Steve Martocci
Appearances
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
inspiration goes a long way. Keep your team inspired. Keep them excited and inspired about what their impact is in the world. Don't overbuild in the beginning. Get enough in the market so that you can start listening.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I'm excited to be here, and I'm also really curious what Nick gets to say behind the scenes on this, because you get the unfiltered Steve feedback, so you know exactly where to go with your questions.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So, so it happens all the time. I think the key is to, to learn from every one of them. And, you know, it's also, it's an interesting, like even working with, with Nick, right. And working with people who are not necessarily as experienced rolling certain things out, like your business team wants something for a reason, but you're like, yo, you really got to use it for that.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You know, like, are you good? And sometimes there's this back and forth between external requirements that are coming in and the like, all right, but that's another piece of code that we got to maintain. And, you know, I've actually really enjoyed my relationship with Nick watching my because like, you know, at some point as a product leader and CEO like myself. You can't do it all yourself.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You have to do it with a team. You have to really grow a team, build a great culture. And sometimes you really want to enable the team to take their ideas, run with them, and build great things. And we've just developed this great relationship. And Nick has taken the lead on so many things, like our trust score that is absolutely loved by the users.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And like he had all the insight to getting that built, which has been great. And then something like I was talking about with the first implementation of like lists and maybe some other things, he's like, oh, he learns and then he hears my opinion about it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And like trying to foster an environment where, you know, people can test these ideas and your team, you have a system for helping people understand prioritization and like the cost that comes with things and build a healthy product development culture out of it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
That's the art, right? That's the secret sauce. And for us, what it is is really short feedback loops and a lot of like in collaboration design by team. And it works right now while we're small, right? So, you know, every six weeks we're getting together for an onsite or offsite, like we get together in person and that's when we tackle some of the bigger stuff.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And that stuff's nice to do in the room together. You have a high amount of empathy kind of when you're together, working through like Sometimes I get heated and people have opinions, but you want people to be heard and understood. We do a team-wide show-and-tell every day right now. I've never built a startup completely remote. I've done remote engineering and things like that, but having...
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Having an environment that feels like we're really in it together has been the fast feedback loop process. And look, people have really good ideas and it's sometimes really hard to have to be the one that's like, I hear you. We're going to ship something that kind of sucks a little bit. We're going to get feedback and then we're going to evolve to that next point.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Or I see when we get stuck on something where there's no good answer, like we could talk in theory for days about like, you know, an opinion on something, but it really just in that sense feels like we don't have enough data. And that's why we should ship something or, you know, talk to, talk to a, do an interview or something because we're just circling on something. Okay.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's your opinion versus my opinion. Like, great. Yeah. And I try my best to not have to, to kind of step in and play any kind of card on like, well, I'm the CEO or I'm the, you know, or like in my experience, like I, there's just so many lines. I don't like say anyone saying on the team and have to, to kind of justify their, their kind of position.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I don't think about it as a differentiator first. I first think about the product that I want to exist. Right. Usually I'm the first user of the product or at least, you know, want to have something come into existence. I generally don't like to build things that already exist in the world. Like, so I don't usually even have something to, to kind of look at as a, as a comp.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
These are all great questions. So I think that when I think about, you know, how does this scale? I really want this to it. Maybe it moves to like departmental. show and tells. There's something amazing about these fast feedback loops.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And look, people get blocked on stuff and they sometimes rabbit hole for days where if they just talked to another engineer, if they just talked to the product owner about something, if they just talked to the designer about something, they would like unblock.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And, you know, yes, you can kind of talk about it in a quick stand up in the morning, but kind of showing people where they are and kind of where they're stuck. And if you kind of are sensing someone's kind of like not moving at the pace, you know, they are capable of moving at. We like kind of address it like fast. So, you know, and context gets heavily shared amongst the team. Right.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You're in the remote environment. You miss out on the lunch together. Right. Where you're just like talking about something or going over. There's so much like water cooler conversation that you miss out on that this works for us right now.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I'd love to see it work at scale kind of departmentally where, you know, like if we form into teams that they can meet and do a similar thing where even if the whole company can't do it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And like, even the last offsite we did, I think it was more of a timing issue, which was like right after our launch and we were still all scrambling that like going right into that was, it might not have been the best timing. I don't know if we got the best use of time out of it, but in person time in general, I think is so important to building empathy, like, and building great products.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You need to have the connection amongst the different people on your team. And so, you know, we always just make sure we get that, even if it's not the most productive session.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then the unscripted lunches and stuff during those things, like there's something about the meetings that make people feel like they need to perform, stick to a topic. And then just having that kind of unstructured time too, of like hearing what's on someone's mind where they don't feel like they have to be on stage either. They're just talking to someone.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah, and I mean, on that front too, like I'm very much someone who came up in the world of paired programming, which is literally when you're coding, two people are working on the same project together. And it's extremely intimidating at first. People are seeing typos, people are seeing you think through things in real time.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But it is deeply, deeply liberating once you've kind of like allowed yourself to be that vulnerable with another coworker. And like you don't get blocked. You think things. You learn. You absorb. Like so much moves fast. And so we actually end up doing a lot of like live design sessions. You know, like you kind of need to be okay with being pretty exposed, I would say, at Subco.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So for me, I think it really just starts is what's the experience that I want. And then I think once you've kind of nailed that, you start thinking about what's the experience for others and the other kind of, you know, different segments of a market.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And it was very like that at GroupMe. And then, you know, Splice got bigger and bigger to the point where that got harder to do. And I think one of the things I think a lot about at Subco as we scale is making sure that that kind of culturally is established early enough. I remember this day at Splice where I was interviewing like, I don't know, like two or three PM roles at the same time.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And it was a day that I realized I kind of like lost something a little culturally because I hadn't codified enough about like how we build software and how we kind of build together was a kind of rapid growth period. And, you know, you let the culture get away a little bit.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. I mean, at least at scale, being open enough to be honest about metrics, be honest about user feedback, you know, like use the product, things like that, that if you get to disconnect. So there's the whole like disconnect to your internal team and then there's a disconnect from the actual user base. Right.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
If we're coming back to customer experience and like that, that is, I think, a recipe of success.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
a failure of disaster for for a company on the disconnect and they're not they're heads in the sand on so much either from a telemetry perspective from just a from like you know our support channel right now it's just like everybody sees every piece of feedback that kind of comes in and it's like yeah it really uh helps drive home where we're falling short where we have more work to do
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
there's like these really processy ways of doing it, which is like, Oh, have a user research team and make sure you're in the field gaining your knowledge. And like, those things are all true. Those things are all kind of helpful. And, but I think there's also, you know, there's a potential, like even once a month to just like make half the day or a full day of like
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We did this thing at a place called Beat Relay, which was a simple thing. Musicians, non-musicians, everyone in the company signed up for a team, and that team made music together. And Beat Relay, as much as it was just a fun thing and cool, was also a nice forced dog food session of trying to work on music collaboratively across location with people.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's just using your own product, right? Particularly, it's kind of like, maybe it comes from eat your own dog food or make sure your food... Tastes good, you know, use your product. It's funny, I realize, I don't know why I think that term is just so common, but maybe it's not. We've had many employees come in and just be like, what are you talking about here?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But yeah, so using the product, I think is one. Create fun experiences for people to use the product. And then also, you know, we used to have a really good hackathon culture at GroupMe where we would do like, I think it was a quarterly hackathon. which was kind of like, just like, what do you want to have exist? You know?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I think that that always yielded really amazing features and insights from people's just personal struggles with our own software.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
