Build Healthy Hydration Habits With Miles Bowles and Jock Thompson of PÜL

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You want tech and tacos? Tacos in tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper captains counting beans Contador Quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy and coffee my coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco standing puesto lucha libre and sombrero Got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Jolla shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SD TechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I'm thrilled to have you here. On the Tacos and Tech podcast. We interview builders of technologies, of companies, of communities, and we do it weekly. So thanks for tuning in. Every Tuesday, a new interview and on Fridays we talk about what's new in the San Diego tech ecosystem from a news perspective. So make sure you join us there as well too. We also have a tech newsletter that comes out every other week@freshbrewedtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode. I've got the team here from Pool. I've got Jock Thompson, founder and CEO, and Miles Bowles, founder and Chief Product officer. Guys, thanks for being on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us.

I am a longtime user, first time caller and I'm excited to have this chat because I got to know the product in a number of ways, including having here in front of me. But Miles, you want to give us a quick one minute overview of what the pool is?

Sure. First, I'd like to say that you were one of the first people to actually buy the product before it was even really technically available. So that's kind of a cool backstory. So the product is a cap that fits on any wide mouth water bottle. We do include a water bottle, but the cap is really where all the smarts are and what the cap does is it tracks your hydration, integrates with fitness, wearables and products that give us an idea of what your hydration requirement would be. And then it manages and helps you train better hydration habits. So we give you cues and feedback as to how you're doing with your hydration and we help you manage it.

Oh, that's awesome. We're gonna have a lot to talk about because the quantified self world is a passion of mine. I'm invested in a lot of spaces, but it's just so hot with everyone now. And I feel like the pandemic has just put that on steroids with people's pelotons and other things as well, too. More data, better for everyone. So I'm excited to kind of hear about the Genesis story, but curious to get a little understanding of your background. How'd you, Miles, take us through a little bit about how you kind of got here? Have you born around a bunch of entrepreneurs and always knew you'd start one one day? Or is this your first, second, or third company? Take us through your journey to here.

I definitely am in the former category. So my, my dad is a entrepreneur and I kind of grew up watching him do his thing. I always loved seeing him build stuff and having that ownership over making stuff. I did see the less pretty sides of it, and I think he had to sell our college tuition a couple times and pull us outta school and sell the house and all that, but that didn't deter me. And as soon as I got into college, I joined one of the incubators at the. At San Diego State, which is where I went. A really cool incubator called Zahn. I think it's the zip launchpad now. Used to be the Zahn center, but. And I actually started with a mobile, like a micro charity donation app. That was the first. My first entry into the startup world and then eventually was struck with this idea. I was really kind of searching for something I was really passionate about and this idea hit and the rest is history, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, let's give a little bit of a nod to your dad, Mark, who is a bit of a startup junkie. You know, it's just serial everything. And almost to think from the outside, you'd think at some point either he's checked every box, but no, there's more. And then maybe from your family too. I gotta see how either it sucked you in or been like, oh, man, this is not something I ever want to do. When was the point where you're like, all right, this is. I do want to run my own company. Like, where was that in college?

So he was very much a believer in getting us started in all different types of work really early on. So he'd have us doing jobs really early on and so did a whole bunch of different stuff there. Worked at a couple startups. And then right as I went into college, I got an internship at a company called Etikogeno. And that was, I think, really when the startup world started to really appeal to me. That was one of the coolest experiences of my life because I was one of the first interns there. So it was just a small group of guys, some of the smartest people I've ever met. And I got to just hang around them all day and have them, you know, share all this information, get me into engineering and software development. And I just got a feel of that startup energy, which was really cool because they went on to sell for like a hundred million, and so they did well for themselves. So that was really, I think, the moment where it was like, this is for me. I want to try to do this for the rest of my life.

Got it. We may have crossed past that. We were in Evo Nexus with my company at the same time Etiko was in there. So it's a small world, that's for sure. And pretty cool to see how they. They sold and got acquired into Lumina and now kind of this big product line. So totally get that jock. You've also been a bit of a startup junkie. I feel like you've done a lot of, a lot of the companies that a lot of people would know here in town kind of. How'd you get your start into the startup world?

