Jon Carder of Vessel Health: An Accessible Way to Reach Your Wellness Goals

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 tacos 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 Estee 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'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@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 Bloom, and I am thrilled to finally have John Carter on co founder and CEO of Vessel Health. John, it's great to have you on, Neal.

Thanks for having me.

We've been talking about making this happen for quite a while. I know, and this is. This is the right moment right now, so I'm glad we waited for it. We go back at least to 2013 when I met you, when you were guest mentoring at Evo Nexus and I had my company Portfolium in there. I believe you're working on it was Mogul at the time and we'll talk about where that went from there. But, man, it's been great building and watching you grow here in town. So thanks for Being on.

Absolutely. Thanks for doing podcasts like this, local to San Diego. It's awesome. Anything that helps the ecosystem here, I'm a big, big fan of. So thanks for all that you do for the city.

Of course. No, it takes a whole village of us here. Build good companies is the first stage. So if we didn't have good companies, there wouldn't be much to talk about.

Absolutely.

Which brings us to Vessel, a great company for building a good body. You want to give us a quick overview of what vessel is?

Yeah, sure. So vessel is a little test card. It's about half the size of your phone. You pee on the bottom of it, and then you scan it with our app on your phone, and you immediately get a little understanding of what's going on inside your body. So we'll give you, like, nutrients, like magnesium, vitamin C. We'll tell you how hydrated or dehydrated you are, ketones, calcium, sodium, even urinary tract. And so about 10 markers in total. We'll give you a breakdown of, like, you know, you're in the good range, high range, low range. Then we'll ask you a couple questions about yourself just so we can understand what you're trying to achieve. Like, where are you having issues? Is it with sleep, Energy, mood? Let's say it was. It's with sleep. We'll ask you a couple more details, like is it falling asleep, staying asleep, waking up refreshed, and based on your test results and what you tell us about your goals and some of your issues, and we also ask a little bit about behaviors. We then build a plan for you. And that plan is what foods would be really good for you to eat, what supplements would be really good for you to take, and then what lifestyle changes you'd make. So you get this whole program plan. It's all about five minutes, the whole process, all can be done at home and pretty affordable, too. The test cards are about 10 to 20 bucks each, depending on which plan you're on. And there's a nutritionist, a team of nutritionists in the app that are there to answer any questions along the way. So if you're wondering what to have for dinner tonight or what kind of magnesium supplements are the best quality, anything like that, you have this, these experts here to help guide you on your journey. So that's Vessel in a nutshell. Wow.

Super cool. I believe I was one of the first to not only pee on the test strip, but also get my pee on all over your bathroom counter at your house as well, too. Which is a big claim to fame there.

Thank you. Thank you for that.

Definitely. I wiped it up. I'm really excited to kind of see this out in the wild 2.0 especially as well, too. I've been. I've got some of the old ones, the originals in my closet. Still the OGs, for sure. But I want to hear you. You weren't born doing P test strips. Maybe you were reborn to do that, but you were born to be an entrepreneur. Like, how early did it start? When did you launch into your first business idea?

My first business idea was actually. I think I was, like, 10 or 12. And, you know, most kids have, like, a lemonade stand. Well, my parents would buy hot dogs from Costco, like 100 at a time. And I used to microwave them as one of the only things I knew how to cook at that age. And so I was like, I'm going to do a hot dog stand. So I set up a T. I made these flyers. I put them all over the neighborhood. And then I started selling hot dogs. If you bought one, I just run inside and microwave it and bring it back out for you. And weirdly enough, a lot of people came and bought hot dogs. I think it was just the novelty of it, and people just thought it was really cute that a kid was selling hot dogs. But eventually I was up, like, 30, 40 bucks, which was a lot of money back then. And then a cop showed up. I thought the cop wanted a hot dog. He actually wanted a food permit. So he shut my dad my operation on day one. Didn't get to finish the day, and he scared me quite a lot. I think I might have been crying. My dad had to come out and figure out what's going on and make sure I didn't get arrested. And, yeah, that was my first business that lasted, like, four hours.

The Costco hot dog, which I bet, you know, they have beat you on inflation, because by now you would have raised prices. They haven't done it yet.

Pretty impressive. They're able to keep those prices so low.

Yeah, the $1.62 hot dog. But. And where was this? Where'd you grow up? Were you in SoCal?

Orange County? Yeah. Well, I originally was born in Michigan, but I moved out to California when I was, like, 8 or 9 years old, and my whole family came out here. My dad got a job out here, and it's. It was awesome. I mean, I love California. So I grew up in Orange county from that age all the way to college, and then came to Point Loma Nazarene University for college. That brought me to San Diego and I have been here ever since. About 23, 24 years now. Wow.

Yeah. Hard to leave, that's for sure. Even compared to OC and la, like, San Diego is hard to beat, that's for sure.

I think it's the best city. I've traveled a lot and it's just the perfect weather, a nice mix of people, lots of activities and things to do from oceans and bays and parks and it's got the downtown life. It's got the beach life too. It's just got a little bit of everything.

