Isabel Petty
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Jeff: [00:00:00] Hey Isabel. So glad to have you on. Thanks for joining us today

Isabel: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to get into it. Yes,

Jeff: this is fun. It's a fun company, right? So let's just clear this out of the way from the very beginning The company is tushy, but the website is hello tushy. com, right?

Isabel: com unless you are in the safe space of your home, not safe for work. I think it's a rite of passage for everyone who joins the company to either go to Toshi. com or send their parents to Toshi. com. Bye.

Jeff: There we go, so fair warning to anyone Anyone listening if you want a bidet, it's not tushy. com. It's hello tushy. com now. Normally I don't go into kind of like company background at all but I think we have to can you just tell us the quick little, hit and run on what TUSHY does?

Isabel: Yeah. So Tushy is the modern bidet company. Tushy pretty much invented the bidet space here in the United States. The very long story short is that we have two amazing founders who experienced [00:01:00] bidets growing up and traveling abroad and had this aha moment, like, why is this not the standard in the U S as it's the standard in bathroom culture and every other country in the world.

So they created the first iteration. 10 years ago. And we've since, sold nearly 3 million bidets. We have multiple models. We've expanded into accessories, toilet paper candles, toilet sprays, and a lot more to come. So yeah, , I'm super excited. I've been at TUSHY for a little bit over a year and it's been a wild ride.

Jeff: Nice. And you're not designing the physical products, right? You're on the digital side.

Isabel: Correct. Yeah. So we have an amazing in house physical product team, and then I oversee the digital product. So websites, any technical integrations, anything that engineering resources are needed for.

Jeff: Nice. And we almost got to meet. We had an event in New York a couple of weeks [00:02:00] back and , my understanding is you were going to come, but you had something just a little bit more, important going on that day. You got married, right?

Isabel: I did. Yes. Slight change of plans. It's not a, for the record, not a last minute marriage. It was purely that we decided to, I got married in California where my now husband and I are both from, and we just decided to fly out a few days in advance earlier than planned. So it was very bummed to miss it.

But as someone who loves her job, but can definitely get consumed, I had to set up some boundaries like wedding one time thing. There will be other networking events.

Jeff: We'll be back in New York. You're probably not going to get to fly off early for your wedding ever again. All right, let's jump on into it Normally we do a little bit of a warm up.

I feel like we're there So let's maybe just do one. I like to understand this one Especially is you know product is super nuanced. It can be anything from really in the weeds, designing and building up to very strategic setting the course of a whole company. How do you, if you're talking [00:03:00] to, some of those folks, and you might run into this more than others because of the physical space you're in, how do you describe to the non tech initiated?

What, A product leader does like what is your job? What is product do and how does it serve the company?

Isabel: Yeah, so You know when a company or a team wants to create a product whether that be a new website a car Someone has to be the ringleader bringing everyone together and deciding What's the game plan? What's the timeline? What colors is this car going to be? Is this going to be a car with windows?

How many seats is it going to have? And the product manager gets everyone on the same page, prioritizes those requirements and then gets the team to execute through launch.

Jeff: Cool, and then speaking of kind of product I was just talking with carlos over at product school and we're Bemoaning the fact that you can go to school for engineering. You can go to School for marketing as I did you can go to school for finance. [00:04:00] But products seem to be the one that is holding out, but you kind of did.

you're a bit unique on the show here. You went to school, you got your master's in tech management over at UC Santa Barbara. And you said a pretty high number of people go directly into product from that is, is that right?

Isabel: Yes, that's correct. So to back up a little bit, my story is I got into my dream school, UC Santa Barbara, going to college on the beach, and they did not have a business program, which is always, I always wanted to go into marketing. That's where I thought I would take my career. And so instead of, I think the options were either like economics or communication, I chose to study in undergrad, a personal passion of mine, music studies.

So I studied vocal performance. Those four years in undergrad never intended on becoming a professional musician, but still had a great experience. Always planned to go on and get my MBA, but UCSB had this new program called the technology management program. I completed the Undergraduate certificate course.

The [00:05:00] story goes that there was a group of professors from Stanford who created and were part of a similar program and they all wanted to retire in, the adult version of Disneyland, which is Santa Barbara. So they decided to create the same program in Santa Barbara. I'm not sure how true that is or if that's just myth, but I love the certificate program.

