Overbuilding and overthinking your med Tech products is one of the most common and most costly mistakes in med tech development. And in today's episode, you're going to learn three things. Number one, learn how to focus on what truly matters for adoption. Instead of trying to build everything upfront, number two, How to apply MVP thinking safely and effectively within a regulated healthcare environment. And number three, discover how early real world use can accelerate learning, validation, and adoption. Welcome to Clinician to CEO, the podcast helping clinicians simplify your go-to-market strategy so that you can stop guessing and turn your working prototypes into international MedTech businesses. I'm your host, Hakeem Aade. Let's get started. In this episode, we're not talking theory. We're gonna get into what it actually takes to take a health innovation from idea. To something that people will actually use and that patients will benefit from, and that markets will actually adopt. And to help me do that, if Mark Fox, uh, founder of Rizzo Health and he didn't just pivot careers, he jumped from working on the space shuttle that, and I mean literally the space shuttle to building a MedTech company. Welcome to the show, mark. Alright, thank you so much for having me. My absolute pleasure. So the first question, which I'm sure you get all the time, uh, and I'm not gonna be uh, any different, just explain to me how that happened. How do you go from being a space shuttle engineer to founding a med tech company? Yeah, I, I never planned to do that. I di it all started from my dog. So my, about 30 years ago, my dog couldn't come up the stairs one morning getting ready for work and she was sitting there crying and we ended up taking her to the veterinarian. And they did an x-ray ever. And she had severe arthritis in her spine. And so the veterinarian's like, you know, there's not a lot we can do. We can give her some IL help with the pain. And then a friend of mine who's a really forward thinking veterinarian in Houston, Texas, he's on a board of directors with me at a couple at a academy. He said, Hey, there's this magic machine that can actually reverse arthritis. And I'm like. Well, that's BS I that can't be true, but it's my dog. So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna go look into it. So that was about almost 30 years ago now, and I learned about the technology then being very skeptical, like all listeners should be, is like, and you know, again, like you said, I'm a rocket scientist, this can't be true. But the more and more you look into it, there's more and more data. And now, yeah, we've generated a lot of our own data and stuff. So that's how I got into it. Um, was that's how I was introduced to the technology. What really took me down the path of becoming an entrepreneur and diving into this technology was the first thing I saw was what it could do for PTSD and such a huge, huge issue in the amount of suicides that we have. And it frankly just pissed me off that we had a solution to stop suicides, but it's being held hostage in clinical environments with expensive equipment. Hidden by doctors scattered around the country and not very many of 'em. So I naively dove in as like, you know, I'm a chemical engineer. This was my undergraduate. I'm not an electrical engineer, but I naively said, Hey, I can go build a little affordable pocket size device that will do this technology. And it was way harder than I thought. Like any, anything that you dive into. Um, the pile of coils I had over here in the corner of this room were about eight feet high at one point, trying to find the right coils and the designs and trade off. So that, that's how I got into the, and I've, I've played with a lot of different things. I've started 12 different companies outside of the rocket world. I even owned still part of a woman's clothing company. So I've done a lot of different things. I know enough about DNA to be dangerous. I created a company with, uh, where you create music and art from DNA, where you take a mouth swab. So I've done a lot of different things, but yes, this has been my focus now, um, because we have like 60 different protocols. They expand actually to 130. And it's not just for people. It's for people and pets. So dogs and horses, cats too. But cats are finicky, uh, to put a device on 'em. But yeah, we have huge success for, with. We could talk about all that too, with dogs and horses as well. Okay. So, so just on that, just, just explain for the listeners exactly what your product does and what your company focuses on. So when we start talking about, um, how you've, uh, manage your challenges, et cetera, people are very clear on what, what area you're in. Okay. So it, it is energy therapy. That's the simplest way to say it. And it's PEMF, pulse, electrical, magnetic fields, but forget that for a second. Is. You go to a higher level is the way I like to explain it is nothing in the world happens without an energy exchange. So you do not eat food, you don't breathe oxygen, you don't drive your car, you don't fall down and hurt yourself. Plants don't grow, you don't get sunburn. Everything is an energy exchange. So you can transfer energy to the body five different ways. At least one is a tens unit, electrical current, that type of thing. People are familiar with the TENS unit. PEMF, pulse electromagnetic field. So it's used in a magnetic field, light, vibration, and