can then capture those reviews, But it also helps build out the entire UGC or user-generated content flow of people posting things on Instagram, on Facebook, you know, getting all that social proof. So it kind of wraps its hands around a lot of that work.

Oh, that's interesting.

So that's stamped.com?

I think it's stamped.com or stamped.io. If you just type in Stamped Shopify UGC, you'll definitely find it.

Okay, that's fascinating. And is that able to also work into Amazon? Because I see you've got Amazon Shop as well. Yeah, it does not work in into Amazon.

Amazon, you know, sandboxes a lot of, a lot of what they do. And Amazon's actually a relatively new channel for us. So we're kind of taking a lot of those learnings that we did at phase 1 and putting them into Amazon. But, um, no, to answer your question, Stamp does not work with Amazon.

Okay, that's the, the gated nature of Amazon, isn't it?

Ravi, I did, I did, uh, it was a bit tricky. Could I ask you 2 questions in one about, you know, you're raising money, uh, and then You got acquired. Just tell us a little bit about that because I also then want to talk about how you communicated the acquisition.

Yeah. So, we were in the midst of kind of raising a bridge between Series C to Series A or Series A. I forget exactly what it was called. These terms changed so much over the period of time, but that's what it was called back then. And in the midst of doing that, we were actually attempting to fundraise from a bunch of strategics, right? People in the industry that could help us with distribution advantage. In that conversation, we kind of basically got one-on-one with Sandy Mark and they said, hey, look, it probably just makes sense instead of us investing apart with a bunch of other folks for you to just become a group company because Sandy Mark is the Sandy Mark Group. They have a bunch of companies within their group. And so, we kind of made the decision and thought that it would be better and best fit for the product and the vision. to really be nested under Sandy Mark to push this forward.

Right. But they've left you to have your own brand and the integrity of that. I can see that.

Ravi, it sounds like a textbook case of success.

So congratulations.

But we all know as entrepreneurs, there's something that hasn't gone quite as planned.

Could you share maybe one thing in the marketing Space that you've done that didn't generate the kind of results you'd liked for Sutra?

Yeah, entirely. So, we— the thing that comes to mind, I kind of said this earlier, was the spray and pray methodology. We initially went to Facebook and, you know, had an ad budget, and we just basically threw money at Facebook and said, you know, market using your lookalike audiences to people that you think have pools. Turned out that that wasn't the case, and we ended up burning a lot of those dollars because we should have gone back and actually really honed in who our core market was on Facebook. And so, what we ended up learning from that was let's go ahead and pump in data into Facebook that's going to be much more tactical. And so, very literally what we did was we built a scraper on Google Maps that looked at satellite view to figure out where pools are in people's backyards, because you can see little blue islands inside of people's backyards. With that data, we were able to basically figure out an address of where our swimming pool was, and we could anonymously put that information inside of Facebook to say, we know that there's probably a pool within this vicinity, and Facebook, you probably have the data of who this person is. Go ahead and market to them, right? And they're probably much more of a qualified customer versus us starting at the Facebook line and just saying, hey, look, here's a dollar. Go ahead and market it to whoever you think would be best fit our customer. So the kind of tidbit there is make sure you know who your demographic is so you're efficiently spending your marketing dollars and targeting the right customer.

Yeah. So as you say, niching down, Ravi, and not niching down is perhaps the error that so many of us make at the beginning.

Ravi Kurani, as you know, the CEO and founder of Sutro, what would be your piece of advice for An unnoticed entrepreneur when it comes to moving the brand big picture, what would it be?

My advice for an entrepreneur is to make sure that they stay focused. There's a big, big, big pull for you to say yes to everything. And sometimes saying no is actually the best thing you can do because you can really keep your eye on the prize and make sure you're focusing on the thing that you should. I know that's harder said than done because I love to say yes to everything. But definitely take a millisecond and think before you do hit that yes button that is there something else that you could be doing if you said no to that?

Great. And it's almost within the characteristic of an entrepreneur to say yes, isn't it? That's the kind of the tautology that we all live with.

Ravi Karani, where would people find out about you and about Sutro?

Yeah, people go to mysutro.com to find out more about Sutro. And if you want to get ahold of me, you can just email me at ravi@ravikarani.com.

Ravi Karani, thank you so much for joining me and sharing a really wonderful story. And I'm really proud of what you're doing for you and for the market.

Looking forward to seeing more purification services that you're going to be able to offer. Actually, I'm going to do that again. Ravi Karani, thank you so much for bringing your water story to us today. Thank you for joining me on the show.

Thank you for having me, Jim. Thanks a ton.

So we've heard Ravi Karani there explaining how he's taken a business and pivoted and then successfully built a brand, sold it to a bigger company, but still focused on using a niche and using sort of reviews, which are very affordable and accessible to us all. And I love the story of, of going to one micro community and getting the first testimonials from that first and building the brand from the ground up. So I hope you've enjoyed this and found it as illuminating as I have.

Today.

So if you have, please do share this show with a fellow entrepreneur.

And if you've got time, review it on your player because it really helps.

And until we meet again, I just encourage you to just keep on communicating.

Thanks for listening.