Speaker 1 (00:00.046)
If there's anything I've learned for last four years, it's just like, expect nothing. know, like this whole thing. CNN and Shark Tank and this is like beyond my wildest dreams. Like, let me just say, so grateful for those crazy opportunities. A long-term vision is become the nest for gardening and houseplants. Become basically this company that merges IoT and everything we've done with the merging of hardware and software to make it as easy and fun as possible for people to become plant parents.

Speaker 2 (00:35.0)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

And everybody, welcome back to the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, De'Andre Hericus, with my co-host, Grant Chapman. And we're super excited that we have a guest with Abesh Dey from Flora. And he starts off as a plant serial killer. So that's how I'm gonna intro him. Abesh, super good to have you on the show.

Hey everybody.

Speaker 1 (00:55.278)
Thank you. It's really good to be here. Recovering Serial Plant Killers is the official title nowadays. If there's something I have to show for flora, it's at least that, you know, I'm trying my best to kind of recover. And so that is literally how it started four years ago. I was a serial plant killer killing every single plant in my line of sight. And I feel like tens of millions of Americans will resonate deeply with that feeling. It was my dear mother's

prized rose switch plant that she had for years that she ended up gifting me and I killed that thing in like under two weeks. So basically a little bit over a week. Record time, Record disappointment on my Indian mother's face. And so that kind of spurred me into thinking like, okay, what can I do to solve this problem for myself, right? I think there's dozens of planker apps and guides and websites and different things I can buy and all this. And it just felt.

Frustrating, fragmented, you I was looking for something as a geek at heart, something kind of like an IoT product, like a Nest for Plants, that I could just plug and play, you know, get real-time physical feedback. And the more I looked, the more disappointment I found in finding the same kind of copied and pasted dropship products across Amazon, Walmart, online. I was really, really surprised to find that there wasn't something like a Nest for Plants that had really broken through yet.

that kind of started the entrepreneurial fire of there's something here. There's gotta be something here because I'm not the only one that's killing plants. Even people that have green thumbs still have the issue of killing different plant species.

I murder plenty of plants in my garden my wife and I are experts at murdering things and not knowing how or why so you

Speaker 1 (02:39.352)
You mentioned, okay, gardening is a great example where it's, you know, the more you get into it, I feel like there's a direct correlation of getting more into house plants and gardening and the number of plants you killed, period. think the more you get into it, the more you kill.

Your percentage of plants killed may go down more than survive, but the total number of plants killed just goes to the moon.

down

Speaker 1 (03:02.112)
It's an absolute, absolute increase. so that was what I was trying to solve for myself. And the real moment was when I realized I was getting into DIY hardware, so Arduino kits and, you know, little robotics projects and sensor boards. And I ended up basically taking time out of COVID while working at Microsoft to create this prototype that would basically light up blue or green depending on the plant's mood and moisture. So I realized that was kind of the starting point.

And then I added to it, eventually added like a little water tank and reservoir that would automatically water the plant, you know, while I was away. And I realized that there was a lot of fun. One, wasn't having a ton of fun with this, right? This is one of those things where I was like, I'm not treating it as a business. I'm treating this as if I can solve this myself and my wife, Anna, and then maybe my mom, and then maybe a few other folks. Maybe this could lead to something, you know? And it wasn't until I actually developed the beta version of the app where I realized, okay, there's

there's something real here. I realized that there was a strong, we were actually talking about this before, right? The disconnect between hardware and software is a very real thing, right? You could have the world's best hardware in the sense of, you know, it looks sleek, it functions out of the box, but there is a certain type of disconnect and certain disappointment in, you know, when you realize you try to connect something that's like an IoT product.

and the first step out of the box, like the wifi doesn't work or the Bluetooth doesn't work or the UX UI is horrendous and like the app doesn't make any sense and so.

And you can't find that one setting that you care about even though it's not obvious that that's a feature of the device. But you knew it's there, you just can't find it. How do I change this timer? How do I change that alert setting? That whole UX, everyone's opinion of a product is the weakest link in the chain that they've experienced in that product every time. This product is great because the worst part about it is it's still great. Or, mean this product sucks. X, Y, and Z are excellent except I can't stand their blank.

Speaker 1 (04:45.422)
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (05:03.662)
Exactly. And that product-centric approach, coming at it from the pain point versus wouldn't this be cool, is sort of what got me into this in the first place. I realized that it was such a frustrating experience having all of these different sensors that I was trying to use, and all of these apps were just garbage. And that's why I think the next step for us was solving that hardware software disconnect in kind of following the Apple methodology.

great hardware is married closely to great software and UX and UI, right? And so that's why I basically, developed the Flora app from scratch and it was a Swift native and I wanted it to be as gamified and easy to use as possible. That was the goal is that I don't want to treat this as a business just yet, but if I do, I want it to be the case that we figure out the app first and then the hardware is kind of.

this nice kind of cherry on top, even though that's really the crux of how we got onto Shark Tank and to all these amazing things. Like I knew that the app had to be the heartbeat of the entire ecosystem and it had to have a strong heart to do so, right? And so that's what we focused on from the start. And I think that really has been one of our strongest differentiators now against all the other competition is that we have such a great app and user experience that go along with it.

that makes the standout for the crowd and honestly makes all the hardware stuff so much easier because we can at least rest easy knowing that all right we did a good job on the software on the UX UI it just makes everything kind of fall into line a little bit more easily.

