Jenna Ryan of Uqora: Keeping Your Urinary Tract in Check

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, Tacos and 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 stand in 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 Tecos with your host, Neil Bloom. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

Welcome to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am 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@freshbroodtech.com you can subscribe to listen to it without further ado. Enjoy this episode and welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neil Blum, and I'm thrilled to have on the most recent CEO and founder of Eucora, Jenna Ryan. Hey, Jenna, thanks for joining the podcast.

Hey, Neil, thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to have you on here. I believe we got to originally meet through the Ad Astra community when you were, I believe, early days on Eucora or starting at least at some point through your starting journey?

Yeah, I think so.

Since then, I know you've built up the business and sold it. So I'm really excited to kind of hear almost like the start, start to finish story here if you're willing to share that with us. So thanks again for joining.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Where does it all begin. Like, did you. Have you built other CPG brands before, or did you come from the tech world? And where are you from originally?

Yeah, I'm originally from the Bay Area, and I have never made it far in terms of geography. I've been in California most of my life, so grew up in the Bay Area, went to school in Santa Barbara, and moved down here to San Diego later on. And that's where it all starts. But where Eucorra's story starts is really born out of personal need. Eucora is a company completely focused on UTI care, and that ranges from helping people get ahead of UTIs with urinary health supplements through to a test strip for diagnosing a UTI and pain management symptoms. So we kind of think of ourselves as helping you from the moment you first have a UTI and you need to address the symptoms all the way through to sustained urinary health. You asked about my background before working at UCORA. I was working at DocuSign in San Francisco, and that was an incredible experience. I was on their D2C, their D2C side of the business, and there were three or four of us to start on that team, and we had, you know, we were responsible for our own PNL, all specific to the DN D2C side of the business. So I got to learn a ton about what it takes to run and scale a digital business through that experience. And when I started at DocuSign, it was about 300 employees, and when I left, it was over 2200. So it was, like, massive growth that they experienced. And I learned a ton through that.

Oh, sure. Was that. Were you there during, I'm guessing, the golden panda statue location? That's what I Remember from the DocuSign place in San Francisco. This giant.

I think you're thinking about their competitor, PandaDoc.

No, no, no. This was definitely some sort of, like, bear statue. I thought that was, like, in the lobby to DocuSign's building somewhere in Soma, maybe.

So I was with them through two office moves, but I'm not remembering the golden bear. But it was fun. I mean, one of the things I kind of, like, reminisce on from a nostalgia perspective is what it felt like to work in an office during that time, like, full of that kind of energy and everyone working towards something really exciting day in and day out, which I think that the sort of shift of remote work has brought in so much value. But I really, like, look back on what that felt like to kind of be day in and day out, going into an opulent office in San Francisco that may or may not have had a golden bear style.

I'm sorry, it was Dropbox. I completely confused the two.

Never mind.

Yeah, DocuSign though. So DocuSign obviously, I think largely was known and maybe still is like a single product, right. A place to sign things, but grew into a family of products. Products. Was that really like, were you part of that diversification? Did you get to understand that piece or was it really just land and expand a home run product that everyone knew about?

Yeah, I mean, I. It'd be interesting to hear someone who's still at the business talk about this because I left in 2016. But my perspective on it is that at that time what we were doing really great is applying one excellent solution to just hundreds of different types of markets. So you know what it takes. Our beachhead at DocuSign was really with real estate agents. And that was a big part of what we focused on the D2C business because that's more individual, you know, like ice contractors, people who are working for themselves, who would be signing up for these tools themselves too. So that was a lot of our kind of like direct to consumer customer in that. But the enterprise team was working on truly lobbying to change certain rules for what, when or what signature was required for different legally binding documents so that, you know, massive insurance companies or whatever it might be would be able to ditch so much paper and be able to use this digital solution. So that was a lot of super, super inspiring people worked there and got a lot of appreciation for the time I spent there.

Yeah, absolutely, I think. And it still lives up, it still holds and is used today, you know, as like the de facto way. So that's got to feel pretty cool to have built a brand, know a software brand that made an impact. What point in timeframe did the idea for your quora start to come through?