Yeah, it really does. Did you know and see that coming out of school at all? Did you see the startup scene or the business community or how'd you dive into the career post college?

So I started my first business, my first legitimate business outside of the taco stand, which was illegal, I guess. First legal business was in college, actually. I was a freshman sophomore at Point Loma University and I kind of randomly found this business. I knew I wanted to kind of have my own business because I was really driven. I was a surfer in high school. I started surfing and I just noticed there was like all these nice houses on the beach as far as the eye could see. And my parents had grown up pretty, you know, so middle class, lower middle class sent me to college, for example, with a typewriter. And I had to pay for just. Just to get by. It's definitely in that hustle mode. But there was just all these amazing homes, you know, mansions, as I would have referred to back then. How did all these people make all this money? Like, it just seemed like there was this abundance in life. And for some reason I just kind of figured that it was all people who started their own business. I didn't really do my research. I thought it was all entrepreneurs. So I just. That was in my mind from a young age, like, build company, get a house on the beach, surf all day. Seemed like the dream life. So I wanted to start a company. I just didn't know what it was. And in college I got this random job passing out flyers at Hobie Swap Meet. Right across the street was Foggy's notion. Old hamburger joints not there anymore. But I was passing out these flyers. All these women with babies and young kids or pregnant would go into the swap meet and nobody sold baby products in the swap meet. And I'm like, there's my million dollar idea. It was actually a horrible idea. I wouldn't recommend anyone sell baby products because nobody's going to the Swap meet to baby products. So I got some credit cards from college. They used to give you credit cards back then for filling out a short piece of paper. I got like, I think 2,000 bucks. I bought a bunch of baby products. I tried to sell them there. It didn't work. I was basically out of money because I wasn't passing out flyers anymore. And last minute decided to build a website. A friend of mine was like, hey, if you're not selling this rot meat, sell them on the Internet. And I actually didn't have a lot of experience on the Internet yet. This is like 2000 and you know, I went to college with a typewriter. So I had to go to the library to use the Internet. And I never went to the library. So I didn't really use the Internet much. But I was like, yeah, I've heard good things about the Internet. Let's try it out. And my buddy in Ocean Beach, I was living in Ocean beach at the time, Dan Rock, he's like into heavy metal. He's in a heavy metal band. He's like, I can build your website. He did like web design on the side. He built Baby's Heaven, the worst baby looking website you ever see. It had Metallica lettering like babies have had. It was all black and purple with like a gold gate on the homepage. It was so perfect for him, but not really great for babies. And sure enough, you know, launched that with like the last money I had from the credit cards. And that sucked that nobody bought from that website because we didn't have any traffic going to it. And even when you got there, you were like, what is this weird, like rock and roll band baby site? And the only way I got my first order and really got going as an entrepreneur was a friend of mine, I think a neighbor in Ocean beach was like, you need to figure out how to get people to link to your website from other websites that pregnant women and women with babies going to it, but they don't compete directly with you. So not knowing any better, I just went directly to Huggies because you can't buy from them directly. You have to buy by the truckload. And so I just emailed them cold emailed. I'm like, hey, could you guys put a link to me? I sell Huggies diapers, you know, direct. And so maybe people would be visiting, you would want that. And they responded like, sure, send us a banner. And I had to go to Dan. I'm like, what's a banner? And he explained what a banner was. And then I'M like, all right, give me a banner. Make it pink and blue. I don't want a purple and black banner. And sure enough, he made one up all cute with some baby with some wings. We sent it off to Huggies. They put it up and like within an hour, we had like our first order. Wow. You know, you never forget that moment as an entrepreneur. That first order that comes through it was like dancing in the streets. I was so excited. All my neighbors knew I was like on this little project and so they were all excited. And we all just had a great time celebrating that night. And that was kind of like my off to the races as being an entrepreneur. I mean, from there I just started spending all my time teaching myself how to do all this Internet marketing. So I learned about. First it was building out a lot of those links. Then I learned about affiliate programs. I think I joined Commission Junction or something like that. Then I learned about pay per click marketing. We called it PPC back then, before, now it's SEM. But Google didn't even have a pay per click engine back in these days. So we had to use Yahoo and Overture and then eventually became Google. And learning how to manage lots of keywords, it was just a hustle from there. I think we grew to like 2 million in sales within our second year just from all these different marketing channels. I dropped out of college. I was living on Top Ramen. I mean absolute top Ramen. Every meal, macaroni and cheese, Friday night. Because it was 10x more expensive than Top Ramen. So it was a rare thing. Yeah. And just kind of hustled my way through that first business.

Incredible. I keep Picturing like the GeoCities web. 1 like fire flames, flat flames behind your. Your title of your website. I hope that's still there in the web archive website that we could find someday.