Yeah, I actually started probably about shoot 20s plus years ago, had a big corporate America job, thought that was everything that anybody needed, but they just never filled that hole. And true story, I was playing golf. One day, it started raining. I was at a company out for this big corporation I work for, and it got delayed. I was like, God, there should be a better way to play golf in the rain. Long story short here we just created and invented a rain cover for a golf bag and that was it. I quit the job, raised money, got it patented and spent a year developing it and got bought and it was amazing. And then literally, I tell Miles this all the time. We talk about it all the time. There's never ever any feeling in the world greater than developing a product and seeing it on the market and seeing it in somebody's hands. Who knows nothing about you or that you're involved in it. And so I frankly, I've been chasing that high the rest of my life. So got involved, did a bunch of different startups, and then fast forward to, I think about 2015. I was in Orange county and got invited down to meet at Evo Nexus company Clever Pat. Mark was on the board. He interviewed me. The other things you always gravitate towards in life is if you find somebody that's that good, that's another feeling that you just can't. You can't beat, right? And so I think that first dinner I met with Mark and the Clever Pet team, I was like, I think I'm going to probably spend the rest of my life working with Mark. And so far I've been pretty fortunate that I've spent the last, you know, seven years working with him. And I've done a couple of different even access projects, not just with Mark, but Mark's Eco ATM team, who is arguably one of the best stories of San Diego and San Diego angel investors. They're just such an amazing team. And so I've been fortunate to do a bunch of stuff with them. And then at one point, I want to say, 2017, Miles, Mark was like, hey, will you come talk to my son about this project? And I was like, yeah, you know, I'm a surfer. I want to hydrate and I want to put this camel back on, you know, and we're going to build this water bottle and in a pump and put it. It's going to be a backpack for surfers and neoprene. And I remember it being like, all right, Miles, first thing you need to know is surfers don't buy anything. And once you get east of the 15, there's not nearly as many of them. And so we started talking about, like, how do we actually make this thing a project and a product? And I think we'll get into it a little bit. But the evolution of not only the product and how deep it is and the foundation we built over those five years. And mostly, Miles, just head down going deep into learning about algorithms and learning about science and hydration. But we also, I mean, we got extremely lucky. I think, like I said, I think we'll talk, hopefully we'll talk a little bit about it. But what you had mentioned, I mean, you mentioned Corona, the pandemic, and what that sort of did to some of the quantified self in the wellness space. But our timing is perfect. I mean, we this, the market opportunities that, you know, originally we thought about market opportunities and we're measuring things like how many water bottles are sold and things like that. You know, I just got back from the health tech conference where it's a conference based on, hey, the change, how we're going to change health care. And this fits into that. And again, we'll talk about that. But it's, it's a pretty, it's, it's pretty amazing to where we've gotten to at this point.

Yeah. And something we take for granted where, you know, just take a sip from our bottle and just kind of expect that, oh, it's been ticked on a, on an app just like our Fitbit. Right. Oh, it's just a step counter. It's not more than that. It's not for sure. So, Miles, why don't you take us through a little bit of that evolution? Like when was the first real idea that you had for this and then how did you iterate to kind of where it is?

That is a long, probably longer story that we want to go through on this podcast, but I'll give you the short version. So like Jock said, it was a, it kind of all started as a, a wearable, fancy, wearable camelback style hydration system that I wanted to direct at surfers. It quickly evol to runners. And then one of the issues that we found was in order to really drink, if you're doing physical activity, you need active delivery. So you can't be expected to suck if you're out of breath. So we started playing around with pumps and those pressures pretty hard to deal with. So we ended up doing motorized pumps. And then that's when we really started to add electronics. And then from there we start, you know, because we had all the electronics in there, we started adding tracking. The tracking evolved into lights and eventually we got smart and did a lot of consumer testing. Once we had something kind of tangible and that's when, you know, really kind of a light bulb moment for us happened where the consumers were, the testers were really focused on the lights as the main appeal and we had some basic kind of status stuff built in. But that was really an aha moment for us because it was like something we didn't fully anticipate. In fact, I was a little concerned with the lights to start with that people might not like them. And then, you know, once we had that big product survey and consumer testing session, we really switched gears at that point and focused mainly on the tracking and the how we could use the lights, you know, for training behavior. That's really kind of where what got us to this point. So again, there was a lot of twists and turns that I didn't even cover in that. But it was, yeah, we were not afraid of the pivot, that's for sure.

