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Colin Billings & Smart Home Lighting

August 13, 2019

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Colin Billings has built something that I’m incredibly interested in generally: hardware that contributes to home automation. He built Orro, the first truly responsive lighting system, out of his own frustration with lighting’s adverse impact on his wellness and sleep. Now the Orro Switch adds the computational power of an iPhone XR inside the walls of a home. It detects your presence in a room and adjusts the lighting automatically to bring out the most natural light, reducing artificial light exposure that disrupts your body and sleep. Within a week, Orro learns your preferences and handles 95% of all the lighting adjustments, so you don’t have to think about your lights anymore.

[Read more…] about Colin Billings & Smart Home Lighting

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Transcript

Colin Billings: The future existed where you just woke up and walked around a space, and the lights responded to you. We’ve seen that for a very long time. Clearly, a desirable experience. The question was how and was that possible to create?

 

Joe Casabona: Colin Billings has built something that I’m incredibly interested in, in general. Hardware that contributes to home automation. You see, he built Orro, the first truly responsive lighting system, out of his own frustrations with lighting’s adverse impact on his wellness and sleep. Now the Orro Switch adds the computational power of an iPhone 10r inside the walls of your home. It detects your presence in a room and adjusts the lighting automatically to bring out the most natural light. Reducing artificial light exposure, etc. etc.. I will let Collin get into all of this, but I think that this is a very interesting topic, especially because I’ve been focusing a lot more on automating my home now that I own one. I don’t want to spoil any more of the conversation. Let’s get to it. But first, a word from our sponsors.

 

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Joe: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks How did you build that? Today guest is Colin Billings, founder, and CEO of Orro, the first truly responsive lighting system. When I was reached out to have Colin on the show, I thought this was a fantastic idea. I thought it was a very cool product to talk about. Right now it’s really good timing because we just bought our first house and I want to make it as smart a home as possible. So, Colin, thanks so much for joining me today.

 

Colin: Hey, Joe, thank you so much for having me on.

 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. Why don’t we start off with a little bit about who you are and what you do?

 

Colin: Yeah. Founder and CEO of Orro. Orro is the creator of the Orro Switch and the Orro home lighting system, which is a seamless replacement for any light switch in your home. Works with your existing bulbs and you plug it into where your existing switch is today, in a way that in about a week at all autonomous to control your lights, that’s what we call responsive lighting. Then turn the light switch into something much more than what we commonly expect from our light switch today, which is an easy control for all the other smart things in your home.

 

Joe: Wow, that’s fantastic. Something very appealing to me here is that it works with the current bulbs in my home. Other lighting fixtures, you’d need to buy these Wi-Fi connected bulbs, right?

 

Colin: That’s right. The previous era of smart lighting was focused around the bulb. That was very easy to install but very difficult to have across your house. One of the biggest problems was that you had to rely on an app to control these bulbs because as soon as you turn off the light switch, the smart bulb becomes dumb. Aside from the fact that there are quite a few light bulbs and it gets quite expensive. Experience is just much better with the intelligence at the switch.

 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing that you mentioned is that within a week, it will automatically work with the way you live. Is it AI-powered to figure out “The lights are always on at this time. Let’s turn them on at this time.” Can you explain that a little bit more?

 

Colin: Yeah. There’s two things that are really at the core responsive lighting. One is machine perception. It can observe the environment. The other is, is what I would call machine intelligence, which is not AI in terms of convolutional networks and other things like that, but more understanding the patterns of your home. You use the Orro Switch after you’ve installed it like a normal light switch, maybe it’ll automatically turn the light on, and it’ll turn it off after you’ve left. It’s essentially making memories of all those adjustments and understanding your particular preferences for that room and how you use it and that it can begin doing that automatically for you within a relatively short period of time.

 

Joe: That’s fantastic. I think a good illustration of this is every morning I wake up around 5:30 or 6:00. I go downstairs to my living room, and I have a smart switch, so I say, digital assistants. I won’t say any names on the show. Digital assistants, turn on the reading light, and then the reading light gets turned on. Then I read for about an hour, and I turn it off. That’s a very specific pattern in my home that says the Orro Switch could probably learn, right?

 

Colin: That’s right. Two things about that. One is that the most transformational thing that Orro does today is moving you from that having to consciously think about your lights. Everything that’s existed prior to Orro was essentially some version of a remote control. You could pull out your phone and make an adjustment. You could connect it to a voice assistant and ask your assistant to do that. Today, with Orro, you walk in the room. We learned that at 6:00 a.m. in the morning, you like it soft or a particular light on, and we’ll automatically turn that on for you. To the right level, based on what we’ve learned about your preference.

 

Joe: That’s fantastic. This sounds like something that my father would love to invent because when I was a kid, the thing that my dad said all the time is every freaking light in the house is on. He would say it constantly because we’re always wasting energy. It sounds like this is the perfect thing for my dad to have circa 1996 when all four of us were running around.

 

Colin: It would have probably saved us all a little bit of grief. I think two things are true. One is that we waste an incredible amount of energy from our lighting. About half of all lighting energy is wasted because people are not there or because you already have enough brightness in the room from natural light or other sources. In terms of total energy consumption, that’s one-tenth of the world’s energy. It’s a massive amount, and it means a lot both at the world level, but also in your pocketbook, over the lifetime that you own a home. Orro completely eliminates that. I think the important part and the reason why this is something that is only now possible is that we don’t like to conserve if it means we have to have a sacrifice in our quality or comfort of living. What Orro was able to do is understand your patterns and make sure you have all the light you need and that it’s perfect for that moment, but make sure that when you don’t need it, it’s off.

 

Joe: Yeah, That’s perfect. That’s fantastic. Where I’m less likely to recycle if it means I have to take my recycling somewhere. But if my garbage man picks up the recycling, as long as it’s in the right bin, fine I’ll recycle. That’s no skin off my back.

 

Colin: Exactly.

 

Joe: As a crude example. This is super interesting. How old is Orro? When did you found this company?

 

Colin: Orro is about three years old now. We spent the first about two and a half years working product development research. We launched our first product that Orro switch at the beginning of February.