A question I have for you, Abesh, is more practical. As you were making that decision with aligning the software with the hardware and that decision matrix around what actually made it user-centric, what was your process there in terms of like, because I think it's one thing to make a product user-centric purely on the software side. But you also had this hardware component as well. And how did you marry those two together?

Speaker 1 (07:04.75)
The hardware took a while. That's the big thing that I think, you know, lot of, I tell a lot of hardware founders or hardware founders to be, the iteration cycle for software is literally me being pissed off about like a feature coding and like losing myself in a rabbit hole until like 3 a.m. looking at Xcode logs and then the next morning there's a release, right? With hardware, it's, if you mess this up,

three, four months will fly by and suddenly you've wasted tens of thousands of dollars and you're looking at something that could have been totally different in terms of a path, in terms of just the cascading ripple effect of losing that time. So an iteration cycle in hardware is so, so much longer. So you have to get the product experience right in terms of putting kind of feedback into the loop as much as possible, right? With software,

It was easy. It came naturally in the sense of, I'm developing this app for myself. I'm testing it ruthlessly so that there is a very strict kind of filter of like, hey, if I'm not using this, there's no way I expect anyone else to. Right. So it has to kind of go through my screening of standards. And that I think is really what helped us early on was that I was so close to the product and so close to feeling the customer's pain points. In that case, it wasn't just like.

me outsourcing things to like another agency, to another product manager, to another person. It was pretty much me seeing feedback come in saying, hey, this doesn't work, hey, this is crashing. And me realizing, whoa, I don't want that experience, right? With hardware, it was the opposite. It was what I mentioned in working with an agency and working with third parties and working with multiple third parties working together and creating those systems and processes.

to essentially and hopefully reduce the amount of risk and reduce the time it took to kind of iterate on the product. So software, we kind of figured out pretty easily because we are very close to the feedback loop and I was very close to feedback.

Speaker 2 (09:06.094)
And you're the developer originally, so you're a software native, right? Right. You're the detective, the victim, and the judge all at the same time. Exactly. You experienced a bug crash, you got murdered. You're the one who actually murdered it because you were on the road to code. You were the code that the bug crash. you're the judge that had to go investigate and find out what happened. Exactly. So it's this whole thing wrapped into one that I love that pitch. And where you jumped into hardware, you are...

the secondary or your third party. know what you want it to do, you think, but you're relying on another party to translate your English to English translation into hardware version of that description and then make that a reality and translate that language into Atoms. Unfortunately, on like compiling code, which you can do at 3 a.m. and by 6 a.m. push it out to all your users, man, making Atoms even the first version to try those new changes isn't always overnight.

Even now modern circuit board manufacturing we can get boards in like 48 hours here at glassboard absolutely bonkers if you want to hit the accelerator button But those are still days not minutes or hours. Yeah, right And that's when you want to bring those changes to market. It's weeks not days

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (10:13.972)
exactly it like one one example a great example came from a recent batch in exactly that where you know we could easily spin up like a prototype of like a working change to like our plastics or working change to something we take around battery exactly like a USB cap or whatever and we might have something within a week to then say okay we have a strong feeling about moving forward with this but then you're talking about okay how do you apply that to

or with.

Speaker 1 (10:41.528)
actual production tooling and the changes to the tooling and then how do you apply that to quality assurance and quality check to where your thresholds and your actual experience is gonna change dramatically when you scale that to 100 units, 1,000 units, 2,000 units, right? And a good example of that was when our production line recently encountered just an issue out of nowhere of, shoot, it looks like this fractional one millimeter change in the tooling.

resulted in the USB cap not properly closing for hundreds of units, right? Or I think it was a fraction like our QA guys like caught it, know, pre-production, mid-production and all that. And we were able to fix it with like an in...

But you had to scrap 10 or 20 percent scrap, right, versus one or two.

We definitely had scrap and we were able to catch it early, but that is a great example of, there's no way we could have even anticipated that, despite you have certain risks and certain factors of like, we should anticipate there might be some stuff that goes wrong here because we've kind of faced that before. But I think with production, so much of it is just like planning, planning, planning, despite knowing that you're gonna get punched in the face, right?

