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Last year, 42,000 Americans died in car crashes. 50,000 Americans died of colorectal cancer. Right now, all traffic accidents combined.
Geez.
For our generation, it is the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. We are putting cameras in toilets to improve people's health and one day save lives. And that is a new concept, and people need to get comfortable with that.
Scott Hickle is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Science. Throne, a company that uses AI-powered toilet technology to track gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and urinary function. And what makes this story so interesting is that Scott is building a real business around something most people would rather not talk about.
This is a crazy fact. There is a 10% risk. 1 in 10 people will be diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract at some point in their lives. 1 in 10. Like, yeah, a lot of our friends.
You got rejected by 100 investors. Why couldn't they see the vision? Because for me, when I got introduced to Throne, I was like, maybe can I invest? Because everybody should have this on their toilet. I don't understand how investors wouldn't have thought that too.
It's a great question. And I think at the end of the day, we are consumer health hardware. And—
What was your worst product decision?
The cost of like getting this wrong could kill the company because if we have to recall these, it's over. So when you're building hardware, you go through a like 3-step process and that is—
Scott, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.
Paula, thanks for having me.
It is so exciting to have you here. You're actually one of my friends. You're my boyfriend's best friend, and it's so cool to live in Austin and be around all these amazing entrepreneurs. And I always tell Mike like, hey, can I invest in Scott's business? Like, I feel like it's gonna blow up. So congratulations on everything you've been building with Roam. You're kind of like a legend in Austin for what you've been building and just really excited to break it down with everyone for the How We Profit series.
That is the warmest intro. Thank you so much. This, I'm, I love Mike, love you, love being in Austin, love what I do. I'm excited to have this chat.
Yeah. So Throne Science is the name of your company and you essentially have, uh, a smart toilet, but it goes like so much more beyond just like a smart toilet device. So in your own words, how would you describe Throne?
Yeah, so Throne is a wearable for your toilet that tracks your gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and for men, your prostate health. Hands-free, automatically, every time you go to the bathroom. It's like aura for your flora or whoop for your poop, we joke. But the whole idea is that there is an untapped world of health information in what's happening in your gut that you just flush away. And we track that so you don't have to think about it and help you tie the dots between what's happening in your diet and your lifestyle and what's showing up in your gut health. And ultimately, our vision is to build not just a wellness device for understanding gut health, but what will ultimately be the first continuous cancer screener looking for early signs of colon cancer and bladder cancer. Every time you go to the bathroom.
That is amazing. And so when I first heard about this product, I was thinking you were gonna make money off the hardware sales, but then actually my boyfriend Mike has a Throne device and he's talking about how he is like looking at his app and he's like monitoring his progress. And it's actually like a subscription model too, right? That's, that's part of the plan.
It's, it's the Aura model. So we charge for both the hardware and the subscription. One of the unique things about our product compared to other wearables is like your Oura or your Apple Watch. You're going to be the only person wearing that device, right? It's a one-to-one relationship. Whereas with a Throne, it's a one-to-many relationship and a many-to-one relationship because you can have up to 6 members in a home using the same Throne. Oh, or you can use multiple Thrones all to one account. Yeah, it syncs up seamlessly.
So everybody has like 3, 4 bathrooms when they have a house.
Exactly. So like we have 3 bathrooms at the office and I have 2 at home and they all have Thrones and it all goes to my account, whichever one I'm using.
And so how does Throne work exactly? From my understanding, it's a camera and a microphone.
Yeah. So can I take it out and walk through it? Okay. So basically it's a little device that clips onto the side of your toilet. So, you know, the water's down here and this is a proximity sensor that determines when someone is standing or sitting in the toilet. And then it uses your phone's Bluetooth to know this is Scott versus Hala. And then once it identifies who's there, it turns on. And so this camera and microphone's pointing down into this toilet bowl.
Okay.
So it records everything happening inside the toilet. You leave, it turns itself off, and then you walk away and you get a push notification a few minutes later with basically a report card that tells you here's how hydrated you were. Here's what your gut health looked like. And most importantly, it allows you to see the trends over time because your gut is super responsive to changes in like diet and lifestyle. For me, it's stress.
Yeah.
And it's like, frictionless. You just go to the bathroom with your phone already, right?
Yeah, most of us.
Most of us, most of the time. And so the whole idea is that that is how we identify you, so it stays off for guests. Uh, if you have members of your home that don't want it on, it just stays off for them. So it's like really an elegant solution to tracking gut health for people who want to understand their digestive health better or their hydration better for any number of reasons.
Yeah, and I know a lot of these like microbiome tests are really popular now. You go and you send in your stool or you send in your saliva and you get all this information, but this actually allows you to track a really important part of your health on a daily basis, right?
That's exactly right. It's the whole idea is it's hands-free, automatic every time you go instead of point-in-time test. So like, I like to think of Throne as we are to a microbiome test, what like your wearable device is to like a blood draw or like from Function or, you know, any of the other big blood draw companies. In the sense that like with your Whoop or your Oura or your Apple Watch, you are getting, you know, 15 to 20 biomarkers every single day. Same with Throne. And then when you want to dive deeper, you can go get a microbiome test or a blood test that'll get you 120 biomarkers. But like, that's a one-time point-in-time test and you have to pay for the next one a year later.
Yeah. So what can Throne measure today and what do you hope it measures like in the near future?
That's a great question. So 4 categories today. Gut health. So like when you think about, take a step back, what does gut health mean? It's patterns, right? If you were having regular healthy bowel movements, that's good gut health.
Yep.
Anything outside of that, you know, too loose, too firm is not good. You know, constipated or diuretic. And those are defined by patterns. Like you don't know how your gut health is just by looking at one sample. And that's, you know, microbiome tests can tell you what's living in your stomach. Mm-hmm. But it doesn't tell you how your gut health is over time and how that's changing. So we look at stool frequency, stool consistency or form on the Bristol Stool Scale. We look at color, volume, buoyancy, which can tell you about fat content. Uh, and then the next big category is we look at your hydration.
Yeah.
So every time you go to the bathroom, we can measure your pee and look at the color and volume and, uh, the clarity of your pee. And that tells you about hydration or what's called estimated urine osmolality.
And yeah, you become a real poop expert. Oh my gosh.
I did not think that I would grow up to be this, but like 7-year-old me is stoked right now. And so then we look at, uh, what we call bathroom habits. So your timelines on the toilet. So the two most relevant there are the time to first evacuation is the technical term. Again, that is a proxy for constipation or urgency. And then the other big one is your total time you spend on the toilet. Is highly correlated to hemorrhoid risk.
Mm-hmm.
And so we can send you a push notification and say, hey, stop doom scrolling. And then the last big category is for men. And you were asking about the microphone earlier. When you pee standing up as a man, because it has to go straight into the middle of the water, we can turn the acoustics of that pee stream into what's called a urinary flow rate curve. And that flow rate curve is the most important marker for prostate health. And that is a men's health metric. Only men have prostates, so it kind of works out that the science and the physics of it all. Meshes together, but yeah, uh, you know, something like 50% of men by age 50 and 80% of men by age 70 have enlarged prostates that make it harder to pee. Mm-hmm. And this is a great way of measuring that.
Wow. That's so interesting. So it can already do so much, and I know colorectal cancer is something that you feel really passionate about and cancer in general. So how do you imagine something like Thron helping with cancer detection?
And so that's our ultimate mission as a company is to build the smoke detector for colon cancer, bladder cancer. Basically any cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract whose earliest manifestation is microscopic blood in your waste. So let me take a step back and just share some of the numbers, because it's like actually mind-blowing. So last year, 42,000 Americans died in car crashes. 50,000 Americans died of colorectal cancer, right? All traffic accidents combined.
Geez.
And still like 20% more.
And that's just in America.
And that's just in the United States. Around 900,000 people globally died of colon cancer last year. And it is the only cancer in the United States whose incidence is rising. The only one. Every other cancer is on the decline except for colorectal cancer. It is now— it used to be for, like, our parents' generation, they thought of it as like an old person's disease, right? For our generation, it is the deadliest cancer in Americans under 50. And the crazy pernicious shape of this disease is that on average, it takes 7 to 10 years —before it was called a precancerous polyp, like a little wart on the inside of your colon. Yeah. It takes 7 to 10 years before that becomes a malignant tumor that's actually a cancer. Hmm. So it's like very preventative.