So that's way before I got big blue in front of me, I'm guessing.

Yeah.

Okay, so eventually you're working. When did the idea for just kind of a cap on anything, when did that come to be the realization in that regard?

So we got some funding early on and once we got serious about taking a product to market, we realized that with all the tech that we had, doing the wearable was a very complex endeavor. So we tried to simplify it to what would work best. And that's where we landed on. There's really a lot more interest in bottles. That was right when, you know, hydro flasks were becoming very, very popular. And so it was kind of a no brainer at that point when we realized this is really where the market is. How do we make this experience more fun and exciting? And so we, and you know, it was a good decision just in terms of simplifying the product in general. So we, the other I guess decision that I failed to mention was we didn't want, you know, it was a very conscious decision to build it into the cap so that it could retrofit all these existing bottles. We didn't want to have a complete solution. We wanted to take advantage of how many bottles are out there and be able to work on other bottles, different sizes. We, we understand that hydration is a very personal thing nowadays. It's your phone, your keys and even your keys are getting integrated into your phone slowly but surely your wallet. So everything's really, it's really just your phone. But you can't, you can't compress water into like a wristwatch or we like to say you can't put water in a watch. So you're always going to have to carry around a vessel for your water. We wanted to make that more exciting and add some smarts to it. So that was the long version of why we ended up with a capit and this form vector.

No, it's really smart and it's really true. And we'll talk about some tailwinds around that because like I'm finding even conferences I'm going to like I'm carrying around my own bottle now. Right. From both a health and safety thing. Right. Cause I don't know what vessel they're going to give me and just having it on Me at all times, I'd rather be in control of my own hydration as opposed to like, oh, shoot, where's a water fountain? Or where is water? So it really is true. We're very much carrying it around. Jock, take us through a little bit about what you're seeing from the industry, because obviously you've done a bunch of products, right. Consumer products out there in a variety of ways. Right. You've done clever PET and golf. What turned you on to join in kind of in the. Specifically in the hydration tech space?