sound. And like I said, light, everyone's been sunburned so they know what energy transfer is with light. So those are the five ways you can transfer energy to the body. P-E-M-F-I chose is just the most convenient 'cause you can have it in your pocket. There's no wires connected to you, you don't have sticky pads. And you can go about your day, drive your car, watch tv, sit on your computer. You're not tied to a. Clinical environment, we have to lay on a mat, blah, blah, blah, how it actually works. And there's a million rabbit holes we can go down. But the two of 'em that we keep at the highest level, 'cause most people will not argue with this because it's been proven over and over. The cells in your body have an electrical charge on 'em, like a car battery. When that voltage gets low, you get sick. The cells cannot get nutrients in and waste products out efficiently if you don't have proper charge. So it's been proven to charge the cells at the membrane. That's been shown in many, many studies. The second one is a TP. It's the number one food that your cells use. Um, for energy, it increases a TP up to 500%. So those two things, you're increasing the voltage on the cells. So the voltage, so the cells operate more efficiently. The mitochondria can act, act or operate more efficiently. And then a TP increasing the food cell. So. You're increasing the voltage so the cells work better. You're giving your body cells specifically more food supply so the body can do what it does best heal itself. So it's those two main things. Okay. And, and what the indication then, 'cause that sounds like it could heal absolutely everything. So how have you honed in on what you're focusing on, that you're, you're, that you almost like at your value proposition? Well. The each product, so the protocols, there's 60 different ones at Starman. They're, and they're frequency pairs. So think of it as a chord on a guitar. Okay. And the protocol is an actual song, and every song is different. Yeah. Picture a pickup band in a garage, right? They're trying this, they throw in a cow bill, they throw in some bass, they're changing the music, they're changing the song. I use the Bee Gees analogy as they put out 150 songs before they ever had a hit. So it's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of trial and error to find out what works and what doesn't. And this came from the foundation came from 8,000 practitioners over 35 years doing exactly that. You're in the clinic. Try a little bit of this, try a little bit of that. That doesn't work. This does work. So keep using more of that. Um, the problem from the foundation is it goes all the way back to 1934, where Rockefeller and Carnegie screwed up the whole world for the United States. Okay. He owned all the oil in the country and he figured out he could make drugs from oil. So him and Carnegie controlled all the medical landscapes. So they're like, Hey, if you're not doing surgery or drugs or pulling your funding or pulling your licenses. So it's stupid because the human body, like most animals and plants and other things, has, you know, it's mechanical, it's chemical, and it's electrical. So to ignore one of those three pillars is stupid. 'cause you're missing a third of the picture. But that's what we basically did in the United States. We stopped all electrical stimulation or electrical therapies. And so a lot of that research just got lost. Right? A lot of like Tesla stuff, it got destroyed, whatever. So some of the basic frequencies, nobody know what, where they came from, what the pedigree is, we just know what we've done. The industry's done with them since then to go show that they work and it's all, it's still a learning experience, right? I'm still writing protocols every couple months 'cause there's a need for something that I don't. That customers want and I don't have it. So then we gotta go try and figure out how to make it work and test it. So just to clarify for my audience, when you say protocols, you're talking about indications effectively in another term, A this, this particular disease or issue. Is that a protocol that an individual, yeah. Yeah. So each protocol is a song and each of those frequency pairs is gonna be different. Some are simple, some are complex. Um, PTSD, for example, is the most complex one. Because it's very complex. It's in every cell of your body and every part. So it's going through 76 different, different frequency pairs changing on average every one to four minutes. So again, picture it as a symphony or a song, and it's going through. This is oversimplifying it, but it's close analogy. Frequency A is where is it, and B is what's wrong with it. So inflammation in the medulla of your brain, right? So it's going through that. That's what the protocol's actually doing. Now when you move over to. Anxiety or back pain or neck pain or dementia, those are completely different protocols targeting different parts of the body. Again, based on clinical experience of what's working and what's not. Okay. So thank you very much. And then we were just speaking before, and this is is a really interesting, um, section I think from for the audience and the listeners is because obviously it sounds very medical. So people assume, oh, you must be selling it to hospitals. You must be selling it to those sort of like high-end clinics and you're not. So I just wanna just talk to me a bit about that because a lot of listeners will be in that