Exactly.
And like, if you got a colonoscopy every year and they looked for those warts on the inside of your colon, you would never get colorectal cancer. The only reason people die of cancer—by the way, 1 in 3 people diagnosed with colon cancer dies from it because we wait too long. Yeah, it's too late of a stage. Exactly. Like the earliest way that people can identify colorectal cancer is by looking for what's called fecal occult blood. So that's microscopic blood. That's the occult part. It's invisible to the naked eye in your stool. And we are building a future version of this device. And our mission is to build a version of this device that is looking for that fecal occult blood and able to identify the patterns of bleeding in your stool. Because there's so many things that can cause blood in your stool, right? Like hemorrhoids, fissures, fistulas, ulcers, viral infections, like You know, got food poisoning or like drank too much alcohol. There's so many things, but like the important thing is looking at the pattern over the course of months. Mm-hmm. If you can look at a pattern over the 3, 6 months and see that it's increasing, you know, day over day, week over week.
Yep. That is totally different than something that's like, you know, comes and it goes. And that is definitely worth throwing up a yellow flag. Mm-hmm. And so that's ultimately where this is headed is like, I believe that product belongs in every toilet in the world.
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Like, people don't talk about it, but like, that's also just like such a uniquely Western attitude, right? Like, yeah, I give a TED Talk about this last year, but like The idea that poop is taboo is like a relatively new thing in human history, right?
Like, and we're flushing away all this amazing health data.
Exactly. And the advent of the toilet was actually like a great sanitation innovation that saved hundreds of millions of lives. Like the deadliest diseases in the 18th and 19th centuries were diarrheal diseases, dysentery and cholera. And so looking at poop was like one of the most important diagnostic tools we had for most of human history, especially recent history. And then the introduction of the toilet pushed that out of sight and out of mind. And that all converged with the Victorian era when like, you know, we had prim and proper attitudes and modesty and, you know, talking about privates was like not allowed. And so now we're at a point where like, you know, Dr. Curran, our chief of science, has this beautiful phrase where he says, people are dying of embarrassment.
Oh my gosh, it's so true, especially certain cultures and women. That actually just reminded me of a really crazy story. Um, I know somebody, their parents were very conservative. Their mother was very conservative and her breast was literally like, she had breast cancer and her breast was oozing and she was too embarrassed to go to a doctor and even show them her breast. And she passed away very shortly because they caught it so late. 'Cause she was so embarrassed to have to go to the doctor and, and talk to him about that. But how great is it to have like a device in your home that can flag to you? So even if you are a little bit embarrassed about talking about it, at least you can go to the doctor knowing something is flagged. Exactly. And I think the—
there's a statistic on this that I think is really important, which is, so Aetna, the big health insurance company, sends out a million prophylactic, so like preventative, what's called FIT test, fecal immunochemical, which is testing for that fecal occult blood. But you have to collect a sample and send it off to the mail. And people hate doing that, as you might imagine, right? Yeah. Yeah. It is not a user-friendly experience.
No, like that's a horrible thing to have to do.
The return rate on those FIT tests is like 3 to 6%. Like microscopic, right?
Like, oh, like so people don't end up actually getting—
Yeah, they send out 100, they get like 3 or 6 back. Oh, wow. Yes. The other side of this though is Cologuard, which makes a more advanced test that also looks at not just for microscopic blood, but is also looking for, uh, like DNA mutations in your stool associated with colon cancer. Same thing that you have to collect a sample and send it off to a mail. They get a return rate of like 66% because that's prescribed by your doctor and they're like, barking down your neck. Yeah. Telling you like, take this thing, it could save your life. And I think there's a really like, you know, negative interpretation of that, right? Which is like, still 1 in 3 people won't take this thing that their doctor says, this could save your life. On the other hand, when your doctor says this could save your life, it increases compliance by an order of magnitude. 10 times more people send these back when their doctors are saying, hey, please do this. And it's, to me, that just says there's so much power behind probable cause, right? When you show someone, and to your point, having this in your toilet every day that's telling you useful things about hydration and like your, how your diet's impacting your gut health.
And one day it says, hey, by the way, like there's a yellow flag here. Like you should be aware of this. And like, don't be embarrassed. Like it's not embarrassing. It's human. It's natural. And like, this is a crazy fact. There's a 10% risk. 1 in 10 people will be diagnosed with a cancer of the lower GI or urinary tract at some point in their lives. Like, 1 in 10. Like, yeah, a lot of our friends.
That's really sad.
It's sad, but it's also like, it's universal and it's human and it's random, and we shouldn't be embarrassed about it. We should talk about it because, to your point, like, when you wait too long, I can't— especially with colon cancer, which is like, you know, breast cancer is like, I can understand how that is private and, you know, taboo culturally, but like, colon cancer is even like even more, even more so, right? Like there's so many stories about particularly, like, put to your point, women, men, it's universal. But like, people, it's just like embarrassing, right?
It's embarrassing to say that something's wrong with you down there. And, and yeah, it's scary. But hopefully you are kind of de-tabooing everything that's going on with our poop health. 100%.
And that's the— what's one of our secondary missions is like, A, we want to build this product and get it out in the world, but B, we want to make it okay for people to talk about it because it's totally not a like embarrassing thing. It's human and universal and it's like everyone does it. Why would you be ashamed?
Let's talk about the actual business behind creating a healthcare hardware device. What would you say is the most difficult part about the type of business that you're creating right now?
Creating a new category by far. Like this does not exist. We are putting cameras in toilets to improve people's health and one day save lives., and that is a new concept and people need to get comfortable with that.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I know that, uh, when you first, uh, had this idea, you and your co-founder went to Trader Joe's and you started asking people at the grocery store how they felt about a camera in their toilet. What was some of the concerns of privacy that people have and, and what made you realize, okay, like I think we could make this happen and people could be okay with this? Man, that is a deep cut.
That's an amazing recall on your part. So yeah, that's exactly what, like, we thought this was a crazy idea at first. And then we had to go out and convince ourselves that like, no, this actually has legs and people will do this. And a huge part of that, we ran some surveys on like Facebook and SurveyMonkey and those surveys kept coming back and people were interested, but we were like, no.
Like, are they sure they're okay with the camera in the toilet?
Those are just like pixels on a screen. I didn't know those people, right? And so we were like, we got to go look in some people's eyes and like actually confirm that like we're not losing our minds here. So we went outside of Trader Joe's and of course we'd, you know, ask people, do you wear wearables? Like, what, how do you track your health? And then we'd ask them, okay, like, would you be interested in tracking your gut health, your hydration? And like almost universally, yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, a shocking amount of people have gut health issues that they would like more insights into. And then we'd always ask them at the end, okay, but now let's say we're doing this with a camera in your toilet and the lens is facing down. "Like, how do you feel about that?" And not a single person was offended by that. They're like, "Oh, if the lens is facing down, who cares?" And we—
They're like, "Do what you gotta do." Exactly.
Like, I don't, you know, there's nothing special about that. And what we found is that people assume other people will have an issue with it, but then you ask like, "How do you feel about it?" They're like, "Oh, I don't care." And like, that's a really interesting psychological thing where everyone assumes that other people will be more worried about it than they are, but then they themselves are not worried about it, but that's true of almost everyone.
So you were able to convince yourselves that this was a good idea. Mm-hmm. I wanna talk about fundraising, and I know you got rejected by 100 investors, so we definitely wanna talk about your fundraising. But first, let's talk about the origin story cuz it's, it's quite a cute story and you also pivoted from an original business. So, uh, from, from my understanding, you actually were making a joke boys' night poker game. And you guys were talking about what are the worst ideas you ever had in terms of a startup. Tell us about that. Yeah. So Mike was there.
Oh, really? Yeah, of course he was there.
I was wondering like, is that a poker night? Like the same poker boys that, that I know about?