Yeah, so in 2014, I had eight UTIs.

Whoa.

And yeah, it was as bad as it sounds. And I belonged to a really great physician network. I was part of one medical group in the Bay. And I still am a big fan of one medical. But even with great care, the answer I was getting continually when I was asking about prevention was old wives tales, remedies that I've tried and didn't work. Cranberry juice, cranberry, you know, derivatives and ultimately prophylactic antibiotics. That was the gold standard of what people could do to actually try and get ahead of cyclical UTIs like I was in. And I Tried that for a bit, but antibiotics wreak havoc on your body and all these other ways. And it's really not. It's supposed to be a sort of, you know, last stop, but not a preventative solution. And so that was kind of the frustration that I was living in. And my then boyfriend, Spencer, his background is in molecular biology, and he started to do some sort of just research on the problem that we were facing. Like, obviously this was affecting him too, and was hard for both of us to be living in that space. And he started to find some really good research coming out of universities and hospitals that just weren't being applied commercially and were sort of disparate in sort of the different themes we were seeing. But he started to connect the dots and combine these different ingredients into a product that I started using as our first customer. I think not unusual to be patient before founder in the consumer health space. And that was definitely my experience. So the first product we developed was a drink mix that people could use after any activity that might lead to a uti. Sex is the big one, but for different people, this can be flying on an airplane, spin class. There's a whole bunch of things that people have noticed can trigger UTIs. And I guess I should also take a beat and explain a uti. UTI is a urinary tract infection, and it's caused by bacteria entering the urinary tract, which then attaches to the urinary wall, replicates, causes an infection that's super painful. Usually it's easy to solve with antibiotics, but if it's not solved with antibiotics or it isn't treated in time, it can lead to a kidney infection, which can lead to a blood infection and be super dangerous. So that's the landscape there.

And women seem to get them repeatedly. And does the more you get them, do they get more severe or it's just get it, treat it, and then it could just come back again?

Yeah, great question. It depends. Once you get a uti, you're more likely to get another uti. And the reason for that is, is that often bacteria from a past infection can stay hidden in the urinary tract and later replicate and cause another uti. That to you, might seem like a net new uti, but it's actually like a relapse infection caused by old bacteria. And so UTIs are actually a huge cause of antibiotic resistance. Exactly because of that cycle. So there's a lot of motivation in the medical community to try and figure out ways to sustainably prevent UTIs, because there's patients that doctors will see who are on their 8th, 10th, 14th UTI in the year. And antibiotics just aren't even working for them anymore. And they've had to maybe go through five, six different types of antibiotics because they're developing resistant to them, which is, you know, scary, is a scary proposition. That's how you can get in a position where UTI can become life threatening. But, yes, people who get stuck in that cycle, it isn't necessarily that the UTIs themselves become more severe, but it has sort of a rippling effect on health. So when you're on that many antibiotics, it's often leading to digestive issues, it's leading to other infections. Often vaginal infections are common to be paired with antibiotic usage. And the thing that we see in our customers the most that I felt firsthand is more kind of the mental impact. Like, it's. You get stuck in an anxiety loop where anything you do that you're worried will cause uti, you just, like, can't actually engage in it. So that's kind of the full arc.

Okay, so you are testing and trying, kind of making concoctions at home with different ideas. How many did you go through, like, how many different tests did you take of your own medic before landing something that looked like a product?

Yeah, ultimately that we landed on the formula that's pretty similar to the formula we have today for the drink mix pretty quickly. And I, you know, I became a first guinea pig there. And that really helped me with my UTI journey, the drink mix in particular. And what we learned through that period of time is that, yes, this is helpful for me, but what became, I think, kind of the big motivation for us to turn this into a business was learning how many other people were going through exactly what I had just been through. And UTIs are actually the second most common infection in the US second only to the common cold, which is astounding relative to how much we talk about it. And I think there's a lot of reasons for it, and I think a big One is that UTIs are often linked to sex. And so it's one of those kind of areas that people don't love to talk about. But for me, once I realized how many other people were going through something really similar, that became like, super, super motivating for us to think about how we can make this more than a kitchen sink concoction and actually help other people find urinary health breakthroughs, too.