Yeah, yeah. I've, you know, somewhat have been a little bit product agnostic, but I got in that. I've done, you know, golf and I've done some apparel companies and I've done some tech and some just straight tech with voice recognition and things like that. But about. I think it was. I tell a story, but I think it was. I was at CES maybe seven years ago or eight years ago, a couple years, few years before I got with Miles. I started. I was working with spy. I had the master license for spy optics out of Carlsbad, and they had this thing called blue light, and that if blue light worked in the lens and it triggered endorphins and it just allowed the right amount of blue light in. But we also, through that process, I started learning about blue light and just what blue light kind of did to your retina and to your sleep patterns and circadian rhythm and started just understanding wellness and how sleep particularly. And this is sleep kind. You know, Apple had bought bed it, but they sort of weren't doing anything with it. People were talking about sleep, but didn't really. I mean, everybody talks about. Everybody always talks about hydration, but nobody really talks about hydration. Like, they're just like, yeah, I think hydration. I know hydration is good for me. I have no idea why, but. And so I started getting. But I started understanding wellness at a different level. Most particularly, I was at. When I was at CES and we had launched this new company that did screen protectors for. To block blue light to protect your retina and keep you on a better circadian rhythm while you're watching your phone or looking at your phone all day. A doctor came up and he was like, I'm just. It was weird. Like, I don't know why I didn't connect the two, but I was at CES in the health tech section or area, and a doctor came up and said, hey, I'm here studying wellness. I'm like, you're a doctor? Well, what do you mean? You're studying wellness and it's like particularly sleep. I go, well, what does that even mean? He goes, well, here, let me tell you this. I go. He goes, if I told you right now that you go home and sleep for the next 30 days, get eight hours of sleep, good solid sleep, 30 days from now, your skin's going to look better, you're going to. You're going to lose some weight, you're just going to look healthier. Now, fair. In all fairness, this is ces, It's Vegas. So I probably was probably in the second or third day, so I probably didn't look that great to begin with, but I got it. And I was like, all right. I'm like. And I'm like, okay, so sure, maybe that's true. And he's like, but the problem with that and what I'm looking for is the fact that I can tell you that I. But I have no way to see if you're doing it. And so I was like, huh? He goes, yeah, I can. First of all, there's two things. I can't tell how much sleep you've been getting. So I can't prescribe sleep to you until I know what kind of sleep you're getting. And then if I do it, how do I know you're complying? And he, you know, he goes into the whole. And things that. Things that you already know, Neil, that only 15 or 20% of the people who are prescribed something are actually compliant and they're taking their own prescriptions to save their life. And he's like, you just can't. So I can't give you this recommendation, which is perhaps, you know, as we're learning more and more, one of the most fundamentally beneficial things you can do for your health is get good sleep. And we, again, we're still startup guys, right? And whether you're a startup guy or a new parent, there's always some badge of honor that I don't sleep or I never sleep. I only get. I can. I only get a couple hours of sleep at night because I'm always working. And so it just. Bells started going off in me and this wellness thing, and it's just. I mean, it's sort of tails, but. Or sort of gotten right into where we're at, which is hydration is now getting its day as well. So sleep is actually, as you look at what's happening exponentially, and sleep is starting to get more and more its day. Like, if you look at whoop and aura and fitbit and Apple Health, Apple Watch, they're, they tout sleep. I mean these Whoop and Aura have billion, billion dollar evaluations. Their primary thing is sleep and recovery. And hydration is a big part of that. Same thing though. There's all these things that we're starting to learn. And you know, while Miles and I were doing this and we start to, we started to recruit scientists and one of the scientists we got was Dr. Stavros Kavoris and he runs the hydration lab at ASU. He's one of the, if not the top hydration scientists in the world. He's unbelievable. And he said the same thing. He's like, when we first started talking to him, he's like, listen, everybody knows hydration's good. You ask my 80 year old mother. She knows hydration is good, but she has no idea why. And then he actually started going through what we're starting to learn. He goes, nobody really even studied hydration until the 2000s. It wasn't even a required nutrient. And the nutrient table, it was like, he's like, it doesn't, people don't understand where hydration is going and how good it is for you. And so he started talking about all of the different benefits of hydration and whether it was preventing dementia or how it impacted cardiac or just, it was so it was just, it was on and on and I was just like, this is, I don't even remember where this question started, Neil, but this is kind of where all this kind of blended together and it just started triggering and Miles is, you know, like I said before, Miles goes and it went into this sort, sort of cave in this rabbit hole of discovery and putting all this information together. If you have a chance at some point, we'll show you the algorithm. I mean it, the algorithm is like, I don't know what kind of map it is, but it's huge. We can't put it on a screen when we present it to people because it's just keeps going and going. It's all these inputs and it just, you know, it really started to all connect and all click. And this was the opportunity. Wellness is the opportunity. And somehow or another, all these things, whether it's serendipity or self fulfilling prophecy or not, everything sort of funneled into where we got to now. And it, all these things that I did, you know, as part of Miku and you know, we have a wellness baby monitor company and that it just literally all we do is study how a baby's, you know, respiration rate and Sleep impacts its wellness. Same thing. It's just all these things have just sort of funneled into this perfect thing. You know, I always think about with Miles, it's like a perfect storm. We just. Besides the luck of the market and Miles and all his work on the product, it just, it felt right for me. And then of course, having Mark as the chairman and having his guidance and everything is just packed. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, for sure. Super cool to hear the two ways you come at it. I think the other problem is that once you realize ignorance isn't bliss and you're open to data, you just said, give me more, show me more. And the flood comes, right. And the biggest thing is, can you analyze it or not? Us as human beings, Right. Like, I can look and say, am I hitting my steps? But you know, am I a better person because of it? Who knows? And I think that's interesting to talk through. Just like as you're developing this algorithm, Miles, take us through how you knew what was meaningful to. For the average person. Right? Because you could say, hey, you hit six, six cups of water today. How did you learn from scientists to decipher that and say, here's what's good for you, human being? Is that kind of how the algorithm kind of developed in that regard?