Okay. The same poker group that's been around for like 6 years. And so the question wasn't the worst. It was, what is a startup idea you would love to start but wouldn't want your name associated with? Mm-hmm. Which is even more fun. And everyone else is pitching like sex, drugs, rock and roll, vice industry type stuff. Yeah. Right. A lot of OnlyFans adjacent stuff in the world. Yeah. And my co-founder Tim was like, no, no, no. Like the actual, like legitimate answer to this question is smart toilets. I was like, oh, that's so good. Like clearly you name that company Throne and put a leaderboard on it and there's your go-to-market.
You came up with the name Throne on the spot?
It's the perfect name. Yeah, it really is. And so fast forward, Tim and I ended up working together. We joined a company that was selling crypto royal— or music royalties on the blockchain. So it was like a crypto company and very 2021. Yeah. Era of, you know, technology, very fun. But we wanted to leave and go do something a little bit more grounded in reality. And so we both come from healthcare families. My dad's a medical device inventor. My mom is a geriatrician. It's like a primary care physician for, you know, aging adults. And Tim has a mom and 3 sisters that are all nurses. And so, you know, this was like peak COVID, right? 2022. And nurse staffing was a, that was the problem in healthcare. Like, and so we were like, let's go build a healthcare staffing marketplace, like Uber for nurses, basically. Yeah. But like treats the nurses really, really good. Cause that seemed to be one of the big problems is that all the nurses felt like they were treated like cattle and not people or like just numbers on a page, but not, you know, there's no humanity behind it.
We're like, let's go do that. And so we went and built a whole two-sided marketplace. This is before you could vibe code stuff. So like Tim actually like, you know, hand coded. Exactly. All like hand rolled this whole thing. Fast forward, we went and raised our first million dollars from previous investors in my last company and friends who'd told me they wanted to invest when we started a company. That was quick. And then we tried to launch that company and like, this was, you know, now early 2023 and COVID was ending. And the nurse staffing crisis was ending with it.
And that was just like 6 weeks into you creating this business, right? It was just 6 weeks.
Totally. Yeah, it was, it was, well, we had one facility, so we got like 90 nurses to sign up in like 2 months, like, yeah, just under 2 months. Okay. And that was amazing. Our nurse recruiter was a killer. And then the actual like sales of getting facilities to sign up for the platform, they'd been burned by so many temp staffing agencies over the past 3 years. It was a very cutthroat business. Yeah. And most importantly, As COVID was ending, the, like, burning need for, like, all hands on deck was kind of going away and people were moving back into, like, full-time roles. And so one of these facilities that we had under contract was like, oh my God, we just made our first full-time hire for the first time in 2 and a half years.
And I was like— You raised money. You were telling everybody about this idea. It takes a lot of, like, I guess, confidence, um, courage to be like, I was wrong. Here's your money back, like we're not doing this anymore. Did you feel like embarrassment or, or, I mean, it's actually really smart that you pivoted, but some people wait way too long. So like, how did you know like, okay, I'm pulling the plug, I'm moving forward, I'm doing something different.
So I, I think about this a lot. If we had started the nurse staffing business 6 months beforehand and gotten just like a little bit of traction, you would've been stuck in that business. It would've killed my soul.
Yeah. You would've been, and you probably would've stayed in it for like years, like chasing the initial rush.
Exactly. So it's just like the fact that in hindsight, the fact that it wasn't meant to be and the timing of it all is just like the biggest blessing. And like, this is so clearly what I was put on this planet to do. This is my passion. And it, it, I stumbled backwards into it just by pure luck.
Right? Yeah. So you guys had this joke at the poker night and then 2 years later it came full circle when you went and tried to go get, uh, basically you were telling your investors like, we're not doing this nursing idea anymore. And it just happened. Organically. Tell us that story.
I had to go back to all my investors and say, hey, this nurse staffing thing's not gonna make— we're gonna spend the next couple months, we let go of the whole team, we're spending 2 months figuring out what comes next. And if we can't figure something out by the end of summer, we're just gonna give you your money back. And we had like a whole list of 30 ideas. Throne wasn't even on that list. We spent a lot of time, like, we were looking for more serious ideas, right?
Were you telling your investors like, these are the ideas that we have to pivot?
No, we just told them like, we know this is not the right idea. We have a list of, you know, a bunch of ideas. We're gonna spend some time exploring all these and if we can find the right one, great, we're gonna go do it. And if not, we'll give you your money back. Got it. Okay. But like, and everybody was, we, we had one investor ask for their money back and that was like painful, but okay, fair enough. We had everybody else was like, let us know what you're chasing.
They probably trusted you more because they're like, these guys are not afraid of, you know, going back on their word, learning something new.
They probably liked you more. So two good stories came out of this. One is one investor offered to host us at his ranch in California. He was like, come out to California, let's spend some time brainstorming. So we booked our flights. By the time we got out there, like a week and a half later, we'd kind of just like decided Throne might be the thing and we hadn't committed to it yet. We hadn't gone to Trader Joe's, but we had this idea of like, wait, the smart toilet thing might actually be good. And he like sits us down. He's like, I hate hardware, but if you think this is the right thing, I got your back. And he's invested more since then. And his, he and his wife are just like some of our biggest supporters. They've, were early beta users, which has been just amazing. Like, and then another investor came back and he was like, I have been waiting to invest in smart toilet companies for my whole career. I just haven't found the right one, but like, please go build that thing. And it turns out. Like another nurse staffing platform, you know, there's a dime a dozen of those, but like a legitimate smart toilet platform that can promise to improve health and save the lives of millions of people is like a much bigger mission.
And like my biggest learning in all of this is the size of the mission is directly proportional to the quality of the people you're able to attract to the team.
It's so true because I get to meet like really successful billionaires pretty much every week at this point, and they all really care about improving humanity. Like, and they're all super mission-driven where, like, they have this huge ambitious goal. And very rarely do I meet somebody who's very successful that doesn't actually want to help people. And, like, their goal is, like, to make money. It's like money is the, like, the aftereffect of everything that they're doing.
Totally. And, like, but I have reoriented around this mission. Like, it's something I hold so sacred. And if it works, inevitably this will make money. But like, we are here in service of a larger mission. That is, there are, you know, tens of millions of people with chronic digestive diseases and tens of millions of people with chronic urinary tract conditions and like a life-saving mission for cancer prevention. Like, that is the type of thing that people can rally around.
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For us, we pivoted. I think in general my advice is life is too short to spin your wheels. If it's not working, go find something that's gonna work. There is zero shame. Like the, the whole beauty of America is that We get second chances and third chances and fourth chances and fifth chances. I have started so many businesses and this is finally the one that stuck.
Go do that. I agree. It's like once you find something that actually has traction, like for me, I have YAP Media. It's been easy since day one. I had failed. Like I had a blog site that I couldn't monetize and I had an event business that like I barely made money and I had too many employees. And now I have YAP Media and it's like everything is so much more like effortless because it's like the right market. We're, it's like scalable, right? And it's got all this that's just like working for me organically and naturally. And I feel like that's what people really need to find is something that like works more effortlessly than not. 100%.
When you find that thing that actually suits you like a glove, it's the most motivat— you wake up every morning like so excited to go do what has to be done. Whereas like when you are swimming upstream, it's exhausting. And that's how it was with the nurse staffing is like we saw that we were gonna be swimming up a freaking waterfall. Yeah.
And like, it's like you don't have to, you've got choice. Yeah. You've got choice. Even when you raise money on a specific idea, like you proved you've got choice where you can just go back to your investors and explain it and see if they wanna ride with you or not.
And as long as you have these conversations with integrity and candor and say, hey, we gave it a college try. And what I did is I wrote a postmortem memo. So I just said, here is everything that we came into this, here are all the assumptions we had, here is what we've learned since, here is what this means. I don't think this is a good idea. Yeah. We're gonna go find a better idea. And nobody was offended by that.
Yeah. So you raised $4 million or a little bit over $4 million in your first round for Throne.
That was our seed round. We'd raised— That was your seed round. Yes.
I don't, I, I'm not a VC, but back company, so like, I don't know like what round is what, but you tell us.
So we raised a $1.2 million pre-seed. Okay. That was Pineway, the nurse staffing. That was nurse staffing. And then we pivoted to Throne immediately. Okay. And then we raised, uh, like $500,000 and $250,000. Like we were raising on SAFEs, right? Okay. Which are these like convertible notes, basically it's a very quick and easy way to, for investors to invest in the company. Okay. Without you having to involve too many lawyers. And it's, you know, instead of it taking—
And what is that called?
