975 - Building The Whoop For Your Poop, with Scott Hickle (Throne)

Speaker A: All right, how's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Forward Thinking Founders, where we talk to founders about their companies, their visions for the future, and how the two collide. Today, I'm very excited to be talking to Scott Hickle, who's a co. Founder, CEO of thronescience. Welcome to the show. How's it going, Matt?

Speaker B: Thank you so much for having me. I am, um, thriving. Life is good.

Speaker A: Love to hear that. Love to hear that. I'm really excited to have you on because I feel like, you correct me if I'm wrong, but you're like, in this. This cohort of, like, Twitter people that all that all just were on Twitter, like, during COVID and like, it's on Twitter in tech. There's like, it's not like a defined group, but it's just like a. Generally people that were very active online, uh, during. During that period. And like, we all kind of like, you know, at least I kind of tracked what everyone was doing and it was a little community. Is that right? Were you, like, really active online during the COVID times? At least when it first started?

Speaker B: I was really active on Twitter going back way before COVID Covid didn't help that addiction, but yes.

Speaker A: That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, I'm excited to have you on. We discussed before we went on air this is the first time you've been on FtF. So excited for this. Um, so to start us off, what are you working on? What is thronescience?

Speaker B: Thronescience is a device that tracks your gut health, hydration, and prostate health from the toilet every time you go to the bathroom, hands free, automatically with every flush. So, uh, we joke it's like whoop for your poop or aura for your flora, but it's the first hands free automatic gut health tracker.

Speaker A: That's hilarious. I love those analogies. So I get this on my toilet when I go to the bathroom. When I go number two, it gives me data. Um, uh, let's go into that. What is the information that's in my poop that is relevant to me? Why should I care? Um, maybe start there. And then we're going to go into, like, how you even figured out that this was a thing and how you got started with the company.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I should take a step back. It's not just number two, it's also urine as well. So we're looking at literally any waste in the toilet. Yeah. Okay. So we track health signals across four major categories. The first is what we call your functional gut Health. So the metrics that gi, uh, doctors care the most about when you go into their office is your stool frequency, how often you're going and your stool consistency, which is like a seven point scale called the Bristol stool chart. But we make it really easy to interpret. We like hard, healthy, loose liquid. Right? Like, everyone knows what that means. And so when you combine those two, it forms what we call your digestive pattern. And like, everyone knows that, like good gut health is regular, healthy bowel movements. Anything outside of that is worth paying attention to so you can figure out what's going on and how. Like, how do I get back to healthy, regular bowel movements? So those are the two most important for assessing functional gut health. The next ones are like color, volume, sink or float, which can tell you about fat content or statoria. The next big category we look at is hydration. So that's based on the color and cloudiness of your urine. Fairly straightforward. You know, fun thing here is people always say, like, oh, I can tell you how hydrated I am. Like, I know what it looks like when I go to the bathroom. And like, you know. No, you don't. We can prove it because we see material increases. 2 in 3 people who use THRONES see a significant increase in their hydration score the first two weeks of using THRONE just because that awareness that we drive, right? So, and like, there's a ton of literature around how hydration is important for everything from mood to, you know, energy focus, stress, uh, you know, cognitive performance, memory, et cetera. Next big category is your, what we call bathroom habits. So that's how long you're sitting on the toilet and the toilet timeline. So the two. It's funny, I see you laughing, but the most clinically relevant biomarkers here are your time to first, evacuation tells you a lot about urgency or constipation. That's something that's highly relevant to GI's. And then the total time you spend on the toilet is highly relevant to hemorrhoid risk. And so there was a recent study came out late last year showing that people who go to the bathroom with their smartphones have a 46% increase in hemorrhoids. And so we turn that into a good thing and we send you a push notification after 10 minutes and say, hey, stop doom scrolling. Um, and then the last category is prostate health. And this one's to me, I think one of the most magical, just because it blows my mind that this works. But like when a man pees. So like, prostate is obviously a men's health thing. Um, and it's a little donut at the bottom of your bladder that your urethra goes through. And so 50% of men by age 50 and 80% of us by age 70 have an enlarged prostate. That makes it harder to pee. And when you pee, like, you know, intuitively, the sound of a healthy stream versus a weak stream. Right? Like, that's a strong stream, that's a weak stream. It turns out that's because that's, like, literally rooted in science. Your instantaneous urinary flow rate maps 1 to 1 to the volume of your pee stream when you pee into a water basin. And so we can use the acoustics of your pee stream to tell you about the health of your prostate. And that affects, like, roughly 40 million American men. So those are the big four categories. Functional gut health, hydration, bathroom habits, and prostate health. Um, I'll turn it back over to you, but I could keep going.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're definitely going to dive into more of this. I have a million questions, but I think the next one I have is, how'd you land on this company? Um, it almost comes off as obvious in hindsight, but I have to guess it wasn't obvious to you. I've never seen anything like this before. I found you and found Throne. So how'd you come across this idea, and what's the origin story here?

