Latest / Healthier: Building Health & Fitness Businesses / How to sell health hardware through retailers | Stefan van der Fluit, FLOWBIO | Healthier Ep 8

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How to sell health hardware through retailers | Stefan van der Fluit, FLOWBIO | Healthier Ep 8 · Healthier: Building Health & Fitness Businesses

• speaker-0: Money isn't the reason you do something. Money is the outcome of the something you've done. Don't get into hardware if if you don't like being punched in the face ten times a day. If you've done the hard thing and you've actually delivered the the asset and it works and it's sound and it's robust, that is incredible moat of defensibility that you've just accomplished for yourself. I always try and remind them that like our only competition is ourselves. It doesn't matter what happens left or right of you. That's irrelevant. You can't control that. What you can control is is what you're doing. You have to by virtue of just a being it being a numbers game, you have to be out there. If we're given the objective, you need to get the word out to as many people as possible. Let's be honest, so many brands are building communities from an authentic place, right? They're building it to sell you more stuff that you don't need. speaker-1: Welcome back to Healthier. I'm very, very excited today to be joined by the founder and CEO of FlowBio, someone who I've actually known for probably over a decade at this point in various different guises and an amazing founder and CEO, Stefan van der Fluyt. Welcome to the podcast. Yeah, I think we first met when we were, we found us, we were kind of both working on communications platforms-ish, weren't we? Yeah. speaker-0: Thank you so much, Will. It's good to be here. Yeah, and I think we were introduced by your friend at Pricewaterhouse, I believe that's how we were introduced. speaker-1: Exactly. But now we're both in the health world, your credentials in this space far outweigh mine, which I'm excited to talk about today. Do want to take us on a little journey through what FlowBio is and where you're up to at the moment? speaker-0: Yeah, FlowBio is a product that we've been working on now for for the last six years. Basically I I'd say the origin of Flow Bio or the the problem that we're solving. It it's very very much a personal problem that that I ⁓ myself have faced kind of throughout various chapters of my life. Initially when I was growing up in in in California, hence the the accent for for a Dutch dude. I would be going home like two, two, three times a week in the warmer months, so anywhere from like May onwards through till probably the end of September, early October. And pediatricians didn't really understand why, until one pediatrician asked me to to do a journal, like a a a water log basically of what I was drinking throughout the day, because they had a suspicion that I was chronically dehydrated, but this journal was going to essentially validate that that assumption. And lo and behold, I just wasn't drinking enough. I've always had issues with Drink like staying hydrated basically, giving my body what it needs. Fast forward to when I started doing sports quite competitively, initially running and then moved into Trathon, that problem caught up with me again, right? Like you I kind of changed my habits. I moved to Europe, right? So things got cooler. So my guesswork of hydration was good enough. But the second I got into sports, all those problems came back and and and quite viciously so. ⁓ So I started working with a coach who when we ramped up my training volume to to quite aggressively because I was trying to go get my pro card in in Iron Man, he basically was the one to to to enlighten me about what hydration actually involves, which is the balance of water to salt. Prior to this, I just thought hydration or dehydration was a lack of water, which I think the majority of us would probably agree. We all think or a lot of us think that that is what dehydration actually is. Whereas this this coach, Stuart Hayes, he basically was like you're thinking about it all wrong. Like you need salt, especially as an athlete. Salt is what helps your body absorb the water. So then the engineer part of me got really curious because you know, I I I had a history of eating disorders. So it means that I had a pretty good understanding, lack of execution of that understanding when it came to kilocalories, right? So I knew exactly what like macronutrients I should be eating. I knew exactly how many c calories I should be targeting a day. I knew exactly how many calories are in the foods that I was eating. I intentionally used that data to kind of deprive myself of food, which obviously as soon as I became an athlete, that had to stop because performance is like the first thing that that suffers when you're underfueling. So I already I already had this very, I would say, perspective when it comes to what goes in my body. So that same accountant got really curious when it came to the water and salt, right? It was very much of, okay, well, on a hard day, right, you know, we were talking about zone two cycling earlier. On a zone two ride, surely the amount of water and salt that I need on a zone two ride is very different to the amount of water I need on a threshold session. How, how do I get to the bottom of that? So I was pointed in the direction of a company called Precision Hydration, who at the time were the only organization in the sports domain that that offered some kind of answer to athletes. And I say some kind of answer but which which we'll get onto later. And basically I did a test with them, which which told me my my supposed like number for life, right? This is the your sweat sodium concentration. This is how much you lose per liter of fluid. If you replace this, your your issue should go away. And, you know, they did for the most part. Like in my easy sessions, I didn't suffer from from from