It's called a SAFE. It's a SAFE. It's a Simple Agreement for Future Equity. And it's, there's a standard template on Y Combinator's website that everybody in technology uses. Okay. And so you can go to an investor and they say, yes, I will put in, you know, $250,000 on a $10 million cap. Okay. And It's quick and easy and you get the money the next week or the next day. So we raised like $750,000 on SAFEs, and then we went out to raise our proper seed round and we raised $4 million in that round. And by that point we had like a prototype. So it wasn't this, it was like, I'm very proud of how attractive this is.
It looks really nice. It's very sleek. Yeah.
What we had before this, the prototype was like this big. And like the camera in the toilet was like massive. And you, it wasn't waterproof. So like, you know, one instance of bad aim, it was all over. It wasn't 100% waterproof.
That's hilarious.
But it was enough to show that like we could build hardware and the app worked and like we had the whole experience. Like we could kind of, you know, paint the vision of where this was going.
And that was when you were raising the $4 million?
Exactly. Okay. But like seeing is believing, right? Like showing up with like the actual thing built was so important. And so we raised that money.
But let's pause there. Okay. You got rejected by 100 investors. Oh yeah, it's gut-wrenching. Why couldn't they see the vision? Because for me, when I got introduced to Throne, I was like, can I invest? Because everybody should have this on their toilet. I don't understand how investors wouldn't have thought that too. It's a great question.
And I think at the end of the day, we are consumer health hardware. And any venture capital investor, most of them are allergic to like one of those three categories. Okay. Much less like the convergence of those three categories. Got it. Right?
Like, so they're why, why are they just like hard? They're hard categories.
Consumer's a notoriously hard category. Healthcare is a notoriously hard category. And like VCs specialize in consumer or healthcare, but like very few do consumer healthcare. Then hardware is also a notoriously hard category. Yeah, it's expensive. The quick money is in like B2B SaaS or like, you know, the big money now is in like these foundational AI labs. Yeah, the AI companies. Exactly. And so this is much riskier and a lot of investors like kind of saw the vision at that point. Also, we had no progress on blood detection. We just had like a, you know, a notion that like, yeah, we think we should be able to identify microscopic blood using these advanced imaging techniques. And, you know, here's some papers we can point you to, but we hadn't built anything like that ourselves yet. And so we had like proven out like the basic technology, but like the advanced stuff that's like, you know, ultimate, because I think everyone agrees with the premise that like life-saving, but they're like, can your thing actually do that? Exactly. And like, At that time it couldn't, and we just got very lucky again, like going back to the size of the mission.
One of our, not one of our lead investor in that round, when she offered to invest, I was like, why? You know, like I can feel your excitement and your passion for what we're building. Where does that come from? And she shared, you know, my husband died of cancer in his early 50s. And all I can think about is like, what could we have done to catch it sooner? And again, just like, thank God she was put in my life, you know? Yeah.
So people who aligned with the mission, even if you weren't there yet, mm-hmm, invested. And then what was the difference between people that you cold outreach to versus people you were introduced to? How is that different in terms of fundraising?
So Marc Andreessen has a very famous perspective on this, which is that if you are a serious founder, it is your job to find a way to get in touch with me. Because if you can't go through the hoops of getting in touch with me, and it's not that hard, then how are you going to break through all of the walls that it takes to build a company into something successful? So I ran a very disciplined process. I had a spreadsheet. I had my wish list of like, here are all the investors that I want to get introduced to. Here's the firm they're at. Here's the specific investor I want to invest in. Here's the other similar companies like Whoop, Oura, Eight Sleep, Levels that they've invested in, you know, so I know why I want to get in touch with them. Here's the list of all the people that I have mutual contacts to who might be able to introduce me to that person.
That's really smart.
I got coached on this by Eric Bond, who's an investor at Hustle Fund. He, when he caught wind that I was about to go fundraise, he called me. He was like, do not fundraise yet until I coach you through how to do it. And he walked me through this masterclass and then he was like, and then you have your list of all of the other founder friends you have and you get on a call with every single one of them and say, hey, Who are the investors you can introduce me to? And you keep a list of all of them. And so, you know, like, let's say you holla, give me 5 names. He's like, great, keep track of all that. And then this is important, the sequencing of it, because you want to build momentum in a fundraise. You want the, you know, the valley to be talking about you because investors chirp. And he was like, very specific about you get this whole list compiled, but you don't let people make introductions for you yet. And then you say on the same day, like, make it a Thursday, like, go to all 500 people or it's more like 50 people, but like go to all 50 people and say, hey, here's the 5 people you told me you could introduce me to and here's the 8 people you told me you could introduce me to.
Like, here's my blurb, please send this to these 8 people. So it's like a blitz. Exactly. It's a blitz. And then you get a bunch of these double opt-ins coming back in saying, I'd love to meet Scott, or like, oh no, I'm going to pass. Like, a lot of people just passed, right? Like, it was like not a fit. I'm like, by the way, that's like my second favorite investor. My first favorite investors are the ones who give me money. My second favorite investors are the ones who say upfront, not a fit. My third and distant least favorite investors are the ones who waste a bunch of time and then say no. So you blitz everyone and then you get all these returns coming in and you schedule them so that you have like, you know, your tier 2 investors are the first calls you take so you can like warm up your pitch. Hmm. Because like when you're, if you do this right, you're pitching, you know, 5, 6, 8 times a day. And you're responding to what their faces are showing, right? Yeah. The questions. And, you know, you can—
You get your story right after you practice. Exactly. To figure out like what story you're telling, what data points, what questions people ask.
And I'll tell you a huge learning for me about the story is so many people gave me the well-intended advice to start with the big vision first and then pitch how we get there. Yeah. And so, The original pitch was we're building the smoke detector for colon cancer, and the way we get there is step one, we build this device that tracks gut health and hydration. And what I found after pitching that 80 times is that when you pitch, here's the $10 billion thing, and here is, you know, the step-by-step process for how to get there. Gen 1 is not a medical device. This is a health and wellness device. People are like, well, why don't you go straight for that?
Yeah.
And it's like, You're setting yourself back. Mm-hmm. But when you say, hey, we're building this device that tracks gut health and hydration, and by the way, eventually the mission is to become this smoke detector for colon cancer, and we think we know how to get there, and that's the note that you end on. Mm-hmm. Infinitely more compelling.
So you went out to these investors and you were pitching, but you did have a lot of setbacks. So talk to us about the 100 nos that you got. What, what were they concerned about?
Privacy. People didn't believe that there was a market for this device. People didn't think it was technically feasible to do a smoke detector for colon cancer that could look for fecal occult blood or microhematuria. People, you know, worry about the ick factor. Like, there's so many reasons someone says no. Mm-hmm. And at the end of the day, like, it doesn't really matter to you as a founder, like, why they said no. Just take the no and move on. I will say the hard part about fundraising is like, it is emotionally gutting.
Just like any sales job, right? Exactly.
And like, the only thing I can compare to, if you've never worked in sales or like done a fundraiser, is like dating. But the difference is like, you know, if you're dating really actively, it's like 1, maybe 2 dates a week, and you get rejected from those. Like, this is like 8 a day. And like, you're so emotionally invested in this because it's your baby. Yeah. And like, to your point, someone says no thanks, and then you have to jump on the next call. Like, All right, let me tell you why this is the greatest thing ever. It is such an emotional rollercoaster. I, it, it's really hard to describe.
But now you've got an amazing leadership team. You've got somebody from Whoop on your executive team. How did that change the perception of everything that you're doing?
My co-founder and chief product officer is the former co-founder and chief technology officer from Whoop. Oh wow.
I didn't realize he was the co-founder of Whoop.
Yeah. So John Capodilupo dropped out of Harvard his sophomore year to go found Whoop. He built that from 2012 to 2022. He left after a decade, and he is now my co-founder and chief product officer. He, along the way of building Whoop, was diagnosed with pancolitis, which is the worst form you can have of ulcerative colitis, a form of, um, inflammatory bowel disease. Mm-hmm. And so he's very passionate about gut health. Okay. And continuous health tracking. Perfect. It was like, yeah, there's—
couldn't be a better fit.