Yeah, I mean, so let's see where to even start on this. Initially was our goal was just to give you real time feedback. So that was kind of the first insight into how to make this, how to improve this space. Because going back to that, one of the earlier questions, one of the aha moments as well was as I was looking into hydration, when we started to add some tech to it, I realized that there's this huge market for hydration tracking apps, all manual input. So you have to go in and manually input all your drinks. And it was, it's kind of wild, actually. How big, you know, millions of downloads. It's. It was really shocking to me that many people would have an interest for it. So that was kind of the first. Okay, there's something here. Let's delve into this a little bit deeper. And then, you know, and the obvious thing issue with manual input is no one manually inputs anything. And so the data, and just the data quality, even over just a day, if you're into it, is probably really bad. So that was kind of the first. Okay, that's how we can make this better. So let's make it real time. Let's make the data, you know, so you can see how your intake distributes throughout the day at the actual times that you drank instead of just one input at the very end of the day. Because that's just a quick note on that. That's an important thing. You don't want to drink all your water like at once at the end of the day. That's not very a good approach to hydration. Then the other then as we started to go deeper into it, it was okay. Hydration is actually pretty dynamic. It isn't like there's just one size fits all eight glasses a day type rule that really works. It's a very dynamic thing and there's some factors that really alter your hydration requirement on a day to day basis. So that was kind of the next. Okay, let's pull in some information and update your recommended daily intake based on, you know, outside data. Like if you work out. Working out's actually kind of an interesting one. Cuz that's another one that blew me away when I first looked into the research there. But you sweat a crazy amount after, you know, just like an hour of vigorous activity. You're. You just lost like, like a liter to 4 liters depending on, you know, which is a lot. Which is a lot. So you can imagine your, you know, standard day is like three liters. Then you can lose that in an hour potentially if you're working out really hard. So that, and then weather and you know, there's a ton of other things that impact your hydration. So we wanted to make that, you know, we know some of the obvious things is people aren't going around all day. Certainly I wasn't like factoring all these things in in real time and keeping a tally of it so I can know how much I need to replace. That's kind of a complicated thing. So we decided that's really where we can make an impact here is let's make that super easy for people. And then that brought us to the, the next stage which was okay, how do we actually make that easy for people? We don't want people to have to go look at the app all the time. That's kind of unrealistic. How do we get this on the actual bottle and make it as simple as possible. And that's when kind of the aha moment again with the light feedback, you know, hit where we have this perfect tool to, to show people whether they're either on track or not on track. And so it's kind of a binary decision and you know, you either need to drink a little bit more or you're okay. For now. And so we distilled it down to that level of simplicity. And so now the way the product works is as you go to drink, it's giving you one of two colors. Either red, which means that you're. That you need to drink some more, or blue, which means you're on track with your daily goal for the day. And it manages all the rest of the computation on the different factors and all that in the background. So you don't have to think about it. You can just focus on, am I hydrated or not? Like, do I need to drink more water at the moment that you're drinking or not? And so it really makes it quite a bit simpler and it's fun. The other added benefit to it is as you're drinking, you get a cue to drink a little bit more in that moment, which is really important because, you know, capturing the data is great, but if you're not able to act on it, then it doesn't really matter a whole lot. So that was another big, important piece for us was it needs to be real time. It needs to be visible as you're drinking so that you're really getting that cue at the moment where it really matters and you can make a difference on it. So that's kind of how we got the algorithm fleshed out. And the other piece is. So we have some really amazing, you know, hydration scientists, but we also have some cognitive scientists that have joined the team. Because it really is more of a, you know, I like to think of it as a cognitive training tool. It really is helping you build better habits. Every time you pick it up and drink, it really, like, pushes you to drink a little bit more. And over time, we're trying to do some studies on this now, but over time, we're hoping that will. We can prove that'll improve your actual habit. So even if you don't have the bottle, you'll have trained yourself to drink more. So that's really kind of our end game with the algorithm, I guess, and what we're trying to do with the light feedback.

Oh, man. Incentives work, right? Like, if somehow you find a way to compete against yourself or your friends, they really do work. Even if it's tricking yourself to do something good for yourself. So I love that. That's super cool. Do you guys know the Visor team here in town? You connect with them already.