And then discovered that they had this one year master's program. So of course, one year versus two years in an MBA, that was enticing, but knowing that was still business courses, but with a technical emphasis that was super intriguing. It was actually part of the college of engineering. One of the kind of initial ideas was teaching undergraduate engineering majors, the leadership skills to go on and lead technical teams. But they realized pretty quickly that non STEM majors got a lot of benefit as well and went on to roles like product management, where you don't actually have to be an [00:06:00] engineer by training, but having the ability to like bridge the gap between technical teams and the rest of the organization is what they were really looking So, Yeah, it was a great experience and I believe they say about 25 percent of students go on to become product managers and it was very much, I didn't even know what product management was before joining the program. It was very much a coincidence, but I think within the first two months after learning about this path I was sold.

Jeff: Yeah. it's great to see the world being opened up a little bit more for education. It helps you get ready for this stuff. Like I remember I went to college and graduated over 20 years ago and a marketing courses were already outdated by the time you graduated. There wasn't a single thing, even a thought about online marketing, but the idea of building a software product didn't go any further than.

As a software engineer, you will code something. I think that's about as far as education got. So it's great to see, the idea of product [00:07:00] beyond Tom from the office space and into a real productive value adding member of the team. So I love seeing the kind of growth of this whole space here.

, moving a little bit from that though, I read everything I could that you've written and there's some cool stuff, but one thing I saw you talked about was this idea of like prioritization being important in product, and I think that's so key because you can't, especially in a startup.

You're not Oracle. You're not a hundred thousand people and have time to do every single thing every way you want to. Sometimes you need to figure out, right? Am I solving this thing with duct tape? Or am I solving it for permanent? And you have this framework of short term and permanent solutions.

And can you maybe walk us through that a little bit and like, How does that work? How do you look at that?

Isabel: Yeah. So it's One of my big mantras, I think for product in general, but definitely in my roles and at TUSHY for sure, is like we all have to remember what the ultimate goal is here. Really grounding the team because as you mentioned issues can stack on top of each other and not everything can be high priority.

As a product [00:08:00] manager, you have to be able to keep your head above water and prioritize very quickly real time. So an example of kind of this short term medium term long term solution is, Tushy, we're an e commerce company. We recently wanted to run a promotion that was three tiers.

So spend 100, get a free candle, 200 free toilet spray, 300 free ottoman. And despite tests and QA going off without a hitch. When we went live, there were a few bugs, like customer would either not see the product reflecting card, or maybe two products would get added. And we're live at this point.

There are ads running. This is a planned promotion. There's revenue tied to this. So how do I prioritize? Number one, there are ads running. We've promised a gift with purchase promotion. immediately make it a one time gift with purchase. So just, all orders over 150 get this one gift. Now , is this promotion 24 [00:09:00] hours?

Is it seven days? If the, length warrants, okay, let's go back to the drawing board and see how quickly we can get this back up and running as planned. I try not to Let my developers work on one bug for more than four hours because the benefit just starts to Not outweigh the work that you're about to put in.

So in this instance, we were able to get it Resolved and back live within 24 hours But the permanent solution here would actually be number one build a stronger product that doesn't break once live but number two this was very much a test. It was the first time we had run this product. So a lot of it was hard coded.

If , it did end up performing well. So the next step, the long term permanent solution was let's build this capability. So an e commerce manager, someone who's not a developer can go in, set it up, customize it, do we want to do three tiers, two tiers? What are the thresholds? And so we don't have to always [00:10:00] rely on development resources when we want to run this.

Jeff: , it makes sense. It's always great to see how companies like duct tape something together and then bring it together for real. Because it's so inherent to, the growth company and startup idea is sometimes you just got to fake it and, not to use a trope, but fake it until you make it.

Isabel: Absolutely.

Jeff: We were talking to Susan Stavitsky who's over at CarMax and she talked about, They were building like a ability for people to check in when they were coming to sell their cars. And they didn't want people to come in as the height of COVID and they didn't want to have to be able to come into the building.