wow, this is really difficult, isn't it? And then there'll be things like, oh, I know that sucks. You're like, oh, we haven't worked on that page for so long. You know, like, yeah, those things are just, those are brutal.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. And like, look, successful organizations I've been at, you know, have done that. I think it was a guilt group. They did rotations through support. You might've even done a week through support, which was nuts. It was a lot. And we did some of that too.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then, you know, what was super annoying that would happen in this is, you know, customer support would be dealing with something all the time that wasn't getting prioritized. But then like, I'd go talk to some musician, some famous musician, they'd be like, Well, so-and-so doesn't work. And then you'd be like, guys, we got to fix this.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And they'd be like, I know, like we've been saying this for months, you know? And you're like, oh, crap. So kind of making sure that the- You listen to your CX people just because they're at the front lines. They're getting that feedback. Make sure you have a really easy way to give.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I think one of the things that AI potentially is taking away too is so many of these issues are getting solved with AI, the actual issues, but where's the feedback coming from? You know, not so much like, oh, I don't know how to do this thing or this is like, but like actually suggestion, like we are getting the most insane suggestions from our user base right now. Insane in a good way.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Insane in a like, oh my God, I can't believe you spent the time to write, you know, six paragraphs on, you know, what we need to do around improving your supplement routine. This is amazing. And so like having it, but you know what, that only works because of the big, at the top of our,
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Every page in our app is a feedback button that doesn't ask you a million questions to get it through, just lets you dump it in. People do it. And that's great. And we answer them.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
One of the quick things we would do on that kind of, so we've always done like a weekly town hall, which again, for some people is way too often. But we would do it an hour every Friday. And a section that we used to have in all of them was like, you know, we had splice rules, splice sucks, and then splice, which would be like the highlight support tickets of, of the, of the week. Right.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And like some of them would be, you know, listen to the good stuff too. Cause the good stuff's inspiring. Right. Then you can you can totally miss the good stuff. Right. So there's some of those deep, inspiring stories like share them with your team because you what you really, really want is an inspired team building a great customer experience.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. And look, I think in all the business, if you go all the way back to GroupMe, right, GroupMe was made in 24 hours at a hackathon to go to a concert with our friends. And it was just something we needed, you know?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And like, you know, a team that doesn't feel that they just don't put in the effort to go the extra mile. And so inspire your team is like really, really important. So show the good stuff. Yeah. Don't hide the bad stuff, you know, like bring it to the top. And then, you know, and then, you know, for us, there's just a lot of levity.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I think too, we make a lot of jokes as a team and, um, and the, the, the splice shrugs, I think we called it would be the sport tickets. I was just like, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, I don't even think of using our product right now.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then, you know, the same weekend I was using it for the concert, my co-founder was using it for his family, kind of like who was having a baby, you know, delivered and keeping them updated. This was before group text messaging existed. So I think that like the real thing is to start with our core message. Problem.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I think that's a great point. And I think that, look, I think I've had a real luxury doing really cool businesses where you can be like, you know, JJ Abrams says he needs this feature, you know, and you're like, oh, wow, we got to build that. You know, it's inspiring.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Like I definitely, how to do it in some enterprise SaaS companies, I'm not exactly sure, but maybe it's, you know, everything you were just saying there, just like. You know, raising that kind of both that empathy bar and just the friendliness of the relationship between both the coworkers and the customers.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. All right. So, you know, there's three different examples on this. First was Splice Studio, our first product, which was just a collaboration tool that I made one of my biggest career mistakes on, which was just not charging for it because I thought it wasn't good enough.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And, you know, honestly, if I had charged for it, I think we would have gotten a stronger signal if people committed to it. And I think we would have invested more resources in it. Because once you do generate revenue, all your focus shifts to generating more revenue. Right. So with when Splice Sounds generated revenue, that was like our focus. Right.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And so that was so for Splice, our biggest kind of real competition at that point in time was piracy. People just stealing sounds. Right. So we had to build a user experience that was kind of good enough to, you know, kind of like what Spotify would do from listening to music. Right. Like it now was like, oh, I'd rather do it if it's not on Spotify. I don't know if I'm going to listen.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I might go to Torrent site anymore. Right. So we had to build a great product. And, you know, initially the price point was like $7.99 a month. And, you know, we had to build all these tools to let people put their accounts on hold because musicians would literally go month to month being like, all right, it's Netflix or Splice this month. Right. And so we kind of kept that price low.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then also what we did is we shared revenue, major amounts of our revenue with the content creators. And so all of a sudden we were a new revenue stream for these people who then wanted to market their content on the platform, which created this like pretty epic flywheel. And that still exists today.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I mean, I think if you pulled the numbers now, I think we would have paid over $100 million to artists for sound. And that was just amazing. And like, you know, some people would look at the model and be like, well, you know, okay. You're used on these top 40 tracks, but the artist isn't making any money off. The sound creator is not making any money off because it's royalty free.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Start with the thing that Nick and I need and then really just kind of like start seeing where it falls apart. Right. You give it to a give it to your mom and she doesn't understand what the word stack is. And you're like, oh, OK, well, maybe we have to tailor that down. Or, you know, you kind of say, I just want to get biohackers right now.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then we moved over to this other thing called our plugins, our rent-to-own model for plugins. So the problem, again, that was pirating sounds. Then there's pirating the software. So like music software, you know, when it goes to like the top piracy, pirated apps in the world, it's like, you know, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Adobe, then the music software. It's like right there.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And so, you know, these guys, most of the software wasn't like on SaaS yet. And it didn't really even make sense to necessarily be on SaaS because it was like not getting updates all the time. It wasn't network connected. So we kind of did this rent to own subscription model.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So I went out and I was like, I need to build a business model that even Reddit can't complain about, which, you know, you want to go figure out if someone likes your product, go see what they're saying about you on Reddit, right?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's a great goal. Yeah. And so it was like, okay. Low monthly fees that are building up to eventually perpetual ownership. You can stop it at any time. You can pause. You can resume. And then even needed the feature of you could pay it all off if you didn't want to be in the Splice ecosystem anymore. And by doing all those things, we got people to pay for music software.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Which was freaking great. And honestly, Reddit didn't really complain about it. They were like, we were the first purchase for a lot of people in this category of software. And look, that was a lot of both. That was a nice mix of the intuition and the user feedback. But I remember convincing our first software provider to be on Rent2Own.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
He was like, yeah, you guys are going to sell like two of these a day max, right? And, you know, that still would have been good for him, but we were selling hundreds, hundreds. And so, again, like, it's got to be that right mix of not being afraid.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Like, a sweet spot for me, too, is kind of like moving into an industry, you know, some people in tech are just like, oh, I'm just going to disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. And they're like, I'll burn every bridge down along the way. I really like to go in and kind of respect what exists.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You know, the music creators, you know, even at Splice, the way we think about AI, we have a very ethical, you know, perspective on what we're trying to do with AI there. And, you know, what I think we're doing in Supco too, like there's too many people in supplements who are just like trying to burn down every institution and like, you know, medicine is terrible and like all this stuff.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We're like, no, we're going to figure out how to work with kind of everybody and, you know, let the good, honest players kind of like, you know, thrive in our ecosystem. So, yeah, I feel like that...