The Visor.

Visor is a team. We should. We should make sure you're connected because they take your data about your wellness, whether it's Step count or elevated heart rate above the thing and maybe, hopefully in the future, hydration. And they. Every time you hit a certain goal, they donate a meal to charity. And so you kind of feel incentivized to hit my goal because it's good for my health and good for someone else, too. So we could kind of a cool data play together.

We will take that intro. Neil Bloom.

Yes, on it. Yeah, Shout out to Sam and Dylan, who were on the podcast about a year ago, but in that case, like, so learn. You obviously are learning a lot from science, learning a lot from building your own algorithm and just what the market's telling you. When did you know you're ready for. To actually have a product in market? Like, because you can tinker for forever, right? When were you ready to. To go live?

Yeah, Jock would agree with you. I can absolutely tinker forever. And that has not stopped. Actually, Jacques, you might be better. Yeah, I don't know if I could answer that question because I'd argue that, you know, we're still building, still making it better.

Yeah, we're still building. So I think, you know, Miles and I always talk about, you know, one of our biggest challenges throughout this whole thing was launching too quick. Right. All of a sudden we put up the website. Neil Blum was there buying a product. We're like, let's launch. But no, we didn't. We. We realized that we were not. Everything we do, we have this really cultural. This culture that we live by and this sort of thesis that everything we do is based on science and not hyperbole. And so it would have been super easy to go out. I mean, this is where this separates from a consumer product, like a, you know, consumer hydration product, to a real wellness product. And so we just made a conscious decision that we weren't going to release it until the science, our science team. And that all was there and that foundation was there. And that was the hardest thing because I could, you know, I always feel like, oh, I can go out and sell anything to anybody right now and make a buck and start turning it. And, you know, we've got an amazing team of probably, I think we're about a dozen people now who make huge sacrifices, who are working for nothing and to make this happen. And so it's hard to sometimes look at and be like, no, we're not going to launch it. But we didn't. We just. We held true or what we believed in making this thing work properly before we took it to market and we did it. And, yeah, you know, there's still. We're still going to second guess. Like, is there. There's still a couple bugs that you always want to work through and like, oh, should we wait it. At one point it was no, we're clearly ready. And I think Miles was. I may even have surprised Miles when we launched, but it was time and the product was ready and I think that's proving out that's.

How long ago did it officially go live?

So we started sort of slowly creeping it out, like fourth quarter, but we had supply channel issues, so we didn't even have like, we couldn't sell it. So we just started. We had old Blue, which you had. So we had some sort of prototypes that were, you know, reflashed and updated to make them up to speed. But so we started selling those. It's interesting. We've shifted our supply so we're actually mostly made in America. So we're assembled by. In America and we use some foreign parts, but we do it out of Clarity Design out of San Diego. They disassemble it. They manufacture our board there's. They assemble all the product there, which is. Which was a great result. But in the meantime, we had been making stuff overseas and we couldn't get it. I mean, we had stuff stuck on boats. We had stuff. And so we were ready to launch and we just kind of had third quarter. We couldn't do it. And so we're fourth quarter last year we couldn't do it. So we really started pushing in January. So we really didn't even start talking about it on the market till January. So we're two months in it now. Just over two months.

Oh, wow.

Pretty happy. Yeah.

Super cool. I think I placed my order. Was it a year ago or two years ago?

I did jump in on it two years ago. I remember when. I don't know if it was Mark or Miles calling me like, we have an order on Shopify from Neil Blue. I'm like, what is he doing? That's awesome.

You know, I was ready. I like, I. My background is in ultra endurance. So anything around height that you can tell me smarter about what I'm drinking, I'm into so personally that that scratched the big itch for me. But I think what's interesting you guys talked about is this idea of tinkering forever but also waiting. And I think the consumer world really sees this a lot more than us in the B2B SaaS world maybe is that a lot of people, consumers been burned through Kickstarter and stuff like that. Where it's kind of gimmicky. And so while yes, you're always told like perfection is too late, you do need it to work to at least 90% maybe of what you promised or something like that. So that's an interesting balance for entrepreneurs on the consumer side I think even more than Maybe on the B2B piece. For sure. Anything to speak to around that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean you can't, I mean again, I've been bringing products to consumers for 20 some years. Like you can't fool a consumer, especially if there's a hardware component because it's touchy feely. Right. And they put down money for it and they feel it and it's, you know, that's something that they've touched and you can't, you just can't fool the consumer. I mean you can get away again, you can get where if you have a couple of bugs here and there, but long term, it's the death of any company.