Speaker B: Meandering is probably to sum it up in a word. So, basically, my co founder, Tim and I m met back in 2021 at a poker game. So he had just moved to Austin as part of the COVID diaspora, and I brought him into our poker tribe. And literally the first time we were ever playing poker, we were talking about startup ideas you'd love to start but never would. And everybody else was pitching sex, drugs, rock roll, vice industry stuff. And Tim was like, no, like, the. The actual answer to this question is smart toilets. And I was like, that's brilliant. Clearly you would name that company Throne. Uh, and it became like, you know, everyone has, like, a list of, like, album names, right? That, like, you know, like, you know, we all have these startups that we bought domains for but never gonna build. Like, Throne was one of those for us. It was like, oh, that's the smart toilet idea. Uh, and so I ended up working with Tim. We treated that very m much as like, this is dating before marriage. We really worked well together. Um, at the last startup we were at together, and when we were leaving to go start our next company, we were kind of navigating the Idea maze. And finally, I called my mom. She's a geriatrician. It's like a primary care provider for old doctor or like old people. And asked her, you know, mom, is there any medical utility to looking at people's waste? That was a 45 minute phone call. She had a whole lot to say about it. And she was like, honey, like, you know, in my field of geriatrics, there's this joke that all old people talk about is their kids, their meds, and their poop. And it's so true that in my own practice, I no longer give my patients my phone number because they'll send me so many pictures of their poop. And like, as you age, your gut motility starts to slow down. You're, like, acutely aware of these changes happening to your body, and you're also less shy about talking about it. And I was like, whoa. So that was kind of the first conversation we had that inspired us to take a deeper look at this. And the more we look, the more we're like, it's crazy that there are devices to track every other corner of your health, right? You have 20 devices Track sleep and cardio and respiratory health, uh, metabolic health, CGMs and ketone monitors, but nothing looking at gut health or urinary function or hydration, despite the fact that the toilet is one of two places everyone goes every single day. It's the bed and the toilet. And you go to the toilet, like five times a day at least. So that was kind of how we got there. But it took us a lot of convincing ourselves that this was not a totally crockpot idea.

Speaker A: Well, I have to admit, the first time that I saw you naturally on Twitter when you were working on this company is you had in your bio. Um, this was probably two years ago. I don't know, at some point you had in your bio, world's shittiest founder. And I didn't actually, I didn't know what you were doing at the time. So I'm just like, oh, this is. This is funny. Or this must be a meme I'm not in on. Then only a few months later, I saw something go viral for Throne. I'm like, wait a second. This makes total sense. And it all clicked. And I'm like, this guy's a genius. Um, I got a bunch of questions. I got a bunch of them. So the first one is, what is the form factor here? So I have a toilet in my apartment, in my home. Um, is this like, is it similar to like a, um, I guess, yeah. What's the form factor? If I wanted to buy one of these and maybe I will. How do I install it? Is it. Do I need a plumber? Can I do it myself? How does that work?