You know, I've looked in the wayback machine and there's some babies heaven ones. But like the second version, which was actually pink and blue. I don't know if we'll find the gold gate with the purple Metallica baby, seven letters. But if you find it, let me know. It'd be amazing. I will.

So, so you built, I mean, the first real, you know, kind of e commerce platform there. Like, obviously you were hooked, right? Because all of a sudden you have a business at your fingertips that you don't have to go to the library to run. Where did it take you? Like, how'd you know? Well, one, like it's one thing to just put up a website and people are commercing 2 second. To build an actual business out of it is a whole nother thing, right? I mean, you got spin up a corporation, have the whole thing. Did you go and do that? Did you build a whole company around it? Or was this just a website that you're running?

I mean, if you compare it to the company, like vessel or my last company, you know, that has dozens of employees and like investors and all that stuff, I mean it was pretty rudimentary because I just didn't know what I was doing. I hired mostly my friends. I remember I hired my girlfriend to run customer service. At the time, that was a really bad idea. It was a good idea because she was free, that was important. She was like, we lived together. I was like, I'll provide the house, you run customer service. And she was from Spain, very fiery woman. And we would have these pregnant women on the other, you know, calling us for customer service because like their crib would got damaged by UPS and so they'd have a baby due in two weeks and their crib was broken. So they'd call pretty fiery too. And the two of them would be like arguing. Our customer would call, I wouldn't be able to hear. I'd just be like in the other room. And then I'd hear, you know, my girlfriend be like, don't you talk to me like that. I don't have to take this. Not good customer service person, great at many other things, great cook, et cetera. But customer service wasn't her jam. And you know, that led to problems with chargebacks. We had like, it was just kind of just figuring it out, making a lot of mistakes and learning along the way. But we did get to, I think about a dozen employees. We eventually. And I was, I had everybody lined up in my living room initially working against the windows. And then. And I had a small little one bedroom shack in Ocean Beach. It was like 600 bucks a month. And then we moved into an actual office which was like another 600 square feet. And I think what happened with that first business was actually the customer service was the thing that brought it down. So we were getting chargebacks because we weren't doing the best job taking care of these customers. And then if you get over 1%, the bank holds a reserve. And so the bank called one day and was like, we're hold a reserve. It's, you know, it's just some chargeback activity. We just want to make sure we're safe. And I was like living, you know, order to order, living off top Ramen, we didn't have any cash flow. I didn't know anybody in town that could invest. I didn't even know this whole concept of venture capital or any of that. And so Babies Baby Universe came in and bought us. And that was like a life saving exit. It wasn't like a big exit, it was just kind of a soft landing for me and the team. And that whole experience was incredible and it taught me so much in such a short time. It was about a two year run on the first time, maybe two and a half years.

Wow, that's pretty quick to go from starting and selling and pretty much learning and learning how to hire and fire and do everything under the gun.