We always joke that in in hard tech no plans rise first contact Yeah, right right good plans help you avoid a lot of other problems You would have ran into but it is just something always comes up in the Adams world You can't just compile around overnight I think that's you know I'd love to dig into this topic that you guys you you've played this game before right you you've now done it probably less good the first time really decent now and great here in the future of your quality control in your process and

Speaker 2 (12:25.806)
learning how to translate a learning in the product into a design change, into a prototype, into I verified that I actually want to do this, into a tooling change, into a verifying that the production part now meets your needs, into how do we catch the quality bugs that we've now introduced. Because every time you change something, you just get different bugs. never squash all the quality bugs. Quality is there to catch the percent that fall out of bounds that you want to sell, and you throw them away.

Speaker 2 (12:55.662)
You don't know whenever it hits that, but let's pretend that you can hit that. You accept half percent, and when you start getting into that, you know, high single digit or low double digit percentage of scrap, now we have to fix this problem. And, you know, there's this continuum. At what point did you feel like you were completely driving blind here, and at what point do you finally feel like, no, no, I'm holding the steering wheel. This feels good.

Right

Speaker 1 (13:17.422)
That's a great question. I think the first time we were flying blind was probably the first prototype we had that like just when I tell the story it still feels like I need to like figure out more detailed around it because it basically was our prototype getting confiscated by the federales in Mexico and like now in our latest batch I feel like we're finally steering kind of in control right and that's a whole different story and having to deal with

Alternative supply chains and working with our suppliers to all the tariffs fiasco like I think flying through this storm that was tariffs Made me feel the most confident ever before in our supply chain despite our supply chain being at most risk in terms of right Exactly, I think I'd be freaking out two three years ago and you know when we were kind of in the midst of these first runs in our journey so the the prototyping of our first official floor pod so

the most upside down it's ever been.

Speaker 1 (14:14.858)
We had 3D printed, we were working with this really great startup agency IDW out of Marieta, Mexico. And we chose them because they were willing to be flexible on payments, on pricing. I was still paying everything out of pocket at that point. Funding everything out of my 401k, out of my savings, like all that. We were still kind of striving for investment. This prototype was a big deal because this was our chance to actually show investors like,

Look, we know this thing is big and ugly, like the shows that like we've made progress and that we're so close to actually that next stage where you're getting to design for manufacturing, getting to a point where you can actually lock into design and come up with producing units at the other end, right? Well, lo and behold, I get a call like late night, one night from Maurizio, our head guy, or had, you know, prototyping guy. Yeah, yeah, we've been waiting weeks at this point for this big.

Yeah, your contact,

Speaker 1 (15:08.878)
beautiful prototype in a sense of like a Trump prototype if you will in the sense of waiting for it and building this and spending all this time and money on it and he sits me down he goes Hey, we're we're dealing with some customs issues. You might want to sit down for this I was like, okay, we this was a risk factor like, you know, I'm not familiar with like, you know Mexican agent but customs and

It's delay it by you know 72 right that's exactly hours no big deal

Yeah, I'm like, is this a weak delay? Is this like this? And he's like, no, this is an existential risk. Like we might lose the prototype overall. I'm like, hold up. What? And goes, it's not just at the hands of a customer being held, like the federales are holding it. I'm like, why would the federal, like the FBI of Mexico be holding like our prototype? And he's like, well, I know how to say this, but your package was basically intercepted as part of like a drug cartel pickup. Like it was,

It had resume on it with actual cocaine powder from another box that was in the same container. Yeah, so our box was seized as part of questioning because of this container that was held there. And so I freaked out. was like, that's one of those moments where it's like, you can problem solve to an extent. But this was completely out of my hands. I was like, I don't know.

next to it in the FedEx truck or whatever

Speaker 1 (16:31.704)
the layout or the conversations or the end end process of navigating with like a customs plus federales agent. And luckily our guy Maurizio was able to kind of navigate through that. He was calling like the customs agent and customs people almost every single day to kind of figure out what was happening. It did lead to essentially what was, I believe almost a three week delay, but we kind of, I kind of accepted that we just lost the prototype at that point, which was such a bummer because it was like,

you we'd spent all this time and granted I knew we were going to kind of move past it. You know, we were already kind of looking at the next prototype and how we could, you know, already make it better. losing that was such a momentum and motivation killer, you know, on the spot and no one prepares you for, know, by the way, there's a potential that it's a cartel package like, right. So

Yeah, well and the thing is like you can't insure for this right you can't tell UPS this prototype is actually a $30,000 prototype for the timeline delay and the labor it might take me to go rebuild this one off that was hand painted, hand built, it's one of one, gotta spool up all the vendors again like UPS is never gonna buy that. No we crushed a box of plastic and then circuit board in it like here's your two grand if it's really that special but that's not what it's worth to the company.

That really should have been taken into account in your due diligence tech.

analysis.

Speaker 1 (18:00.527)
We keep losing investors that don't want to mess with the cartel.