Okay, so live now still supply chain is crazy, right? Because there's still ships sitting out there in Long beach and hopefully you have nothing being made in Europe right now. But take us through kind of current state of where the product is and really more the movement. Like where's the movement now in terms of wellness and quantified self and that you're riding this wave.

Yeah, the movement's insane. I mean so sort of the things that we look at right is there's just the quantified self space and that's become that ecosystem now of that wearables I think is $120 billion. I mean it's the growth, as you noted, since pre pandemic when we were about 20% of people wearing wearables. Now you've got closer to 80%. I mean that I think, you know, part of it was pandemic. Part of it is some people just wanting to know more about themselves and trying to be healthy or just understand things. But where I hope it goes, where it should go in the space and this is part of this Vibe health conference that I was just at is that It's. We're spending 20 or 19% of our GDP on healthcare. And so I always say that's sick care, right? That's 19% of our GDP is on sick care. It's not wellness and health, but wellness can reduce that significantly. So you know, when I talk about those two simple things of hydration and sleep, what that will do to wellness and to the health of the. Everybody is unbelievable. And so it's again it's starting to become more prevalent. People are starting to talk about it more. The whoop, the aura, all these quantified self things are helping it. Right. Why go to the, you know, if you're going to go to the doctor once a year or once every three years or once every five years or whatever you do and get that snapshot of your blood pressure and your heart rate. Like is that really telling you what you need to know versus the longitudinal understanding of what it looks like every day where you see variances? No, I mean the longitudinal variances are going to be so much more impactful and so much more ahead of that and reduce cost so much in that system. That's. I think that, I mean as a society that's where we're going. We're fortunate that we fit a piece of that, we fit a piece of that puzzle and sort of help fix that. So I think quantify itself, that's where that. And that's the tailwind we have there, which is huge. Corporate wellness is another part of that. Right. So companies, you know, hydration improves cognition. Right. It reduces sick days. All these things help save a lot of money. I mean corporate wellness I think is a 40, $50 billion industry at this point. These are huge numbers that we're talking about and there's so much impact that they can make. And the reason they're such big numbers is they the return on those numbers for whether it's corporate or the healthcare system is monster. And that's what, you know, when you start putting those three things together, it's. There's the opportunity is insane.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is gotta feel really good to have the product out and seeing others use it actually not just, not just you, but seeing actual buys and that you're not refunding, which I appreciate. But yeah, I'm gonna go buy another one anyway.

Where's.

Where are you headed on this? Like is there another. Is there sensors that are start going to telling you how much you're losing on sweat to, to piece like that. Like where do you think it goes from here with pull itself?

Definitely our mission is really to connect with as many things as possible. And like Jock was kind of alluding to, there were. We really are feeling a missing piece in this overall health ecosystem. There's you know, activity, diet, all these trackers that are coming out for every aspect of your health. But the one that's been kind of neglected up until our product has been hydration, you know, and it impacts all this other stuff. Like if you're going to go do a workout, it really helps to know whether you were hydrated during that workout or not. If you're going to look at your performance or if you know you're talking about sleep, it makes a difference to know the full picture. And so we're trying to fill that gap and what that looks like on our end is we need to, you know, we're going to be trying to integrate with more services, apps and trackers and make that a little bit more seamless and smooth again and then both ways. So pulling information into our app and then also providing our data to other apps for them to utilize as well. Jacques probably doesn't want me to go into all the updates that we, that we have planned for the actual hardware itself, but there's some cool stuff that we have on the roadmap there. You know, as we spent some time going over this discussion, we've spent a lot of time working on hydration related devices. So we've got a pretty, pretty large backlog of cool ideas and stuff that we've actually got patented as well. So we've got, we do have a lot of stuff that we can draw upon moving forward. Awesome.