Yeah. And men get UTs too, I believe. Correct? Yeah, Just way more Prevalent in women. But you decided to focus on the brand, on women, Correct.

Yes. Men get UTIs too. It's a lot less common in younger men. But once men are in the age of life where prostate issues become more of a problem that can often lead to urinary health complications. So they're correlated. So by the time people are in their, like, 60s and 70s, that gap really closes between incidence rate in men and women. It becomes a lot more common in both.

Okay, so you've got, you know, a bit of a product that you want to start. It's a health product, maybe. I'm guessing if I'm looking at a consumer brand, I would also think there's some sort of biotech piece to this and FDA and all that. How did you start getting educated to know? All right, this is what it's going to take to actually put a product on the shelf.

Yeah. So Spencer was really always the led the charge in the ingredients we wanted to use in the product and the efficacy aspect of them. But we don't have a lot of experience in flow agents and drink mixes and flavoring. So we started working with co main early on to dial in those different aspects of what makes a product feel like something you actually want to engage with and taste good. So I'd say in sort of the different aspects of the decision of how to make the product feel professional, we relied heavily on our partners to help us dial in different aspects of that. And, you know, you have to kiss some frogs in that whole process, and we certainly did, but the trial and error was part of it all. And in terms of the question of kind of like, how do you navigate the landscape, we were and have remained in the supplement space. And so to get educated on that, it was a lot of research on our own, some consulting with regulatory experts to try and figure out where those lines are in what you can say about a product. And for supplement space in particular, as long as all of your ingredients are cleared as safe by the fda, you can get to market really quickly. And then instead what's regulated are the claims you're making about the product. So you have to understand of lines of what you're able to say and not. And for supplements in particular, kind of the, like, blunt line here is that you are allowed to help people maintain health. You are not allowed to prevent diseases. And that's like the sort of line you walk and how you talk about how the product works.

Okay, got it. So what did. What does starting look like? Because, you know, you started this with Your then boyfriend was this kind of by night or kind of in the garage and then one day ripped off the bed and said, we're all in. Like, take us through kind of the founding piece there.

Yeah. The first few years were moonlighting. And there were times where Spencer was working on it more, times where I was working on it more. We were kind of going back and forth on how much of our time we were giving to you, Cora. For me, I was dragging my feet because as I described, I was loving my time at Docusign and like ultimately left before I was ready. Would have stayed there longer, but felt confident in giving UCORA my full attention, really, because we started to see repeat purchase rates that were motivating and hard to ignore. And I think that is what gave us the confidence to go from moonlighting to actually investing our time into the business in full. And, you know, we weren't doing like any paid advertising. Our email marketing was basically non existent. We had gotten like a press hit early on that was helpful in giving us our first cohort of customers. And from that cohort, people were buying the product again on their own. And that to me felt like, all right, we're doing nothing here. This is a true indicator that it isn't. This isn't marketing, this isn't persuasion. This is the product standing on its own. And that was what kind of put me over the edge.

Was it called Ucora from the beginning or were there some other names?

It was called Ucora from the beginning.

Okay, that's cool. And people were, every time, like, as you say, I was coming up, they would. We were kind of looking, saying, scrambling, saying, I need this or people are getting used to using it almost like pre. Ahead of time.

Yeah, people were using it prophylactically, which was the goal. The way we. The product. The company back then was a single product company. It was the drink mix. The drink mix is still sort of our flagship product now, but it's mostly sold in combination with our other products. But at that point it was just the drink mix. And people were latching specifically to the use case of drinking it after sex. And that, I think was a natural place to help people build a habit. Because if you're prone to UTIs, you are already getting up after sex every time, going to the bathroom, maybe you have a little routine of drinking a glass of water, whatever it is. Like there's already a routine involved in that process. And when I think back on why that was sticky, I think whether or not this was super conscious at the Time it was helpful for us that we were speaking to this, like, experience that was already embedded in people's lives.

Interesting. So how far along until you could think about a second product and what. How did you split off your time to start working on that?