 

Joe: Nice. Oh, wow. So it’s been two and a half years in the making. This is perfect. I love hearing about stuff like this, because most of the people I interview and myself included, we are in a very digital space. If I have an idea on a Friday night, I can code the weekend and have it launched by Monday, if I wanted to. Two and a half of the three years you spent doing the research. Let’s focus in on there. First of all, how did you come up with the idea?

 

Colin: The idea started with an experience I had in my own home, and it was one related to not sleeping well. I was struggling with sleep. I was recommended an app for my computer called Flux, which adjusts the color, temperature, and brightness of your screens. You have it on your phones now with things like Night Shift, and there’s a couple of ones on Android. I started sleeping better immediately. That was fascinating to me. I learned, through some research, that the way that we expose ourselves to light throughout the day matters immensely to our health. I wanted to build Flux as a hobby project for my home, because that’s where I spend the most amount of time around artificial light. That was an interesting technical project to start working on. As I started working through what was available, smart bulbs, you talked a little bit about that, very expensive systems that cost $20,000 for your home. I was like, “I’m not going to do this for my apartment in San Francisco.” I think I saw what was an opportunity, which was that clearly, the future existed where you just woke up and walked around a space and the lights responded to you. We’ve seen that for a very long time. Clearly a desirable experience. The question was how and was that possible to create? That was the thesis around where the experience should be. We started as a business when we realized that the light switch is the most widely distributed electronic device in the world. It’s in every room. For 60 to 100 years, it’s done nothing more than turn the lights on and off manually. That seems like a pretty interesting space to begin trying to build a company.

 

Joe: I love that. The light switch is the most distributed electronic around the world. Every home needs light switches. Every home needs multiple light switches, maybe multiple light switches in a single room. You’re not limiting yourself to iPhone users or Android users, or whatever. You’re like “Homes need light switches, every building has light switches. That’s fantastic. Walking around and the lights change around you. The example of that that will always stick with me is from the 1998 movie Antitrust. Have you seen this, with Ryan Phillippe?

 

Colin: I have not, but I’m going to go check it out. I’m a big fan of finding these old movies where they had things like Orro in them.

 

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. This was lights, but also music. The music would follow this guy around. I was like, in 1998, I’m like, “This is magic.” But now, today I’m like, “You could probably do that.” It’s cool to see this put into action. You mentioned a little bit about researching the smart bulbs. Like you said, really expensive. We’re renting right now. We’re going to move into our new house, and that’s when I’m ready to bite the bullet. If I’m spending, I don’t know. It’s like $120 bucks for two Phillips Hue light bulbs. We’ve got dozens of light bulbs in our house. That’s a ton of money. As far as the research into the competition goes, it sounds like you did that. What research did you have to do to make sure that the switch idea was viable?

 

Colin: Yeah. I worked on product teams, in those roles for most of my career. I knew that it’s very hard to pitch consumer products to customers on things like value savings, or you have to have a magical experience that also has the right timing. We spent a good part of our first four, six months just talking to customers. Asking them, “What is the role that light plays in your life? How do you feel about the jobs you have to do every day? To get that light to meet your needs, what are your desired benefits?” I would say that following something like a customer discovery plan, is a great place to start. We essentially did a version of that ourselves. What we found was that people at first, if you’re asking, “What is the role of light in your life?” That they’re like a little bit of a mental block. Then you ask, “What do you do every day? You go through that process. I wake up in the morning, and I walk down the hall, and I turn on a light, and then I adjust it down because it was bright from the night before. I am at my door getting ready to leave, and I’m having a moment of like, “Am I going to turn my lights off and be a good human being today?” You find out that it touches a whole host of moments across our life. You could simply think about it. If your light switch doesn’t work in your house, you basically go to the hardware store tomorrow and replace it. We narrowed in on what those pain points were and where we could delight people. Then we built a prototype, which was our validation of “Are we going to commit our lives to this?” Let’s get something that does an approximation. It was a super ugly product, sat on the outside of your wall, didn’t replace your light switch, but it did the core components and gave it to people and said “Do you like this? Is there something that you can see having in your home?” Those were the validation steps that we went through.

 

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Joe: If I am in my car and I see into my house that the light is still on, I always have this moment of “Am I going to get out of the car and turn the light off?” Which I do, because I like saving money. That’s an experience that we’ve all had. Or like “I’m halfway down the road now. Did I turn the light off? I don’t remember.” I love what you said here because it’s a theme that keeps coming up with people, especially people I talk to in the physical product space. We talked to customers for 6 months or 12 months, or we built a prototype, and we asked them these very serious leading questions. Again, the contrast between the physical product and just the software that I can iterate on quickly is different. I think software developers could learn a lot from this, because no matter what, if you build a product that nobody wants because you didn’t do research, you’ve wasted time. Stuff like this takes time, but you get the right information, and you can ultimately build a better product.

 

Colin: I think that that’s absolutely true. Coming from a previous company was mobile application space and streaming media. You definitely have the ability to move faster with product changes. With a piece of hardware, it takes a very long time to commercialize something to mass production. It’s a bit harder to steer, so you have to do a lot more work upfront. At the same time, the same principles of a more Agile development and other things from which you could do early stage with digital products, you have to find the different way of applying that same approach to the physical product. One of the things that is part of Orro and what we focused a lot on early on is there’s a physical component here. It has to control power, and it has to connect to the Internet, it has to talk to one another. Control your lights reliably. That’s one vein. It’s a very digital product. It is much more like a smartphone than it is a light switch. It can be reconfigured to do many different functions and adapt to your use cases in your home. That was designed intentionally so that we didn’t know what the light switch is going to be over the next 10 years. You put an Orro switch in your home, and it could be a light switch today. It could be an intercom tomorrow. It could be a security system down the line. We built a platform for software to eventually get to that world. The other thing was that we built a ton of data into the product so we can understand how people used and how it performed. Now that we’re live and out in the world, we understand what priorities are out there in terms of building better experiences.

 

Joe: Yeah. That’s great. Let’s get into the title question. Which is how did you build it? I’m going to make this a multifaceted question because I’m interested in the hardware. I’m interested in the software because in the brief that was sent over, it says that it’s like the power of an iPhone 10r. Then as a web developer myself, I’m curious about how you built the marketing website. What platform did you use for that? Maybe that’s the easiest question to answer here. Maybe we’ll get that out of the way now. What was it like building your website, and was there any headache involved in it?