That's

Totally fair. guess on the topic of investors, you already mentioned this. You've been on Shark Tank. feel like for a lot of folks out there, not particularly in the hardware space, think hardware is actually pretty well-spotlighted on the show. Almost. That's right. it's kind of counterintuitive. I think it's almost counterintuitive to the market at large. But nonetheless, you actually went through the process. You were on there. Your show has been aired, I think, now a couple of different times. I would love to just dive into that experience that you had going through that process, both

disproportionately to software.

Speaker 3 (18:35.522)
the application and I understand there's a long process in addition to actually going in front of the shark saying go through the whole process.

It was a dream come true moment. think it's disproportionate because of the fact that it's just easier to showcase and show and tell hardware products period, right? You're trying to show a product that you brought to life. And honestly, I'm all about that. think more hardware products and CBG products should be kind of, you know, the highlight of the show. think

Honestly, there could be less food type products. I feel like that has definitely been a focus over the last couple of seasons, the last couple of years. I love when I'm seeing other kind of tech, especially IOT products that make it to the tank. It feels like those are far and few in between depending on their stage. And so when I made it on, like they were telling me like, hey, like we really like your product because I think I met the check boxes they were looking for in hardware product, IOT,

And gardening was still one of those industries and categories that hadn't seen a lot of love in Shark Tank, I feel, in terms of just like people coming on.

But it is something that done by a lot of the viewers. That is actually the Americana hobby that they were trying

Speaker 1 (19:47.63)
Exactly. so there was a lot of potential there, which is why I feel our video applications and all that really stood out. We were reached out to through a referral, got in contact after submitting, you know, the classic Shark Tank application. the initial one was pretty straightforward. And then there's like a 30 plus page application with like two video applications. And we spent so much time on it and eventually made it through. I think our season had to put it in the context of like

how much people kind of apply. 60 plus thousand businesses apply to Shark Tank season 14. That's crazy. Or season 15, sorry, the one I was on. And so it's really one of those cases where you just have to treat it as like a lottery ticket. That's not guaranteed. Even after you go on, which is the craziest thing, we did all this preparation, spent all this time and money, right, on things like the props, the set work, like all of the time and energy that it went into.

kind of perfecting the pitch and all that good stuff. And even up to the weekend, what I can share is that they basically, you have a producing team and all this, and they share that you're not guaranteed anything even after you go on and have a great pitch. So of like the 100 plus folks that actually go out and fly out to LA, Sony, television, studio lots where once I flew out, it felt like a kid in a candy shop.

I was in a little gold card, all these other kind of giant movie studio lots with Spider-Man movement, filming in one lot here. You have the boys from Amazon Prime filming in this lot. it was definitely a Hollywood moment. But despite that, you're still kind of left with this question of, man, there's like a 30 % chance still, even if I have a good pitch, that my stuff never makes it to the screen.

on air.

Speaker 1 (21:38.638)
It is very much and I tell everyone that applies to Shark Tank this advice like treated as a lottery ticket and a way to own in on your business and in the sense of storytelling, right? Like treated as a big, big kind of massive investment opportunity that may or may not play out, but do not treat it as your end all be all of like this. This is the only thing that's going to work for the business or this is the Hail Mary pass like one out of 60,000 is like you're essentially looking at.

lower chances, 10x lower chances than like a Harvard or Stanford in terms of getting in, right? So, and I'm not saying that to like, to our own horror, like it was truly when we were going through it, we were like, just anxiously kind of waiting for them to say like, sorry, you're thinking there, sorry, you didn't make it. And I had that feeling, that same anxiety, two weeks before our airing until we finally got the official email.

you know, from the executives and from the folks saying, hey, congrats, you're gonna be hearing, here's your info. So it's very much a kind of mysterious process in the way the production and everything kind of goes,

I mean what's amazing is I would have never said this until I heard this journey you went on this is an accelerator It may or may not turn out good for you, but it makes you polish your pitch It makes you get ready it makes you do this stuff Yeah, you know you may or may not actually get the investment the accelerator, but like it is a forcing function Yeah, that's hilarious. I would never view truck tank like that until I heard that journey Yeah, of like because the journey would have been worth it even had you not gotten aired

because now you've had to level up your marketing, your pitch, your et cetera, and you had all this content you could use everywhere else. That's so neat.

Speaker 3 (23:20.426)
And so what was like the byproduct of the season be like you officially being on shark tank? Yeah, mean, you know, I'd imagine.

Are you famous now?

Speaker 1 (23:31.79)
I'm like an F-list celebrity, if that's like the terror structure. I've definitely had a lot of cool moments with, I think specifically Nashville. There's been a lot of cool moments with people coming up to me in person with my local communities and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, the Nashville Chamber of Commerce, or some of these different outlets where I show up of people coming up and saying how excited they are to see me on the big TV and seeking my advice and this and that.