these these these situations. However, again, in race situations or hard weekend sessions, or even like hard midweek turbo sessions where you're doing it indoors with the limited airflow with like twenty-two Celsius temperatures, the problems would come back. And, you know, like if I was going into work, I'd I already start the day off with a headache kind of feeling hungover. So that just stuck with me for for quite some time. I wasn't yet ready to do something about it because my foundry battery was still recharging from the last business. But in 2020, I I I really wanted to I I just couldn't stop thinking about this problem space. So in 2020, my co-founder and I, we got together, we brainstormed a bunch of different ideas that we wanted to pursue. And FlowBio was the one that that really kind of came out on top. And yeah, fast forward six years later, we we've built now what we call the FlowBio sensor, which is ⁓ this device. So it's a ⁓ we call it an attachment. So it basically clips onto either an arm strap, which we sell with the with the unit, or a heart rate strap, which most athletes own, and it clips onto the back. And basically ⁓ we capture sweat through this inlet here, we measure skin temperature through that disc there, and then we expel sweat through this little outlet there. And essentially what we're doing is we're measuring physically in sweat the amount of sodium that is contained within the sweat, as well as the total quantity of sweat that you lose, which is a function of the skin temperature and and near skin temperature. as well as the energy expenditure. So we basically have come up with a methodology which looks at the amount of heat that the body produces. And that heat is directly related to the amount of water the body needs to dissipate to maintain core body temperature. Cause essentially if you if you think of the human body as an energy transfer system, as soon as we do something, we create heat, we need to dissipate that heat. Our body only has two means of dissipating heat. We have ⁓ some fat tissue, which is which is quite useful for dissipating heat. But as soon as you're doing like, you know, exercise, even walking, for example. We need to invoke the the sweat glands. We need to get ⁓ water dissipating out of our system to be able to cool that down. And the body's just notoriously bad at energy transfer. Around 70% of total energy we produce is heat. Only 30% of energy goes into like me being able to do this motion. So if we're not getting rid of that heat, we overheat and we die. Sweating is basically a mechanism. It's it's not so good. That's it's not great. Like the more we built this company, the more like I look at sweat in a completely different way. Like it is sweat is an amazing physiological response that allows us to like build buildings that we're sat in, to, you know, run marathons that we're that we're all wanting to do. And without sweat, none of this would be possible. That's kind of how we think about it. speaker-1: So know that you would, you would see it so much more, but when I've talked about you in the past excitedly, I've used something that I think was a line of yours. I don't know if it still is, which is like turning sweat into data. Yes. ⁓ and I think people kind of seem to get that, which is like, look, you're, I've got something on my finger, which is turning my pulse into data. ⁓ and my body temperature and you're, looking at that as well. And then now if I'm someone for whom knowing what like. my exact hydration levels look like and exactly how much I need to rehydrate using things like electrolytes and fluids. Then now there is a way to understand that fully. And you can then understand like there would be a bunch of different ways to use that information. Cyclists, you are an avid cyclist and I know that a lot of your most kind of fervent users are also avid cyclists because there's clearly a performance benefit to be had by having this information, right? Where your focus is. speaker-0: Yeah, absolutely. So r you're you're you're absolutely correct. Right now, we're focused on what we call the the kind of ⁓ performance oriented athlete or the objective ⁓ oriented athlete. So people who they they train for a purpose, right? They they've got a a marathon that they're doing or multiple marathons that they're doing in the season, you know, same for bike racing or triathons, et cetera. So it's it's it's very much geared towards I would say, you know, the early days whoop user, right? Same story, different product. You're going after the customer who's highly motivated, highly ⁓ liquid, right, in terms of disposable income, they they really invest ⁓ heavily into their sport. Even though they might not be six figure salaries, the proportion of income towards their sport is very high because it it's it's it's it's what it's what defines them. It's their purpose. ⁓ like I identify first as a cyclist, then as a founder. It's just 'cause it's it it's it it's who I am and as a function of who I am my expenditure goes into that direction. So that's really who Flow Bio is is is for today. Obviously that is not kind of where where the story ends. I think we've we've spent a lot of time now developing the wider technological capabilities of this company and and really like the North Starflow bio is to delete dehydration. That is that is very much our ⁓ our yeah ten year plan. And we've already got some really exciting, I'd say, bits of traction and partnerships that we're that we're lining up that have nothing to do with, you know, your endurance consumer, but still provide hydration data in a very meaningful and and kind of accurate way as as customers should expect from FlowBio because that's that's one thing that we've always prided ourselves on. It's why it took us five years to develop this hardware technology. Everything we do has to stand by the scientific ⁓ critic cr speaker-1: Let's jump into that because, because when you and