And so they wanted to do it remote. And the first solution was they literally put a QR code up had people scan it. It took them to an air table form. And then literally it was just them behind a curtain inside manually entering the data as someone put it into this form. But you do what you got it first to spin things up, right?

And then you figure out like, does this have legs? Let's make it, the medium term or let's make it the permanent solution. How do you think through that? What's the kind of value judgment there to say this is the thing we're going to do right [00:11:00] now. We're going to solve it for good.

And we're never gonna deal with it to versus just we just need some duct tape and glue and good luck right now.

Isabel: Yeah, I have a bias to building lean. I think probably every product manager should and probably says that, but I have found that I really push my stakeholders and my leadership team. Like we don't know if this is going to work. This is the first time we're doing it and it's going to take how many of my developers?

Yeah, there's no way we're investing more than a few days into this. So understanding You know, is it a test? Is it a one time thing? Or is this a long term goal? And then breaking it up into those iterations. So what's an MVP look like? What's a V1 V2? What are those success criterias? Another way to describe that is what's a must have and what's a nice to have?

What's launch critical? I think like typical startups, we Don't start the work for like a new promotion or a new product launch really more than like a month out, at least on the website, of course, [00:12:00] physical products, those take months to develop. But , we have, a very lofty roadmap. And so I can't really start thinking about things too far in advance.

So when we're a month out, The world is our oyster. How many, Oh, I want this there to be an animation here. I want there to, when it adds to cart, it tells the customer how many trees they've saved by making this purchase. But as we get closer and closer, then you really start to think, okay, what's actually launched critical, what's a must have.

And it is interesting how. That mindset changes just how far away you are from launch if you're pre launch. Oh, we need all of these things but if it was supposed to be live yesterday now, what's actually a must have

Jeff: And how easy is what to build, right? is It safe to say that maybe toilet paper was the temporary solution that just stuck around a little too long whereas the bidet is the permanent solution now?

Isabel: Yeah, I actually, I need to look up the history of toilet paper and how that was created because it is, [00:13:00] I don't know if anyone really thinks much about it after it gets flushed, but that all goes somewhere.

We did at one point have a sustainability calculator on the website that calculated, okay, how many people in your home and how many bathrooms do you have? And that would tell you how many trees you're saving, but we do sell toilet paper. And that's what I thought you were referencing because a lot of people see that and think, wait a second, this doesn't make any sense.

Isabel: Obviously. When you use a bidet, you still, you're clean, but you have water on you. So the toilet paper is, bamboo as sustainable as possible, three ply highest quality. And it's why we've invested so much time into this, like luxury teepee is because you really don't need a lot. You're just patting dry when you use the bidet.

So that was the strategy there for the rest of society. I cannot speak for I know what, our largest bucket, when you look at the data of how did people find out about Tushy, the number one bucket is always friends and [00:14:00] family. Once people try the product, they can never go back. They're gifting these products to everyone.

We have a lot of evangelists out there every once in a while. I, we'll meet someone in a social setting and mention, yeah, I work for Tushy, the bidet company, just to clarify. And, oh my God, I feel like a celebrity. They love it.

Jeff: you guys are, you were even on SNL, so

Isabel: yes, exactly. Yeah, no, it's been truly a wild ride. So much to come. It's been such a fun role.

Jeff: Cool. Okay. So we've gone over this . Pretty, deeply so far, Toshi is a bidet company. This is clearly, even though you've sold, you said 3 million.

Isabel: Yes nearly three

Jeff: Nearly 3 million still far from probably, still far from a, the peak of that kind of mass market adoption curve area. You talked about the biggest thing that, that drives people is, recommendations and friends and family. How did you discover that? Describe to us how you guys are doing regular user feedback here and understanding exactly that kind of thing.

Like how [00:15:00] do people discover it? How do people want to know about it? Cause to be honest, like. Pooping is not really something that people love to talk about public. It's not for public discourse, most would say.

Isabel: Yeah. So I'd say most people discover Tushy either by traveling abroad, because like I mentioned, almost every other country in the world, this is the standard in the bathroom. We are definitely the weirdos. In this sense, but traveling abroad and trying it a lot of people, you know, Oh my God, , why doesn't this exist?