You know, I've showed up in a couple of different like new spots before and interviews. And so it's definitely leveled up like our media and PR in that respect. It is it is one of those things again, where it's a lottery for a reason. We won big time in the sense of being on air and having a good show. And because of that, we've we've earned this ability to kind of mention, you know, as seen on Shark Tank, as featured on Shark Tank, people see us as kind of like a Shark Tank company now. And so all of that.

was definitely game changing for us. We basically doubled in revenue year over year last year. We didn't really kind of skyrocket like a lot of people see after Shark Tank. And I think a big kind of misperception around that is that the people that really take off from Shark Tank, especially with their airings, they're typically the ones that have massive marketing budgets to essentially ride out the wave that comes from the organic lift that Shark Tank, right? What I mean by that is that we didn't have that budget.

We didn't have the big marketing budgets. didn't have, we barely got in the funding we needed to fund the inventory for the demand that Shark Tank gave us. And even then we were like two to three months late because we only had a two week notice before our airing. So all of our money went into inventory. We didn't really have the marketing budget to really ride out that wave that you get. And what I mean by riding out that wave is that there is a bit of science of marketing that goes behind, okay, we know we're airing.

We know we're gonna get like this big demand spike for 48 to 72 hours. The people that have the marketing budgets in place immediately hit the ground running and capturing all of that top of funnel traffic through a mix of paid advertising, UGC influencer ads, being able to remarket those visitors within a month and then doubling down on as much Shark Tank based marketing content as they can. We're starting to do that. We're finally playing catch up and organically pushing those budgets.

Speaker 1 (25:57.838)
But whenever I see people like saying, oh, these guys blew up like two millions of dollars in sales with this. And it's like, oh man, they already had a ton of sales before they had a ton of fundraising. You know, for a fact, they're like pumping all the market. Exactly. Exactly. They have a lot of dry powder and fuel to kind of pour into to ride that wave. And so we had a bit of that, but it's it's not like that crazy wave that we were hoping for, like, you know, that was kind of promised to us.

I'm getting on dry powder.

Speaker 1 (26:27.702)
or we kind of expected in seeing a lot of these different short tank success stories, right? You kind of have to make your own momentum even after short tank to really make use of it.

Right, well that's just the heart for me of how competitive the world of sales and business are in general. like Deandre, this goes to where you and I join forces to figure this out for Glass Board and for our partners. You can build the best product, but if you don't have the sales and marketing and the go-to-market motions and your ICP nailed down of where you're to find them and how you're going get them to learn about your cool thing, whether it's a service or a product or a digital product,

You don't have anything. You can be a team full of brilliant engineers. If you can't sell in market, it doesn't work. And selling market isn't just luck, isn't just skill, isn't just money. It is all three of those that kind of go into a blender together.

Oh, sure. totally. think that when it comes to go to market, especially for, I think you do have a very unique angle though. You focus so much on, because I think you guys are up to 250,000 plus users on the mobile application or more than that.

it crossed half a million downloads, at least 350,000 registered users at this point. Yeah, yeah, it's the way we've set it up is to make it usable as many people as possible, so you don't need the device to actually use the app. The app is free to use even without the subscription and all that. So it makes it so that anyone can jump on the app, coming into the heartbeat, as I mentioned, coming into the ecosystem. And then the hardware just becomes like,

Speaker 1 (28:05.794)
the sticky kind of intro to the ecosystem as well, but it really levels up anyone. It's the sticky hook.

I think that, know, we look at we have conversations with hardware founders frequently as you could imagine. Yeah, you wouldn't imagine. This is the Hard Tech Podcast. It's like literally what we do. And I think about the best practices when it comes to scaling a hard hardware company, specifically that also has like the connected piece. And I'll tell Hard Tech business and the community, you've got it. The actual product, you've got it.

And then I think they also go to market in addition to that with going on Shark Tank. A lot of people try to get there. But it seems to me, especially with that massive audience in terms of you basically have curated that go-to-market. You've built your own channel of these really interested and attentive users that then can then go buy your product, which then makes it even more sticky. think that just for founders out there listening and investors as well, just in terms of best practices, it's

what you've done with Flora has, in my opinion, best practices. And I think that people should really look at that.

Yeah, I think and in a bit to dig into that like you were going on earlier about how that UX UI in the app is Your brand ambassador right like that is how you want people to experience floor the first time yeah, and the hardware has to follow that it's a tough act to follow yeah and Are are you seeing that like the the software is the world's best loss leader? It's free to push out, but it's effectively a loss leader for you guys, right?

Speaker 2 (29:41.542)
And that gets people excited about your brand what you offer and the hardware and hard tech is that sticky hook? Yeah, because it allows them to touch the physical world not just experience it digitally exactly

No, it's beautifully put. love the flip because typically what you hear is the hardware is the loss leader, right? And I hate that because it's so funny. One of our best investors early on, Brack and Darrell, he was the CEO of Logitech and now is the CEO of Vans Group. So he's overseeing like Vans, Timbaland, North Face, like all these incredible brand builder. He used to work on Gillette and back in the day he's like he oversaw all of Gillette like as part of P &G.