I first started in startups all those years ago, the thing that always got said, and it still gets, it still gets talked about a lot now, but I suppose it's a little more sexy hardware now, but it was always hardware is hard, right? So it's a lot easier to write a bit of code, get it out the door, all other things being equal than it is to make a product and get it out the door and into the hands of users. So, but you, decided to go down that route. There was a, there was, there was a world in which. flow by, I don't know, you need to capture the sweat, right? There's a world in which it's an algorithm, but maybe not because then you'd have to just get off body temperature, but you made the decision to go down the hardware is hard route. ⁓ how's that been? You've mentioned like getting to needing kind of scientific studies to prove that what you're doing works. I'd imagine you've had all sorts of logistical fun and supplier fun. speaker-0: Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, so what have you learned in that space? if someone forced you at some point to do your next company as a hardware company as well, what are the top things you'd be kind of remembering and saying to yourself to make hardware work? speaker-0: Yes. So okay. Well, I'd say that the top line is hardware's hard for everyone, right? It's it's like I think it's this this thing and and we have this habit of like being focused on us and just like our bubble. But if anyone is building in this space, believe me, they're all stru s suffering from the same issues. So I think that's that's the first thing to to to bear in mind is you're not special. Like ev even though we think we are, we're we're really not. Like the competitive CEOs like Miranda at NYX, she has the exact same struggles, right? And and we we catch up, you know, probably once or twice a year. We're founders first and we're competitors second. Or at least that's how I choose to do life and and that's how I choose to do business, right? Yes, business is personal. Of course it is. Like, you know, this this company is everything to me, but that doesn't mean that people who are air quotes, you know, going toe to toe with me are like the enemy. So I think that the first thing is Hardware is hard, but it's it's it it is for everyone. The second thing I would add is our philosophy has always been if we can execute on the expectations that we've been setting, if we can deliver what we say we're gonna build to our customers, this thing will sell itself. Because hydration is such a big issue, it's such a misunderstood marker, it is incredibly impactful to each and every one of us, whether you're doing marathons or whether you're just living an office working life. Hydration impacts everything you do. And if you can do that right and if you can provide that information in in a meaningful way and a digestible way and and people see the results first hand, this thing will sell itself. speaker-1: This is this, Musk talks about how he'd much rather have the challenge, like logistical challenges than demand challenges, right? speaker-0: Yes, this is very much that, right? So you can flip it from a product and investor standpoint is if you've done the hard thing and you've actually delivered like, you know, you you've delivered the asset and it works and it's sound and it's robust, that is incredible moat of defensibility that you've just accomplished for yourself. And again, talk about competition. The amount of hurdles that they would have to jump to to to get to your destination is essentially close to impossible for for some truly, truly deep tech stuff, especially if you've like patented it, yada yada. So I always choose to see things from that perspective of, you know, what's what's the cost of not doing the hard thing, right? I do think we live in a world right now where expectation is it has to come easy. Things need to come easy. If it doesn't come easy, it's not It's not for me. You know, what happened to good old work ethic of like, you know, the guy who founded KFC was, I think, in his late 70s when he founded KFC after attempting to build how ⁓ however many companies beforehand. Right. I think there's this unfortunate expectation now that if it's too hard, it's just like, ⁓ it wasn't meant to be. I think hard hardware's not for the faint of hearted. Absolutely not. Like don't get into hardware if if you don't like being punched in the face ten times a day. ⁓ I come at it from an athlete's perspective where Training is a physiological adaptation. You only get better by pushing yourself. Like physically speaking, you cannot have a higher power output if you're not biking towards that power and you're not getting your your body accustomed to be comfortable at that power. So you have I I think learning to be uncomfortable is critical when it comes to building hardware. But if you can learn to be uncomfortable, the rewards I think are phenomenal. I mean, look at the world's most valuable two companies. They're both hardware companies. Yep. speaker-1: Absolutely. And I think there's something on mission as well, right? Is that you must get mission aligned people wanting to work with you, wanting to partner with you, wanting to buy from you through the kind of very committed cycling or endurance athlete community, but also through trying to solve our problems. Like it's, it's attractive to great people to try and solve our problems. Great, talent want to be working on difficult things. speaker-0: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That I I would agree with that. Yeah. Yeah. speaker-1: So you've also, I would assume, around with a bunch of different channels in this journey. You've probably gone, you'd see, I know that I can buy you on a couple of different retailers online from our conversations. I think it's okay to say that I can pick you up from a bunch of different specialist stores in person. And then there's also the potential to chat to