I literally don't think there's a more perfect person on the face of the planet for what we're doing. Yeah. Than John. That's amazing. And so he joined us originally as an angel investor, and then we made him an advisor, and then he— I added him to our Slack group and he was like in every conversation, like could not help himself. Yeah. I was like, John, you, you gonna come join us full time? And he was like, eh, I think I'm good. And then a few months later he was like, yeah, I think I should come join you guys full time.
That's amazing. I'm, I'm so happy for you. It's so great when you have like a leadership team that you just feel like so locked in with. Let's talk about the marketing. So you guys are officially launched. You launched in March. Yes, March 10th. Um, you took it to the Consumer Electronics Show.
Yeah, so CES was in January. We were there with some preview devices. We didn't actually have like devices rolling off the assembly line until the end, beginning of March, and that's when we were able to ship them. CES was an amazing experience. 500 people a day coming by the booth talking to you. Like there's a lot of amazing innovation happening in the world of consumer electronics.
Did that make it feel real for you, that moment? Because I remember seeing images and stuff and I was just like, oh wow, like This is really a thing. Did, did it feel like a, a real like turning point for you?
When you talk to like literally probably me personally, 130, 150 people a day and you see the switch flip in their minds where they come in skeptical about like, what is this thing on the toilet with the flowers in it? 'Cause we put the flowers in it because people come and talk to you and they're like, what's, what are you doing with the flowers in the toilet? But then you say, hey, like, no, this is actually to help you connect the dots between your diet, your lifestyle, what's happening in your gut health. People think about it and they go, oh wow, like either I need that or I know someone who needs that.
How did you generate interest for Throne? Like what are your marketing strategies right now? What has not worked and what is working?
Great question. So definitely by far the best thing that works for us is referrals. Like word of mouth. Word of mouth is the number one thing. People use the device like it's a very sticky product. People like There's this ratio called a DAO MAU, which is like, of your people who use the product in the last month, how many have used it in the last day? And on average, we're like 0.6, which is phenomenal.
So you're like, you build habits.
Exactly. It's very habit forming because it's frictionless, right? And like, people use the product on average 4 or 5 times a day and they check the app every time they go because like, you want to see what's my hydration score. And like, you know, you wake up dehydrated, you get better hydration scores at 11:00 AM and you love to see your scores move up into the right. Who doesn't love up into the right progress, right?
Right. Gamifying it.
Referrals is a big, big mover for us. The other big one is we've gotten a lot of press and we've had some viral moments on like TikTok and Instagram. Those have been great for us. What hasn't worked for us is like paid meta marketing. Mm-hmm.
And that's just like paid ads. Paid ads.
Exactly. So paying for TikTok and Instagram Reels doesn't work nearly as well because if an influencer who you gave a free device to posts about it, or a journalist who you already trust posts about it, like, that's a totally different thing than a brand that you maybe have never heard of putting an ad on your feed. And you're like, this is interesting. What's the thing on the toilet? But, you know, you're just, we can show you the statistics. Most people watch like 6 seconds of a 30-second reel. Yeah. And so they just really have only the faintest glimpse of what we're actually doing. And there's so many legitimate questions people have. That aren't answered when they, by the time they get to our website. And so what we're doing now, you know, going back to like what our marketing is, what's working is we're building a long-form content engine because we know that's how you build a category. And this is a brand new category. One of the best examples of this is a company called Levels that was the first to put continuous glucose monitors, those like sticky patches on— Oh, those like circle little—
Exactly. I see them everywhere.
Yes. So Levels was the first company to put those on non-diabetics. And like half the Level team is here in Austin. Mm-hmm. And so I'm good friends with their former head of growth who now is our VP of growth. Oh, cool.
Look at you building that rockstar team.
Again, like, it's this, this big mission attracts great people. Mm-hmm. And Levels grew their YouTube to like 330,000 subscribers in an average watch time of 15 minutes. And you think about like, that's a ton of great attention and great traffic that when someone goes from that YouTube page to Levels, they know infinitely more about what that company is, what the product is, what they're about than if they'd come to them through a paid ad.
So you're really just witnessing that your consumers need to be educated. They need to have like a real reason because it's not cheap, right? It's like $400. Exactly. This is not an impulse buy. So it's like it's not an impulse buy. You've got to really help them understand like why they need this. And educate them, and you've, you've been feeling like the long-form content, it's, is what's pushing the needle. How about influencers that they already trust? Has that been working?
Yeah, so our chief of science is Dr. Curran, who has like the biggest following of any GI doctor on the internet, and when he posts, we see huge spikes in our traffic. Like, I don't know if you've watched his content, he's a just a gifted speaker about health issues. Health is one of those things that anybody can talk about. It's universal. But also, like, when you start getting into, like, real medicine and, like, human anatomy and physiology and, like, how these systems work under the hood, it is so complex. And to talk about those subjects that are deeply interesting but make it also educational and entertaining at the same time is, like, a gift.
Influencers can when they're really trusted, they reduce the time to buy, right? Or like the thought or the risk associated with spending $400 on something because you trust that influencer so much. A good idea for you would be whitelisted ads.
So do you know about this? Oh yeah. So that's something that we know we are going to experiment with. We're redoing the website right now and doing all our lifecycle marketing so that when we start spending on ads again, it's, we are doing more efficient capture on the back end of it. But yes, whitelist is high on my to-do list.
So basically, this is like something that I've noticed is becoming way more popular because I'm in the influencer marketing space, right? I have a podcast network. I grow and monetize like 45 shows, and more and more brands want to actually put their own money behind our creators' posts. So it's like the creator puts up a post, um, you know, they might have talking points or whatever it is. It grows organically, but then the brand actually puts paid ads money behind it, and that's what a whitelisted Ad is for those who don't know. So that's really cool. So is there any other branding marketing tactic that you've been leaning into?
The other big one for us is just long-form editorial, like written content. Yeah. And the two reasons for that is a traditional SEO, but the other big one is AI search. And we've had a surprising number of customers come to us because they found out about us through ChatGPT.
Wow, that's so interesting because they're probably being like, what's wrong with my Exactly. Exactly.
Like, there's a very big difference in the intentionality from, like, push marketing, which is like, you know, Meta, you know, Instagram, TikTok. That's push marketing. We are pushing this onto you. Whereas, like, if you're going to ChatGPT or Claude or Google and asking, like, what's wrong with me? That's pull marketing. Yeah. And, like, when we can find people in those pull moments, it's way more intentional.
They're already, like, down the funnel because they're looking for the solution. You're not having to educate them. They have like a real burning need of figuring out the solution. So really interesting stuff. Okay, so I want to, um, do a segment with you called Founder Failure. It's a new thing that I'm trying out for this series where basically I ask you like what your biggest marketing mistake was, your biggest manufacturing mistake, whatever it is, and you tell me some of your failures because we all learn so much from failure, especially as founders, right? This is why these founder peer groups work so well. Mm-hmm. Scott, what was your worst product decision?
Oof, that's a tough question because the reality is with hardware, like there's the hardware side of the product and then there's a software side of the product. In the software side of the product, the cost of making a mistake is very low because you can go and fix it the next day, right? Like you just go update the code. With hardware, the cost of making a mistake is very high because like best case scenario, You recut the molds that the plastic is molded in.
Yes, so you've got to be really careful before you say go produce all these things.
Yeah, exactly. It's just very expensive. And so we were— so when you're building hardware, you go through a like 3-step process: design validation testing, electronics validation testing, and product validation testing. You can't skip. It's actually electronics, then design, then P. And You can't skip any steps and it takes like a year to go through manufacturing because they don't want you having any mistakes because catching them after the fact is so expensive. So we were very lucky to have a very professional manufacturing group that we're partnered with. I'll say actually for the beta product, the not waterproof. Yeah. Was terrible because like we, we knew that like if a guy peed on it, that would kill the product. What we didn't realize was that the humidity of just sitting above the toilet would also kill the product. And so like the average lifetime of one of those beta devices, like 6 months before it would short out. Got it. And that's why you do betas before you move into mass production. Like, it also just, you know, we realized like the cost of like getting this wrong could kill the company because we have to recall these.