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
or I'm just going to focus the initial release on this core market. And then think about them educating the world about these things like terminology and stuff as you go. So, you know, in every company, it's been a bit different. In Splice's example, I wasn't really the first customer because I am not the kind of hardcore musician.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
That's been another one that's been interesting is building products in which the brand stands for something and kind of stands as a trusted, you know, as infallible as you can be because you're truly looking out for everybody in your ecosystem. The brand is just as important as another layer in the customer experience because it travels.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Or they don't trust the brand. We used to have a line that said, oh, I love this one. It was from my buddy John from the Disco Biscuits. He said, you can't refund inspiration. Like there's no amount of dollars I'm going to give.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Maybe there's an amount of dollars, but there's no amount of dollars that I would have been able to give you that made sense to refund the fact that I lost, you know, six hours of your work and you might never get it back. You know, you just might never think of that thing again. And so we had to be really, really well trusted.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And look, I think that in what we're doing in Sepco, right? So we're totally free right now, but I want to make sure that whatever model comes down the pipeline is that it's never just trying to sell you more. Right. I don't think you're going to build the trusted. I want to be just as excited when you stop taking something that's not working as when you're going to try something new.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And like that, that is an alignment that I just feel that kind of value driven care or outcome driven, you know, stuff in healthcare is where, you know, capitalism and health have their friction points. And so, you know, I, similar to what I think we did in music, I think we really want to do stuff innovative on that front.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. And look, we, we built that right. Like, uh, cause you do, you do lose your splice credits if you cancel, but we made, we were like, we need pause right away and you can continue to pause and pause and pause and pause as much as you want. Um, and, uh, and that was, that was important, right?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Cause I literally, when someone says to you, they're picking between Netflix and splice this month, you just do not want to leave them hanging. And Totally.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And also, like, I think with these products in the supplement space, like, look, because customer acquisition cost is so high and because people do such a poor job of sticking to the things, whether they don't take them right or they don't see their results on the timelines they expect.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And that was, I had to do a two-hour research session with, you know, a music producer to understand their workflow to validate a hypothesis I had. So, you know, it's a little different every time. But you go with your gut at first and you kind of, you know, even if it's not pretty, it's got to be functional. And then, and then you can kind of, you know, spice it up and adapt from there.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
People are thinking about CAC LTV ratios in like months when they really should be thinking about them in years, if not decades.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And look, business model transformations are hard, right? Even the transition for Adobe to the classic change from upfront software to Adobe Creative Cloud, it's the famous J curve, right? Which is like, you're going to lose money. for a period of time. And people might be pissed. But you're going to come out the other side, and it's going to be worth the investment.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And e-comm company is trying to really understand how to transform their models and maybe even lose a little bit of their margin in the short term in order to play that longer game. it's really hard for them to do. Um, and so, you know, for us, there's, there's some things we're thinking about to, to help them in that process.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And, um, and I think similar to what we've done in splice is to create these kind of, uh, everybody wins scenarios, which is, uh, you know, it takes us effort to build stuff. Uh, it's not easy. And we take a lot of that on and, and sometimes our providers will do better than we do. Um, and that's okay. Cause we're playing a really long game ourselves. Um, and, um, yeah.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then just be customer focused, right. Customer supplier focused, um, kind of just looking out for everyone.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
I'm going to go into airlines, which I don't know if many people say this too. So- One is JSX, which was the first experience for flying for, for Jackson. I have a five month old and we went up to a conference in Napa and just the, the experience of not having the TSA.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And we, we do this in blade on the East coast and, you know, the experience of having these kind of semi private, but low cost experiences. And then them checking all the bags for the baby, like,
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
free it was just like okay great this is a good first flight but that was like a 50 minute flight right short haul type yeah yeah uh and then the next one was jet blue and uh they have upgraded their planes into this jet blue mint studio seat that's in the front of the plane that like
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
yo you can like that thing converts into like a bed that is wide enough that it has like a little extra bench it's only the first row seats that jackson me and kelly got to lay down and like read books together on the flight Like, holy cow. Like, that is a great experience. And I think so many people overthink their airline. Like, oh, I need, you know, who overthinks his airlines? Nick.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
You know, he's basically the points guy.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And I'm just like, no, let's just fly JetBlue. And, you know, it's great every time.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Being the blade guy talking about JSX is kind of a, you know, Rob, it's time to come to Southern California again. Let's go.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Oh, man. I mean, look, we covered a lot of it here. I think the using your own product. I think that let's just go back to that, like, keep your team inspired thing, right? Like, I just think that when your team's inspired to build software instead of just crushing...
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
the tickets monotonously, that whatever it takes to keep them excited and inspired about what their impact is in the world, featuring what the customers are doing with this, telling the story of someone's life you made better by building a feature, that inspiration goes a long way.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So hopefully there's plenty more. We have some amazing people in our network.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Look, I think one of the principles for me that's really important is I like to build tools that are extremely powerful yet extremely easy. Right. Like there's like there's something that you can do, especially when you're not just trying to recreate something that exists. You're not just trying to make something 10 percent better that existed before you're trying to create a whole new category.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And so, you know, that gives you the kind of opportunity to, you know, kind of build these elegant user experiences that can progressively reveal themselves to the newbie. But then when the, when the hardcore user wants to click in and see, oh, you do that, you do that. Oh, okay. You're there. And then, you know, there's kind of this, this secret sauce, I would say of, of, of towing that line.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And, and look, I get a lot of sometimes for people being like, well, what's your target market? Like, why are you just focused on, on this group? And I'm like, cause I actually believe I can build stuff that appeals to the entire sector. And that has happened with Splice particularly, you know, we're such a tool for the brand new music creator and half a top 40 music. And that's hard.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah, look, I think that it's a great question, right? And you see that with, so for Splice, and I actually think for Sepco in a lot of ways, if you appeal to the pros, if you appeal to the most respected people in the industry, you start to realize that the newbies and the people getting used to the space, they want to learn from their heroes, particularly in music.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And they're kind of willing to jump over hoops to be like, I want to be like that person. right? It's kind of where like, you know, yes, a lot of people have garage band installed and mess around garage band, but there's, you'll actually see people jumping ahead to tools like logic and Ableton and, and these more complicated systems because they want to learn what their heroes do.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So if you kind of give a way to speak to them and let them do some of the marketing and messaging and you realize like, Oh, wait a second. I have the same sounds that, you know, that producer is using to make top 40 songs. Like, Okay. And, and you kind of inspire them so that even if there is some, some learning to do along the way, they realize it's the right learning to do.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
It's the learning that like the absolute best in this industry can also go down this path and it's not going to be a waste of their time.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. You know, we used to say our biggest, we had two things that were our biggest competition, but, but once we had you, our biggest competition in, in, in supplies is people giving up on themselves. Yeah. So you just didn't want to let someone get frustrated with the process and you never want to have someone get stuck along the way.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
So if you can kind of cater to them and even if they have some learning to do, they just don't feel alone in their journey. It really helps them stick around.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. And look, I think that's exactly right. And in music, it was important to have a wide variety of genres. Yeah. And a wide variety of producers at all different levels, you know, just because, you know, yes, the Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso song, Song of the Summer was made from three splice loops. And that's like super inspiring to some people. They're like, wow, like I can do that.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
That's nuts. But then there's other people who are like, well, no, I'm like a deep underground techno artist doing this and that. And like when you realize they can use it too, you're like, oh, yeah. I can appeal. And I think in, in Subco it's similar, right?