others in the space who are going after the same customers and kind of build with them. How have you thought about channel? How have you thought about The natural home for your technology. How have you thought about getting in front of the right customers? speaker-0: Yeah, so I mean, I I remember a very informative slash like diff like direction setting conversation was was actually with a guy called Bruce Smith who who founded Hydro who he he opened my eyes to a completely different path. For context, the founder of URA invested us in twenty twenty two and URA's path was D to C up until probably like two, three years ago. So th they they were a D to C only product for for the greater part of like a decade. ⁓ before they opened up like John Lewis and Selfridges and and and you know Target and and whatnot. So when we built this company, and again we we started it out of Entrepreneur First, which is a VC, you know, VC is like profit margins, profit margins come from D to C. So we were heavily, heavily biased towards just D2C consumer. It was only when I spoke to Bruce that he said the only reason we survived what was a really hard time for many companies, including for Peloton, was because of our best buy relationship. I love having my perspectives being challenged. I love taking in data. That data point was critical, I would say, for the flow bio journey because we I completely changed my my outlook on how we should grow this company. And and right now, actually 65% of our business is B2B. It is the independent bike stores. It's the feed, it's health, it's Sigma Sports, it's the the brick and mortars, the specialist retailers who are selling towards our clientele. It's those guys buying in bulk. Most of them actually buy like very small, you know, between ten to fifty units for the smaller I B Ds. Like you're you're not doing volumes through them, but if you multiply, you know, like an IBD who does ten units a month and you have a hundred IBDs, suddenly you have a thousand units per month type scale, which is not insignificant. ⁓ and I and I think this is how we're starting to build the business where, you know, I I think D to C is is very much a romanticized channel from the V C industry, which I understand it makes sense. Like I think the truth of the fact is, especially when you're creating something new in the way that FlowBio is like the the sweat sensor category was not a thing un until ourselves and Nixon and others made it a thing, you have to go through the hard miles and education is critical. And if you're yourself the only educator in the world, that's a very long and expensive journey. So what we've done is we've created a partner model where all of our partners are educating their customers. who, you know, we probably it would have taken us another three to five years to meet that customer, but they're they're shopping today at Wolfie's, they're buying their bike today, and it's an upsell opportunity for the salesperson to to get them onto the category. speaker-1: This is real getting into the detail, but I find it fascinating having never been in this doing what you're doing. Do you then have to go and educate the educators? Like, are you or someone from your team going and spending a bunch of time with these people in the stores and saying, Hey, look, this is the benefit. This is how it works. If they ask you this, you tell them that. speaker-0: Yeah yeah. Yep. So so our head of retail, he he grew up his entire life in the cycling industry. He was one of the first employees at Evans. He then went on to help set up Cycle Republic by Halford's. And basically his whole ethos, because he he was on the other side, right? He was on the receiving end of of a flow bio. What he saw worked best, and this is a strategy that we're now implementing, is you need to it doesn't really matter that you got, say, ⁓ an Evans Cycles on board. Like the CEO of Evans Cycles is not selling to the customer every day. It's the salesperson on the shop floor who's selling it to the customer every day. He is or she is your CEO. That's the person who matters. That's the person who you need to get on board. So you develop relationships with them. It's all about relationship building. I think this is it's it's very inligned with our culture already at FlowBio because we're very heavily relationship based business. We we we hate transaction based deals. Like we have brands all the time asking if we can do an Instagram post. And we're just like, you what, walk a mile because if you just want one post, like that's not us. I'll give you the number of our competitor. Like it's it's we we are here for relationships. We're here for like genuine change. And retail is very much aligned with relationships, right? You're you're building the the educator kind of portals, you're going in physically, you're spending evenings with them, ⁓ walking them through the product, potentially even given the industry, you're going on rides with them in the weekends. You're you're developing incentive schemes around if they hit certain markers, they get certain things, benefits from the company itself. So I mean, David always tells the story for for specialized, so the the bike brand. Where they would come in every Wednesday with like t-shirts, free bottles, stickers, whatever you name it, you know, swag basically. And they would just bribe the store staff with their free swag. It looked good. It's quite cool. Guess what was the top performing bike sailing brand within evidence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It's it's not rocket science, but again, it requires the the hard miles, the manual miles, which I think again, in in today's world, we all want to do things from the comfort of our screen. And like, ⁓ my gosh, you're you're asking me to leave my desk and like go speak to another human being? I feel speaker-1: I've heard the Mr. Beast story about how he, like some, someone will be like, ⁓ I hung out with