 

Colin: Figuring out what to say on your website is always the hardest part. Knowing how to talk to your customer and how to get your customers. If there of any type of different persona to the right places on your site is always the seminal question. What we have done in terms of that stack, I think is something that I would definitely do again, which is we used a product called Contentful, which is a CMS/API based– It’s essentially content as a service. You can put code in there. You can put content in there, and you can call all those different components and reconfigure them. Imagine, in a couple of months, building something more robust and flexible than a WordPress site, or like a WordPress actually for yourself. The right amount of data structure, but customization to build the site the way you want it to do that. Clearly, Google Analytics underneath. We used a lot of plugins along the way to help us understand what we need to invest in. Whether it’s analytics or other things, I think you can get started very quickly with off the shelf things. Customization eventually becomes the battle that you have there, but until you know what you need to customize, picking something specific is hard to do successfully over time.

 

Joe: Yes, absolutely. I like that a lot. Until you know what you need to customize, picking something is hard. I want to ask one more question around this, because figuring out what you want to say on your website is absolutely the hardest part, especially because you want to tell the right story. You want to create that experience. Did the customer research you do help in writing the copy for your website?

 

Colin: Absolutely. When we did the customer discovery work, and we’ve done that regularly, every couple of quarters, to make sure we understand who our customers are. What we do or those is we tell them we’re going to record the audio. We’ve done hundreds of these now. As you start to listen to those things, you start to see common ways of describing different things. I think what we really tried to do is lift the narrative, the copy if you will, from the actual research that we did as much as possible. Clearly, you’re going to tailor it to be specific and talk about where your value lies but use their language. Having those recordings has been valuable. I’m excited, and we’re going to go back and run that through something that does speech to text. I bet you were going to even see new things come out just from that.

 

Joe: Yeah, that’s great. Use their language, and it’s something that I’ve just started to learn this year, as I wade more into the digital products space. Using the language that your customers use or your potential customers resonates with them. Like “Yeah, they’re saying the things that I feel. They’re describing the very problem that I have.” It’s another notch on the do more research beforehand belt.

 

Colin: Yeah. I think a great example of that is why we call it responsive lighting. You had a lot of “It’s autonomous lighting. It’s AI lighting.” You can throw all kinds of different places. When you heard from customers, they say, “What I wish is just my lighting responded to me. Not me having to control it or manage it.” The concept of responsive lighting came more central for us, just because that’s how people describe what they imagined the future of lighting looking for them in their homes.

 

Joe: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. AI might have a negative connotation. I’ve seen WordPress plugins, that’s mainly the space I’m in, talk about how it’s all React or all View or it uses APIs. I’m like, “Potential buyers don’t care about that.” They don’t care the tech you’re using. They want to know if it solves your problem. That’s a fantastic story about how your customer discovery shaped your language that you used. Let’s talk about Orro, the product. It’s a piece of hardware that functions a lot more like a smartphone, and then it’s very software-driven. Let’s talk about the software development, but also the manufacturing a little bit because I don’t know a lot about that and I’m always very curious about it.

 

Colin: This is my first hardware company. I learned a lot of this through the process as well. When you’re building a device that is basically a computer. I mean, a smartphone is a computer in many ways. There’s a number of complexities that come into the design and the choices that you make. Fundamentally, it’s what you want it to do and what you want users to experience and what roles do you want it to play. Those are things that have to ultimately come out in software. It’s not a pitcher of water. It does something digital. That was really what helped shape our focus on an operating system rather than something very simple, in terms of C code or something real-time only. We also knew that we wanted it to have an interactive capability, so it had a touch screen. You wanted to have something that felt modern, just the same way your smartphone does. That’s an operating system that has a GPU. As you start to walk from the consumer experience, you start to get parts of each of these stacks defined, from our requirements perspective. We knew that we wanted to be able to sense you in the room and not have the problems that motion sensors have. We had to find other sensors, like microphones, that were able to complement motion sensing, so that if you’re sitting in your room watching Netflix on your TV, your lights shouldn’t change because you’re not moving around. Being able to combine those sensing capabilities started to define that. We worked backwards from what the customer experience was going to be about and feel like, and that started to give us the framework for what parts of this stack we did in software and hardware. We ultimately ended up deciding on Android as the core operating system. We’ve customized Android. We picked Android because it has all those aspects of a smartphone, an operating system, great motion graphics, no complex schedulers and all the things you need to do when you have a lot of different software happening at the same time. It’s also something that, because it’s the largest operating system and it has a great community behind it, making sure that it’s secure and everything else. We chose to go the open-source starting path there because so much work had been done on it already and a lot of the big problems– I think part of starting something is choosing which problems you need to solve yourself, vs. something that you may have a better way of solving it, but the effort of solving it relative to what you can get by leveraging people who have come before you is a big influence on how much time and cost comes into the equation. Then as you start to get down from the operating system level, you get things that are defined by what it supports. That type of experience. Microprocessors and then you’re making tradeoffs on specs relative to what you need.

 

Joe: Right. I like what you said there. If we look at Tesla, for example, they’re reinventing the car, but it still has four wheels and two doors. They’re not changing it completely, and they’ve decided to focus on changing the engine. I think what you said is great because looking at your website, and it looks like the Orro switches is about, like you said, lighting today, but it could be about security tomorrow. It could be about controlling the temperature of your home. If you’re starting with something like Android, which has the right support for accelerometers and microphones and other stuff, then you’re not spinning your wheels there. The nice thing about software development is you can integrate later if you don’t like the way Android does something. Here’s how I know that you thought about this product. If you’re watching Netflix and you’re not moving, but the TV is still on, you don’t want your lights to change because of that. That is that’s just great. Because I think we’ve all been in a situation where we’re in a room, but we haven’t moved in a while, and the lights turned off, and you have to wave your hand and look like a dummy because you want it to come back on, but we’re still having a conversation in that room. I like that bit of it.