And so I brought up like the loss leader of hardware for him in the sense of like, you hear that a lot in terms of strategy to the hardware and software of kind of best practices is what Peloton is doing and pushing this hardware. They're losing a lot of money upfront on it, but they're making it up in the subscriptions and the app and the ecosystem. Same thing with like, or a ring at first and these guys and that. And he left and he was like, you know, if there's one thing I could change is like people's perception on the loss leader because

we still made money on every single handle sold. Sure, there were the razor blades, but people are spinning this loss-sitter aspect in terms of hardware where it's like, if you're unable to figure out the margins and the first order, first profit order basis of hardware, you're gonna have a much harder time trying to figure out the rest of the equation with the software or the upsells or any of that. And so I say that because I think I had to flip exactly like what you're talking about, the...

the ideology of like, what is gonna be our loss leader in that case, right? Because we basically were like, okay, we gotta make money on the hardware. It's a sticky hook, but what if the app is kind of the game?

Speaker 2 (31:29.582)
Right is the loss later exactly it's a free one right cost you zero dollars a brother almost your dollars is is download

We're asking for attention and time. And when we provide value to offset that attention and time, people start getting hooked. They start realizing like, hey, I can trust this app, this Flora thing that I'm sharing with others, or they might not be ready to kind of jump into the hardware, ready to pay a subscription just yet. But that is the long game, right? It is much harder to kind of convince people to an app over a couple of days than it is like the other way around. And so we chose that hard path of

let's make the software free, let's get people out of the door to the software and the community building and the gamification, and then let's see if the hardware acts as an accelerator. And that was a multi-year bet that is finally starting to see dividends and starting to pay off. And it is now a really solid hardware moat, right? As you see, one thing that I've been, I'm a huge AI nerd, like I've been kind of plugged into all,

You know, the AI ecosystem updates even before GPT, like early on, I was the one that came up with Flora's machine learning base, like, neural net with identifying, you house plants and data labeling, tens of thousands of different house plant species so we could have our own kind of custom neural net in identifying different plant species. The one thing I can tell you, you know, with AI is that it's making it easy for anyone to spin up a Planker app and then push it out in a matter of 48 hours, right?

The barriers to entry in terms of software and making really good apps is going down.

Speaker 2 (33:08.726)
It is so rapidly.

Yeah. No, sorry to interrupt you. The one thing I was going to add is another prime example of a company that is like, so Aura Frames, for example. Right. I think they said about either is it 50 or 80 percent? I think it might be 50. Huge percent of their sales comes from repeat buyers, but it's not the same client. It's because these Aura Frames, if you've ever seen one, it knew about $100 million.

It's a huge run of the market.

Speaker 2 (33:35.362)
There are digital photo frames for those listening.

Digital photo frames, yeah. And basically what it is, they have mobile application, which is like their heart. you have, know, grandma has the picture frame owner.

I get grandma the picture frame, but you get the apps. You can upload photos to your frame, but you never bought a photo frame.

I a photo frame and guess who ends up buying a photo frame? I do, why? Because I'm on the app. That makes a lot of sense. So that's kind what we're speaking to there. It's like you have opportunities that you've built that software mode to sort of move about and try different strategies with that user base to kind of create either those reoccurring buyers or what have you. I think it's just really unique there.

Well, I think the really neat part about what you did is you called the curve on the machine learning part of teaching me how to not kill my plants, right? And now that's table stakes. But you used you being ahead of the curve initially to survive the hardware mode of death. And now you have hardware. if anyone's ever bought a piece of your hardware, it is they're not going to leave your ecosystem.

Speaker 1 (34:35.15)
No, that's exactly it. I think and that was a tricky dance to figure out right because It's so hard doing hardware for a reason. It's it's why it's in the name It's why even like it's one of those things where even if you have a ton of capital You can screw it up and it goes back to that conversation we had of like all those long iterations all those unknown risks all those things of trying to control and figure out you know how you can minimize like getting punched in the face and

I think what we found is that the reason you don't have a blossoming field of these plant sensors coming out from the likes of giants like Scott's Miracle Grow or Apple or Google or these guys is that creating a great hardware product that is brand defining and actually lives up to its potential, it just takes a long time of iteration, no matter even if you're throwing millions of dollars into it, right? And I think...

It was that big bet that we had to make in the sense of, you know, do we want to go down this route because it's capital intensive? And the answer to that was yes. And the only reason we were able to survive through that hurdle of death, that value death for so many hardware startups is because of our app. It's because we were able to survive on our community, our subscriptions, you know, what we built around, you know, a model that can sustain itself even without the hardware.