Mr. Beast. And then he just wanted us to drive at 3am to Walmart so he could like rearrange the shelves. And like, it's also obviously this little pie trick that he's got when he wants to kind of show people how much he cares about his brand. there's something there, right? There's something there. And I think that's super exciting. was listening to someone talk the other day around, they got listed in Costco and a similar message to yourself in that getting listed in Costco doesn't matter. Selling the stuff in Costco is what. is what matters. how are you going to get in there and activate? remember all the way back to like when I was doing enterprise software and we would sell a big license and hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue, but you're not getting it next year unless people are actually using that thing and benefiting from that thing. speaker-0: Yeah, exactly. If they don't use it. Yeah, I mean a a great brand that I'm seeing like live unfolding right now is Cadence. Like what what what Ross Mackey is is building at Cadence is insane. And like the hustle that he puts in, you know, they've just closed like Walmart, they've closed Target, they've closed all these big retailers, and he's physically boots on the ground in those stores, activating those salespeople because that's what's required. And, you know, it's it's they've built such an incredible brand, which looks very snazzy, but there is so much manual grunt work that goes in by himself still. ⁓ and that is just what's needed. speaker-1: Is it a strategy to have a group of people who would see themselves as part of a community that flow bio has either started or facilitated or is that not really what you're. speaker-0: It's a great question. By design, no. Are we are we going out to like Richmond Park, Battersea Park, and being like, hey, come do a 10K with the Flow Bio team? No, because like who gives a shit? And it's like the the the I'm so important. Like no one really cares. Like, you know, we're all busy, we're all going about our day. We're, you know, especially in the country that we're in with the UK, things aren't necessarily easy. Like people are just really like up to here already. So asking them to like go a step higher just so they can know about your sweat sensor, I just don't think that's credible or authentic. Yeah, because again. Let's be honest, so many brands aren't building communities from an authentic place, right? They're building it to sell you more stuff that you don't need. So the the way that I guess we're unintentionally building community is more the one-on-one relationships that we build, which then develops genuine bonds. So for example, so Sam Dickinson's a great example of this. So Sam Dickinson, he's someone that we now officially work with, but unofficially we worked with him probably for the last like 18 months. And that that relationship started off with me going to Leeds. grabbing a breakfast at a calf after a rainy ride and just kicking off a conversation. I did not ask him to to do a social post. I did not ask him to buy a sensor. It was just a hey, let's meet. Fast forward twelve months later, he came to us saying, I have real issues in the heat. Is this something you can help with? I remember a conversation from a year ago. We said, yeah, sure. You know, we can absolutely help with that. That is one of the things that the product supports. You probably have a high sweat rate, high sweat sodium. Let's let's do this. Let's get, you know, let's get into the data. Again, we're not asking you for anything. We're actually not asking you to post anything. It's just, it's about you and me now. Very cool. And then fast forward another six months, he came in first, ⁓ second at T one hundred Singapore, which is one of the hottest races in the T one hundred calendar. Now we officially work with him. But because it was such an authentic relationship. He has so much trust in us. He's talking about us all the time. So, you know, he himself is an elite athlete. He hangs out with a lot of elite athletes. They all now know about FlowBio in a good way because of the relationship that we've cultivated with Sam. And I'd say that's how that's how we're building that community. It's not like intentionally through like social stuff. speaker-1: And one of the themes I wanted to touch on, because from the outside, seems to me like you're doing a great job of getting devices on arms and getting people at top of their field. I remember before, I'm catching up with you again that I saw you on Oli from Arjun's YouTube channel. saw you on, I think Shervin shares, you popped up on Shervin shares, it's his YouTube channel. And then from seeing you and chatting to you, I now know that you are. used by all of these elite athletes. So they all happen serendipitously in Rainey Leeds Cafe. speaker-0: It's a really good question. I it's it's both. So so there's definitely there's there's a bit of serendipity probably is like sixty percent of it. Intention is the other forty. So we we also reach out actively. So for example, my partner's physio, he runs called the running room in in Battersea, and he's really good mates with ⁓ a Red Bull athlete who does ultra Johnny Davis. So like Johnny, for example, incredible storyteller, really genuine, authentic. Journey that he's gone on, very aligned performance, pushing the body. Johnny was one of those examples where like I intentionally went out for an intro to Johnny. Like we didn't wait for Johnny to come to us. Other athletes come come via referrals. You know, it's it's it's very much a combination of the two. we we are developing, we have developed an athlete strategy, kind of like a three-tiered strategy of of like, you know, elite athlete, pro athlete, and influential microinflation type thing. And each one we have an intentional outreach program, but we also have inbound and they kind of slot into one of those three tiers. and I I think it's it's one of