Yeah.
So you took it— the lesson in that is like, take your time, find a professional manufacturing partner, learn processes, have a coach. Like, don't waste your money. Move fast.
Break things only works when the cost of breaking things is like near zero. What would you say your biggest marketing flop was so far? Instagram. We spent way too much money on Instagram to learn the lesson that Instagram is a horrible fit for our stage of awareness. Because I, I'll, I'll give you a really specific example here. There's a company, are you familiar with Nood, the, uh, like laser hair removal product? And it costs like basically the same as our product, $400. It's direct-to-consumer and it's laser hair removal and it really works. And the founder of Nood is a good friend and he was like, oh well, here's how we market. And, you know, we were like, oh, let's just go copy and paste that playbook because, you know, on paper we look very similar. It's a white device roughly this size. Yeah. Uh, $400, like, you know, similar audience. We're like, let's just go do what they do. And what we realized, you know, after 2 months and, you know, losing $100,000 is that, wait a second, laser hair removal has been around for 2 decades. It's not a new category. Exactly. And like, when you— all you need to see is a before and after and you're like, oh, I get what this is about.
And women spend a lot on beauty. Like, they're happy to shell out $400 because going to a medical place to do it is $400 a session. Exactly.
And so the whole idea is like there's this preexisting awareness, like there's this framework called stage of awareness where people are unaware and then they're problem aware and then they're solution aware and then they're product aware or they're brand aware and they know about you. And then all they need at that last stage when they're most aware is just a nudge, right? Like, what's the deal? What's the hook that's going to get me in? And for laser hair removal, anybody in the market for laser hair removal, like, hey, everyone's aware of that market. Yeah. And then if you're in the market, you're probably aware of the leading brands. You probably know there's at-home laser hair removal and now you're just waiting for like that sale. You're like, you know, to your point, I'm going to spend $400 on this anyway. Next time there's a $50 coupon, like, I'm in. Yeah, totally different marketing challenge than ours. And that was an expensive mistake.
What is the most unexpected thing that happened so far in your journey creating Throne?
I have been amazed at the deeply intimate conversations that I've gotten to be a part of too, because of the health implications, what we're building, right? Like there's so many people with inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn's and ulcerative colitis or IBS. And when they find out I'm building a gut health tracker, they start talking to me like I am their doctor. Hmm. And they'll share their most intimate and they'll tell me things like that. I don't talk to anyone about this, but. Because you're so in this area, I'll tell you. And it's like, there's an NPR podcast episode on Invisibilia called Poop Friends. And the whole podcast just talks about how like your most innermost circle of friends are the people you can talk about your poop with. And what I found, I didn't plan for this, but like, I get to be strangers' poop friend. And like, there's something deeply special about that. Yeah. Ironic as it sounds. Like people, you know, cause like think about someone who has IBD, like one woman stopped me at a conference and she was like, I wish I'd had this product when I was going through my gut health journey because there were days my doctor told me to keep a stool log, which is humiliating.
And I would like go 40, 50 times a day. And I knew exactly how many tiles were on my bathroom floor because that's how much time I was spending in the bathroom. And to have something that would track all that for me so I didn't have to. Would've been like spared me so much humiliation. Mm. And like for her to open up to me and she was like, she was like, can I give you a hug? Like, I'm so excited this exists.
And like, yeah, that's incredible. You know?
Like, yeah. It, it's just like been such a beautiful window into humanity and like some of the most intimate parts of humanity. I don't know. It's very special.
Okay. What was the most unexpected financial thing that you encountered?
Probably every founder you talk to will share this, and you even kind of alluded to it earlier, having a team that was too big, but like the number one thing that eats away at your balance sheet is headcount. Mm-hmm. And like they say, hire slow, fire fast. Yeah. And that is just actually great advice. It is. And we have been very careful to be very lean. And that has saved us. Like, we would not have survived. You know, think about like, we pivoted in 2023 and launched our product in 2026.
Yeah, 2 years or so.
Yeah, 2 and a half years of being like heads down in the trenches without a product. And like, for most of that time, the team was 4 people.
Mm. And now how big is the team? 9 people. So yeah, so you've been really conservative about hiring.
Incredibly. And it's because And actually another surprising financial reality is that when you find experts, they are cheaper and work faster.
Yeah, they're worth like 3 or 4 people.
For example, for us, for like the specific types of engineering we needed for this, like optical engineering, we got burned by 2 product development firms that like, I hate them. They, they market to you and they like their biz dev guys sell you on like, oh, like we've got this crack team of like A players and then They end up staffing with like C players who are literally learning how to code on the job.
So they got, they like, it's like a bait and switch. Exactly. And that happened to us twice.
And we were like, okay, like no more of that. We need to go like actually find the engineers themselves who have this explicit specific set of expertise. And we found those people. They worked faster. They got the work done in a week instead of a month. And their rate was lower. Because you're not paying for like a project manager on top of this whole thing and like they're not learning on the job. It was mind-blowing to me that you could work with someone who was 10 times more talented and pay half as much.
So basically you went to hire them directly rather than working through an agency.
Funny enough, we found an agency whose model was more aligned with that. So there are some agencies, because like the typical like agency model is they have people on staff and they need to staff all of those hands, right? They can't have idle hands. And so they— that's why they sell you on the A-team, and then the A-team ends up supervising work, but it's done by the B or the C-team, the junior people. And we found an agency whose whole model is we don't have any employees, we have a network of freelancers, and we will match you with as many freelancers as you want to interview with, and we just take a cut on whoever you end working with. Cool, that's a great model. It's a great model. And like, I wish I knew that existed a year before. Yeah.
What would you say was the slowest decision that you made, or a decision you made too slowly?
Just hired the wrong people, let them sit in the role for too long, drag my feet on it. Like, you know, within— really, you know, within a week if someone is going to work out. Like, yeah, you tell yourself, like, all right, I'm gonna watch how this warms up, and then like it never does. It just never does.
And it always feels better once they're gone, right? It's like the impact is immediate and you feel so dumb for—
It's offensive how much better it feels. And like, that's definitely the biggest mistake is like we had just the wrong people in the wrong chairs. My dad's an entrepreneur and he told me this years ago. He was like, look, like when you set out to build a company, you tell yourself and you tell your investors and you tell your team Like, I am building a world-class team. And when you find yourself in the position of having someone on the team who's not world-class, you have to let them go. Yeah. Because you either let them go or you are a liar.
That's such a good lesson. Okay, so let's play something I call SWOT Sprint. Okay? We're gonna go over all your strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats, which I'm pretty interested in learning about. So what would you say are your biggest strengths right now at Throne?
We have an amazing team. We have a strong brand. We have a product that works. It's super sticky. People love it. Those are the biggest ones. Definitely. It's like the product works. The team is outstanding. We're building a world-class marketing team to match our world-class product team. Cause like, you know, we've had a very small team for this last 2 and a half years, but it was all product and engineering. It was like, but like overpowered and we, just had underinvested marketing because we hadn't, you know, launched yet.
I think one of your biggest strengths is like your silly marketing, like the fact that you called it Throne and like you're such a personable guy and like, I feel like it's just going to be a really funny brand and I feel like you're making something really serious, really lighthearted. And I feel like that's a big strength.
I appreciate that. And that's exactly what I mean by brand is like it's a tightrope walk because on the one hand, yes, this is poop and it's funny and it's, you know, lighthearted and levity and like You can't not have, like, puns in every conversation. Yeah, I mean, it's so easy.
I was— I, like, introduced you to Naveen Jain because I was like, that would be such a great contact for you. And even in the email, I found myself, like, being like, this is a match made in bathroom heaven. Like, it's just so easy.
You can't help yourself. And then on the other hand, to your point, it's serious. And, like, you know, people who have conditions that, like, really impact their gut health, like, their worst days are really bad. And so, like, navigating that with appropriate, like, reference.
Yeah, you don't want to be, like, insensitive. Exactly.
And, like, but that's something that I think our team does really well, in part because, like, so many people on our team are personally affected or know, like, we're all just people.