Speaker B: Yeah, great question. So it is a clip on. So it literally clips onto the side of your toilet. So I've got here a little cross section of a toilet that's literally install. Is that easy? So it just clips onto the side of your toilet. The toilet seat goes on top of it like that. And then there's a camera and a microphone pointing down into the toilet bowl that's recording the contents of the toilet bowl, you know, only facing down, never up. There's nothing but liability looking up. But down there's like a goldmine of health information. Um, and then the way it works is it uses a motion sensor plus Bluetooth to know this is Scott versus this is Matt on the toilet. So once it identifies your phone's Bluetooth, then it turns on automatically. It's hands free automatic, you don't have to touch it. It uses, you know, totally hands free sensing. When you leave, it turns itself off and then everything gets sent to the cloud. And we run about a dozen different computer vision models to analyze those four different categories of health signals that we were talking about. And then we send you your results like two minutes later saying, you know, here's how you're trending, here's where your gut health is, your hydration is, and here's any new insights that you've learned about yourself.

Speaker A: So that's fascinating. Um, so it's key. So if I have a throne, and I guess I was going to say it till the end, but I'm just genuinely curious, how much does the throne cost? Like if I want to, if I want to buy one right after this, like, how much does it cost to get it and put it on my, put it on my toilet.

Speaker B: Uh, it's $400 plus $6 a month. But I can give you a discount code, uh, for forward thinking founders. So it'll be 100 bucks off.

Speaker A: Honestly, I feel like that's like super fairly priced for the value that you provide. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like premium, but it's like you're, this is health. Like if you don't take care of your health, you don't, you know, you're not hydrated, you prostate issues, the things that you track, like that is much, uh, more expensive in more ways than just money. Um, so that's like, I think that makes a lot of sense to me. Okay, so. And I'm just gonna go to your website after this and maybe snag one. I think it's a really interesting idea, but to that point, it's like, who is this built for? You mentioned that your mom serves a bunch of older people. Is this primarily built for older people? You know, I'm in my 30s. Would I get benefit out of it? Maybe? Like, who was it built for? And then who should buy it? I guess maybe two questions.

Speaker B: That's, uh, a great question. So, short answer is, this version of the product is primarily built for people who. I would say three categories of people. People with digestive health issues who are trying to understand what are my triggers, my sensitivities, my intolerances, what are the things that cause me to have episodes of bad gut health? Which is like 60 million Americans. Right? Like, you know, there was a survey back in 2019 of 71,000Americans, and 61% of them, almost 2 in 3 said they'd experienced GI symptoms in the previous week. That's a massive market.

Speaker A: That's huge. Yes.

Speaker B: So, and right now, one of the primary ways that people like the gold standard for finding, like, dietary triggers and sensitivities is to go on an elimination diet, where you cut things out of your diet, like, everything, basically, and then you slowly reintroduce foods until you find the things that upset you. No one has the discipline for that. That is like an impossibly difficult ask of people. Right. Like, food is social, food is life. Like, to cut everything out of your diet and then go through one by one over the course of months is like a superhuman ask of people. The next best is working with a dietitian or nutritionist to go through and say, okay. Like, they'll ask you, keep a stool log, keep a food log, and then they're go through and eyeball it and say, okay. Well, it looks on the days that you had, you know, food with MSG in it or, you know, Taco Tuesday, or, like, you had coffee on an empty stomach that led to episodes of bad gut health. That's great. But again, most people don't want to keep a log of their bowel movements and their diet. And then, you know, you know, A, that's tough to get the data, and B, it's not particularly rigorous analysis. You're just eyeballing two spreadsheets side by side. So what we're doing is we get that ground truth, gut health. Like, we know exactly what your digestive patterns look like. And then when we see you have episodes of bad gut health, we can ask you what changed in the last 24 hours? You know, what did you eat in the last day? Were you stressed? You know, were you traveling? Like what? Were there any changes in your lifestyle? Did you sleep poor, poorly? And then we can start running, like, real linear regressions and correlations against these are the things that, you know, 85% of the time when you have an episode of bad gut health, it's because these factors changed. And so that's where we're headed, is like, much more rigorous analysis of what causes upset stomach for me personally. So that's one big cohort. The other big cohort is men age 40 and up. You know, I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing you're in your late 20s, early 30s, correct?