But the beauty of thinking across, know, seeing that curve kind of come up ahead is that now that that software curve has been completely flattened or is flattened, already ready with the hardware, we've done kind of the hard struggles with hardware in terms of iterations and learning and hard lessons fought and learned that we feel so confident even with our competition of being able to step up with a fraction of the capital, right? That's one of the things is that

played out yeah weird world

Speaker 1 (36:27.458)
We've been so bootstrapped through this journey that, you know, I actually like when people start out, I tell them that hardware is brutal if you don't have the capital to kind of withstand the shocks and the craziness along the way. And so I think what we did was very unorthodox, very like it is next to impossible to bootstrap a hardware startup or business. I do not recommend it for anyone starting out.

And there were a lot of things that we got lucky with. know, Shark Tank being one of them. Obviously there's effort and applied luck and things you can do to make that process easier. But it was definitely one of those cases where we survived and now it's helping us survive. You know, now the software kind of flattening and the software reckoning that's happening now. So it's something come full circle in both ways through the journey.

It's unpacking this theme that I've been internalizing during this talk that everything you've done is so intentional. think distill down what you've done well from the story you've told here and when you and I talked earlier. You started out building a hardware product as a toy, not a product, building a hardware hobby Arduino kit as a toy, because you wanted to solve your own problem. That snowballed out of control. Now I'm building an app.

And I know how to do that. I know software. I know how to develop software and software products. I'm going do this right. I'm going be intentional about this thing. It's going to look good. It's going to feel good. It's going to work good. And that probably bled into how you developed your hardware with the partners you joined. You might have been Bambi in the field, not knowing how hardware happens, but you were very intentional about what you wanted the expectations of the outcome, like just drilling that down. And with us in Glassboard or in anything else that we're working on hardware,

that makes it so much less likely to go completely off the rails. If you have conviction and intentions about what you want to build and the quality you want to hold and what you're willing to bend on and what you're not, man, it makes the engineers behind you so their job's easy. We might still have to iterate, have to fumble and drive by Braille to find what you really like, but at least you're very clear on intentions on what it has to do and what your users need it to do. And you have a design language and a quality in your app

Speaker 2 (38:41.078)
And that had to drive you to where you're at today. And I would put money that in your next hardware iterations in the future, they happen on more on the Rails timelines. Or they are way more bigger reaches. You've now learned how to play this dance, because you were an expert of this in software. Now you're getting to be an expert of this in hard tech. And that intentionality is going to drive you to such good outcomes. I think that's why you have users in your app. Everything feels like it's there for a purpose.

It's really well said and I really appreciate that. think it comes down to one thing you kept repeating, is language, right? Being able to speak that design language, being able to speak that language of iteration. I think the biggest thing that helped me early on was learning that language by literally applying it myself with prototyping and having to learn how to code and having to learn how to, like, I couldn't, I didn't, I barely knew C++ to be able to,

write the code for my first Arduino kit project in terms of literally what do I have to set this thing, this LED light to glow blue, right? And then...

Like, how do I hello world a blue LED that flashed?

Exactly, And so like that's learning a language that's very similar in that I had to learn the words for the simple if-then logic of turning on this LED switch of learning how to program, you know, a reset switch for my for my breadboard or was learning how to, you know, push out my first like test flight like app in the sense of learning how to program through Swift and Xcode. And so

Speaker 1 (40:13.932)
you start learning the language and what that allows you to do is speak that language with your engineers and it not only earns you the sort of respect of, okay, shoot, like this guy knows what he's talking about, but it's Street credit is definitely there, highly recommend it. But it also is exactly like what you said, learning that language smooths the rails to where you're able to move quicker, move faster. You know exactly what you want to avoid in terms of your initial specs.

He's got string cred. Right.

Speaker 1 (40:42.412)
you know exactly what you want and the more language you have to kind of define that, the easier it becomes for the engineers because you know what we've seen in both software and hardware, no matter what, you know, you're kind of dreaming up, it's basically the same process, right? You want this thing, whether it's an app or product, you come up with the right people around it, then you figure out the proposal and the specs to kind of get that to, you know, step one, which is the prototype. And the thing is, even in that first step, there's this game of

kind of telephone, right? Where you're saying one thing to one person, that person then says another thing to another, and then the language is lost or kind of like diluted or misinterpreted along the way, that gets less and less so when you speak the language yourself and learn the language yourself. And I think we were in a very unique spot, and I challenge myself to be in that very unique spot of learning that lingo, because you'll find that a lot, at least in my opinion, a lot of CEOs and founders

that really miss the mark end up being the ones that are too gung-ho about one-ass through the business, is like maybe fundraising, or maybe they're doing a bunch of marketing, but they're getting more and more removed from speaking the language of the customers, or maybe it's a hardware founder giving all of their trust to an outside agency, or a contractor, or someone that they're working with to market it, to build it, to whatever, and they realize that they have to learn the language along the way, and they feel like they're getting

at this thing.