Where can I buy it? You look up, bidet USA, bidet attachment, and she's right there also trying at friends and families houses. And then a lot of children of immigrants, people who grew up with the bidet or have family from a country that use a bidet is. I'd say the largest bucket. Then you've got the sustainability folks who are looking to cut down waste.

And then. We have a really awesome brand team. , when I first discovered Tushy, I was [00:16:00] blown away by the humor and the presence on the website, the social media, the way that the team is able to break down those barriers and talk about something that's so taboo. We sell t shirts that say, ask me about my butthole on the website.

Jeff: I saw that.

Isabel: yeah, we definitely.

Jeff: needs to check out your website. Like it's fantastic. It is my eight year old and 11 year old would love it. And I also found it like quite tasteful for the jokes you were making and like very tongue in cheek. It was fantastic. Whoever wrote that really good, but people definitely got to check it out.

And again, it's hello, Tushy.

Isabel: Yes. Hello. Yeah the team is amazing. And when, you asked about user research and we have multiple teams that do user research based on their department, right? I'm doing a lot of user research, whether that's speaking to customers, looking at session recordings, looking at the data, reviewing CX tickets.

To understand, okay, how is the website coming across and where can we improve the brand team? The marketing team [00:17:00] does a lot of research to determine how are we positioning new products and marketing campaigns. And then of course the physical product team as well looks at like, how can we improve existing products and what are we missing that consumers are looking for?

So Bye. Bye. There's so many different, ways to talk to the consumer and working for an e commerce company. I'm very fortunate that they're easily accessible.

Jeff: And do you find it tough to get people to open up about, their toilet habits for better or for worse, or like their proclivities around that?

Isabel: Yeah. Not in not typically because again, I look at the data from the website or We'll set up customer interviews with people who fully are aware and know what the topics are going to be but with researching the app, the digital app that I'm working on for the company, that has been a little bit more difficult.

A lot of sleuthing on the Reddit boards to find out like what [00:18:00] customers are looking for in the market. Which is totally understandable. I think a lot of people don't want to slap their first and last name when talking about these things, especially when getting vulnerable and sharing their frustrations in the bathroom.

Jeff: It seems like there's a, there's a big talk in a lot of medical studies around nutrition that actually asking someone about their eating habits is probably not going to get you accurate data. And this smells like one of those kinds of areas where you might run into the same problem where people are going to paint a more idealized picture of what they need than actual, if you're not careful.

Yeah.

Isabel: Yeah. We've done customer interviews, but you're right that a lot of people when they know they're being asked, when they know that they're being sometimes watched, if it's recorded there, they want to be professional. They want to be more careful about what they say. So I find a lot of benefit from looking at like Instagram comments reviews on the app store.

Obviously Reddit, as I mentioned, I get a lot of information from those places.

Jeff: Nice. I just got a little giggle because [00:19:00] I thought about people acting differently when they record and then it hit me afterward that you're not talking about recorded using the product. You're talking about recorded talking. I was like, that's, I was like, yeah, that's so this is a great product to talk about.

I love it. There's so many possibilities. Okay, one thing that I'm curious about here is we we had a guy named David LaPrestian several weeks back. He runs the basically product for the mobile applications over at U Haul. And there's way more parallels here than I think people will think about between, Trailers and trucks and bidets.

And the number one thing is just the market needs education. Like it's very likely that you're in the middle of setting up your bidet or maybe first time you've run into it, how do you use it? What's the process? How do you not have it, squirt into the bathroom or, other negative things that could happen.

Or even just how do you put it on the toilet? And he had a really good focus around, how do you get this education in a very Natural seeming way just in front of the user when they need it. Not that they have to do a searching for it. How have you all [00:20:00] thought about that? Cause that's definitely something I could see, setting this thing up and running into what do I do here?

How do you go about usage and set up and stuff like that?

Isabel: Yeah, definitely from different angles. Because we want to offer up, build out those touch points at every part of the journey. So it really starts with advertising, social media presence. When some customers first hear about TUSHY, we want to make sure that it's very clear what the product is, what they're looking at.

Is this a toilet? Is it a toilet seat? Oh, what's a bidet? So ensuring that's very clear. At that first touch point. And then you get to the website and that's really where maybe 50 percent of the education happens because of course we're convincing customers why bidets are the way and why a tushy bidet is the best.