Yeah, what I described to you up till now was sort of the early days, the nascent, the seed planting. We consider February 2017 our official launch. Like, we had taken their product offline, rebranded. I had started working on it full time. Spencer was still part time at that time, but we were ready to like, give it the old college try at that point. So looking at February 2017, we launched the, relaunched the product. And that first year was just trying to figure out what was going to stick still just the drink mix product, trying to do some sort of, like, SEO on our own. I was running our Facebook ads, which is scary for everybody, and was really just trying to like, get to know our customer more closely and understand what they were wanting. And that first year we did 70k in revenue. It was like, not it. There was reason to feel optimistic still, but it certainly hadn't felt like we made it. And when I look back on that first year, what I think we were really trying to do is figure out who our customer was. And we wasted some time there. In a way that's not a waste because it led us somewhere good. But I spent all of summer 2017 driving around to every senior care facility in San Diego. And the reason for that is, is that older people get UTIs much more frequently and severely. And what's weird about it is that their symptoms present really differently. So they present as sort of delirious or like, it can look like early onset or quick onset Alzheimer's and they lose their balance. And it's often misdiagnosed as a memory care issue. And when I learned about this, I was like, so impassioned by this because it felt crazy to me that there isn't more kind of like awareness around this and solutions. And every organization we talked to in the senior care space was like, we desperately need this solution, but when it came time to implement, it would just fall apart. And I chalk it up to kind of, you know, sort of a fragmented industry, overworked people, like, very hard to actually make change there. So B2B didn't work, but B2C started to rev during the same time. And by the end of 2017, we actually won a pitch contest that gave us our first non dilutive capital. We got 40k of non dilutive capital from the Sarah Blakely Foundation. Up until then, we had bootstrapped the business and raised a small amount of angel funding. So I think we'd raised 80k from friends and family members and had put in 20k of our own. So it was clean operation. And this pitch contest was the first time we had money that it felt like we could be reckless with. From my perspective, it's really hard or it was really hard for me to place big bets from a check that someone wrote that I knew personally. And so I felt a lot more responsibility to be very like incremental in that first year. But with this money, we rolled it all into an FM radio test, believe it or not.

Really?

Yeah. And it worked incredibly for us. And this was sort of based on a couple instincts. I had met someone who had worked in the supplement space in a totally different industry. He was in weight loss 10 years early earlier, and he credited his entire success to FM radio with this specific agency. So I'd started talking to them. And the reason I believed that Dr. Could work well for us is that UTIs are just super common. One in two people get UTIs and if you can find a broad reach medium just with the prevalence cast wide enough net at the right CPMs, you'll get enough people in who need your solution. And at that time CPMs were in some cases less than a dollar and in some a dollar for FM locals. And that was just like gangbusters for us. So we that next year did more than a million in revenue, which felt great coming from 70k the year prior.

All from like online Amazon mostly sales.

Kind of, or no, at that point we were 70, 30, 70, our own website, 30% Amazon. And in the course of that year we actually went off Amazon and went fully D2C. And that's true for you, Cora. Today it's 100% D2C on nucora.com and the reason for that is that as we were doing more offline Dr. Marketing, the funnel for that is for people to then come to Google. Usually they're not remembering Uqora because it's not spelled like a real word. And I don't have many regrets, but that might be one of them. And so we were double paying for people in many cases, like already they came through a Google Ad to our own website. But then we were also splitting that traffic with Amazon and at this point we had enough usage data to see that our LTVs were 40% lower for our customers on Amazon and our subscription rates were starting to tick up on ucora. And with those two data points combined, we felt confident to leave Amazon to invest in our own like LTV growth and customer relationship, which we were greatly rewarded for. But it was definitely a hard decision at the time because it was a substantive part of revenue.

Yeah, I'm sure that's a scary decision to unplug that for sure. But like you said, you have the data that had it. You know, you had your dashboard, so.