those things that we're just now seeing now, having d been in the market for like a year and a half, two years, is that the more relationships we build, the more the inbounds pile up. Yeah. So it's kind of this like momentum that's now almost like a self fulfilling flywheel. speaker-1: Do have to start thinking about how you like almost had brand of the bulge speaker-0: So so we we're we're we're developing a campaign called Spot the Bulge for for like twenty twenty seven and beyond. We were at the Tour de France this year in a very kind of like I would say ninja capacity. Obviously next year we we want to be less ninja. And Spot the Bulge is one of like the the the projects that we're thinking about of like, you know, it's it's a it's it's it's a very small device, but in skin tight Lycra, it will it will bulge out of the kit. So it's it's these kind of initiatives where You know, I we we had one of the Eurosport pundits in the office the other day and he was kind of talking about, yeah, you know, I've already started talking about like the flow biosensor and and now I can point it out. So he very famously screenshotted a photo of Pogachar wearing something here at the I think it was Strata Bianchi this year. And the internet blew up, right? 'Cause everyone's like, What the heck is he wearing there? Like what what what's he detecting? What advantage is he getting? Ended up just being his whip strap. But you know, one photo went viral. About the potential that this could be a new sensor, which is giving him the edge, which explains his performances or whatever. ⁓ so the internet is always ready to like jump at something which is remotely interesting. You just need to be very patient for that time to be right. And I think that's the flow bias strategy. It's it's you we we literally just had a team meeting, competition comes up, especially because I did a LinkedIn post recently about one of our competitors, which potentially by some of the team members was seen as a bit aggressive. So, you know, competition always always comes into the mix and I always try and remind them that like our only competition is ourselves and our lack of focus on what we need to accomplish. It doesn't matter what happens left or right of you. That's irrelevant. You can't control that. What you can control is is what you're doing. And one choice that we've made very consciously is yes, our competitors are making noise left, right, and center, and you know, closing deals, announcing pilots. You and I both know the shenanigans that founders pull to like show hype, right? Yeah, for sure. And and I think it's one of these things that like, yes, this all sounds very lovely, but tangibly. Which sweat sensor was at the tour de fronts? And that's the only thing that matters. ⁓ and and so we we try and be very patient. We try and be very methodological. We don't need to be the first movers, we need to be the last movers. When we move, everything else stops. That's that's kind of how we how we try and do things. So a very long winded way of answering yes, it's a combination of by design, intentionality. More and more of it is now becoming ⁓ very organic based on those relationships that we've that we spent a lot of time curating. speaker-1: It strikes me from both of those things that we've just talked about that part of your superpower is, is hustle is, is kind of going off that those conversations that might, may or may not be like the one that, the one that helps you level up. the conversation that gets you on the arm that happens to be on TV, the conversation with that one person who you're lovely to them in a cafe and have a particular problem. And then you actually solve that problem and then they, ⁓ won't stop talking about it. either publicly or privately to their very influential friends. It feels like that is part of the recipe. speaker-0: You're you're not the first person to make that observation. I laugh because I remember a conversation I had with one of my first managers at Facebook, where, you know, bear in mind my job was business development and sales. And her feedback to me in the negative was, you take too many meetings. You're meeting too many people. And I'm like, Are you fucking for real? You're telling a salesperson I'm having too many sales conversations? Like, and I think one of the things that I've learned is, you know, and it's the same thing with fundraising, right? Like we have one of our investors is like, He's very process oriented and he's he's always been kind of not excited by my approach, which is it feels quite random and like like like out there, many leads, many different directions. You know, I wish I didn't have to have 50 conversations in parallel. The issue is the world's just not that clean. Like you you never know who someone knows, you never know what what conversations people are involved with. You have to, by virtue of just ⁓ being it being a numbers game, you have to be out there. I think what what we try and do, and this is kind of the culture we've tried to instill at FlowBio, is when you're out there, because you have to be out there, always be out there in like your best foot forward because people tend to then want to help someone who's nice, you know. Wow, what a yeah, what a thought. So we we always try and be like the nice people in the room, the the kind people, the helpful people. Like I'm always helping people who've yet to help me because that's just what you do. So speaker-1: When I finished up at my last company and then had this blank sheet of paper, I set myself a goal of having a hundred meetings with interesting people in one of the hundred meetings. So you would have been on a piece of paper going, who's doing interesting shit, download all my LinkedIn connections, like go through, like who's interesting. And, the interesting thing there was some, some were conversations like, like ours where we hadn't caught up in like eight years or something. And you