So we actually just released a toilet compatibility quiz where customers can either take the path of. selecting their toilet model [00:21:00] and brand or just visually selecting like, Oh, this looks like my toilet. Yes. This is the setup I have. And it will tell them which bidets they're compatible with, because we do have some that attach up to your hot water system.

So only certain setups would have that. We have one that requires an outlet. So depending on your setup it'll tell you which is best for you. We also, Have a lot of course, educational content across the website. A lot of videos we've tested into bringing more of the user generated content from social media onto our website.

If something does well on our Instagram page, . We'll bring that on to the website. And then the last part is after that purchase is made now installation support. A lot of people that is a big barrier is how am I going to install this? I'm not a plumber. Our bidets take anywhere from eight and a half to 10 and a half minutes to install.

They're very easy. Everyone at the company has done it multiple times. And all over our packaging, we have instructions. We have [00:22:00] QR codes that take you to, online videos or blog articles. We have a lot of different videos on social media that walk through the installation and once people do it they realize, Oh, this is a lot easier than I thought it was.

Jeff: So going through all this now, get into the point where. I think we skipped a step here. We're talking about, how you educate people once they buy and how they get on the toilet. But maybe if we back up a little bit, how are you getting people to do that?

Like what are the kind of growth things that you've really tried here? That, on the digital side that you found work really well. And maybe even better, like what's one that , maybe deserve to go in the toilet cause it just didn't work.

Isabel: Um, I'd say that the outcome was positive, but I do kick myself with how long it took us to get here. So as I mentioned our bestseller model, the classic 3. 0, it's just one temperature. So it hooks up to the tap water behind your toilet.

And then you adjust the pressure. Then we also have our spa 3. 0. So this [00:23:00] has both Cool water, but also warm water that you can hook up to your sink. And, for the first six months that I was at Tushy, the amount of questions that our customer support team would get about where does this warm water come from?

First, it was a lot of questions of like, where's the water come from? Is this dirty water from my toilet? God, no, that's disgusting. This is fresh, clean tap water from the pipes behind the toilet. But a lot of people, where does this warm water come from? We put the copy in the description in so many different places, but as many people in e commerce know, nobody wants to read anything.

So one day I go up to my head of creative and I'm like, I think we need to take a photo with like arrows pointing to where does this water come from? It took us maybe an hour to set it up in the office, because we do actually have a shootable bathroom in the office, it's a full bathroom setup that we.

Took an hour to set up, take edited the photos and immediately there's like a [00:24:00] 90 percent drop in tickets. And it was that simple, like literally a photo infographic style with arrows saying, this is where the water comes from. So yeah, I can't believe how long it took us to figure that out.

But one exciting, more growth focused idea that we worked on for installation support was we actually do offer one on one installation support on our website for purchase. So it's 15 to add onto your order. You can get 30 minutes, one on one Video call with one of our support agents and they will walk you through the entire setup right there holding your hand And then if you know for whatever reason your toilet isn't compatible, they'll support you through either Return exchange or getting the spare parts that you need

I guess people can be worried about this. So anyway, you can reduce that kind of fear of messing up or feeling incompetent probably helps. So, cool. Going through that, my one last kind of question about just the proxy up here is.[00:25:00] 

Jeff: And you alluded to this earlier, you don't sell just bidets. There's a whole array of stuff. Let's forget the t shirt that I really wish I got and it was wearing for this right now, but you have stools, you have smells, you have all sorts of stuff where do the, the idea behind the full life cycle package like that come from, like how'd that come to be?

Isabel: Yeah, I think it starts with you launch this product. It takes off We launch More versions like the warm water. We have now an electric luxury model that has a warming seat. We just launched Literally today two new non electric bidet seats So now these are bidets that will replace the entire toilet seat and the bidet is built in And you saw a lot of yeah, a lot of excitement for those.

But I think immediately being a startup and having a lot of like growth mindset, people, a lot of the teams, like what's next, where can we go from here? We don't want to just change toilet culture. We want to change bathroom culture. We want to be the go to product that changes [00:26:00] the way that.