 

Colin: What we want to do is deliver on that vision of “I can just walk around my house and never think about my lights again.” That device that delivers that can become something beyond lighting. We have a very clear picture of what the next couple of years look like on that, but this is going to be in your home for 10 years. It’s going to understand a lot about how you and your family use your house. It’s going to be in more and more places across that home. What it looks like in five years is harder to predict., so build for the ability to be flexible downstream.

 

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Joe: I guess we’ve already touched, or we’re touching on this now, but there are a lot of big plans for the future. Let’s start here. If I bought the Orro Switch today, I’d be able to help control my lights. After about a week, you said, I wouldn’t have to think about the lighting in my house. Is that the full feature set, if I bought it today?

 

Colin: That’s a core feature set today. It also works with voice assistance and other things, so you can integrate it to your existing ecosystem if you want. This past Monday, we started our integration, so you can begin to connect other devices within your home to Orro. We’re adding more of those every week. That is where we focused today on control functions within your home. The first one [we launched] is a doorbell integration, so you can hear your doorbell when it rings. Sometimes that’s hard to do. You can also digitally mute that, in case you have a baby like I do and you don’t want your doorbell to ring. That will become being able to see who’s at your door. Starting the integrations of the beyond lighting phase currently. As we go forward, I think the next steps are built-in voice assistance, and whether that’s Alexa, that’s probably the first one. When you think about what you would do to prepare a room in your house for a smart future. There’s fundamentally sensors, usually and then some type of interface. Orro bundles all of those on top, into one switch. Through software, we expand on that. The more distant future, it may be things like security or other applications that help work on this peace of mind aspect of how lighting can play.

 

Joe: That’s great. I like the themes that we’re hitting here because the current state of things or the recent past state of things is you need to buy more and more hardware to do specific things. I’ve priced out what my smart home was going to look like. I need to get a Ring Doorbell. I need to get, and I don’t need but, the Nest thermostat. The Phillips Hues light bulbs, luckily I have a bunch of echo devices. It sounds like the Orro is this one piece of hardware that’s going to be able to do a bunch of things, which I like.

 

Colin: Think about like a front room in your house and what you might want to do with that, from a like a smart home perspective. You probably want to buy some type of voice assistance, so it’s like an Echo Dot or one of the Google products. That’s 40 to 50 dollars right there. I want my lights to turn on to simulate that I’m home, so that’s a timer, that’s 15 to 20 dollars. This is on my street, so I want to know if someone comes through my glass, so I want a motion sensor, and maybe I want to trigger other types of things in that room, based on a motion sensor. All of a sudden, you’re looking at $120 – $130 worth of hardware that you then have to go plug into the wall and find a way to power inside of that room. All that is in our sensors that are an existing switch today, from Orro.

 

Joe: That’s great. The thing you said about digitally muting the doorbell is fantastic because I have a toddler who still naps. My wife was just recently a night shift nurse, so she’d be sleeping during the day. We wouldn’t want the doorbell going off then either. Things that you’ve thought about, or have figured out, from actually using slash talking to people in their daily lives. I love that. We’ve talked about the current state of things. What are your plans for the near future, what’s coming down the pike?

 

Colin: We’ll expand our integration, so you’ll start to see climate control, other types of light. We’ll be able to control, maybe your lamps, and other things like that. That’ll mostly come through integrations. Later this year you’ll see a couple new products from us, on the hardware side, to do two things. One is expand the number of sensors that are in a room. There was quite a bit that can be done from the actual location of the light switch, but not every room works well with that, or long hallways, you don’t want to buy a switch on both sides of that hallway will be a part of that product rollout. As well as other switches in your home.

 

Joe: Awesome. That’s fantastic. You’ve given us a lot of really great advice so far, but I do need to ask my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

 

Colin: Trade secrets? I think a trade secret, or it’s just a working principle that always helps us to always, at a regular interval, come back to “Why are you doing this and what’s the vision? What’s your North Star, and where are you going within a particular timeline?” You might have a five year North Star, and you might have a one month North Star, you might have a quarter North Star. The reason why I say that’s important is that the probably most expensive thing you have that you invest in, anything you work on is your time. You need to know how to prioritize your time. Revisiting why you’re doing this and is the thing I’m doing next week helping me towards that? Helps you get rid of the things that aren’t.

 

Joe: I love that. I was just to somebody recently, “You know you’ve made a shift in your career when you start to value your time more than money.” When you’re first starting out in your business, or at least when I was first starting out in my business, I feel a lot of freelance web developers do this. I can either spend $300 on FreshBooks for the year, or I could write my own accounting software. When I was first starting out, I was in college, so I had all the time in the world. Time was super cheap for me. But now, I am running a somewhat successful business. I have a family. 200 or 300 bucks is a few hours of my day now, and I will gladly pay three hundred bucks a year for FreshBooks if it means I don’t have to spend 50 hours writing my own accounting software.

 

Colin: Exactly. If you look at people who are successful, I think you’ll always find a time management strategy somewhere in their world. Some people are keen on scheduling time to work on creative things, or they are very maniacal about their calendar. Others are very good at “Every week is a new week, and I’m going to spend it on the most important things.” There’s just so many hours in a day and so much energy that a person has, that you have to try to make sure you’re doing the most with what you got.

 

Joe: Yeah. Awesome. That’s fantastic. Well, Colin, thanks so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. Where can people find you?

 

Colin: You can find us at getorro.com, and that’s where the Orro Switch is available for sale.

 

Joe: Awesome. I will link that and several other things we talked about in the show notes. Colin, thanks again so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

 

Colin: Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it, Joe.

 

Joe: Thanks so much to Colin for joining me today. Again, I think that this is a really interesting topic because I love home automation. It has a little bit of AI and machine learning. It has building hardware and the whole nine. I love his trade secret, which is, what’s your North Star? Why are you doing this? Figuring out if your actions are going to help you achieve your goal. I think that’s fantastic. I also want to thank this week’s sponsors, Ahoy!, Pantheon and CreatorCourses. I would not be able to do this without them. My question of the week for you is, have you dove into home automation? If so, how? Let me know by writing me at Joe@HowIBuilt.it or on Twitter @jcasabona. If you like this episode, please share it with somebody. Sharing it with somebody helps expand the show and increase the downloads and allows me to keep doing this on a weekly basis, so thank you for that. Until next time, get out there and build something.