said, yes. And we have the conversation and like we've, I, speaker-0: I think I was in one of your hundred meetings actually. speaker-1: We've gone on to do, you came to our retreat, like we, swap notes. I've done a tiny little investment into FlowBio, like all this stuff happens. But then there was other people who just completely like aired me and don't take the meter. And there was, that was the same actually for, for people I didn't know. I've got no problem sending a cold email, a cold LinkedIn message. Some of the best things come from that. And so I messaged a bunch of people, a load of people just complete air and then. a bunch of people being like, Hey, yeah, let's, let's, let's take the call. Maybe it's 10, 15 minutes. Maybe it's coffee. Maybe it's a walk, whatever, whatever it might be. And some of those have now led to really, really cool stuff. and then obviously interestingly, you then have the people that completely air you when you start doing stuff publicly or when you start, then it's, then it comes to come back. And I think to your point on the, on the unfocused bit, having managed teams of salespeople, I think you just need to know the difference right for yourself or if you're in a sales role, is this, am I exploring here? Is this a, is this a attempt at bumping into serendipity? And if it is, then I'll treat it in a different way. Like maybe the expectation on it is different or like, I'm not expecting this to be one of the thing, the three things this week that moves the needle or like, speaker-0: The expectation on it is different. speaker-1: I'm having a chat with a guy that I really got on with a decade ago, then suddenly my business is going to turn around. Like suddenly, like next quarter is coming in boys, like I've got this exploratory call with a guy who reached out to me on LinkedIn. But if you reserve some of your time for those kind of hustle time, like increasing the surface area of luck, increasing the surface area of serendipity and then amazing stuff comes. speaker-0: Yeah, I think it's exactly that. It's ⁓ you know, just put out good energy. I think that's the that's kind of the the the long story short. If you put out good energy, good things will happen to you. And it it's it's very similar with with with business strategy, right? Like some some people always ask me, like, what's your philosophy when it comes to building the company? We are we are hands down a product led organization, not a sales led organization. Cause I I've been raised it with the school of thought that money isn't the reason you do something. Money is the outcome of the something you've done. And money follows success. Money follows good products, money follows good stories, money follows interesting accomplishments. If you focus on trying to create something of value, the money is a result of that. And I think it's it's very much the same of if you if you're trying to get to a certain goal, networking wise or you know, ⁓ customer wise, if you put the best foot forward, the world, surprisingly, is a very small space. I mean, it and and this is a bizarre conversation that I had literally yesterday. In one room, there was someone who knew Putin. And someone who knew Larry Ellison in one room. What what you could do with those, you know, yeah, like very different things, or maybe same, depending on who you ask. But it's it's just like that's how bizarre the world is. Like, you know, whoever thought that they could access the Kremlin or like the the golden keys of Silicon Valley? Y never in a million years, but like here I was, and it it happened to be a friend of mine who I never knew had this relationship and and connection. speaker-1: do that. speaker-0: So I think it's it's these things that we you know, one of the best lessons I've I've learned and I've learned this the hard way is humility is the most important virtue for founder. Because once you admit that you know nothing and you're not the best person in the world and you don't have all the answers, what happens? All the answers come to you by process of you asking for help from the right people that can solve those issues. It was like two, three years ago. Was going through really hard time, you know, one thing led to another, led to another. And I kind of discovered my faith in Christianity. And as a process of that journey, you kind of go through like you're like studying, you know, I really love history. So like I just saw Jesus as another character in history who you want to study. And what's what's really fascinating is, you know, the this this concept of humility and this concept of going to the people in need rather than the people of strength. Right, you know, you and me, we're founders, right? If we're given the objective You need to get the word out to as many people as possible. Who do we automatically default to? We we need to go to the rich and the powerful and those with access. Right. But the way that one of the biggest, I would say, philosophies in the world got out was through the poor, the hungry and the needy. Right. And I think there's this thing of that humility. If you're if you're humble and you want to help people, people want to help you. And I think that's that's probably the the biggest life lesson I've learned in terms of how how to build a company, how to build a team. And also, just how to live with yourself. It's so much more fun leading through love than it is through fear. Like it's just so much more fun. speaker-1: You are in a space where historically in sensing in general, like the sensors that your customers are wearing on their bodies, the people on the Tour de France or when they're training or whatever it might be, typically made by a few different, very big, very powerful organizations. I would imagine if I was to step into your shoes five years ago and you're just starting the business, the immediate thing would be to think of those guys as competition and they very well might be. There