Speaker A: Yeah, 32.

Speaker B: And so no one our age thinks of prostate health. No, men our age are concerned about their prostates. Every single man our dad's age is thinking about their prostates. And tracking your prostate health is one of those things that if you catch things early, I mean, this is just true of preventive health in general. Right? The earlier you can identify negative trends in your health, the earlier you can intervene, the better the outcomes are. And so that's a big cohort, and that's roughly 40 million Americans. And then the last big category is people that care about performance and feeling good. Right. And that's where hydration tracking is. I didn't expect hydration tracking to be the standout feature that we found it to be, but people who track their hydration on Throne, on average, check it every single time they go to the bathroom. And it turns out it's because one of the most compelling loops we have is you wake up dehydrated every morning. It's the longest time you've gone without drinking water, is that six, seven, eight hours you were sleeping. And then you see your score improve throughout the day. And so, you know, everyone loves seeing their numbers go up and to the right. And that loop happens on repeat every single day with hydration when you're checking on Throne. And not only does your hydration impact, you know, how you're feeling cognitively and how you're feeling in terms of your physical capabilities. It also materially impacts how you sleep at night. If you go to sleep well hydrated, you have a lower core body temperature, and you sleep better. If you go to sleep dehydrated, it raises your core body temperature, and you Sleep less well. And so there's just, like, you know, all these compelling reasons, depending on what you care about, to use Throne, then ultimately, you know, everyone poops. So, uh, I argue that, like, no one has perfect gut health. Everyone has had days of terrible gut health. And for most people, it's not useful until it is.

Speaker A: Totally. I think it's like the king of preventative for a lot of stuff. It's like you said, you catch something before. It's an issue. Um, so specifically on the hydration, because this is important. This is very interesting to me. My wife tells me she doesn't think I drink enough water. And someday. It depends on the day. Some days I tell her she's right. Some days I tell her she's wrong. So, so what does it look like specifically? So I wake up, um, I drink water. I use the restroom. You know, I pee. It tells me, is it like a scale out of 100? Like, hey, Matt, out of 100, you're at a 17. And then I go in a few hours, and it tells me I'm a 23 or something else. Is it. So, out of 100, is that the framing, or if not, what's the correct framing on how you track hydration?

Speaker B: That's exactly the user facing framing that we use. So we track it. The scientific term that we use is what's called osmolality, which is an estimate of the concentration of your urine. And so that's what our AI model is actually estimating, is your urine osmolality. But nobody knows what osmolality means. And nobody knows, you know, a 1200 osmolality. Is that good or bad? That's actually really bad. But you don't know that. But what you do know is that a 17 hydration is bad and 100 is good. And so we just map that osmolality onto a linear 0 to 100 scale because it's so intuitive.

Speaker A: Okay, this is fascinating. I want to go into the journey of getting this off the ground. Uh, this seems like an idea. Like I said, it appears to me that it's obvious in hindsight, but not obvious. If it would have been obvious, you would have had competition. You would have had people building in this space. So how did you get this off the ground? Did you. Were you able to build an mvp? Did you need to raise money to do that? Like, how did you. How do you get it off the ground? Just like, early days, uh, when you started working on this.