The Americans go to the bathroom and spend their time in the bathroom. Something that, our brand team discovered was a lot of people view the bathroom as their Oasis as time to get away from the day to day, whether it's just your nine to five, or maybe during the holidays, you need time away from your hectic family.

So how can we create this Oasis experience in the bathroom? And so that's where a lot of those scent products came from, right? The candle, we have the toilet spray, the bathroom spray the stool, the Ottoman was, It's an early kind of iteration as well. And that kind of comes more from like a health and wellness perspective.

It's actually much healthier for your body to be in that position with your knees higher when you're going to the bathroom. And that I believe also came from other cultures that are going to the bathroom in this position regularly from childhood. How can we [00:27:00] make that the norm in the U.

S.?

Jeff: that's actually a great segue now because, I know we've been talking about the physical piece a lot, but you're mainly focused on the digital and there's a whole world of stuff you guys are working on. That's not even really like out in the wild yet. You are putting together the company's building a poop tracking app.

You tell us about I don't mean to laugh because I mean I realize it's like actual medical stuff behind it But but what I guess what was the thought behind? how did you guys get to the idea of going we're gonna go from making a toilet attachment to An app to make people's you know butts healthier

Isabel: Yeah, the initial kind of light bulb moment of this was when we discovered that cases of colon cancer in patients under the age of 55 have doubled in the last 30 years. Colon cancer is unfortunately on the rise specifically in, patients under the age of 55 and obviously, that's very concerning.

And Being the expert in this space on all [00:28:00] things bidets and butts A lot of the team was like what can we do here? Is there a tie in? Can we help people here and early research? that we did showed that You actually can identify early signs and symptoms of colon cancer just by looking at your stool.

So from there, that's how we got to poop tracking app, right? \ I actually started doing research on competitors. Are there poop tracking apps that exist? If, there are what are the pain points that customers are having with these? That's where I dove a lot into the Reddit boards and learning about toilet anxiety and IBS suffers and how a lot of people like to track their stool because it can reveal so many insights about their health microbiome, gut health.

These. They're so trendy right now, but do people ever think of what's in the gut, what's in the microbiome? It's poop. It definitely makes a lot of sense to follow like where the consumers are going [00:29:00] and where the industry is going and see if we can help. solve here.

Jeff: now, first of all, I don't think I would do very well at your company because I'm laughing every time we're talking about poop and it I'm basically just still a 10 year old in a much older body. It feels like at this point I'm realizing today. But it is like serious health stuff. And It's interesting to see it being tackled and again back to having a great kind of verbiage around this and stuff , one way you can open people up to it is to make them feel comfortable by making it more casual and I think the site definitely does that.

But I guess looking at this right as you're going to build it. How do you think about what do you build first or what like what's necessary because if you're going to build something with a health app and maybe you know some network effects necessary you know it's a minimum you need to do but also there's a lot of as soon as you say health.

name. There's, I'm sure regulations that just kick in left and right. So how do you weed through all this? What's, what does the actual product process look like here to put something like this out?

Isabel: Yeah. So this is very much a [00:30:00] big swing, right? We are, like I said earlier, I have a bias to building lean, so this will be an MVP. We had a lot of meetings of paring down, okay, what's the must have, what is the most basic version of what this app needs to look like to test if customers are actually interested.

So we, yeah, there's Of course, having that mindset of this is going to be a lean version. Let's, take it easy here. But also we have partnered with a development agency that specializes in health tech mobile apps, because this is so new for the company. They're going to be helping us through, like the user research phase, UX UI phase, and getting that first version launched.

But yes, there's definitely additional concerns once you add in the word health. I think any industry, especially if you're direct to consumer, any role is going to have like legal implications that you have to consider, right? There's [00:31:00] constantly new consumer privacy laws being released that we have to think about on the website and make sure we're up to date.

It's not that different from what we do on the website, but we will be partnering with medical practitioners. So there of course is extra sensitivity when we're dealing with health information, but fortunately this is, we're not reinventing the wheel here. There are a lot of health and fitness apps, wearables out there that have set a path that we can at least follow for the initial version.

Jeff: Nice. And then, kinda thinking deeper about this, right? Are you going to follow, is the plan to follow through the humor into it? Cause it feels again, that's something that can diffuse a little bit of the, coat anxiety, not quite but let's go with that just as a close enough.