Yeah, for sure. And your question that actually started this was about product rollout. And so at the end of 2018 we a couple of things were happening. One, we'd gone off Amazon, we were fully D2C at Ucora to we had been raising a seed round and were able to close a $1.3 million seed round. Also in this all happened, I guess at the end of Q3 in 2018. And we then rolled out our second product, which was a daily product. And this product was developed based on that insight. We were actually talking about earlier that often UTIs are caused by bacteria that has been nested in the urinary tract from past infections. So we were having customers share with us that they don't always know to be when to be drinking the drink mix because, for instance, they're not sexually active. And so that can't be their corollary for urinary health. Yet they're getting UTIs or they are, but the last UTI they had came out of nowhere and they don't know why. So that's where we started to develop this product that's more of day to day coverage for people's urinary health. It helps people stay consistent on the regimental and with whether or not like it's clear to them or not. Also helps with that bacteria that has stayed hidden in the urinary tract so they don't have to try and map what might be happening there. They'll just always have coverage between the daily product and the drink mix.

And so now people are buying two SKUs and subscribing to two, which is great for a CPU product especially to have that totally.

And at that point our subscription rates went from what I think was 25% when we just had the drink mix to over 50. And the business as it stands today, we, you know, flash forward on the product development timeline. We released another product that's a vaginal probiotic. And vaginal health is tightly linked to urinary health. If you have an imbalance in your vaginal health, it's been shown that you're up to 14 times more likely to be getting recurrent UTIs. And so that sort of completed our coverage of the day to day urinary health for people. We launched that product the following year and since then that's really become the most popular regimen for people. And we designed those products to work together. At this point, over 60, 65% of people buy all three of those products together. And the subscription rate is very close to that. It hovers between 65 and 70% of all people subscribing upon purchase.

That's awesome. It's really, really cool. And. And the company at this point is in San Diego. Right. Is kind of where it was headquartered and grew physical team, I'm guessing in San Diego until Covid maybe changed things.

Yeah. So we had a lean but mighty team, which was so much fun, so many great, talented people. And also in Q4 2018, this was like really a huge inflection point for us. We hired our first two team members who are still with the business today. And one of them was focused on growth marketing and she did everything from radio through to digital. She's actually become really a super skilled TV advertiser as well. So that's a big chunk of Ucorera's advertising budget. And the other person was focused on customer service and retention. Customer service has always been a huge part of our strategic focus at Ucora. And a lot of this was natural. I was a patient before I was the founder. So for me it felt really important that we were recognizing that people often feel vulnerable when they're coming to us. Often feel like they've, you know, worst case, been gaslit by people around them. Best case, have maybe just felt sort of lonely in this problem that feels crummy. And that's like often someone's on that continuum of how they feel and when they find you, Quora, they have hope. And often for some people is the first time they're talking to anyone about this problem. But I'd say that's a more extreme. I think it's really common that it's the first time people realize how common UTIs are and what good company they're in. And we've put a big emphasis on community building. So we have a Facebook group, 25,000 members in it. We have over 20,000 reviews on our website, which we've never incentivized. I think that because we have this component of a high touch, highly personal relationship with our customers, people just feel motivated to tell us how it's gone. And I think more than that, they feel motivated to pay it forward to other people who might be experiencing UTIs too. So although our second hire was someone who focused on customer service and retention, that really then scaled with the business. So by the time we were acquired in 2021, we were a team of 15 and almost half of the team was customer success. And, you know, I think, like, it's tempting to think about that as a place to automate the business, but we've always been pretty staunch on the fact that, like, we don't care. That's not a place where we're looking for efficiency is because the value we get from having a one to one relationship with as many people as we can just pays dividends in how people think about the business, how they refer the business, and their willingness to share with us, which is super motivating, and with other people, which is valuable.

Absolutely. Wow. So take us through a little bit of like, what growth was like. Especially, I'm curious, did Covid change much? People are already buying your product online, but now maybe people are a little bit more health conscious and we're looking for alternative options. Just curious, like, what did that do for the business?