It was a fast one. And then what was even more fast was the shift from like totally broken, horrible cash flow business to like a really good business. So when I sold that company like right before it, three months or so before, I'd interviewed this employee to potentially work for us. And they worked at an insurance lead company. So they explained to me the lead insurance business, how it works. Like you have a form on a website, you fill it out and then we match you to you know, three or four insurance companies and they, they're basically selling information to those insurance companies for like 20, 30, 40 bucks a pop. I was like, this is incredible. So no warehousing. Meanwhile at the baby company, I had to go buy a lot of my products at Costco because that was the. I couldn't buy the truckload yet. I didn't have like a flatbed full of like 50 huggies diapers. Every getting so many weird looks, a little 21 year old babies at home and you know, storing them in a local warehouse and I had to pack them all up and give them the ups. I mean it was a, it was quite a heavy business. So I was like, this is incredible. I could just generate information and sell it. My buddy was in the mortgage space at the time, so I decided to start with mortgage. I put up a webpage form like I built in Dreamweaver in like a night. I started doing all the marketing techniques I learned at the baby site. So Pay Per click Marketing launched an affiliate program. I started generating all these leads for like two or three bucks a pop and I would sell them to mortgage brokers for 20, 30 bucks. And I could sell it three or four times each. So the profit margins were insane. I literally didn't have to leave my house, which I thought was the most incredible thing considering what I had to do at the baby company and I think it was like month two or three that the company made $100,000 in profit. And it was such a crazy reversal from literally top Ramen every day, all day. Probably did a lot of damage to my body back in those days, the nutrient deficiencies. But it was just I'd learned a lot about the marketing and basically growth hacking. You didn't call it growth hacking back then, but that's in essence what I was doing. And it was wild. I remember my tax account was like, hey, you need to buy like a big truck because it's good for your taxes and it'll help you. So you want to give away all this money back to the back in Texas. I did. And sure enough, I roll home. My parents knew that my last company had basically, you know, not done great and I was totally struggling. And then also I drive up in this brand new Hummer. I hate to admit it, but it was a Hummer and they were still cool back in those days. And my mom is like, oh my God, what? You are selling drugs? Have you got into selling drugs? There's no way you can make this much money this quickly. And she was just, she was pretty worried. She was actually worried the whole four years I ran that company. And we scaled that company up to about 60, 80, maybe 100 employees. Bootstrapped as well, but we were able to fund it through the profits of the company. Lots of different marketing channels, eventually ended up in call centers. Just a lot of growth hacking mindset there. And we sold it to Internet brands in la, which was a good life changing exit for me. A lot of craziness on that, like a lot of ups and downs and near death experiences and a lot of stress and gray hairs. But my mom, who thought I sold drugs the whole time, she was a teacher at a school that I went to as a kid. And so I knew all the teachers there was and they all knew me as well. She goes into the teacher's lounge. Fortune, small business. Ends up doing a story on selling your business like it is now the time to sell your business. So they take a picture of me on the San Diego beach holding my surfboard. I think they interviewed like seven or eight entrepreneurs. They picked my surf picture for the COVID because it just had a great sunset. Everything looked good. I didn't even know. And the magazine lands on the coffee table at my mom's school. One of the teachers sees it. It's like, John Carter sells business for X millions. And she's like, isn't that your son? My mom sees the magazine article, is like, oh my gosh, he's not selling drugs. It's a real business. And she was very proud of me at that moment and sort of ever since. But yeah, that one was a wild ride. And it taught me a lot about changing up the marketing strategies and how quickly things go to zero on the Internet. Because, you know, we had. All of our revenue was from basically pay per click. We had like 2 million keywords that we were managing. And within a year or two, everyone had figured out that that was a really good way to generate leads and very cheap. And so, like pretty soon Wells Fargo was betting on mortgage leads and California mortgage was $20 a click when it was like 20 cents a click when I started. So all the profit went out of that channel. And we ended up moving almost entirely to a call center, call center we had in Del Mar, plus a call center overseas and generated what's called live transfers, where you get somebody on the phone and then transfer them right to a mortgage broker. And that's how we maintain such rapid growth. We got San Diego's fastest growing company in 2006, I think the San Diego Business Journal one like 12,000% growth over three years. And it was because we kept innovating on the marketing channels because there was so much competition in that space. You could build a website in a night just like I did, and have a lead company. It was that easy. So it was also that competitive. But you managed to stay ahead and sell it. Wow.

Wild ride. And Internet marketing is just like known to just be a conglomerate of sites. Right. I mean, they've just gobbled up so many brands. So a good one to sell to if you've got the right traction. Because they. Well, it was early days then too, but still, I mean, they're just big behemoth.

Yeah. The Internet brands guys were. They bought a lot of companies. I think they sold as well for like 800 million or something five years ago or something. They. So they did pretty good too. Their strategy worked. Yeah.

And SoCal too. I think they're. Were they LA based?

LA, yeah. Yeah.

So at that point, like, you know, you'd done two companies now. It's probably more than a lot of people do in their life. I mean, were you done or did you think you were done?