So next is weakness. What do you feel like are your biggest weaknesses right now?
If you'd asked me 6 weeks ago, I would have told you— maybe 8 weeks ago, I would have told you marketing. Like, that was definitely the biggest thing. Like, we didn't have. Now we have the right people. And so it's going to take probably 2, 3 months to ramp up the full marketing engine and get everyone working, you know, in symphony together. And, you know, we have one person who's going to be shooting the content, another person editing the content, another person posting and distributing the content. Like, that doesn't happen overnight. But, and so right now, I would say that's still our weakness is marketing, but we have momentum and it's so exciting.
I mean, you're building out a podcast studio. I can't wait to find out more about that. Opportunities. What are your biggest opportunities?
Our biggest opportunity is all the stuff that we're already talking about.
Yeah, you got such a big market to kind of tackle. And we—
exactly, we, we just like— how big is the market? Let's talk about like this product, right? Like tracking the basics of gut health. The most motivated people are people with IBS and inflammatory bowel disease. IBS is like 35 to 50 million Americans, depending on who you ask, probably 45 million Americans caps out. IBD is another 3 million Americans. So let's call that like, you know, 45 to 50 million Americans. Uh, and then people with urinary tract conditions is another roughly 50 million Americans. And then like everybody should track hydration and like, yeah, anybody who wears an Oura Ring or a Whoop would benefit from tracking their hydration and their gut health and seeing it. Like I just ran an analysis yesterday, like of the last like 420 days of my gut health and hydration against my Whoop metrics.. And I was able to show that like my gut health is hugely impacted by my stress. Yeah. And you can see that like the days I have stress, I have bad gut health. Same thing, like my hydration and my recovery. I expected my hydration to drive my recovery more, but on the days that I am dehydrated, it really hammers my recovery even more.
It's less of an effect on good days, but a huge detriment on bad days. And there's just so many interesting physiological lessons at the intersection of like sleep and hydration and gut health and stress and gut health and diet. Like the market's really everybody. Yes.
You're like, it's, it's pretty much everyone. Do you know how many toilets are in America? Like, did you do research like at that level? Like what were the things that you researched?
That's a great question. It was, it was more understanding like who has a motivation.
You're like, we think about it more for like GLP-1s too, right? Exactly.
That's a, that's a huge one. Like so many. Can't believe a lot of our investors have told us like, oh, I've tried GLP-1s and like, I am getting wrecked by the digestive side effects. And it's interesting, GLP-1s like will change people's digestive in both constipation and diarrhea. It can like tip you in either direction. Yeah. And so like, I think that's a huge market for us.
So like medication, um, what is that called? Like medication effects, like side effects. Yeah.
And so that, that's a huge opportunity for us. So there's like Everybody has episodes of bad gut health in their life. And at the end of the day, I don't think you should drive, you should like drive your life based on what your wearables are telling you, right? Like that's a common critique of wearables is people say like, oh, you shouldn't live your life based on what your recovery score is or your sleep score was. And I agree, right? Like, but it is nice to have check engine lights on your car that tell you like, hey, this might be worth looking into and just raising things to your awareness that like you wouldn't think about because you couldn't feel it.
Okay, let's move on to threats. Talk to us about the competition.
What is, what is threatening to you? So there are several startup competitors. This is like a very interesting space that's like weirdly heated. And were you like the first one and then people followed? So we came up with this idea all on our own, but once we got into it, we found that there have been several attempts at this, different attempts. Some people have tried to do whole toilets. Some people have had, had tried to do just iPhone apps. And there's a whole universe of like poop tracking phone apps. And the reality is like, that's not gonna ever catch on because people aren't gonna take pictures of their poop with their phone because the user experience is bad. You have to like go and then like take a picture before you wipe and that's like awkward. And so having like, that's what motivated the hardware is like making this truly frictionless and effortless. And so there are a few companies that are trying to do this. Our biggest competitor is Kohler. They're, you know, massive privately.
Yeah, this is one of the most popular toilet brands in the world.
They do. Like a billion year or a billion dollars a year in revenue. They're privately held. They have their own town in Wisconsin named after them. That's their headquarters is Kohler, Wisconsin. And they released a product very similar to ours like a few months before we did and totally caught us off guard. Damn. We knew they'd been working on something like this. They acquired a company out of Israel like years ago, but, you know, went zero dark thirty, didn't hear anything from them. Where we've been very public since basically day one about like, here's what we're doing, here's who we are, here's what we're building, here's the mission. They, they took a very different approach and their product is beautiful, but it's not hands-free. It's not effortless. It has like a 1-week battery life, which means you have to charge it every week. That's a lot of maintenance for your toilet.
Yeah, that's a lot of maintenance. Yours is once every 30 days, right?
That's what we advertise. In practice, we find the average battery life is 56 days. Oh, cool. Which is like 6 charges a year. That's awesome. Yeah. There's, you know, it limits your session to 5 minutes.
So they're just like, you have a better product.
I'm very proud of the product. Branding.
I think that's the key. Like, I think your, your way of going against the big dogs is going to be community. Yes. And branding and personality and mission and your team. Like, that's what I think is going to help you really compete.
We have a lot of personality and that's— yeah. And then there's a bunch of little startups that are trying to do things and like I don't know how real those are, you know, like we, we've seen a bunch of them at the conferences, but you know, I know for fact one of them copied our design of our beta device because it looks identical. We're just like, all right, good luck. But they made it black and we're like, okay, well, you know, and like, you know, we saw them preorder devices from us and we're like, uh, skip. Honestly, I think the biggest threat is not a competitor. It's that we fail to educate this market. Mm-hmm. Like, the only way this really fails is not a competitor comes in and kills us. 'Cause like, right now we're all trying to create this market, right? And I think this is a market that's big enough, the same with like health trackers, right? You've got Apple Watch and Google Fit.
That's so smart. It's like, there's so many watches and like, it's— Exactly.
And like, there's Garmin and Coros. There's so many brands that—
So you're not afraid of having a competing brand. It's like— No. Almost like proof that it's worth it to keep doing. Oh, 100%.
My biggest hope was that Kohler would come out and spend hundreds of millions of dollars educating the market. Mm-hmm. And we would get to ride their coattails.
Oh, that's such a great point. Yeah. If you're listening, please do that.
I, I can help you spend that money. I love it.
Let's go back to money. So this is called How We Profit. I wanna understand what are your biggest costs associated with creating a hardware device for, for health like this? Like what were your biggest cost centers?
People, right? Like headcount. Headcount, number one. And for the first 2.5 years of the company, it was just developing the product. And that's still by far our biggest cost center. As we continue to ramp up our marketing engine, it's going to move into marketing. Okay. And a big part of that is going to be, you know, we're hiring headcount for marketing, but we're also going to be spending more on marketing projects, right? You know, like you mentioned the podcast studio earlier. We're building out our own podcast studio that's going to look not quite as fancy as this, but we're very excited about it. And the whole idea there is like one of our biggest challenges as a company is people see this product when they receive the product and they're like, wow, this feels like something Apple or Microsoft would have made. And like, that is the highest praise possible. But they're surprised because our marketing is not yet at the level of Apple or Microsoft. And the whole level, the whole point of marketing is to set people's expectations. And if your expectation is like, whoa, this is better than I expected, that means our marketing failed.
And so we have to level up and spend more on marketing. So we're redoing the website, redoing all of our email flows. Like literally the last thing I saw in my car before I came out here, I got a text and it was screenshots of our new emails and this like, oh, that's why you spend money on marketing.
You know, it just, it marketing makes everything easier.
It just elevates you in such a real way. And like for something, especially at your price point, right?
Not that it's so expensive, but it's not cheap. So it needs to seem like premium.
Yes. And like I say this all the time, like the consumer is used to buying Apple. Yeah. You know, like if you're buying, if you're spending $400, it better feel like it's worth $400. Yeah. It's got to have some weight to it. Yeah.
So would you tell us how much it costs to make?
Yeah, it costs us about $130 to make.
And then you're selling it for about $400. Yeah.
So it's about a 70% gross margin on the hardware itself. And then we charge a $6 a month membership.
And you're doing annual memberships too?
Yes, I think that's $70 a year or $6 a month. Okay.