But I guess, does the humor, is there more to it than the humor is meant to diffuse or is it just, you guys like poop jokes.

Isabel: , I think there's probably a little bit of both. The initial strategy there [00:32:00] was being such a taboo topic. We have to break down the walls here. We have to make people more comfortable. So the humor definitely addresses that. And for a lot of people, it's a delightful moment. . They're, laughing as they're shopping and they're discovering if they want to make a purchase.

Some people it's totally a turn off and they're like, this is weird. I'm not gonna make a, making a purchase. So I think with the app, we're gonna be both a little bit of humor, but also this is a new um, arm for us. This is health and wellness. This is going to be medically backed. So a little bit more of that superiority caught, messaging and testing that out.

But like I said, this is very much a test. If the initial version takes off, the opportunities are endless. We could develop. Our own stool like at home stool test We could build hardware into the bidets that connect with the apps With the app so it's not manual. Do we you know invest in ai [00:33:00] image recognition a lot of opportunities we're trying to Again, take it slowly and then evaluate each As they come.

Jeff: I was actually going to ask is there opportunity to build a coordination between, the bidet and the app, because it seems like something you could put a sensor into and very quickly you could do value add and I think equally quickly you could do probably not functional value ad but, Life value ad

Isabel: Yeah.

Jeff: maybe it reminds you like, Hey, are you hiding from someone and you've been here a while? 

Isabel: There's definitely opportunity to also work in some hardware technology, obviously hardware is a much longer life cycle. So we'd have to take that into account.

Jeff: yeah, that's fair. Now, as we're hitting the end here, I have one kind of Big meta question before we wrap up , this has always struck me as funny as right. We laugh about it. I've joked about it throughout the , whole session today, but this is a topic where it's both like literally children's books are written.

Everybody poops and yet is so taboo to talk about publicly. Where do you think [00:34:00] that comes from? Where it's such a vital part of our health and our lives. And yet at the same time, Just no one wants to talk about it. And you guys are breaking barriers just by even having it very blatantly on the site and making humor about it and having it just right there in the open

Isabel: Yeah, it's all about branding, right? I guess poop just got a bad brand back in the day because That's been how we've tackled. This is by like developing an identity Around this market and making people more comfortable Your earlier question about like strategy and how you prioritize we always have a goal for one of our OKRs for the company is always around brand and brand vision.

And how do we develop that? So that's something that's always top of mind that not just the marketing team is working on, but every team is leading up to this brand vision. So I think it's about yeah, being strategic about how you communicate this, because we're very comfortable talking about poop, but Maybe we don't call this a poop tracker.

Maybe when this [00:35:00] rolls out, it's called something totally different. A microbiome tracker or something because yeah, gut health, microbiome health, those are so trendy right now, but they're trendy because they're important, so they're not going anywhere. There's still a lot of runway. We're really excited to be a part of it, but it will definitely be a learning curve.

Jeff: Or maybe, maybe a lean in as a strategy of just go for it. And you can get banned from , the New York subway system again for ads.

Isabel: Yes,

Jeff: that got you guys a lot of awareness. That seems like a great strategy. All right. 

Isabel: Have that article framed in the office. It's a very prideful moment for the team.

Jeff: oh yeah I watch I don't watch all SNL all the time, but I'd make sure to check out Weekend Update pretty regularly. And the fact that y'all got talked about by Colin Jost and specifically Michael Shea was, I think that would be the height of my career. I don't know what I would do after that.

I'd have to quit, retire and go do something else. I don't want to keep you all day. You got, a lot of important stuff to do. but if people look in and we'll follow up about product, or they want to learn either a about your [00:36:00] product or B, talk to you about how you approach this stuff or, have follow up questions.

What's a good place for people to find you? Is it LinkedIn? Is there anywhere else?

Isabel: Yeah. LinkedIn would be the best place. I try to make a point to stay active there.

Jeff: Nice. Love it. Cool. Thank you so much. It was great having you on Isabel. I really appreciate the time and learning about , both poop and non poop stuff you guys are working on. Hopefully talk to you. Hopefully next time we're in New York. We'll see you.

Isabel: Definitely. I will be there. Thanks.