I thought I was done. Yeah, I definitely did. I mean, I had always started from my first baby company, even my hot dog stand. It was about making enough money so I didn't have to get a real job. And, you know, I could surf all day and drink Mai tais and it sounded really nice. Especially when bootstrapping. I'd been bootstrapping for seven or eight years at that point. A lot of stressful near death experiences. You're basically almost always near death when you're bootstrapping, right? Unless you've got a highly profitable business, which we did, we had for some months and then we would lose money. It kind of fluctuated. So I cashed in. They didn't need me to be CEO because they already had a mortgage divisions with a CEO. So they just bought the company and had me advise them for like four hours a day for six months and then I was free. So I went on this surf trip and I'm like, I'm done. Woohoo. 27 years old. All my friends came with me for the first two weeks and they all had to go back to work because they all had regular jobs. So I was stuck by myself out there and I was like, that's no big deal. I'm just gonna like hang out on this resort. I ended up in this resort in the Timor island chains in Indonesia. Super remote, nobody spoke English, they didn't have Internet access. And so I kind of did one of those quiet retreats that are like really popular now where you don't have any distractions. You sit there for a week. So I was surfing and sitting on the beach. That was pretty much it. And a lot of time to reflect. And I think what I, you know, what was the aha moment, I wish I would have known earlier was I'm going to be doing this entrepreneur thing until I'm like 70 years old because I can't just sit around on a beach and drink Mai tais and surf. It sounds awesome, but it was like two weeks in, I was already bored. Like the stimulation and excitement you get from running a company, it's like a 24 7, 365 challenge. There's ups and downs, which makes the ups so exciting because the downs are so dark. It's just what I was made to do, you know, I think us entrepreneurs know that, like it's in our DNA. And so we, if you're really a true entrepreneur, not just building it to make some money and then go on to do something else, you can't really stop, you can't retire. It's just going to lead to like, you know, boredom and eventually misery. So I realized that a lot of my fulfillment, my happiness comes from that. Another big chunk comes from relationships. Probably the biggest chunk of my Happiness. But outside of that, what I do with my time is building things and contributing to the world in a hopefully positive way. So I made a decision right there on the beach that like, okay, I'm going to play the long game. I'm probably going to be doing this until I'm old enough where I can't do it anymore. So I'll do it until I can. And because of that, it could be another 40 or 50 years. So a, let's build something really cool, something that I love to use that's super helpful for me and all my friends and my family in the whole world. So impact became a motivator, not money. And money kind of follows, right, if you do have a big impact. So it should be that way anyways. And I'm also going to take better care of myself. In the first seven years I didn't take vacations, I killed myself to hit my target and get a good exit. And then once I had the good exit, who knows what kind of damage I did on top ramen, probably a lot. And then MSG just wasn't balanced. Like now I'm playing the long game. I exercise every morning. I do a walk in the morning to set my circadian rhythm that I exercise in the middle of the day, eat really healthy. I just take better care of myself and it just actually it makes me a better CEO as well. Like, I don't think killing yourself is the right way. We got to be careful with people like Elon Musk talking about 100 hour work weeks, 120 hour work weeks. Like eventually in some people, very quickly that will lead to bad decision making and burnout and all kinds of other things. Like, I won't name names, but there's an entrepreneur here in San Diego who is a friend. We get dinner every once in a while and had a big company, big exit and pushed himself so hard that even a year or two after his exit, he was still decompressing and looked a little bit miserable. And us entrepreneurs have to be careful about that because you only get one life. You don't want to be miserable. I mean, he now had tens of millions of dollars in the bank, maybe even a hundred, and it didn't matter. Like he just had pushed himself too hard and gone through so much stress and probably compressed so many emotions, you know, deep inside that he's got some work to do for a while and you know, may mess him up for a long time, maybe permanently. So really encourage. It's one of the few careers where you can Push yourself that hard. Maybe like Olympic athletes and other athletes or something else like that. But they typically stop after 10 or 15 years. Entrepreneurs, we can really go for 40, 50 years if we pace ourselves. Correct. And that's where we're the happiest. Because you can't just not build things. If that's in your DNA, you'll get bored. Even though friends and family and all that good stuff, it's still not enough.

And once you build, start building big business where you take outside money, the pressure is on in a whole different way as well too. Right. You're now even more than just caring for employees, you're now caring for people whose money's at stake as well too. Which I think you eventually did with Mojo and Mogul. You took outside investor money.

That's right. So vessels coming number five. The first two were bootstrapped. The last three have all been venture backed. And between bootstrapping and venture backed, there's different. It's both stressful, but there's different kinds of stress. Like with bootstrapping, you're almost always near death, like a month or two or three where you could run out of cash and not make payroll. With venture funding, you're only on a near death experience, like when the next round of funding is coming up, so you need to raise it. If not, you might die. So it's. There's less continual stress. There is new stress though, that comes from having a board and having investors. That can be very stressful. It just depends. I mean, I've been very fortunate. Great investors, a couple here and there that weren't ideal. But generally I prefer venture over bootstrapping because I value my, you know, my lifestyle and my ability to like be healthy. And so having, you know, raising 5 or 10 or $20 million in a round gives you 12, 18 months of Runway to work on your business exclusively. Really focus on it versus bootstrapping. Sometimes you don't get that luxury and you're kind of always running at that razor edge, you know, redlining. It's great if you can pull off bootstrapping and get to cushion in the bank with real profitability. I tend to push so hard on my companies and grow so fast that I don't get to that cushiony profitability. I've seen other entrepreneurs seem to have a knack for that. I'm like, oh shit, we made $100,000 this month. Let's go add another channel or add another distribution here. Like grow the company. And so my typically grow really fast, but they use A lot of capital and they're pretty tight on cash in the bank because of the hyper growth. So I like the VC path.

Yeah, I get it for sure. I think there's a lot to tell about the Mojo and Mogul stories and we can touch on them a little bit. I do want to get the Vessel as well too. But something just a trend I saw is that you went to from physical products to back to online. And then I think with Mogul, you went back. At first you had the kiosks, didn't you? Like inside. I remember seeing those in Hermosa Beach. And then you went to eventually full software again. Right. So you've seen this back and forth of hardware online. Tell me about that kind of path.

Yeah, I mean, people always say hardware is hard. I think generally it is. But if you have the right people, like at Vessel, we have this amazing head of manufacturing and like manufacturing has never really been an issue. And I think it just goes down to the team you build around yourself. Because I've had software only companies where I haven't had a great cto and software has been my biggest nightmare, like where I spend most of my time. I'm catching bugs, I'm reporting bugs, and it's just a nonstop. Yeah, everything's working. Nope, everything's not working. It's not built to spec, there's issues. And then you have a great CTO and it's like, boom. Everything's working beautifully. They're building it even better than you had envisioned initially. I think the same thing goes for hardware and software. You get the right person to run it, it can be great. And if you get the wrong person, it can be a huge hard. But we had some great people on the team that were able to build it and get it working. We ran into some problems for sure that we had to fix it. Like when we first launched it to a mass audience, we learned there was a bunch of issues and we had to work through those. And that was a hardcore like six months of like refinement and getting it all working. But generally sometimes it just depends on what you're trying to do. You might need hardware and I wouldn't want you to not do the passion project, the thing you're supposed to build just because it has hardware. I think the most important thing is just what are you trying to do? What's the impact you're trying to make in the world? And if that is with hardware, you can pull it off. Plenty of companies have and just make sure you get the absolute Most amazing person in charge of it. Because it's a bit trickier than software.