Speaker B: It's a great question. And so the short answer Is, yeah, we had to build two separate generations of hardware before we got to the throne that we just launched three weeks ago. So we originally, Tim and I incorporated as Pine Way Incorporated. We were going to build a nurse staffing marketplace because that was the big healthcare problem of 2022. Right. Was Covid. Nurse staffing was like crazy bad and there was a huge shortage of nurses. And he comes from a nursing family. Three of his sisters and his mom are all nurses. So that's what we were like, oh, we're hearing about this a lot. Let's go build something that's better for his family. And right. So we originally raised $1 million to go build that. And we'd already. We actually built it. We bootstrapped building that and then we raised a million dollars to take it to market. So we already had the software. We raised some money to go hire a nurse recruiter and a salesperson. And within a month we were like, this market's dead. Like, Covid's over. You know, we missed the boat on this. This was terrible timing. And we let go of the team and went back to the drawing board. And that's when we had this call with my mom and she was like, no, wait, the smart toilet thing is actually like a really good idea. So at that point we had a million dollars in the bank and, you know, we spent basically two months convincing of doing just a ton of research, right? Like throwing up landing pages and pointing meta ads at it to understand, like, will people actually engage with this idea of a smart toilet? Like, what are the things they'd want to learn? We'd go and interview strangers outside of Trader Joe's and local gyms to ask like, hey, if you could track your gut health and hydration, would you do that? What about if it was a camera in your toilet? As long as it's facing down? And like, nobody was offended by that idea, right? Like, two people asked, where do I invest? And that's when Tim and I were like, shit. Like, I think we have to take this seriously. So then we used the first million dollars to build two different generations of prototypes. The first prototype was literally just a Raspberry PI with a webcam plugged into it. Let me see if I can get this. So yeah, so you can see it's like a. It's a Tupperware box with a Raspberry PI and then a 3D printed holder for a webcam. We made about 30 of these and distributed them around our friends homes in Austin. And like, we'd have to go manually install each one of it to get, ah, it connected to WI Fi. And we'd have to ask our friends, like, hey, please let us record your shits. Like, you know, we need to build a database to train our first AI models. You're not getting anything in return for this. We're just grateful. Uh, and then we built this device, which is our first, uh, you know, prototype that I could actually send to your house. And you could connect this up to your Bluetooth and wi fi on your own. This was battery powered. So this, this is the first one that was like, you know, there was an app with it. Uh, and this one actually gave you a GUT health score and a hydration score. And this allowed us to build the data set a lot faster. This allowed us to get much more accurate with our AI models and it allowed us to learn about user habits and behaviors. And one of the biggest things we learned from that is that people forgot to push the button, right? Like, you have been potty trained since you were 2 years old, going to the bathroom the exact same way like 30,000 times. And to ask you to change your behaviors and to upset that routine is just not realistic. So then we were like, okay, the next big hurdle is to make it hands free. And that's what inspired this device. And we knew we had to make it smaller and we had to make the battery life longer. And so there's a lot of, you know, usability things that we just obsessed over. Um, but yeah, so, you know, we couldn't have gotten here without pivoting from a different idea first because that's what gave, gave us the startup capital.

Speaker A: How did you get the. Well, it sounds like you had the realization that the nursing market, like, what you were doing wasn't working. Was it a long period of time before the seed of that idea to the decision, um, to lay off the team and figure out what to do? Was that months or was that kind of like a. How long did that take? Because some people, it takes years for them to figure out if they want to pivot or not. Some people, they do it on a dime. Where were you?

Speaker B: Um, more closer to the on the dime side of the spectrum. So we started building that nursing staff nurse staffing marketplace in like October of 2022. We raised our first capital in March of 2023. We hired our first team in March of 2023, and by May of 2023, so like two months later, we knew it wasn't going to work. And the reason was we had, you know, we had 90 nurses on the platform. Like, our nurse recruiter was a, uh, stud. She was amazing. But getting nurse, like nursing facilities, you know, like memory care facilities and nursing facilities to actually sign up for the platform was just impossible. And by that point, you know, they had been, you know, raked over the coals so many times by other terrible nurse staffing partners that they were very reluctant to work with new ones. And the nail in the coffin for us was we got an LOI from one and they were excited to work with us. Uh, and they went radio silent on us for three weeks and then they came back and they were like, hey, sorry, uh, we've been very busy. We just made our first three full time hires in the last two years. Like, isn't that great? And I was like, hold up, walk me through that again. They're like, yeah. So we haven't made any full time hires in three years for nurses assistants. And in the last two weeks we've made our first three full time hires. We're fully focused on onboarding them. I was like, great, this market's dead.