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Some people are, the supplement space is extremely opinionated and the opinions range from like the hardcore research institutions and doctors to, you know, influencers that are just talking about what they do. So finding a way to help you easily absorb all that, to figure out kind of what is, what path you want to go down to, you know, make your own decisions.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
That's how we give you agency over your health. And that's how we kind of empower you. And so, so it's a big piece of figuring out how to kind of expose people to a diverse set of opinions and then easily make them be able to make a choice.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Yeah. And look, that's, that's the goal, right? But then to make an experience easy, you could, if you're like, Hey, I just trust everything this doctor says, you click a button and go. Right. You don't need to, I'm not going to get in the way and make you, you know, do all this research. You can trust, make the experience simple.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But to know that you don't have to take anyone's just word for it and you can incorporate your own thinking or things that are more specific to your, you know, demographics or, you know, health conditions, that's super interesting. That really unlocks the ability to make you feel like you've got control of your health.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Usually for what I do is in the beginning, I have an initial thought of where I think things are. I have my gut based on my experience and what I want to see exist in the world. And it's pretty important for me to like get that out, that first version out and then start listening to the feedback.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And sometimes that might have a little bit of an overbuild in one area or underserved in another area. But if I don't get that core hypothesis out sometimes, I sit around being like, well, but what about this? And what about that? I never got a chance to explore it this way.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And so for me, I think usually I try to keep it pretty tight, but keep it kind of driven from the gut, maybe some user research. But sometimes also in the beginning, I've gotten some user research that has been set me away from a certain path. Like some of the social features on Supco, we did some initial testing and people weren't that interested in it in the cohort we did.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But like now all of a sudden we get a lot of demand and people wanting to see these things. So you have to kind of be careful in some of those early hypotheses. I think it's, I think it's don't overbuild in the beginning, get enough in the market so that you can start listening.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And then I love to just work down the list until someone says like, oh, it's just too expensive or I didn't have enough money this month. But you got through all the other complaints. That was a big splice thing was like, okay, the backlog for, you know, year one after launch was just like, what? what are they saying? And we just work through it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And most of the time, the good news is it's aligning with what we were, what our hypotheses was. Like right now in Supco, a lot of it's around scheduling and people wanting to take things like they're hardcore, right? They're hardcore users who are like, I don't just take something every day. I take something for once a week.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
And we intentionally knew that that was going to be a limitation, but we said, let's go let the users ask for it before we overcomplicate, you know, the workflow with introducing all these extra variables and taking more time to build it. So that's a great one. That's like, okay, top of the backlog, let's work through it.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But then, you know, some things that people might not even know they need or want, like some of our community features that are coming and things that you just kind of have to see it. So it's, it's a, it's a mix, right? It's a fine line and you only have so many resources. Prioritization is always your biggest problem in a startup. And so, so it's a, it's a dance for us.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
and listen but there is always some magic in what we think is right in the beginning as well that needs to be considered yeah and look i think that sometimes they also don't get to see where you're going right so you might roll something out and you know maybe the users are okay with it but they're not like super happy even like um so one of the things we did at splice with this was we had to make sure we were faster than the file system
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Meaning like when you go to listen to a sound, it's got to load even faster than if you were listening to it on your going through sounds on your local hard drive. And we did that. And that was amazing. But some people were still like, oh, well, I want it to just show up in my hard drive view because that's where I'm used to going through things.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
But if we did that, you'd miss out on these features that we have now where you can find AI-based similar sounds and automatically find compatible sounds and all these things. And you have to understand why we kind of hold the line on something for a while because we know what can come if we change this experience. This stuff always comes up. And look, at some point, users love things.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
We had a bunch of people give feedback in early SEPCO of what they wanted, but they never really quantified it on how much they would be willing to pay for that. You know, if you're like, oh, you know, well, I want, you know, everything to be personalized to me exactly based on my blood work and sent to me and pill packs and done to be like this and, you know, all this stuff. Great. Awesome.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
What do you want to spend for that? And like, you know, it's like, oh, oh, right. Right. There's a cost with that. Totally.
Experts of Experience
Why Customer Experience is Your Best Competitive Advantage
Oh, I'm sure there are tons of them. The key to that though, is making sure you find out fast and didn't over invest in them, right? Like we had a product come in, Nathan at Subco, and he saw a couple of the features we had built. And he's like, guys, like what, you built this already? You were like, well, we were going to use it for this thing. And like, and we were, we never even used it. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we're excited to get your protocols in stack on the platform soon. And I think for us people to know, right now everything on Sup goes free. And we'll launch a premium membership later this year, which will have some premium features and eventually help people save money on their supplements as well. We don't sell any of your data. There's no advertisement on Subco either.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And yeah, we want people to come in and be aligned with them so that we're just as excited when they stop taking something that doesn't work as when they start taking something. So you're not selling supplements? We're not selling supplements. And if we do, we will never profit from them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Is it widespread? Is it rare? I mean, look, I think this is your world. I think this is the one that you particularly would talk best about. I know my own individual struggles, but honestly, like you've got this data. This is your world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
By the way, what's shocking about that is 75% of Americans take a dietary supplement, 55% are regular users, yet 70% are still getting those lab results. So they're definitely taking the wrong things or not enough of the right things. So I think that just speaks to a lot of the...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Stuff we're trying to sort out, SUPCO, is giving people the ability to actually know what they're putting in their body. One of the big features of being able to enter everything that you're currently taking is you'll actually see your nutrient totals across all the different products. Vitamin D is coming from six of the products I take.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And actually having a conversation with a doctor about what's actually going in your body doesn't really happen. I remember talking to a nutritionist in the beginning. They're like, she was like very good. She said, yeah, I would spend four hours, you know, actually going over the nutrients that people were getting from the products they told me. But most people don't ever do that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I don't know who has a conversation with their doctor who knows actually what they're putting in their body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Are you hitting your outcomes?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
As I said, we've got about 200,000 products. There's like 195 already done, and then a big queue of ones that have been submitted to us that we're going through. And that's up from 4,000 products in 1994. That's all there was, right? So it's been a- Wait, 4,000 to 200,000? In 1994, there's 4,000 supplement products on the market, and now there's over 200. That's insane.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And so we've kind of gone in and taken each one of the supplements, taken the supplement facts labels, and kind of taken the data so that you can get an aggregate view of what you're actually putting in your body. So that helps you understand what you're taking. But addition to that, we've gone out and scored the top there's 8,000 brands, which is insane too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