Yeah, talent matters for sure. And coming into vessel, I want to hear kind of the founding story, which I believe was first was Bloom was a great name for it. So, you know, if you're ready to hand over that domain name, I'm happy.

To give it a good home.

So hardware, software, you've done both. Now you're adding a whole other component, the biology and the science part. And obviously you've had an awakening around taking care of your body as well too. But, like, when did that all come together to become vessel that it is now?

Yeah. So when I hit my mid-30s, I'd been an entrepreneur for 15 years, minus that, like two weeks off that I took or four weeks or whatever. And it started taking a toll on me. Maybe it was from all the top ramen, I don't know. But it wasn't like major disease or anything. It was like I was waking up at 2am and I couldn't fall back asleep. And I used to sleep like a baby, so that was a big issue. I had problems with memory. I couldn't remember people's names as much anymore. And I also had energy fluctuations, especially after I eat lunch. I go into a food coma and be like, oh, what's going on? I have to do real basic tasks for an hour or two until it passed. These kind of things were hindering me from being the best CEO I could be, and I couldn't figure out why. And so I went to my conventional doctor and they're like, do you want some Xanax for sleep? And they're trying to go right to medicine. I'm like, no, I want to do some more of this just kind of generally healthy stuff. I've been hearing a little bit about this idea of doing a blood test and figuring out what's going on inside your body. It was pretty new back then. It's about 10 years ago. So I ended up finding a functional medicine doctor. They did a blood test, tracked all kinds of things and learned a. My magnesium levels were low. I learned that most people's magnesium levels are low, and that impacts things like sleep, mood, energy. It's a really important thing, affects so much in your body. So I got a good quality supplement. Not the crap that you would see at like a grocery store, like low, like fillers and things like that. I got my magnesium levels up, slept way better. So that was a huge win, pretty easy win. And then I also. And that's one of the things vessel contest for. Then I also learned that my mercury levels were really high, so I was eating a ton of sushi, and that elevated my mercury levels, and that was messing with my memory. So I cut back on the sushi, did some detox stuff, and got those levels in order. And then my. It was weird. My memory not only came back, but I was, like, remembering things I had completely forgotten, like trips and things like that, people. And then the last one was the food coma. So my functional doctor recommended, you know, why don't you try out intermittent fasting, so eat dinner at 8 and then don't eat again till noon. For my body type, that works beautifully. So now I still do that 10 years later, and it just gives me this more consistent energy. I rarely drink coffee. I do it for fun now once or twice a week, But I used to do it every day as a necessity. And so, you know, it changed my life. It changed how I show up as a CEO, as a father, as a friend. I mean, all the different roles that I play. And I wanted to bring that experience to the masses. Because the one problem with that experience, it was thousands of dollars. Like, I had to do a lot of blood work not covered by insurance, and I had to drive back and forth to his office and then the labs and all this stuff with vessel for $10, $20 a test, right at your house, you pee on it, you scan it, you get some of the things that I saw, not all of them, obviously, blood would be more comprehensive, but you do get magnesium and some of these really essential things, Hydration, et cetera. And then you get the plan that I got from a functional doctor. A food, supplement, lifestyle, but just way easier and way cheaper. This will kind of open the door to personalized wellness, hopefully for the masses. Tens of millions of people is what we want to impact. And they can go deeper from there. Right. We might even offer deeper options in the future, like get a blood draw at your house and learn even more about what's going on in your body. But at least get started with something like vessel to really start to hone it in, because it's incredible what you can learn from and the impact it can have. I think the first time we did a test with you, if I recall correctly, did you learn that your vitamin C was too high because you were, like, doing lime juice and that was kind of messing with sleep.

Yeah, lime juice and a lot of vitamin C packets, whatever. Because I. Because I was running so much or something, and I thought, oh, I've got To have like low everything because I'm running and sweating so much and it was affecting my sleep. So, yeah, there was an immediate thing we learned and kicked that out of my daily habit.