Yeah, so growth curve, you know, we grew from 2018 to 2019, we grew 5x. The next year we grew 3x. The next year we grew 2x. So we stayed on a high growth curve. We never needed to raise more capital. That's due in large part to the subscription business model that we had, which really allowed us to have great customer economics. And, you know, if you backed out even further, that's due to a product that people loved that was really genuinely creating value and health breakthroughs. So Covid was probably net neutral for us. We definitely saw more churn, but at the same time, we're not totally like a nice to have product. Like, if you are in the position that certainly I was, this is consuming your life. And so when people have found success with Eucora, they're motivated to stick with it. And, you know, I think like a really common refrain you see in our reviews is like, customer for life. I'm never going off this. And I just think it's the fact that, yeah, you get a health breakthrough, but you also get that mental break that's maybe been plaguing you for years or decades, depending on what your history looks like. So we did see like a bit higher churn, but actually during this time, we implemented a policy that if you mentioned that you were canceling your subscription because of job loss due to Covid or budget constraints due to Covid, we give you your subscription for free, sometimes two months, sometimes up to four months. We ended up giving away over $30,000 worth of product during this time. Yeah. Which I think just felt good for all of us, too. Like, it was one of those things where it's like, if you can you have the opportunity to make this person's day better, who's clearly in, like, a terrible time of life, why wouldn't you? And I think that was like a huge motivator for me, for sure, and for all of our team to be able to be like that positive touch point in people's lives. And then I'd. So. So that was sort of some of the ways that, you know, it was harder on the business. The ways that it was better on the business is that we were able to take advantage of lower marketing costs, especially in the early pandemic. So we had been. I mentioned sort of our offline journey in terms of customer acquisition marketing. We are unique. I think that we were offline marketers as early as we were for a digital business. And that meant that in 2018, we were spending almost exclusively on radio, and, like, 80% of our customers came from radio. By the next year, we had revved our digital channels and it was a little more split. But we also launched on TV, linear TV, like cable TV. And so in 2019, we were equally split offline online, and about half of our offline budget was tv. TV is pretty classic in that at the beginning of the year, marketing is cheaper and the costs increase throughout the year. And by Q4, it's like you're priced out depending on who you are. And we're not a holiday company. So we had gone off TV at the end of 2019 as we started to see the CPMs rise. And we actually hadn't gone back on yet in 2020. And we were talking to our radio agency the first day of COVID and they were like, go all in. Like, this is like an insane drop in CPMs that you're not going to see again. And Alexa, my. Our head of growth and I looked at each other and said, like, let's go back on TV tomorrow. And we, like, got back in touch with our TV agency and they were able to bring us back on within a week. And we were able to just like spend so much during those first, let's call it six, eight weeks of ambiguity where marketers were really pulling off on their ad spend, especially like huge marketers like Toyota or whatever that end up really gridlocking the media. Space. So that was definitely like a positive for us. And I say that was like a quarter of just excellent customer acquisition for us. That was never that clear again because, as you know, we all. We can all play the tape forward. And Covid sort of hobbled along and became less. Less extreme, I think, in ways of how the marketing was. The market was responding, but that was in the positive category.

So sudden growth. How did like manufacturing and supply chain handle that at that time? Because everyone was going through craziness there too, right?

Yeah, we were in a good position and we owe a lot of that to my teammate Becca Odin, who heads operations at ucora, had during this time negotiated contracts for almost like a year out at a time with our suppliers to lock in pricing on our different ingredients, which was an excellent move. And then I think part of it was luck. Like, it just turned out that the ingredients in our product didn't get hit as hard as a lot of others did. There were some. There were some weird things like the caps of our bottles we had to scramble to find because that was a thing there. There was a shortage on. You know, it was just all these like random components that ended up being hit hard. But we didn't end up out of inventory. We actually were 100% in inventory for all of 2020 and 2021. It was like 99.5. So I. That's in equal parts thanks to foresight. Thanks to luck.

Yeah. Okay. And good planning, obviously, a year in advance, like you said. When did selling even become something on your mind? Like, how early did you start thinking about that?