 

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Mihran Papazian & Brushette

April 30, 2019

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Mihran Papazian is the CEO of Brushette, a company that plans to revolutionize…toothbrushes! In a rare episode, we cover what it’s like creating a physical product, from the deep research they did, to visiting over 1,000 factories in China to find the right manufacturing partner. Mihran’s experience and deep knowledge means there’s lots of great takeaways here – no matter what you plan to make.

[Read more…] about Mihran Papazian & Brushette

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Transcript

Intro: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 121 of How I Built It. Today my guest is Mihran Papazian. He is the CEO of Brushette. Brushette is a little bit different from the normal things that we talk about here on How I Built It, in that it is a physical product, and it’s a physical product in the health space. I was excited to talk to Mihran today because it is a whole other industry, and generally I get very excited about talking about whole other industries. Mihran did not disappoint. He talks about doing things like reading the content on a bunch of American Dental Association websites, and he talks about manufacturing and how he visited over a thousand factories in China to find the right connections and the right people he needs to work with. It’s an incredibly interesting conversation, so I don’t want to spoil too much of it. Mihran has lots of fantastic advice for us, and his story is incredibly interesting. I get to ask him a question that I normally don’t get to ask people because they are usually already web developers, specifically WordPress developers, so I get to ask him specifically about how he built his website and some of the troubles there. Let’s get to the show, but not before a word from our sponsors.

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Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today my guest is Mihran Papazian, the CEO of Brushette. Mihran, how are you today?

Mihran Papazian: Hi, Joe. Thank you. I’m good, How are you.

Joe: I’m very good. I hope I pronounced that name correctly, for you and for everybody listening. We talked a little bit about pronunciations before we hit record here. Thanks so much for joining me. Why don’t you tell us–? First of all, somebody from your team reached out to me and asked if I would like to have you as a guest. I thought your idea for your company was super interesting, and generally off the beaten path of what I talk about. I usually talk to developers or people who found software companies. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and what Brushette is?

Mihran: Sure. Thanks for having me on your podcast. So, quickly, I’m born and raised in Paris for 20+ years. I attended school in New York for a year, and then I was off to China for ten years. Then I learned all the grass roots of business, from manufacturing to handling all type of products and visiting all type of factories. Hardware. I would say hardware background created that background in me. Then about four years ago I moved to LA, and we’ve been specializing in designing and distributing electric toothbrushes and replacement heads. Brushette is born out of the vertical which are the replacement heads. We have re-engineered it to make it more affordable and more hygienic for everyone to use.

Joe: That’s cool. My wife and I recently– Not recently, on Amazon Prime Day, we got electric toothbrushes that set us back a little bit. You’re supposed to replace those things every three months or something like that, so I liked the birth of this idea. I don’t know anything about manufacturing, so I’m excited to pick your brain on that stuff. It sounds like you’ve been doing that side of things for a long time.

Mihran: Yep. As far as the timing goes, you mentioned the three months. That’s true, that’s what dentists recommend. As of now, we should replace your bristles every three months. We’ve done– We’ve run a lot of studies that show that the bacteria accumulation on your bristles even after a day used is pretty insane. So after 90 days, after three months, you’re shoving back about 100 million bacteria back in your mouth. Because that little saliva or residual toothpaste, all these together with the moisture that are in the bristles that you just rinsed, it creates a breeding ground for bacteria. We figured that there must be something, there must be a solution that leaves everyone else here more hygienic and more healthy, to replace the bristle more often. Then we understood that with the current economy of $10 dollars a head, or even if it’s cheaper if you get on– If you hit generic products on Amazon it’s still pricey to replace those, so we engineered the system where it will only cost $1 dollar to replace the head.

Joe: Wow. That’s impressive. Maybe before we get into the research aspect of it, maybe we can talk about that. Let’s say I get a Brushette toothbrush. What am I looking at, as far as replacement? What’s the process like? You have a really interesting animated gif here on your website that shows how everything comes together, but what would I as the consumer be doing?

Mihran: You have the Brushette, and Brushette is competing on the replacement head market. We do offer electric toothbrushes as well, but it’s important to– We are literally on the replacement head market. What happened is that we’ve created what we call the “Neck.” Your current brush head has two parts, it has the neck, and it has the top part with the bristles. So, the top part with the bristles we call it the “Brushette,” it’s a small brush. Then the neck is an adapter that fits on your existing Oral-B toothbrush. We made the Oral-B version of the neck, and then we have another adapter which are compatible with Phillips Sonicare, which are coming a later this year. As of now, you could, and you won’t have to replace your electric toothbrush to switch to Brushette. You can literally use your existing Oral-B brush and then get one of our neck, and it’s a one-time neck adapter that you buy. Then after that every month you’ll swap on the fresh Brushette on top.

Joe: Wow, that’s cool. That’s very smart. Because electronics– I got the cheap electronic toothbrush, I know that other ones go for $100 or $200 bucks on Amazon, right?

Mihran: Yeah. They go for, I think, up to $200 plus. Then you will have these great Bluetooth seven mode capabilities, playing Spotify while you brush your teeth. The thing is that you will– It would certainly help thinking that you’re cleaner mentally, but what is touching your teeth are those bristles. The way they’re tufted and the quality, the stiffness of the bristle, the length. All those together, the impact that they have on your teeth, on each of your teeth. So that’s really where we focused, on the bristles.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s cool. It sounds like you’re very knowledgeable about this, and you have a lot of interesting copy on your website. What kind of research went into not only accumulating that information but solving the problem and finding and understanding that there’s definitely a market for this. Because there’s probably some percentage of all toothbrushers that have electric toothbrushes, and then another percentage that’s like “I’m paying way too much for replacement heads.” I would be interested in your research process.