Yeah, it's pretty awesome. We've had a lot of stories. I get them a lot from investors, obviously, because they're like giving me feedback right away of just something like that having immediate impact on sleep. Magnesium, like, probably 60, 70% of your listeners are low in magnesium. It's just hard to get it from just the food today in America. Even a healthy diet, high functional doctor always says, like, unless you have an organic garden in your backyard, you're probably going to be low on a lot of the essential nutrients because they have to travel. The soil's been used up so many times. I mean, there's all these studies showing that nutrient content of food 50 years ago, much different than it is today, much higher, and it's just kind of depleted. So good quality supplements and really focusing on your diet can make a pretty impactful change. A lot of investors were low in magnesium and started taking a high quality supplement. And within weeks we're like, I'm sleeping better already. I'm in. It was our secret way to get fundraising is to just give them a test card and they improve how they feel and they get it right away. So, yeah, that's our goal, is to try to help as many people as we can by just making it more affordable and a lot easier.

And I know during COVID I actually tested with you guys a blood draw. I think you were testing and trying a Covid antibodies test. Right. So that may be on the radar is something beyond, like you said, beyond just urine to eventually go to other tests as well, too. Kind of like, what's that product launch? Like, for what? How you guys decide what else to add and build.

Yeah. So Covid was our first foray into blood and we did pretty good. We got a blood test that actually works. You were probably one of our guinea pigs trying to tell us, like, what doesn't work, what does work. We did a lot of quick changes and got something working. It was a antibody test that could be done at home and you get results in like 15 minutes. Problem was the FDA moved to they don't want to use antibodies anymore, spacing on the name of it that they use, but it's a different type of test. And so we never got approval from the fda, which was a big bummer. Antigen, they're all doing the antigen test now, so. And we knew about antigen back Then, but it hadn't really been proven. This is like two, three months after Covid first really hit. So that was a good learning lesson, but it never really materialized into revenue. But it did teach us how to do blood so we could do instant blood tests at home. A lot of people are getting used to these rapid tests, like now the COVID antigen tests that are saliva based that you can do entirely from home. That's similar technology that we use on our test cards. So I think these at home tests are going to become pretty commonplace, pretty ubiquitous. And some of them could be saliva, some of them could be urine, some of them could be blood. I also like the idea of just sending a phlebotomist to your house and doing a full blood draw. You'll get a lot more data out of that and it's pretty easy. I've done it. It's like 10 minutes and you still don't have to leave the house. A little bit more expensive, but your insurance will cover it in many cases. So we're looking at that. We're looking at really cool, like saliva based DNA age testing that we can find out how old you are versus how biologically versus on the calendar age. And there's all kinds of fun stuff you can do with at home testing. So we're really just at the very beginning of eventually we'll have all this data available to us right from home pretty affordably. That'll help us kind of optimize ourselves.

That's great. And you mentioned obviously, just like Covid has brought the lab into the home. Right. We're all doing tests at home now. Or even at the beginning of COVID we all were going in lines at our cars and even from then to now. So that's a great way. If you guys are writing the other part is the E Commerce everything. Right? So throw a bunch of stuff in your Amazon cart of whatever you're missing in the app itself. So the E Commerce play Married with this digital health play, it's a pretty powerful platform. And then obviously the telehealth. We all now are used to telehealth too. So you kind of have three big waves that rose up during COVID What's that looking like now kind of going forward? Because I think you've just launched 2.0, so kind of take us through that.

Yeah, 2.0 launched last month and with that we brought some new tests to market. Calcium, sodium, urinary tract. And we also brought in a free trial. So for all the listeners here, you can now go to vesselhealth.com and try it for free. You just pay $6 in shipping and we'll send you a test card for you to try out. And if you like it, it converts into a membership. And if you don't like it, you only paid six bucks. So that's. That kind of is enabling us to really turn on the growth engine. I think a lot of our first year and a half was getting feedback from people figuring out what was working, what wasn't working, making those changes. Like, a lot of people wanted that telehealth element, you know, nutritionist, where they could ask unlimited questions. We added that a lot of people wanted some new tests. We added that a lot of people also wanted a way to try it. So we added free trial without committing right away to a membership. It's a membership based program. And then the last thing we learned, which I think might have the biggest impact of all of them, is people just wanted a more flexible membership. Like, we were originally selling a weekly testing program or monthly testing suite, and 80% of our users were doing weekly testing, so once a week. But what would happen is they would miss a week or go on vacation or whatever, and they would start piling up cards and then they would have too many cards. They'd have to like pause or cancel things. We've introduced Vessel Flex, which allows you to pay just 10 or 15 bucks a month. You get access to all the app, all the recommendations, food, supplement, lifestyle, plus the nutritionist chat unlimited. So you get access to a nutritionist for just 10 or 15 bucks a month. That alone is pretty rad. And then you can buy cards as you need them. And so now people can test once every two weeks, which a lot of people have been asking for, or once a month, or even once a quarter, even once a year. It's totally up to you, kind of the way that you want to do it. And I think that free trial combined with the flexible membership is kind of the things that we needed to really set ourselves up for some pretty good growth. So now we're shifting our focus to growth from products. We're not taking our Apple. We still make a lot of cool improvements, but generally speaking, we're trying to hire right now a director of growth. So if anybody knows anybody awesome, especially if they're in San Diego, even better. And we're hoping to build some explosive growth now.