Yeah, so, you know, we thought about it early and I think that's pretty specific to the fact that my co founder and I are a couple in business. And you know, I mentioned we were together at the time that we started the company. We got married in 2020 and I think we always felt like it was very fun to get to grow this business together and work alongside each other. But we also aren't like so arrogant to think that it would like that it couldn't potentially ruin us. So we like had sort of this idea in mind that like, we wanted. We want to end as a hot on a high note as best we can and like keep this as sort of this like wonderful chapter together, but not run the business for 10 years, 20 years, whatever it is. And I actually think that flavored a lot of the decisions we made. I think that we often prioritized autonomy and flexibility in the business. We had option to raise venture capital and ultimately decided like the value we get from agility, like, feels huge to us. And, you know, that it wasn't forefront or necessarily articulated that that's like relevant to us being a couple. But I, I think it was like, that's always like whatever we could do to kind of reduce maybe like external stress on us in that way was a priority. And so we had a revenue benchmark in mind, which was sort of the number we'd heard, like a 20 million run rate was the number we'd heard that you get to expand your options from a potential PE buyer to a strategic buyer. And, you know, I've heard different benchmarks in the CPG space, but that was the one that had kind of gotten lodged in our mind and we were approaching that run rate end of the 2020, is that right? I'm struggling to remember now. I think it was, yeah, the end of 2020. And so we started to look for an investment banker to help us with the process. So it was very deliberate in that way. Like, we got to the point where we thought our options were open. We started working with an investment banker. The investment banker we chose is Whipstitch, who deserves a shout out because they were an amazing partner for us and ran a full process. And that was then the first, you know, starting at the end of 2020. We ran that process through the beginning of 2021. Ultimately, we met Pharmavite, who is the owner of Nature Made, the largest BMS company in the us and they were a great fit. And I think the two reasons it was the right time for us to sell is one, personally, which I've kind of described, and two, is that for the business it was strictly B2CFD. This point still is today. Wasn't even Omni in the. In like the Amazon sense. It was purely B2C. And that was excellent for us in getting to understand our customer intimately, build a super tight relationship with our customer base and build a profitable business. But ultimately we know that people are talking about UTIs with their doctor. They're looking online for UTI solutions and they're in store. And like Big Box can't be ignored. And we were doing a really great job of serving people who were looking online for solutions, but we aren't. We weren't doing a good job in those other categories. And so we were looking for a strategic partner that had great retail relationships and also a good health care practitioner. Footprint PharmaVite's the number one pharmacist recommended brand and they've been selling in retail for the last 50 years. And so for us that felt like great pairing and where the business was going next. Aside from that, like it was the deal structure we were looking for and they're a really nice group of people which like, I feel like that's not often what you talk about in kind of the acquirer selection process. But it just. We built a business that was highly mission driven and built on empathy. And that also means that we had this team of people that were like incredibly heart forward and kind and got a bunch of value from that mission oriented work. And so it was really important to us that the company that was going to be the forever home for Ucora like found value in that and also felt like a lot of kind of that human aspect in their work. And the farmavite team definitely appeared to be that during the process and has proven to be that in the time we worked with them after acquisition.

That's great. You love hearing that, that's for sure. But obviously a big change for you because it's you and your husband's baby, you know, can you give us a little bit of what transition's like in that regard of just the mentality more your own personal feeling like ink the deal. Is it relief or like what's, what was that feeling like?