What do you think is going to make more money in the long term? Like the hardware device or the subscriptions?
Mm, that is a great— ultimately it's going to be the hardware device for us, right?
Yeah. Because people will buy multiple hardware devices in their house.
Exactly. We'll upgrade, you know, we'll— in the future we'll do upgrades. Like so many people, like I have an Oura Ring on and so many Oura customers get the next Oura Ring just because they love Oura Ring and they want the latest and greatest.
Yeah. That's so true. So it's like you're gonna, it's gonna be like the iPhone. You're gonna get a new one every 3 years or something.
Exactly. And we're gonna add new sensors to this. We'll eventually do like things like, you know, we've talked about adding gas detection. We're gonna do the, you know, one day we'll have multispectral imaging that'll be able to do, you know, blood detection. Like, mm-hmm. You know, those are gonna be real innovations. Yeah. And like, I'm so excited about those.
I love this. I feel like we've had such a great conversation. I'd love to talk about how somebody else Of course I don't want anybody competing with Throne, and I think there's enough competition in the space, but somebody else who has a mission-based company that is like a hardware-based device, how could they copy you? Like, what are the first steps that they should take?
The first thing you should do is just reach out to me. I'm Scott at thronescience.com, and I'm happy to hear about your idea and help you however I can. I think the first step you should take is make a prototype. Our first prototype was a Raspberry Pi, which is like a cheap $40 hobbyist computer. Okay. In a Tupperware jar, like a little bucket that we would tape on top of people's toilets. It had one button on it and it was record, and you would have to push it again to turn it off. And there's a little light that blinked when it was on. And we put that— we plugged a little webcam, like with a 3D-printed enclosure, so we could like— who made it?
Us. You and your co-founder?
Me and my co-founder Tim.
That had to have influence from your dad, who was like a medical device inventor. Like, do you— like, I feel like that's not normal to like want to actually create the prototype yourself.
I mean, so I knew the process from my dad. I've watched him, you know, be a medical device inventor since I was like, you know, that tall. Yeah. But we just had this deep intuitive sense of like, we have to see this work. We have to actually understand like how people interact with this product. Even if it's an inferior version of the product. Like, you know, fun fact, the first time I pitched that this would be hands-free was on an investor call, and Tim pulled me aside afterwards. He was like, what do you mean it's going to be hands-free? Like, we've never talked about that before. And I was like, oh, well, I'm pretty sure we can make it hands-free with like these types of sensors and you can do Bluetooth. He was like, no. And of course it's hands-free now.
So build a prototype. Build a prototype. And in the healthcare space, like, what kind of things should they validate first? Like, how can they determine whether it's like something to actually go after? Like you, you decided that this was a new category you're gonna invent. If somebody has some other healthcare device, like what were some of the considerations that you had before you actually went full steam ahead?
So we did 3 things that were really helpful. Number 1 is we ran Meta ads at like a landing page just to understand like, could people sign up for an email list around this concept? Mm-hmm. And this was back in 2023 when like landing pages you would make on Wix or Squarespace. It wasn't like you couldn't vibe code a beautiful landing page. Yeah. Like it would be a very different experience now. So you could do this in like 2 hours now. So go throw up a landing page, point some meta ads at it, and just see if people will sign up for like less than $5 an email. Mm-hmm. The next thing you do is every single time somebody email or signs up for email, send them an email that says, hey, I'm blah, blah, blah, and here's, You know, the product we're building. Why did you sign up for this? Like open-ended question.
What, what are you hoping to get out of this feedback?
Yeah, exactly. And then how engage in those conversations. And we have like hundreds of those. And that was like, I called it our wall of love because like we heard from so many people, all these different use cases that I was like, oh wow, like this is actually something the world wants. And that was a huge piece of it. And then the last piece is build the prototype and put it in people's hands and see how they interact with it.
Yeah. Is your ultimate goal to sell this company?
No, my, I want to run this company for the next 20 years of my life. Like, I want, my mission is to save a million lives personally. And the math on that is basically saving 50,000 lives a year over the course of 20 years adds up to a million lives. And I think if we scale this to the scale that it belongs, like globally, like you can't do that in the United States alone, right? Like 50,000 lives a year would be every single one with colon cancer and like roughly 100,000 year lives a year when you include other cancers of the lower GI and urinary tract. But like, let's say we start saving lives in like 5 years, right? We get through FDA. We're like in a place where we can actually mark this as a life-saving device. Then we go global. Yeah. And like 900,000 deaths a year globally. And like, you know, that'll probably be closer to a million by the time we're at that point. And let's say we can save, you know, 10% of those. Like that adds up fast. And so, yeah, I, I think if I do my job right, I will get to be doing this for the next 15, 20, 30 years of my life.
I hit that number and like, then you're good.
Yeah. I love that. What advice do you have to, for founders out there or wannabe founders who have a big idea? They might be creating a category, but you know, they're gearing up to actually start their journey. What is your best advice for them?
So the best advice I have for other founders came from a different founder, and he told me entrepreneurship is an exercise in spiritual growth masquerading as a money-making opportunity. And I think about that at least every week, most days, just because there are really hard days and there are like strings of really hard days. And companies don't die because of competition. They don't die. Because of co-founder disputes. They die because you gave up on the company. Like, you can run out of money and find ways to make the company work again. And the only reason you gave up on the company is because you're spiritually, you're not there anymore. And like, when you're in a hole for 2 and a half years building a product, like, it's really easy to have a bad day or two. And I learned somewhere in that time that the most important thing for the health of the company was for me to maintain my own health, both mentally, physically, because if I'm not healthy, then I will not show up and bring my A-game to company building and being a leader. And when I show up and I'm healthy, happy, have good energy, positive, stoked about what we're doing, everything else follows.
I love it. Scott, before we go, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
So we are at thronescience.com. We're @thronescience on Instagram, Twitter, every social media channel. And then I'm personally @ScottHickle. It's pickle, but with an H, so H-I-C-K-L-E everywhere that you would find people on social media.
Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. Oh, thank you. Well, YAP fam, that's how Scott Hickle and Throne profit. And I just love this series because it opens up so many real life lessons hidden inside every business story. I learn so much every episode. And today Scott showed us that some of the biggest opportunities come from problems most people overlook, avoid, or feel too uncomfortable to talk about. What started as a joke between friends on a poker night became a mission-driven company helping people better understand their health through a behavior we all share every day. Throne is quite literally saving lives with every flush. Thanks for listening to How We Profit Wednesdays, the Young and Profiting series where real entrepreneurs share real numbers, real margins, and the real story of how their businesses actually work. I'm Hawa Taha, and I'll see you next time.
Scott Hickle built Throne Science around a startup idea most investors thought was too unconventional: a device that transforms your toilet into a health tracker, monitoring your health as effortlessly as a smartwatch. After nearly 100 investor rejections, he and his team kept refining the product, driven by a mission to detect early signs of diseases like colorectal cancer before symptoms appear. That persistence helped them raise $4 million in seed funding. In this episode, Scott shares how entrepreneurs can validate unconventional products, raise capital despite rejection, and build demand in a market consumers don't yet understand.
In this episode, Hala and Scott will discuss:
(00:00) Introduction
(01:27) How Throne’s Smart Toilet Device Works
(07:56) Throne’s Mission to Detect Cancer Early
(17:22) Launching Throne in a New Product Category
(23:55) Pivoting Away From a Failed Nurse-Staffing Startup
(32:27) How Scott Raised Millions After Pivoting
(42:35) Marketing a Product Customers Don’t Understand Yet
(49:46) Lessons From Scott’s Costliest Business Mistakes
(1:00:03) Throne Science’s SWOT Analysis
(1:08:37) Smart Toilet Costs, Pricing, and Margins
(1:13:14) Building a Mission-Driven Hardware Startup
Scott Hickle is the co-founder and CEO of Throne Science, a health technology company building a device that attaches to a toilet and tracks gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and prostate health. Before Throne, Scott and his co-founder, Tim, built a nurse-staffing marketplace called Pineway before pivoting into consumer health hardware. Throne’s long-term mission is to develop technology that can help detect early signs of colon cancer, bladder cancer, and other cancers of the lower gastrointestinal and urinary tracts.
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