Speaker 1 (42:10.892)
you know, maybe scammed or taken for a ride. And it's like, well, it's almost the same for me as like going to a foreign country, not knowing the language and feeling like you're just constantly anxious on your feet the whole time. It's like, you can do the prep to speak some of the language. And I think that same kind of belief I hold for other founders and for other folks that are kind of joining, you know, starting on that journey. I think the best products start with a really fundamental understanding of like,

Hey, like we can build at least a crappy prototype version of this ourselves. So we know.

Right. Yep. No, that's so awesome. And again, I think it's it's so cool that tools like Arduino tools like 3d printers exist to allow someone who wasn't a hard tech native to feel comfortable enough to jump in the deep end, right? Like I haven't written a line of software since my senior year in college I've had drew here at CTO at glassboard to fix all my software since for me ever since but I have no doubt that if I

got the itch to go start a SaaS company because I found a problem that I was passionate that needed to be solved. I could go home, go on the internet, and teach myself how to write enough code to make a crappy prototype and get it there. And that's been the case for what, 20 years, right? Like for actually 20 or 25 years, you could launch a software product beta from your house because the internet existed to teach you how to do it. That hasn't existed in hardware until the last 10, right? Like half the time.

And it's just now catching up and getting more mainstream. Arduinos are more mainstream than they've ever been. People like Particle, people like Blink are doing IoT platform literally out of the box. You can buy a dev kit and on their hardware, right in their software IDE environment, as long you put it in a 3D printed box and it measures some sensor you connect to it, you've made an IoT device. And you're on their backend, you're on their front end, you're on their hard tech. You can now launch these products with so little risk.

Speaker 2 (44:06.072)
that you can MVP things, and start pushing on bruises. Am I solving this problem? Can grandma use this? Can my mom use this? Do they like it? Would they buy this for dad for Father's Day? You can go flight this stuff without hiring a firm. That's exactly it. With just enough grit.

And it's becoming easier and easier. And I think that is the true beauty for me with like the AI proliferation over the last couple of years is that that speed to learning and speed of curiosity is like, it's insane, right? Like if you use it as a tool to accelerate the learning of that language, whether it's hardware or software, you let's say jumping back into something that you want to build that solves a pain point for someone that you love like.

the ability for AI to teach you those steps along the way, instead of just plugging and playing as like the thing that does it all for you, it smooths that curve of you learning by like 10x. And I think if I had AI to like assist and help like back in the day, it would have made those first couple of months so much quicker in terms of the uptake. I think that's how a lot of people are cleverly using it these days to kind of use it as a curiosity acceleration tool.

if anything. to your point, I think it's easier now than ever before.

Yeah, I was gonna pick it piggybacking that the AI is the best thing to ask you questions What should I be asking? How should I be looking as I'm not like I'm not gonna ask you the right stuff AI I'm trying to learn this topic. What questions should I ask myself? Yeah, it's great with that's parallel for all of us technical people down right your world's gotten easier too and go to market because of AI

Speaker 3 (45:39.662)
I mean, it's the same exact concept. It's just on the side of go to market and sales and marketing as a whole. It's what questions am I not asking? Or if I'm looking to deploy a new go to market channel in X field for YICP, what are the kind of questions I should be asking? And you probably thought of one through seven, but you didn't think through seven through 10, or eight through 10. you're like, OK, those are actually really, really good ones. Maybe one and two you kind of ruled out anyways, but you end up with three or four really, really good ones.

that with one or two that you didn't think of previously, and that actually leads to success and learnings that you didn't have to go and learn, it just kind of accelerated that process. And now you're immediately deploying a channel or emotion or an action that actually bears a desired result you're looking for. So I find that, of course, AI is helping across the spectrum. As we wrap up the show, I'm just curious, what is the future of Flora? And I don't know if we mentioned at the beginning of show, you've been on CNN and talking about tariffs.

I think you mentioned before that you're getting this big batch in of an order as well. we've talked about the future of the hardware, the future of the software, and the mode that you've already built. What does the next few months, maybe years, look like for you in terms of growth for Flora?

So I'd like to think we have a really crystal clear idea of that. you know, the life if there's anything I've learned for the last four years, it's just like, expect nothing, you know, like this whole CNN and short tank and this is like beyond my wildest dreams. Like, let me just say so grateful for those crazy opportunities. You never know what's going to happen. But, you know, short term goals is really become like.

Like expected.

Speaker 1 (47:20.244)
a start up of the year essentially in Nashville and keep doubling and tripling in our home base here. Build out a beautiful team in person. I think it's something that we've been kind of missing in these last couple of years because we've been fully global remote as a company since inception. Like we have people from all over from Atlanta to the UK to Ukraine working on our projects and working on Flora. And so we're starting to kind of lay down our roots here in Nashville, all puns intended.

The long-term vision is become the nest for gardening and houseplants. Become basically this company that merges IoT and everything we've done with the merging of hardware and software to make it as easy and fun as possible for people to become plant parents.

incredible.

everybody, this is the HeartTech Podcast. I'm your host Deandre Herikis, my co-host Grant Chapman. In the best, thank you so much for joining us, man.