Mihran: From all the regular homework that we’ve run, like looking at the toothbrush market and the replacement heads market, all the subscription service models. Right now everything is on subscription. From our toilet paper to aluminum foil, every single thing in a household that is coming on a regular basis got to be an Amazon Subscribe and Save process. Then when you look at the competition, not on the subscription service but on the electric toothbrush and the replacement head, there is not many people who offer a price point that we got to offer which is a dollar per head. The research that we’ve run are a lot of, and I guess you call them street interviews. Randomly hitting people in Hollywood Boulevard, which is a very scattered and a very– That is not necessarily presenting any specific target market but like the mass as a whole. Could be a lot of tourists, a lot of locals, and ask them how often they replace their toothbrush and did they ever knew about the amount of bacteria that are on their toothbrush, and if they would like to have their next refills whenever they come if they would like to have them  delivered to their home. Because they can think of, “When am I reaching these three month threshold? When is it the time to replace those brushes?” So we don’t have those reminders. There are some reminder on the bristles that are very, and I would say, on the bristles that turn– There are some indicators that turn from blue to white to show the wear and tear. Those come after past two months, and I think you will start seeing them in two to three months. We’ve run a lot of micro studies, and micro meaning a couple of hundred people answering questions from our own direct experience, and then also we had a pretty solid consumer base of people already buying these products before Brushette was born under another underrepresented brand. We have knowledge of the market and how often those same people were coming in and repeating their orders. They just bought it, and then the following month they would still buy a pack of six. We started to ask ourselves, and they might be like “What are they stocking up for. Is there going to be like a war where there will be people who will prevent them to brush their teeth? Why are people stocking up on brush heads?” We realized that the actual demand was here because people were actually– For a reason that we ignored, people were renewing their purchase of a replacement head. From there on we started to reach out.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s interesting. I’ve never heard anybody on my show mention them doing the street interviews on Hollywood Boulevard, but I like that because it is a diverse group of people there. It’s like walking down Times Square and trying to interview a bunch of people. In Scranton, which is where I went to college, you get a lot of the same people and a lot of the same demographic I should say. But not the case–

Mihran: Then that might not be– Today we figured out our demographic is more like moms and early adopters. So mom is one target, early adopters and tech savvy would be another target. The third demographic that responds well are older, healthy, yoga LGBT and wellness people who would– Those would be the people who would embrace Brushette as the healthy lifestyle they can take with you. They can swap and play with the function, etc. People who care a little more about their hygiene levels. Those are– Which are people that you won’t find necessarily in Union Time Square if you’re going to run a little research, but we’ve tried all the different avenues from Facebook ads to running around questions. One out of all these studies, because that was the question, the type of research that we did. We read a lot of articles, a lot of content on the ADA website, on the American Dental Association, and figured “What was the problem that they were raising?” One of the problem that they were raising, they were saying “Since there is nothing that prevents the packaging and the bristles to be fresh right out of their packaging, there is no compliant nor from the FDA that requires your toothbrush to be sanitized and completely sterile. So, we came up with a sterile packaging that will prevent the growth of bacteria in your toothbrush in the packaging. So when you buy it from the shop, then you know that it’s clean. There were, those type of problem that were raised by the industry leader themselves, by the ADA, we took them, and we found a solution for that. So that’s those type of research that were helpful.

Joe: Yeah, that’s cool. I don’t want to spend too much time here, but I do have two more questions around this. The first has to do with you specifically found that it was moms, early adopters and then health-centric people. Which health-centric people, that makes sense. My brother is a bit of a germaphobe. He would probably jump all over this. Then, early adopters, I’m a tech guy. This is interesting tech to me. What was it specifically about moms that you realized they would be good for this demographic?

Mihran: Our subscription box. All our audience, our test audience bought subscription model, and moms are responding better. So, from old school even when you target school, you’ll see that those are moms that are getting hit by these ads. Moms are the ones that are the head of the household, and they’re the ones who are shopping for everyone in their household. They would know if they will have to toss in two Brushette or 20 Brushette in that box for this month for their kids and their husband. It’s a subscription service, and generally speaking those resonate a lot with moms.

Joe: Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. It was a mom friend of ours who told us about the Amazon subscription service when our daughter was born, and now my wife is letting me know every month what we need as far as our Amazon subscription goes. So that makes perfect sense. Cool. Then you mentioned that you had a pre-existing audience, was that one that you specifically built around Brushette? Or maybe you said that was from another company?

Mihran: Right. We started four or five years ago in the field, and we joined the brand Prodental that is distributed in over 40 countries, and they’re more traditional doing electric toothbrushes and replacement heads, and mouthwash and toothpaste, etc. Great design, much cheaper than the competition, and very nice looking brand. But nothing very disruptive as far as an invention like Brushette, like it’s [inaudible], etc. We had the experience, the supply chain, the manufacturing and then the audience while selling Prodental. We were leveraging that for our first Brushette customers.

Joe: Cool, very cool and that is a nice segue into what I want to talk about next, which is how did you build this? I’m very interested in the full process because again you’re building a physical product. You have to prototype, and you need a relationship with a supply chain and manufacturer, things like that. So what was that process like, maybe from the first idea to execution?

Mihran: In China, where again I’ve been spending ten years of my life there, full time. Our first son is born there. I’ve been, I don’t know how many factories that I’ve ever visited, but it goes in probably over a thousand, but the ones that I’ve worked with on a regular basis what I like to do is I go, and I sit at every single place on the assembly line. I sit on the different production stages, so I understand what the pain of manufacturing this product is, what the problems are that those workers are going to face, how complicated it is. Is my great looking packaging a real burden to make it happen and to do it? With your fingers, when you have to fold the paper and put this in bag, etc. For me building the product starts in the factory on the assembly line with the engineers, etc. So it’s never complete unless you went and validated yourself, then you can do it. Of course, you will not do it as good as a worker who has been trained for hours, and they should do it. But my way of doing it is going through the assembly line and from there on to improve, and I go both on the assembly line, and then all day all the way on the other side on the market, and talk to customers so I can literally shape a product that the market wants and not the other way around.

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Joe: You understand the process inside and out. You can say, “I want this crazy, good, beautiful looking packaging,” but you also understand the headache that the folks who are going to be doing it are going through, and you can probably make a determination on time, on quality. Because if it’s overly complicated, maybe you won’t hit that quality every time, or it’s going to raise your costs considerably.