Speaker A: Yep, yep. That was the nail in the coffin. Yeah, that makes sense. You're just kind of get, getting this data as you go and at some point you kind of see, see what's going on. Um, I think a lot of folks, they, they take too long to, too long to pivot if that should be the right, you know, the right thing. But there's this like, dynamic of, you know, I feel like YC is very pivot friendly. They're like, oh, if your idea is not working after a little bit, you know, pivot to find something that is. I'm a little bit more of like, I'm really going to try to see my idea through. And if, you know, if there's forces that aren't, that aren't. That are at play, say this is kind of like what happened to you. There's, you know, external forces that make this not possible. Then I'll pivot. And I think it's interesting, um, interesting like to think about pivots and when people pivot, why they pivot. But anyways, um, have either of you built a hardware company before or is this like your first time building a hardware company?

Speaker B: Uh, this is my first time building a hardware company. This is Tim's first time building a hardware company, but we were joined by a third co founder.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And this is his second time building a hardware company. The first company he founded was called Whoop. And so, uh, John Capitolupo, who's now our co founder and chief product officer. Joined a couple years after Tim and I. He was originally, uh, so we started Pineway in 2023. We pivoted to throne by joining June of 2023. Uh, we met John in February 2024. At that point, he left Whoop already. So he co founded Whoop, was CTO for over a decade, left in 2022 and was doing a very active angel investor. And so we met him as an angel. We told him, we're building WHOOP for your poop. He was like, yeah, well, I think I have to invest. Uh, and he also has ulcerative colitis and is super involved with gut health patient advocacy at the highest level as he sits on the board of the National Crohn's and Colitis Foundation. So he's just, uh, the perfect triangulation of someone who's built consumer health hardware and cares deeply about gut health, um, both because he's personally affected and he's just a highly empathetic human being who cares about making this problem better for others like him. Uh, and so he joined us as an angel. We made him an advisor because he was, he was just very active as an angel. And once we made him an advisor, he was in our slack every single day. Just like, couldn't keep him out. And we were like, dude, like, come build this with us. And, uh, he did. So that's. That is a hack, right? Like, having someone who's already built now a $10 billion company in consumer health hardware is like, helps.

Speaker A: What is one piece of advice you would give an aspiring founder that wants to build a hardware company that hasn't built a hardware company or just a company where there's a physical good? What's one thing that you've learned along the way of building this, like, technology in the atoms world?

Speaker B: Yeah, it depends on the type of hardware. So I'm going to focus on consumer hardware because the nature of consumer hardware is completely different than building like, industrial hardware like SpaceX. Right? Um, and in consumer hardware, the most important thing is getting usability, right? Like obsessing over, like, what is going to get people to actually use this every single day? What are the levers that really matter? And you can build a beautiful product that no one uses and sink millions of dollars into that product development cycle. But if you don't get the fundamental unit usability right, like, it'll never work. And so that's step one. And, uh, then I think the other big thing is like, keep your team lean as hell. We for the first two and a half years were no more than four people at a time.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Uh, it was like me, Tim, like an R and D engineer and one app developer. And that was the team for most of the company's history. We used contractors for everything. Because when you're doing consumer hardware, like once you've got the design of the product, you don't need a mechanical engineer, you don't need a firmware engineer. Right. Like it's there now. You're just copying and pasting it and printing it, you know, in large quantities at the factory. And so that is, I think something else that's easy to get hung up on is, uh, building out a team that's too big too soon.