Well, I want first iteration of every product to.

Just a quick note on top of that is because you had mentioned sensors and sensors, you know, my assumption is you're talking about sensors that actually read direct hydration through your skin. That's something that's, it's something that's coming. Right. It may not necessarily come from us. We'll certainly integrate with, with that type of a system to correlate. So and we now we. Or calibrate more would be probably a better specific answer. So we work with like one of the guys on our advisory science and advisory board is Dr. Joe Wang out of UCSD and that's what he does. He does nanotechnology for understanding sweat, sodium sweat or hydration on the skin. So why I say that because well we may not develop that ultimately develop the product that reads hydration on the skin. We certainly will integrate with him. We applaud it. Right. Because it actually makes, it helps our product. Right. We care about keeping you on your hydration track so we can get a better intel into what your hydration is. It lets us do our job better, lets you be better. And as Miles says, you can't put water into a watch so you're going to need a vessel anyway. And so that's that I think is sort of key in understanding how we're going to work into that ecosystem. And we also work with another team, we're collaborating with another company. Vessel, I think you know, vessel out of San Diego, John Carter.

I'm an investor in them. Yeah.

Yep. So we. So same concept, Right. So you know, if you use one of their P sticks and you understand your hydration or certain things, we can actually look at that and make some on the fly adjustments based on that or help you calibrate your daily goals a little bit better. And it's just there's a lot of opportunity in sort of what you were alluding to there excited about. I mean the whole space is exciting.

It's cool that there's so much in San Diego around this as well too. Just from a sensor wellness connected device as well all coming together. You alluded Joe Wang who I think a spin up company, another evo Nexus company, Biolink, which I think originally was Electrozyme. I was on their bike testing, testing their original sweat device back in there. It's cool to see all these kind of come together in a geographic area. I'm sure it's happening all over the world, right? Sure. But some of, I don't know the certain technologies that have been developed in San Diego to be applied to the body. Right. So taking biotech and Iot and quantified self coming together to form brand new industries and expand the industries too. Obviously you guys have capitalized on something here. So excited for you. The last thing though, you can't go work out. You can't build a good product without having tacos there as well. That is the perfect part. Partner there. Do you guys have a favorite taco place?

I'm gonna go first, Miles, because you're gonna, I mean you're like, I mean.

Okay, this is like.

You gotta know your strength and this is one of Miles strengths. Just tacos and food and knowledge. He's just better at all those things. I am. But you know, I'm. I love chronic taco and so it's an Orange county taco place. But I'm a big fan of chronic taco.

It's a good one, Miles.

And for me, I think if I'm going kind of classic taco, I would do the taco stand in La Jolla. I've never had a bad taco from there. But if I'm feeling like something a little bit more out there than Galaxy Taco also in La Jolla is, is good. Yeah. They have kind of a unique take on tacos, but I've never been disappointed going there as well.

That's awesome. Great spot, all three of them. I think they're all in our taco database. I'll double check. If not, we'll update it. But there's, you know, a taco. There's a taco for every time of day, that's for sure. There's no wrong answer here and I hope that we can share a taco and you know, maybe some water or whatever we can fit into our pool water bottle soon. Guys, I really appreciate you coming on telling the story, you know, know it's cool to see people want to know how products are made and this is just the next step here. So we're excited for where it's where you guys are at and we'll make sure we put some links in the show notes for it as well. Without further ado, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you, Neil. And on behalf of all the startups in San Diego and oc, you're a huge part of making this startup ecosystem work and grow it and you deserve tons of kudos for that. So thank you. I don't know if any of us would be here without the work of some things that you do and some of the others like you.

Hey, I appreciate that. But step one, build a good company. And we're all coasting on good entrepreneurs who are doing good things. So I appreciate that, Jock. Thanks. It's a pleasure to be around everyone who's building. Thanks for tuning in to the Tacos and Tech podcast. You can find all of our episodes on freshbeantech.com as well as on Twitter at Tacos and Tech Podcasts. Also follow Fresh Brew Tech on all of your social platforms and make sure to share and give her a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Play. Thanks again.

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