Mihran: Yeah. The most important is your user quality right now. People are buying, and trying to buy cheap. But people are more importantly, the more it goes, the more people are trying to buy sustainable products, a product that is not going to break the next day. Yes, price factor is important, but if you deliver crap regardless of how you price your product and how great is your marketing, it’s not going to work. The problem often with new products is that you don’t have necessary quality standards to actually to get inspired from, for example, the snapping system of Brushette. There’s got to be something you like about the noise, about how many times you can snap it on and off, all these type of testing that you can run. Those are standards that you have to set as you see the product evolving and getting hit a thousand times. Then you’re like, “All right. Maybe we should use this material, and maybe the spring inside should be done this way, and maybe the whole– Maybe we can’t use that thing.” It’s a lot of testing and a lot of self-determining, like as the product goes and as the product start coming out from the assembly line, and then you give it away to people to try, and they have feedback, and you have your own feedback, etc. Then you’re building from there on, you want to build something that does not break, or if it does to at least, to be honest about it. In our case, we know that it’s a great thing, it’s a great device. You can keep it for a year and then replace only the Brushette. I say for a year, but the tests that ran it for two years. I’m not going to– I’m not going to lie, I’m not going to say “For the rest of your life you don’t have to buy a neck anymore.” It’s still a small piece of plastic, and it’s still–  There is a knob, there’s a spring inside. It’s not like a rocket science thing, but it’s in time. It can very well wear and tear, too. What we’re doing is we’re replacing– we’re replacing it and guaranteeing replacing it free of charge so long as you have a subscription. That way you come up with your product, you know what people are getting, and then you’ve got to stand behind aware on others. So that’s how we’re doing.

Joe: That’s cool. Again, it’s a physical product, and it’s going to break down. It’s not made of titanium, or whatever.

Mihran: Right.

Joe: That’s cool. Again, you’re mentioning a lot of things that as a software developer I might not think of. Like the noise that the snap makes, or the number of snaps you can get out of it. That sort of testing. There’s a company called Studio Neat, and they make this cool notebook called the [Penotebook], but they also are making a clicky pen. They built, 3D-printed a machine to click this pen thousands of times over and over again to see how well it holds up from the manufacturer. So, cool stuff like that that you would never think of in software development.

Mihran: Right. You’re monkey testing when you’re using an app, and it’s the same thing where you’re touching that product a thousand times. So, it’s different processes, but at the end of the day you’re trying your thing out, you’re trying it out, and you’re making sure it works.

Joe: Absolutely. Maybe as we are approaching, we’re coming towards the end of the show, what advice would you give to a listener that wants to make their own product? What should be their step one? At what point should they look for a manufacturer, and what should they look for in a manufacturer?

Mihran: In our case, I had a factory with 450 people. I was in there, so it’s not really– Maybe it’s not the same way, but if I were to start from here with no knowledge whatsoever of manufacturing, regardless if it’s in China or in the US, I would start and call my first MVP a prototype or even a drawing or anything that is that people can try and test without having not even approaching one single manufacturer. It’s very important to understand that there is a fit for your product, that there is people would want that. If yes, don’t get lured, how much are they going to be ready to pay for that? Then from then on, you have your two, like “Is there a product?” “Yes.” “Can you make a profit?” “Yes.” “All right, now start. Start pushing the studies, start looking for people who would work with you for people who can come up with a CAD drawing so you can get the first–” You were talking about the 3D machine, a 3D printing machine. We have a lot of shops in LA, and throughout the country, we can first prototype for you before you jump into the actual manufacturing process. I think manufacturing is important, and it’s the main– Of course, it’s the most important thing. If you have everything ready and then you can’t supply, then there is no point. At the same time it’s the least of your problems should you have validated that everything else runs smoothly, then I think manufacturing is an easy piece of the puzzle.

Joe: Gotcha. That’s great advice. Manufacturing is the least of your problems if you validate the rest of the process, and you’ve said, “Is there a product? Is there a market?” And “Can you profit?” Because that’s a really good thing a lot of people, myself included– I used to think “Do you think this is a good idea?” was validation, but it’s not. “What would you pay for this?” Is where the validation comes in.

Mihran: Yeah. If you need a million people to pay for these, maybe it’s still good to that, and maybe still a good idea. But you’ve got to make sure that you’re going for that size, for the big, for that a risk, for raising this much money, etc. At the end of the day your profit margins are important, so if it’s a great idea, yes that’s good. But if you can’t have any margin, if you don’t have any room to even– Forget about manufacturing, you just– I mean, manufacturing with the problem that manufacturing would offer. Which means that you’ll have quality batch default, you will have a transportation problem, and you’ll have compliance problem, you’ll have a lot of different legal problems. If your margin is getting eaten up by those line items, I don’t think your great idea would go anywhere. It’s the two valuation before jumping into manufacturing.

Joe: That’s another important distinction to make between a physical product and software, is there is cost associated with software, but that cost is mostly my time or someone else’s time if I’m paying a developer. But with a physical product, there is all these steps along the way. You send it to the manufacturer, there’s transportation, there’s regulations probably in your case, or maybe there’s not. But I know in certain cases there are regulations that you need to pass through, at least here in the United States. Then you get the product, and if it’s not up to your standard then you have to account for that, and other things like that as well.

Mihran: Right.

Joe: Awesome. I guess first before I ask what are your plans for the future, is that something that I can buy today? And if so, where can I get it?

Mihran: Right now it’s on Indie Gogo. We’re not fundraising per say, and we are open for pre-orders. Our products are already ready, and we’re manufacturing. We manufactured our first batch of about ten thousand products that are ready to ship right now, so we decided to open the pre-sales on Indie Gogo and then shortly after the campaign Brushette.com will go live with the subscription model on Brushette. So, right now if you wanted the product, you could get it on Indie Gogo.

Joe: Gotcha. With that, what are your plans for the future? This is a subscription model, so how is that going to work? Do you have anything else in the works as far as the actual product goes?

Mihran: The goal is to start out with Brushette to get something, to get a solid consumer base of people who are interested to get these boxes every month to their doorstep. But then in this box, you can definitely add a lot of different items from the bathroom, and especially from the dental hygiene– where we are in, and we want to stay specialized in. So all the dental consumer, dental hygiene, you could have a small pops of toothpaste and mouthwash and the monthly supply of floss and a lot of different things that would come up in that box. That’s one thing, and then the other most– Since you’re, you’ve been talking about software the whole time we also have an app that is in development right now to be able to go through your saliva to understand your health problem and your hygiene problem and to put that in a block chain so that everyone would get its own health block chain. So, we have quite some different project there in the pipeline, right now it focuses on getting Brushette out there.