If you think about it, we've taken the top 500, which covers, you know, a big percentage of it and kind of expanding down the long tail now, and we've given them a trust score.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And so we basically have gone in and done what you were doing kind of manually and doing all these individual reviews, built a 29 point system that goes in and, you know, checks what certifications, what kind of testing they're doing. and kind of breaks it down and gives them a score. That alone, that feature alone, you can scan any supplement for its barcode.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You just take the bottle, you put your phone on it. Yeah, you can do it here while we're talking, too. Yeah, it's a pretty cool thing. You don't have to manually enter it. You just scan your code, and it knows the product. You scan it, it pops up right away, and you get the trust score and all the information about the product. It's super fast, it's super easy, and the hit rate is really high.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And if we don't have something, you immediately can submit it. AI scan the label and it'll put it in the system. And the queue is insane. Like the long tail here, there are 20,000 products in the system that only one person is taking. There's a long tail here that is absolutely insane. And that's- And there's unique products that are kind of not commonly taken. Yeah, like one person's taking it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I don't know how they found it. I don't know if that's a trusted brand. And you've seen an explosion on Amazon of these kind of brands that are just quickly coming to market because there's no real thing stopping you from bringing a supplement to market. There's a big difference in the FDA around the federal code between pharmaceuticals and supplements.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Supplements are covered under federal code 21 CFR 111. And that's basically that for pharmaceuticals, there's a whole process that they have to get pre-approved following CGMP standards and all these different things. That's good manufacturing standards. Yeah, current good manufacturing process. With supplements, it's not something that gets done up front.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You can be held to this standard retroactively, like if something comes up, but it's kind of up to you to just say you're doing this. You can get, retroactively, someone can say they're having a negative experience, report it with the FDA, they can come after you for not following the practice, but no one's checking up front.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Right, and those latent things you're talking about, the ones that might be heavy metal exposure that take a long time to ever show up or you don't know the source of it, There's no guideline there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And when they actually tested it, it was full of heavy metals. And even if you follow CGMP, you're supposed to occasionally test your lots. I think it's like once a year. And then even then, they don't provide the guidance on heavy metals. It's kind of up to you to be like, well, for this type of product, what should the...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Prop 65 helps a little bit in terms of making sure you don't have to put the label on there if you exceed those numbers. But it's a pretty wild west, to be perfectly honest. And there are systems now that can say, come up with an idea and a brand and get a supplement and market in weeks. So that's why you're seeing the explosion.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we've gone in and we've taken 29 different points and we've built a scoring system. This is your trust score. This is our trust score. So basically you're taking 29 different attributes, whether it's toxic. Lot testing, CGMP. The biggest one that makes a difference is whether or not you're getting a third party to certify your CGMP practices. That's kind of like the fundamental.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So instead of you just saying, yeah, I'm good. I'm going to self-certify that I'm following these practices. There's NSF and UL, these two big firms that will come in and do what you are doing, go tour the facilities, make sure you're actually following, give you a certification. That's like a fundamental big one. And there's a surprising number of brands that don't follow it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And that means that the manufacturing plant is clean. Oh, yeah. The way they get sourced the ingredients. They're testing each lot. And there's a lot to that to figure it out.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I wanted to live, but I was deeply unhealthy. I got up to 300 pounds in college. I found a functional medicine doctor. We started doing lab work, right? And we started experimenting, and it worked. At that point, I probably lost 70 pounds.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Metagenics, who you brought up, is our 10 out of 10 label. They're our highest scoring brand on the platform. They do one thing that is rare, but we really, we give some points to it, is they make every batch test COA publicly available. So you can look at your bottle, look at the lot number, go online, pull it up, and see the results from the test. That's like a gold standard for us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Pure ranks very highly and there's, but then there's a big spectrum, you know?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah, that was a super interesting thing about that Centrum pill in particular is that the Centrum brand ranking is pretty high, but we just started exposing the excipients, the inactive ingredients. Yeah. And it had titanium dioxide, red 40, red five, like these things that I'm sorry, yellow five, these things that are, that are not good.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I mean, titanium dioxide is not, it's banned in Europe, you know, like it causes DNA damage and they don't need to be in your, in your supplements. So that's another thing we just rolled out was not just the manufacturing standards, but now we're going down to the product level and actually going in, we have like a
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Forget how many, it's a couple thousand of these excipients that get added and ranking them out by, you know, how cautious you should be about.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You want the nutrients. And I think it's going to be interesting. We're starting to send out, you know, different supplements for our own independent testing to do what you were saying. Just kind of like verify that even if they're highly rated, are they, is it actually in there what they say it is, right? So the precision of the nutrients that they're claiming are in there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
It's a complicated market. And I think that what we've done though, by just making a simple score, like making it out of 10 is like, it makes it really easy for people to understand. The simple like red, yellow, green, like you can go deep and you can go look at each of the 29 points. Like this is a nine, this is a two. That has been helpful for people to just like simply take a glance.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Cause some, the user base we have, you know, one thing I like doing in general when designing software is it's gotta be easy enough for grandma to use. but powerful enough for the most hardcore user in the space to go deep on. I did that with Splice, making sure that 40% of top 40 music using it to create music, they're like the hardcore guys and the brand new music creators.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we're doing this in supplements. There's a way to dive way deep into what those 29 points are in each one of the excipients and all that, or you can simply look at the score at the top and be like, okay, that feels good. Because some people just, we got to meet the consumers where they are. Because nobody's really doing that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah. And like, I think the big thing too, is like, we're not out here to, we just want to kind of arc the industry in the right direction, right? Like some of our trust scores, if you find a negative one, we're not all doing the big gotcha, you know, story on it. We're having conversations. A lot of the brands have reached out to us first that the top end brands are like, thank you. Right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Thank you for simplifying and raising to the attention how much work we are putting into testing this. So like super appreciative, you know, sometimes they'll clarify a piece of data that we might not have, right. Cause we've collected it through our teams, you know, reaching out to them and they might provide something, which is great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And then we've had brands also reaching out one, they want their trust work because the consumers are starting to care about this. And then how do we make it better? Right. And that's our big dream. If we can just help the industry move in the right direction with the scores, I think we've done something really great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I'm not kidding you, Mark. This is a true story. My fiancee, Kelly, with her OB, her fetal medicine doctor, she was having Russell's leg syndrome and magnesium oxide was the only one the doctor recommended. And we were like, where are we? And like, you know, like it just felt very out of date.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And he's like, you know, best in his field and all that, but for nutrition, we're not following his advice.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So this is preventing the disease at the very low end.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And doctors don't recommend usually CoQ10 with statins. Personal story on that. So, you know, I got into this kind of longevity movement young at 30 and I did a calcium score at age 30. Which is like a heart scan. Heart scan, see how much plaque I have. Zero at age 30. At age 35, I had eight. So that was something that was off the charts. And so I went on a statin at age 35.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