could be a garment sweat sensor around the corner. We don't know. ⁓ But I'm, think there's also collaboration opportunity that can move you forward. How do you think about these big guys? Do you think about collaboration? Do you think about competition? Do you think about both? speaker-0: Good question. So ⁓ it's it's I'm definitely more collaboration than I am competition. I I think, you know, it's it this this concept of game theory of you know, there's there has to be an absolute winner and an absolute z ⁓ loser, I I don't think necessarily applies in the world of business. I think people who build businesses with that perspective end up building really ugly environments because I I think, you know, and we again, David was saying this, you know, he sold he sold bike shoes and helmets from hundreds of different brands, and they all were were successful to a certain degree. You don't have to, in my opinion, see everyone as competition. That being said, you need to also be kind of smart, right? You you can't be naive. So it's this, it's this weird balance of being kind and accessible and humble, but also not being walked all over. So it's it's always finding that like yin and yang, I guess, of of the two polar opposites. But the the way that we see things and then kind of our role in the world is very much we're we're we're part of an ecosystem. And we we almost, by virtue of just doing one thing. We kind of fly under the radar because people aren't interested in just building one thing, right? Apple or or or Google executives pitched to to the the product leadership. We want to build one sensor, we're just going to measure one thing and we want to sell that to 150 million people. They'd get laughed out of the room because speaker-1: It doesn't impact our multi billion, multi tens of billion dollar P &L in this area. speaker-0: How do I sell this? Like how do I sell one thing that does one thing? Like I I'm already seeing the nightmare in the product marketing launch. So almost by design of being very limited in what we do, but going really deep, right? So Mark Gainey, founder of Strava, one of the things that that he like really instilled in me very early on in this journey was like inch wide, mile deep. If you focus on an inch of the world, but you go all the way to the core of the earth and you do it really, really well, that is so much more valuable than like, you know, inch or like mile wide. But like inch deep. So that's that's strategy number one is like really be good at one thing because you you tend to have two things happen. One, people aren't overly interested in squashing you because you're too small in terms of like the the thing that you're solving. But two, by the time that people actually clue on to the fact that, ⁓ shit, actually this is quite a big inch. It's quite a deep hole. Like, fuck, how did we miss this? By that time, you you've already got the best technology. So that that's kind of the the first bit. The second bit is, you know, scale, right? I I always say this when I'm speaking to founders that our job as founders is not value creation. Like value creation is the cute part of building a company. The serious part is value capture. And there's there's countless stories of companies and and engineers and scientists who showed value to the world, but they got absolutely walked all over because they couldn't capture that value. A great example, actually, again, a family friend of ours, he invented the synthesizer, the the digital synthesis, like the ability for us to create music digitally, he invented it. Does anyone know who he is? No. Because he got crushed in lawsuits. Yeah. Really? Right? He like Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, they all crushed him because he wasn't able to capture the value that he created. Meanwhile, all of us, you know, the entire like music industry is using his technology. So I think the trick, and this is where you kind of get a bit into like game theory and tactics, is how do we capture that value? In my opinion, the way that we capture that value is we have to be the biggest player in the shortest window of time. You almost need to like dash your opponent before they even know what's happened. You're already at the finish line. But we have some very creative things that are coming in the pipeline of how we're dashing the competition in a way which isn't necessarily obvious. And it's very much a collaborative approach rather than a competitor approach. speaker-1: We'll have to do the catch-up episode in a year's time. speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, see see if the strategy played out. speaker-1: Well, no, hear about those exciting things from horses now. Dude, this has been amazing. Is there anything else you want to say about what's next for FlowBio? Or if you are, if someone listening to this is elite talent or an amazing investor in the space and wants to chat. speaker-0: Any and and any people, be it professional or non-professional, right? If if if what we've talked about, you know, dehydration, like headaches, like cramping, lethargy, all of that stuff, if that resonates, obviously do reach out to us. We we we love helping everyone on a on a case-by-case basis. In terms of investment, yes, you know, we're a hardware company, we're always raising, we're we're closing our four million pound round right now. There is still some allocation, like a little bit of angel allocation available. So again, ⁓ if you're interested in that. If you're fun, we we can obviously still chat, ⁓ but it it might be too late. Yeah, we're we're we're both raising as well as always taking new new new new customers on. So I'd say the easiest way to reach out is just probably over LinkedIn or or my email. speaker-1: Beautiful. This has been awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And we will have you back in a year's time to tell us about the journey of the all day. speaker-0: Appreciate it.