Joe: That’s super interesting. I will be sure to link everything that we’ve talked about so far, and I’ll definitely keep an eye out for this app because that’s– Block chain is the new hotness. I do like to ask my non-web development guests, people who have a product but they’re not necessarily web developers, what are you using for your website and what was– What would you say is the hardest thing about developing a website from your point of view?

Mihran: I’ve done a lot of them, I’ve done a few startups before. They were software oriented, so I’m not complete, but we’re not using– We’re using a custom e-commerce CMS, and it’s called Zanno. To develop the website, I’m just opening XP and then working wire frames, and then giving it to my designer and then to the dev team. It’s a regular e-commerce website, and there is nothing amazing code-wise behind it. There is nothing crazy that the app is supposed to do, so I can’t say that we’ve been facing a lot of difficulties in the website so far.

Joe: I’m glad. When I got into the game, it was– Making an e-commerce website was the gold standard. It was hard. You hired the real professionals for that, and nowadays with– Zanno, I’ve never heard of it, but I’m definitely going to research it after this. Or like WooCommerce or Shopify, you can have an online e-commerce store in an hour or so. Cool. We are coming up on time, and I do want to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Mihran: That’s a good question. Do I have a trade secret for you? I can certainly make an open invitation for everyone on the show if you want to reach out and want to tour a factory in Shenzhen, and I’d be happy. That’s probably the best place where you could find the trade secrets. Other than that, I wouldn’t– There’s no secrets in– There is no secret in the product, there is no secrets in what we’re doing. Everything is open. Other than showing you exactly the manufacturing part and what’s being cooked for the future, those are the only trade secrets that I’ll be able to happily share.

Joe: That’s cool. If I’m ever out there, I will take you up on that offer, because I’ve never been on an honest to goodness manufacturing floor before. So, I’m very interested to see. On that note–

Mihran: That’s interesting. Sorry, I’m cutting you off. What’s interesting is that when you’re the hardware software startup, you are getting it. You already have difficulties when you’re doing a software startup with deadlines, with everything. Hardware is just adding more difficulties, but I think at the end of the day if you get along well,  if the team is able to put them up in a nice fashion together, I think there is a lot of value in software and hardware together if they can work together. It can be very valuable.

Joe: That’s fantastic. That is a great way to end the show, though I do want to ask, Mihran, where can people find you?

Mihran: Where can people find me? I’m an e-mail away, Mihran@Brushette.com.

Joe: All right, awesome. I’ll be sure to link that and all of the stuff that we talked about today in the show notes. Mihran, thanks for joining me today. I appreciate your time.

Mihran: Thanks for having me, Joe.

Outro: Thanks so much for Mihran for joining me today. Things I loved about this episode, how he talked about how he sits on the assembly line in factories in China at different stages of creation to understand how everything is made. I love how he talked about getting the first MVP, the minimum viable product. He talks about how he answers these questions, “Is there a product? Can you make a profit?” For creating physical products, which generally cost a lot more than creating software products in the beginning. He says at the end of the day that profit margins are important. I liked how he talked about his website, and I always like hearing about websites that are not built on top of WordPress, and the reasoning why. His plans for the future which include things like an app, block chain for help, which is– A block chain is a little bit of a buzzword, but it’s also an incredibly cool and important technology moving forward for a whole lot of things. So, I think that’s pretty cool. I like his outlook on business, and I love a lot of the advice he gave us. I hope you enjoyed this episode as well. My question of the week for you is, “Have you ever considered building a physical product?” Let me know by emailing me Joe@HowIBuilt.it or by letting me know on Twitter @jcasabona.

Miniseries: To continue our conversation from last week, I talked about how I built the first iteration of my podcasting course. I also talked about how I made a grave mistake in assuming that people just wanted to buy a course on how to make the website. It turns out, based on a lot of the feedback I’ve gotten, that people want the whole process. What microphone should they buy, how do they set up that microphone, how do they record, and the whole nine. So I’ve decided to take that course and expand it to answer all of those questions. Last week I talked about how I built the course as far as just focusing on the website. Focusing on the website is now just a small section, or will be a small section of this course. The new goal of the course– The previous goal of the course was, “Launch a website and submit to iTunes.” The overall goal is now “Record a podcast, launch it and submit it to iTunes.” I dug deep, and I thought, “What were the questions that I had when I first started podcasting?” Of course, they are the questions that I get the most often. “How do I know what microphone do I buy? How do I record? Where should I upload it? How do I build an audience? Is artwork that important? How do I figure out a name?” So the new outline for this course has all of that stuff. The new course is going to have videos on I bought the microphone that I recommend, and I’m going to record how to hook it up to your computer, do a test, and make that first recording. I’m going to show students other software besides just web based software, how to record with Quicktime and Garage Band or Audacity. Audacity more likely, because I want this to appeal to more than just Mac users, so those are the things that I’m rebuilding in the podcasting course. I came to a very important conclusion, I might have mentioned this in a previous episode in this miniseries, but the reason that I didn’t do this at first was because other people like Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas already have this covered. But what I didn’t realize was that they don’t have it covered cheaply and affordably, and what they have that I can’t possibly offer is their own time. That’s what a lot of people are buying. If people are buying the knowledge, I think my course is going to be the best option for them because it’s going to be the most affordable. They still get my time, and they get access to a deeper wealth of knowledge in the areas of website creation, site building, and the more technical aspects of things. That’s– I look up to especially Pat Flynn, I think he’s an excellent resource, teacher, podcaster and business owner. He has knowledge that I don’t have and I may never have in the areas of business and building an audience, but I believe I’m a little bit more technical than him. So that’s what I bring to the table, and I can do it in a different manner, and that’s the thing that I need to remember. As I build out part two of this course, or maybe the course revised, those are the things that I’m focusing on. The new goal for the student is record, launch and submit a podcast, and not just launch a website and submit your podcast. So that’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode, be sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps people discover the show. Until next time, get out there and build something.

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