Speaker A: Totally. It's like I feel like a first time founder trap of like, oh, we got a couple million bucks, like, let's hire a team. It's like, eh, I mean, maybe, maybe, uh, cool. So what is like, like I feel like you have an unlimited market here. Like I feel like there's like there's a, you know, every toilet in the world. Uh, is your tam, what's your plan with this? And like, and like, how do you think about product evolution? Maybe is there only so much you can do with this data? Or like, do you have other visions that you're willing to share around where this can evolve to? I'm just curious what you think about the future here.

Speaker B: Yeah, the future for us is very clear. We are building not only a wellness device, but ultimately we want to build the first continuous cancer screening device that is looking for the earliest signs of colon cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer, stomach cancer, and ureter cancer. The earliest signs of those cancers are blood in your waist, microscopic quantities of blood. So if it's in your stool, it's called fecal occult blood, and if it's in your urine, it's called microhematuria. And those six cancers together comprise one in six U.S. cancer cases. 17%. And if you're able to identify microscopic quantities of blood and waste, and we can do that with the next version of the device. And that version of the device is basically screening for the earliest signs of cancers and looking at the patterns of bleeding. Right. It's like a hemorrhoid comes and goes. That's very different than a cancer where you're getting more and more blood week over week, month over month. And that version of this product belongs in, I believe, every toilet in the world. Because that will save lives. Right? Like more Americans died of lower GI and urinary Tract cancers last year than all car accidents and gun violence deaths combined.

Speaker A: That's wild. Um, and that vision is ah, inspiring, smart and just good for the world. And that's like, those are the best companies, right? Companies that find a real problem that a lot of people have and solve it very well. Um, so congrats on that. Um, is there anything that the forward thinking founders community could do to help? Like you know, I'm guessing you, you want people to buy the bright Buy a throne. Are there other. So there's that. You know, where can people buy it? Beyond that, how can the community help that's listening to this podcast.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, step one, obviously buy a throne. That's the most helpful thing you can do. Uh, I'm going to create a discount code for you FTT for forward thinking founders. That'll be $100 off. So you know, please do that, link to it in the show notes. The next big thing is like tell doctors about us. Like we, we have partnered with some of the most, well I should say this, most accomplished doctors in the field of gastroenterology. So like Dr. David Rubin is kind of our lead science advisor. He wrote the clinical guidelines for ulcerative colitis. Dr. Mark Pimletel wrote the clinical guidelines for SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. We've got the leading researchers in IBS as well and gut motility disorders. Like one of the things I'm most excited about is like these new science that we're able to advance and having other doctors know about us is just helpful. Right? Like this is the kind of data that is already clinically relevant and like one of the features that we're going to be building soon is the ability to export that data to share with your doctors.

Speaker A: Nice. Is it is any type of doctor or specific doctors in this specific field, like you know, how would you kind of. Yeah, any doctor would be good to share it with.

Speaker B: Uh, your primary care provider is great. Um, gut health doctors, gastroenterologists, urologists are super excited about what we're building.

Speaker A: Cool. Cool. Well, my last question for you, uh, before we call it a day is um, how can people find you or throne online? Um, website, social media accounts, newsletter, you know, where can someone connect and learn more to, um, follow along your journey.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, throne is just thronescience.com We're Alsone science on X and Instagram. I'm personally Scott Hickle. H I C K L E on X and Instagram. Like pickle but with an H. Uh, and then we have a newsletter for Throne called Throne Thursdays. So every other Thursday, I send out a newsletter to all of our subscribers, and it's just me telling the honest story about what's going on at the company. And, you know, I don't know if you can tell, but A, I'm incredibly passionate about what we're building, and B, um, I'm pretty transparent about things. So, uh, if you want to follow along, you know, the building in public journey, just go sign up on our website.

Speaker A: Love that. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for building this company, and I'm looking forward to buying my own throne and tracking your progress. Thanks for coming on, Matt.

Speaker B: Thank you.