It was not recommended to go on CoQ10 at the time. No. I ended up finding it myself, right? Take MitoQ now. You know, it's just one of those things that feels essential. It is. But it can be totally missed. It is. You know, in the doctor's office.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah. And that's one of the things I think together, uh, as we keep navigating the space and increasing the functionality on Subco, the interactions, I think they're going to be really important to have on there. Right. And there's like the ones that you should be aware of, like St. John's ward, reducing effectiveness of birth control and antidepressants. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
um, vitamin K interacting with blood thinners. Like there's, there's a lot. It's legit stuff. Yeah. And that's a layer that we want to get into as we, as we keep going. We think that getting people stacks on there now, knowing what they're taking and then giving them the jumping off points to, to improve things and find the warning.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And that's kind of a future for us, right? There's a, there's an evolution of where, so we launched our beta in October. It was kind of an early beta to just, you know, I had to update my LinkedIn. So I was working on something new. So we launched, you know, in beta and,
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And it's going great, but what exactly what you're talking about, why we're working together, why we have the function partnership is, you know, we really do want to incorporate more data. And there's a, there's kind of a church and state mentality too, around the product recommendations and the like nutrient supplement recommendations.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
The product side feels like the things we were talking about, the trust score that's based on manufacturing, like quality, cost, and then some of the dietary preferences, like, do you want vegan? You know, that kind of stuff. But the nutrient recommendations, you know, right now they're kind of generic. We ask you basic questions, height and weight. We have 80 protocols.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You can go in for different health goals and kind of see the general recommendations there. But we really need to up the game there, right? And people want our number one most requested feature is a personalized supplement plan. And so that's what we're working. It's a big thing to take in as much data as we can and help people understand what they need to take.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Once they understand that need, the how you get it in your body, the cost, which brands, all that, that can become an independent thing. That might even change over time. New products might come out. Lower cost options might come up. Higher trust scores may change.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
But we need to make sure you have a really good nutrient plan and that eventually you also need to track whether or not you are hitting your goal. And so one of the things we talk about a lot is being aligned with the customer to be just as excited when they stop taking something that's not working as we are when they try something new.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And so it's a big part of our overall ethos is being your companion to navigate the space.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
it doesn't really exist for the supplement industry, which is so shocking. And it's not integrated into a flow. There are some websites that you can go to and look at some lab results and things like that, but there's not action to take. There's buy, but that's not really the thing we're looking about.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
We wanna make sure that you can have a conversation with your doctor about what you're actually putting in your body look for alternatives, you know, that might be cheaper costs than the thing that you found through some influencers website and that you're tracking results. Like alone, our scheduler, you know, 30 to 50% of supplements don't get finished. The bottle that you buy, people just stop.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
They stop. They forget. They, A lot of things they forget is the one thing, right? And then I don't know, some people have just very much the wrong expectations up front. Like they think they're going to feel something immediately. They don't understand what the protocol is to actually getting the results they want.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
They don't know that they should be actually checking their vitamin D levels in six months or, you know, three months. And so you might notice the absence of something, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I'm not getting sick all the time. I'm not having muscle aches. I don't have muscle pains while I'm taking a high dose of statins. So that's the thing. We really want to set people's expectations right. And also that they're dosing it, they're taking it at the right time. People don't follow, it's very rare that people follow the with food, without food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah, because you talk about that for a little bit in terms of different nutrients and how you need to take them with or without food. Yeah, I mean the fat soluble vitamins like A, D, E, K should be taken with a meal to help improve absorption and it can impact it by up to 50%. With fatty foods. Fatty foods particularly, let alone any food.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
If you're taking your vitamin D, you have to have it with some fat as opposed to vitamin C. So we have a scheduler in the app too that takes all your different products and then helps you build what time of day you should be taking it at, set reminders for it, and soon track whether or not you're experiencing side effects or the results that you're looking for.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we've got to kind of close that loop, then feed that data back in, help you optimize, make changes, and kind of keep improving things. And it'll be a journey. And then you get feedback from people about how they responded. So you get sort of data on. That's going to be the key, right? To me, right now we have the protocols and the products.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You can see how many people are taking them, but how many people are actually hitting their results? And I really struggle when I look at reviews, like on Amazon reviews for supplements. It's usually like one of three things. This changed my life. This did nothing. The package came damaged. That's all that's happening on these Amazon reviews.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
There's no one actually seeing whether or not they're hitting results with it. We definitely aspire to do that. We talk a lot about creating that closed loop experience. And I think that's when the N equals one data starts to become really valuable. So what does N equal one mean? N equals one is like one of what is my data. I am an individual in this. It is not the clinical result.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
It is not the aggregate. It is just my personal, you know, your own biology against your own story, right? It's your own, it could be subjective, but it's, it's the N equals one is the, the sample size is me. And that is the, you know, it was, we talk a little bit about the battle of the institution and the individuals, you know, there's so many people on, on Twitter.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
If you, if you get caught up in your algorithm on kind of, The supplement health Twitter, you just see people making some pretty outlandish claims about the impact of certain supplements on their life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And we need to start feeding that back into a system that can aggregate whether other people are having those experiences or just the loud voices on Twitter are having those experiences on X. Because those people stand out and people make decisions, as I said before, like 51%. of people buying a health or wellness product because they saw it on social media, that's real.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Even though the trust with them is not necessarily high, they are making these decisions. And so we can really find out whether or not these are working because some of these things are in complete contrast to what the medical world thinks. We need to build better data sets.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
That came out recently. That was a FDA went after a brand for having a bunch of these natural supplements, having. Viagra in them and all that. And there was a scandal even in the kind of Amazon Basics world where they had tested some of their products and they weren't hitting the numbers that they said. There was a ginkgo biloba test that the FDA, I think, did where there was zero of the product.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
There was zero ginkgo in the actual product.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
There was nothing activated.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I mean, this is what I'm so excited about, about us working together. I remember when I showed you the platform initially and it was like, whoa, I've wanted this for 30 years. But like, I'm a tech guy, right? Like I love to build, the initial version of this is built out of the product that I really wish I had. And for stack sharing and creating all that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And then my co-founder, Nick, came up with the trust score rating. And the other thing we have is this sub score rating, which is take everything that's in your stack, grade it against the brand qualities, price, does it hit your demographics? Are you aligned with your health goals? And kind of give people an easy score to iterate on, right? So these are some of the core functionality you have, but