That's awesome. Yeah. And I know 2.0 has been. We've been waiting for it to come out. So we've all been excited for it and you kind of put the brakes on growth a little bit. So now it's fun to get back out to growing because you obviously had a lot of exuberance with 1.0. So excited to get it back out and start testing again. Can you tease us with what's on the horizon? Like, I know. I don't know if I can say this, but the attachment to the toilets, like, where are we in a few years from now with vessel?

You think it's going to be pretty cool to see where it all goes. We launched with just this simple test card. And I should say that within our first year, we sold about 600,000 test cards. So even though we weren't growth focused and we were probably primarily product, we saw pretty explosive growth. Definitely the fastest company I've ever had. Go from kind of 0 to 5 million in a year. But what we see coming up in the future is, yeah, one of the cool things. So I talked about the blood test. I think we're going to bring a phlebotomist in. We've already found some companies that can help us with that. So bringing in other data sets, blood, saliva, even stool, potentially. Although that one's a real pain in the butt, pun intended. So, you know, and you could figure you could bring in activity trackers, Apple health, things like that. So the more data you bring into the system, the smarter the food recommendations, supplement recommendations, you know, lifestyle recommendations. You can get really, really good at that with, with a lot of data. And then beyond data collection, we want to make it more easy. So, yeah, we've already developed a prototype for one, a thing that just attaches to your toilet and you can just pee directly on the device and it captures all of that data without you having to really do much. I used our prototype for like two or three months. It was so cool. It's like living in the future. I just walk into my bathroom, push a button, pee like I normally does. It has like an arm that swings out and collects the urine. And then like three, I walk away. Three minutes later, my phone bings and it's like, here's your results. And I was like, wow, that's where I want it to all go. We decided to launch with a test card because it's just a lot easier to get to market and cheaper and so lower barrier to entry. But I have a real soft spot in my heart for that. Fully automatic. Eventually we just build it right into the toilet. So you don't even have to have a device that attaches to It We've got some patents on that already. So excited to see if we can eventually bring that one to market.

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, the finding ways to get the data collection is so smart in that. I'm excited for it as well too. You know, building in San Diego and finally not being ramen poor, you can finally afford some tacos. And San Diego is a pretty good spot to have some good tacos both. And there's high end tacos here and you know, the late night drunken tacos. Do you have some favorites?

You know, I love Mexican food and I probably eat it, you know, two, three times a week. I live in Bakers Hill, so we've got some gems here. We've got like Barrio Star is a great one. There's a newer one called Casino de Barrio which is right down the street from Barrio Star. And also amazing, super like healthy Mexican. Not a lot of people know about that place yet. They've got like vegan options and gluten free options and stuff like that. And I also like El Agave if I'm feeling like going a little high end. Right. And they have so many tequilas there. I think they have like a thousand tequila bottles in the walls. Their tequila tastings are amazing. They'll try like three different kinds. A little more expensive than your typical Mexican, but great date spot and kind of cozy environment. And then if I feel like getting a little wild, I'll go to Kings and Queens. That place is, you know, it's just loud and it feels like I'm at Papa's a beer or something. Like a nicer Papa Sabir. And it's great for shots and margaritas if you're just like looking for a really fun time with some good ambiance. Those are my go to's right there. Those four. Yep.

Kings of Queen. It's like Little Italy. Right? Is where kings.

Exactly.

I haven't been yet. I need to go.

And El Agave is in Old Town. Yep.

Oh yeah, the solid one right next to the Old Town Tequila liquor store which is like have you been there?

No, I haven't.

Oh man. It has got the most comprehensive liquor tequila store I've ever seen. Old Town tequila dot com. If you search like any. They also have a great web presence. So if you search any like obscure tequila anywhere in the country, they're the first one popping up too. So also a good tequila shout out to my guys there at Old Town Tequila.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to go there. That's pretty close to the house. And I love a good. Like you can go to Algave and tell the waiter, like, I want to try three tequila. You know, they have this tasting, they bring you the most amazing tequila. Sometimes it's kind of hit or miss. I've had some of the best tequila I've ever tried. I'm like, show me this bottle. And then they show me it and then I can't find it anywhere. I take a picture of it. Literally. I've got like pictures of bottles. I'm like, one day I'll find that. It could have been right around the street. It sounds like right around the corner.

I think it might be like the bar on top of this liquor store. It is. Oh, that's hilarious. So, yeah, they are probably connected. El Agave, right? So it's on kind of a second story. The first story is the liquor store.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Walk right by that. Every time I go into elegy, that's pop into it.

Well, John, great to have you on. Amazing story and growth. We know you're obviously going to continue building for the rest of your life, so we'll have to have you back on for continual stories around this. But it sounds like we need to go get some tacos and some tequila, so let's make that happen. Sometimes we do.

Sounds good. You're making me thirsty right now just thinking about it, John.

Thanks again. Appreciate it and we'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for having me, Neil. Take care.

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