Yeah, no, and I, I think like it should have been relief and I was very much expecting it to be relief because the investment banking process was grueling. One of the things that feels crazy to me is when we were like seeking advice from advisors, people who had been through it. It was a really mixed bag on whether people thought you needed an investment banker to help you run this process or not. And I can't believe anyone was advising us that maybe we didn't. And I know that like things went well for us and we got the deal we wanted. And so how you feel about an investment banker's value I'm sure is very related to the outcome of the deal. But when I think about the process that was run, it started as kind of a slow build. But by the time we were in the throes of diligence all the way through to negotiating the mechanics of the deal, it was 14 hour days for Spencer and I, every single day. And part of this is we were a team of 15. Only one other person was aware that this process was being run. So a lot of the intensity was around the fact that like not only was this totally consuming, we were doing our day jobs and pretending like this wasn't happening. So it was like A crazy amount of intensity around that. When July 1, the acquisition date hit, I assumed that like all that would melt off. But for me personally I like had a very hard time kind of switching gears and I just like was staying in this like intensely revving place. And some of that was the comedown, but some of it was that like immediately there was a bunch of like backed up work that like just hadn't really been happening because it had been displaced by this process. So no it wasn't instant relief, but I would call it instead like a three quarter slow melt. Like that stress started to melt over the next two or three quarters and it's really hard to talk about the period after acquisition in a way that feels like constructive to any other potential founder because it's so circumstantial. And like I think for instance like farmavite had acquired one other company before Ukora, but it was five years earlier under completely different management. So for all intents and purposes this was their first acquisition and we were figuring it all out together and you know, we interestingly came in with a thesis that integrating the brand would be, there would be you know, air quote synergies around integration and we started to integrate certain parts of the business and you know, ultimately found that there's just no way that you can integrate a company of Eucora size with a company the size of Pharmabyte without just an insane amount of human capital damage. And we were finding that like there'd be a person from UCORA on a team or on a meeting with 20 people from Farmavite to solve the same problem and, and it was just like completely not possible. And you know, to Pharmavites immense credit, they agreed. And so we, after six months of trying to integrate, did six months of completely non integration work and like pulling all that out and getting the company to a place where it is largely independent except for strategic oversight. And I think that's absolutely the right call for the business health. But I think for the quality of my work for a while it was pretty hard to be going back and forth on that.

Sure. Wow, interesting. Yeah, totally different kind of skill sets as well to running the brand and obviously the marketing focus before now the integration and reintegration is just like a lot of, a lot of different hats you had to wear all over again to make sure your team was supported. You're looking back on the other side now. So now out day to day, right? Eucorra?

Yes, as of Q4 last year.

Okay. But team members still so There is there still. So the UCORE team still like San Diego office still kind of working or what does it look like today?

Yeah. So when we sold the business, there were 15 people. We were all based in San Diego. It's Now, I think 40 people. And the office is in Bankers Hill and it's San Diego's the headquarter. There's a few people who are remote, but the intention is to build the business in San Diego. And the other thing that's changed is that Eucora now has a sister brand which we had actually taken on from Farmavite. It was a menopause brand, but has a super unique formula. It's a product that mimics estrogen in the body without actually having hormone replacement estrogen. So most menopause symptoms are a result of declining estrogen and this product addresses that. So they're at a super early stage. But starting last year, we'd taken that brand into our employees umbrella and we're trying to grow it in a similar model that we grew, Eucoura. So now at that office, it's a family of brands and the intention is to continue to evolve that as well.

That's really cool. And especially that it's here in town, still growing. So we love seeing that. That's got to feel really good as well too, for you to see it grow and live on.

Absolutely.

Outside of your nest, per se.

Yes, definitely.

Well, it frees up some of your time now. Maybe more time for more tacos, though. You know, we always make time for tacos back in the day. Where do you find yourself? Or do you have a favorite that you always go back to?

I love carnitas shack. Their carnitas tacos are so good. They used to have like the actual shack in north park and I lived half a block away from it and then it changed hands. But I was eating a lot of carnitas tacos in 2018.

Oh, yeah, they also. Didn't they open one right on the waterfront too? Is that the same spot? Yes.

Yeah, it's the same one. And I think that one is the owner. That was the former carnitas shack in north park too. So that's where I go now to get my carnitas figs.

It's a great one. They have like a really good pork belly of some sort that is just like amazing there.

I haven't tried it. I can never branch out from the tacos.

Yeah, I totally. Well, Jenna. Quite a ride. And kind of, I mean, theoretically from 2017 to 2021, like it feels compacted, but man, like a lifetime of experience in that time frame. So really appreciate sharing the story, but even more obviously the impact you've had on a lot of women who've gotten to have a better quality of life because of your product. So that's got to feel amazing. So congratulations on that.

Thank you so much, Neil. I appreciate that. And you're absolutely right. That was the most rewarding part, Bar non and will always be.

Well, congrats again. Thank you so much for sharing the story here with the audience and we'll be in touch again soon. Cheers. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

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