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
getting into the mind of the people in the clinical world and what they need and how to kind of interface with them where this really focus more on the self-directed health journey. But it seems like there's just so much with your guidance that we're able to kind of tap into the mentality of the doctors and how patients can kind of interact and show them
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
their actual, you know, supplement list right now. Like you can actually share it with your doctor, which you go to those intake forms and it's just like, Oh my God, I don't know. How do you even fill them out? Yeah, I know. They get so mad at me when I try to not fill them out, you know?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Right. And so now it can be a link to us and you can actually analyze it and we'll see what doctors really want to, want to take the time to kind of take action on it. But we're going to navigate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I think the money side, though, is a big one. So one of the things that we really want to do over time is drive down the cost of supplements. There's a big problem in the industry is that they're really not designed. In my mind, when you think about taking a supplement, especially some of these core ones, you should be thinking about your customer's lifetime value in years or decades.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
But so many, because of that 30 to 50% of people not finishing the supplement, not reordering, the way the margin structures are and how much they're costing to acquire customers keeps the price really high for people who are on stuff for a long time. I remember I was on year five of taking Elysium and I was like, guys, I sent customer support an email.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I was like, you've made all your money back on me. I want to take this for my whole life. Can I get like a discounted rate on this? And they said, no. And I was like, cool, I'm out. Like, I'm just, you know, their customers, they said they don't have that yet. And I was like, cool.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Like, there's not a, there's not a real reward for the people who are in this for the long haul who are taking, there's not a system designed for people who are in it for the long haul with their health. I mean, we should be measuring their LTV in decades, not months. Lifetime value. Lifetime value. Yeah. The customers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we're trying to find the right intersection between capitalism and health and help drive that down for people. You'll see that from us later.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
How do you take the rest of the amount of pills?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So I don't know if it will or not. I mean, I'm curious. You've done so well on the policy front, and I think a lot of change for things that you've been caring about for a long time are starting to come into taking action. What do you think of the regulatory side of this space?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
For us, it's about bringing the awareness to what we have found, right? So their manufacturing process, you know, do they have the COAs that show this? Are they doing their lot testing? So there's like, you know, are they following the guidelines that they should be? And then the excipients list that we have in there is helpful too, so that you can see
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
you know, the inactive ingredients, but then we're going to, we're going to try to do a bunch of our own independent testing as well to verify these things. Personally, I like the edge of medicine where we have a lot of agency over what we're doing. Like we don't necessarily need prescriptions for things.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
We can make our own decisions, but there does need to be something that's giving consumers guidance. And that's kind of what we're trying to be. Yeah. So in the absence of new policy, we're going to keep trying to up the standards and push the industry in the right direction.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Right. And we want to be customer aligned, right? We want to find that intersection between capitalism and health. that really looks out for the consumer. A big thing is we don't ever want to profit from supplement sales, right? We need to be just as aligned when you stop taking something as you are when you try something new.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
From the stories that we're hearing too, supplements for doctors, the doctors who are prescribing them and getting involved in the products, it's becoming like a bit of a revenue stream for them. And, you know, I had a friend who said their doctor came up to them in the grocery store, didn't ask anything about how they were doing or whatever, and said, why'd you stop buying your supplements for me?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And that just doesn't feel, that doesn't feel right. That left a really bad taste in their mouth. So we're gonna keep evolving in the direction that we think is gonna best look out for customers and be their advocate. It's okay.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
What's crazy is you're getting that, right? But like the consumers are so much making their own decisions about the supplements. So they're never even touching a doctor that knows that. So there's just so much risk out there with them not you know, having that information at their fingertips in a self-directed way. And, you know, it's one of the things we aspire to get on the platform.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You're going to help us with that. You've already sent me some resources. And, you know, we think it's a big opportunity to help consumers not make a mistake when they're doing things on their own.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
We just touched on it briefly, but I don't think most people know. I want to talk about our stacks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Look, so stacks is like, to me, a stack is like the, when you're taking a bunch of things together, that, you know, have a, for either an individual effect, like this is my, you know, a muscle growth stack, or this is my daily stack. This is the stuff that I'm taking every day and the stuff that's meant to be taken together.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And so, you know, one of the, as I said in the beginning, the kind of core offering here was the ability to share your stack. and see other stacks that people are taking. My stack is on there in public. Your stack is going to be on there in public. And I think you can learn a lot from people like you or people facing the same challenges.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
One of the things I love that I came across a year or two ago was the effects of taurine on longevity. Two grams of taurine a day, it's kind of much more than people had thought about before. But in primate studies showing like, really long extensions to 20% extension, I think, in primates to life and a bunch of cardiovascular effects too. No doctor has recommended me to take Tori.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I've had to find that on my own.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Everyone's stressed. But like this whole concept of sharing and learning from each other. Like I remember I was over at your house for dinner one day and I saw you were taking Timeline, you know, the urolithin A, right? Yeah. And you were like, I fucking love this thing. And I started taking it, you know?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So like learning from each other, I think is such a big piece of it for, you know, people who are facing similar things or have similar goals to you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Our protocols are very much designed for like the crossover between the nutrients and the health condition in the health conditions. Right. So you're going to be on there with a longevity one, a brain health one. That's really exciting to have those protocols on there. And the stacks to us are what you're taking daily.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And then you can see how they relate to the health goals, the nutrient totals across all of them. It's really fascinating to go look at other people's stacks and see what they're taking.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah, when you come in, you give us some basic information, which is going to be expanded more soon. And then you go and you scan your existing products so you can kind of get them in the system. And then we give you a score, right? And that score tells you how well your supplements are aligning with your health goals, the quality of your supplements, the cost of your supplements.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And people just seem to do really well with this. They want a simple, easy to understand number that they can go move. I talked to all of my friends who would come in, they're like, I got a 75, I want it to be an 80. And so they go and do something. The average person is right now making two to three changes to their product stack based on the sub-score, which is amazing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
These are potential decisions that could impact them their whole life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
It's really more of a data-driven approach, right? I think that's what it really fundamentally is. The structured data finally being available and the ability for us to soon provide recommendations that span...
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
you know, give you the info on whether it's an AI based recommendation, whether it's coming from Mark's protocol, whether it's been tailored based on, you know, some of the data that you provided us and actually give you like a pretty comprehensive way at looking at why you are making this decision, why you are going to take this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And then the end game, which we are, we are working on is then to self report back in whether or not it worked. And once that loop is closed, you know, we think we've completed the journey end to end on supplements and we can just keep improving.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I think so. I think it's a huge benefit. I think in the world of kind of, you know, of an AI driven world too, there's this kind of blocked on human concept I talk about where like at some point the AI only has enough information it now needs to get from you whether or not you are getting results from this, whether or not
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
you're taking your pills successfully, that it doesn't have this information. And if you can kind of sit at the intersection of that, I think you found a very, very valuable seam as the collective intelligence grows and the individual intelligence gets fed back in.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah, so sub.co is the site. You can go on there, supp.co. And if you go to supp.co slash mark, You'll be able to find a link to the protocols and Mark's stack on there, which is pretty exciting. My goodies. Your goodies. And you'll get to see when that gets updated and when things change, which is very cool.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And look, I think together we're going to build something, something better, something better for this industry and something that, you know, I know you've wanted to see exist for a long time. And so this is just the beginning.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
There's also an app. Yeah, the app. If you can get it in the App Store, just search Supco. You'll see it in there. Or you can go to the site and sign up, and we'll send you the links to it. You can go to sup.co slash mark. And then you can share it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
We've added a bunch of social sharing features, too. You can build customized lists and stacks that you think work for you and share them to the community, which is kind of a fun new thing that's on there as well. So we have a mix of... AI-driven data, clinical data, expert data, like from yourself, and then users sharing their N equals one stories too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And so it kind of wraps it all up in an easy way for you to make decisions about your health. The bottom-up data is really interesting because it's often dismissed. It's so dismissed. There's a battle going on between that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
That's a topic that's kind of near and dear to, you know, while I was building the first, you know, Sepco, Kelly was pregnant and going through it. Yeah. And it was, uh, It was hard to get the right information. We had one saying, only take magnesium oxide. We had another saying, buy my supplements. It was a wide spectrum.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we think those issues, menopause issues, things like that, that we really want to have somebody yourself coming on the platform. Another round of experts are coming on to tackle individual topics that they're the best at. So you'll be able to see a nice mix of what the individuals are doing, what the experts say, and what is the kind of clinical.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
story because you you were you know a very overweight unhealthy guy when you were in your 20s i mean 20s i think it my journey probably goes back to my childhood i was always the fat kid i was a tall fat kid um and i would make all the sports teams because they'd be like oh he's six five like he's gonna he's gonna we can make him good right he's gonna get better as time goes on but uh honestly like nothing i would do playing football
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So we've packaged those up. Some of those topics, particularly fertility, prenatals, they're on the platform with the protocols. And every one of the recommendations has an explanation of why.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
So you have an ability to really understand why, and you can pick and choose whether or not you want to follow it to exact or adapt it to the fact that you might know that you don't need to supplement your vitamin D. You are okay. So that's, I think, giving people the ability to either click the button and go for it or tailor it to what they know they need. is a unique feature that we have.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And it was like- The average Subco user takes six products. If they're correlating the same to your data, they're taking the wrong thing. And so you solve that problem.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Engage in conversation, be able to talk to your doctor about it, be able to talk to your friends about it, share the things that are working for you, aggregate N equals one data. There's a lot of like submissions and making sense of supplements with SUPCO.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You know, you do two a day practices and all nonstop and I wouldn't lose weight. And it was pretty wild. My mom has hypothyroidism. She took me to an endocrinologist. This is like 1996, seven, something like that. And they did some labs and they just told me I was on the low end of normal and they couldn't do anything. And it was completely disheartening.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I never saw 300 on a scale. I refused to get on a scale once I was 299. It just was not good. And then I'm a software engineer. I just love building. Code is kind of my canvas. It's just where I can lose days building. And it's so much fun for me. Built a successful company called GroupMe. It was kind of pioneering group text messaging.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And when we sold that, we sold it quickly to Skype, you know, I was 270 pounds. I had just made some money. I wanted to live, but I was deeply unhealthy. And I found a functional medicine doctor. And this is like, this is 2010, you know, like, so kind of ahead of the curve a bit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I had a social media curve at least. That was 14 years later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ahead of the curve of like the biohacker trend that I feel like is now. We started doing lab work, right? And we started experimenting and, you know, started with some thyroid medicine. kind of dialed in some hormones and built a supplement stack and it worked.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And I committed to diet and exercise again, you know, with these, you know, helping me this time and it worked. And people would ask me, they'd see my transformation and they'd asked, what was I doing? And no one wanted to hear diet and exercise.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah, I mean, at that point, I probably lost 70 pounds at that point. You know, they're asking me what I'm doing. And this is 10 years before Ozempic is a thing. This is not the easy answer. And so I would share them my stack, which was the list of supplements and medications I was taking. And it would be a ugly, out-of-date Google spreadsheet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And honestly, people didn't really know what to do with it, you know, but a couple of people would be like, cool, I talked to my doctor about this one thing. And, you know, then I went on with my life, happy. I started Blade and Splice and ran Splice for 10 years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I was a little burned out leading through COVID and, you know, getting ready to have a kid and kind of wanted to step back and hire a CEO there. You know, it was time to build again. The software itch is just always in me and I wanted to do something in health. I mean, it had been a transformative experience. experience for me. And it had become the zeitgeist.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Your book was just coming out on longevity and Peter Atiyah's book. It just seemed like the dinner table conversation and the stack sharing on social media, it was happening. This wasn't just a biohacker. I'm taking this. What are you taking? Exactly. And so the core concept was to bring back the stack sharing concept I saw what you guys were doing with Function, and I was so inspired by it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Yeah, these things that are not good. They don't need to be in your supplements.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
I'm a Function investor. I'm happy about that. But I wanted to tackle this space, which I found to be an incredibly gray area of understanding what to do. And so that's where it formed. I remember the first day, I had the idea in my head. So a friend of mine came over for dinner without me saying anything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
She said, I spent four hours today going through all my supplements, putting them in a spreadsheet, figuring out how to save money and take less pills. It's like, oh, this is like a pretty good idea then. And then like I had another friend in the first week say that their friend, they knew someone whose mom had taken so much vitamin D. They didn't know.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
She had dementia, early dementia-like symptoms. And she was like totally misdosing vitamin D. And so I started to really like get into- Because it wasn't what it said on the bottle or because you took too many pills? I think it was too many pills or not understanding the like IU dosing versus milligram dosing and was like, you know, that was the story I was getting.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And so we're really here to help you make sense of supplements.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
If you listen to most doctors, you don't. I mean, I think that is the thing that is so hard as a consumer in this space is just the wildly different opinions. And like, it's, it's the doctor gap of people who say expensive urine to the ones who are like, this is exactly what to do for this. And it's also like the explosion on social media.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You know, there's a, this whole kind of N equals one world right now where people are raving about, you know, this supplement is just changing my life. It makes me see in 4k, but, but you know, then they, they also have their supplement store right behind it. So it's a, it's an extremely difficult space to navigate. I mean, there's a lot of snake oil sales, but a lot of snake oil sales. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And look, there might be people who are having actual real great experiences, but they're not aggregating that data in a way that allows anyone to make sense of it. It's just their individual story. And I think we're going through such a big battle right now in America around the individual and the institution. And who to trust in this. And that trust is really eroded.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Institutional trust is continuing to go down. And 51% of Americans say that they have bought a health or wellness product from a social media influencer, from something they saw on social media. Well, I bought you shorts and shoes and supplements. Yeah, fair, fair. All right, see, we'll kind of dive a little bit deeper for us into what is Subco and how it works and why it's so important.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
We like to say that we're helping users make sense of supplements. Through our website and app, we're helping you figure out what supplements are right for your health, what products and brands you can trust, how you can save the most money and get results. To do this, we've cataloged over 200,000 supplement products that you can search in our app or by either scanning the barcode.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
And we've built an in-depth trust score rating from 29 different attributes that lets you understand the manufacturing standards and quality of your supplements. For those looking to figure out what they want to take, we have 80 expert protocols that you can go in to find guidance on different health topics like brain fog or heart health and women's hormones. To get started, it's pretty easy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You enter a little bit of information, start scanning your supplements to kind of catalog what you're already taking. We give you an analysis of your stack so that you can kind of get a score that's easy to understand how you can improve quality, how you can improve trust, and make changes to kind of improve that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
You also then can share your stack with your doctor, your friends, kind of get feedback from different people, create a conversation around it. That helps you understand if you're taking too much or too little of something, which happens to a lot of people. And then we have a smart scheduler that lets you make sure you're taking your products correctly. Are you taking them with food?
The Dr. Hyman Show
How to Choose the Right Supplements (and Avoid the Wrong Ones)
Are you taking them at the right time? Which will then also start tracking to see whether or not you're getting results. We launched a beta in early October. The response has been amazing. We're getting nearly 1,000 users a day right now. October 24. October 24, yeah. And we're getting 1,000 users a day without even having your protocols.