position where there's a lot of processes to go through to get into hospitals, et cetera. You haven't taken that route. So why didn't you take that route and what's the route you've taken and what's the what? What is the actual buying cycle or buying path to get your product? Yeah. So very interesting question. So, and I'll answer it this way, is a lot of times people will go. Hey, is it FDA approved? And instead of explaining what that means, 'cause they don't know what they just asked, I just say it's an FD, a general wellness device. Now, normally what happens is people give you the jungle book look, their eyes kind go trust to me for a second. And they go, okay. He didn't say yes, he didn't say no, he said, FDA, something, and then they move on. Okay? Yeah. So that's usually the easiest ex explanation. FD, a general wellness device. So one, you don't want it approved. Because approvals take hundreds of millions of dollars in decades, and if you ever get it approved, it can only be used for that condition. So if I got it approved and I had all the money in the world and I approved it for anxiety, I can't use it for sleep. So I don't want that. Okay, so the next level down from this regulation is a five 10 K or a cleared. Not as aggressive, but it usually says, my duck looks like this duck that looked like that duck before that duck. That, and literally there's five 10 K clearances that go back to something that was built in the 1930s, which is ridiculous in this world of PMF. Anything in the last 10 years is gonna be a general wellness device, FD, a general wellness device, or this has not been evaluated by the FDA and people manufacturers like me have chosen which one of those to choose. And it's about a 50 50 split. 'cause I pretty much know every competitor that's in this space out there. Right? And that's what they've chosen to go do. We've chosen that. It's an FD, a general wellness device. What does that mean? It's like the government. It's complicated on purpose. Okay. So it's like you can't diagnose, treat, or cure anything, but you can say helps living well with a condition. So let me give you a specific example. Okay, diabetes type two diabetes. I don't diagnose, treat, or cure anything, but I can't diagnose, treat, or cure diabetes. However, if you use our technology and you're shooting 110 units a day and now you're down to 10 units a day, that improved your life 'cause you're not sticking the needle in you as much and you save money. Back pain, I went from a 10 to a three. I didn't cure your back pain, but you're playing sports again. And improved your, like, so you can go through each one of those protocols and say, help living, well, these is the exact words the government uses help living well with X and it's unclear of how much data or anything you need to say that kind of on purpose. Right. So it's, it's a vague area. That's weird. And, and it be, you know, the government can never keep up to it. 'cause the technology, think of it like. This technology is not anywhere near as rapid as the AI development, but yeah, picture exponential on exponential. On exponential, right, is the technology's changing so fast and I'm, I learn new stuff every week, right? On my own products. So it's like, for example, our vaga vibe, right? It's a vagus nerve pendant that you wear to stimulate the vagus nerve. We had a bunch of people say, Hey, my AFib went from 95% to two. I go, first of all, I don't know what that means. And they go, well, my heart was in AFib 95% of the time. Now it's in two B. How the hell are you measuring that? They're using their Apple watches? I don't have an Apple watch. I didn't even know they had AFib on it. Right? So now we're doing AFib studies with Apple watches and Vaga vibes, right? So it's something I learned from customer feedback going, oh, okay. Didn't ask anyone to do that. That just happened. And so there's, that's what makes this, that's one of the pieces that makes this. Super exciting as a CEO. We just hired another new person, a new person to answer phones today, and I told her or her name's Amanda, this will be the most satisfying job you've ever had in your life. But this is not how's wives of Orange County. This is not a reality show. This is real. People that have tortured bad about boyfriends, husbands, miscarriages, cancer in the family, right? There's real trauma and most people. Hakeem that come to this technology, either have long-term mental or physical, physical pain or both Bec and the side effects of drugs and everything aren't working. They hate 'em or whatever. So they go search for alternative stuff and they find this technology. That's how most people find it. What's funny in the medical world, the type, it's a different way to answer your question is. The logical thing people are gonna ask, well, how come my doctor doesn't know about this? 'cause the doctor hasn't been trained on any of it, and your doctor has no continuing education except to travel to a resort once a year. That's presented by a drug company on here's the new drug. They're not getting any of this, and they have no incentive to learn these things. The funny part though, to that is we have wholesalers and re and affiliates, right? Here's how I get most of my wholesalers in the medical world, and it's growing rapidly. Very typical scenario. Somebody comes in for their physical, the doctor goes, holy crap, your A one C's 5.3. It's never been below eight. Your blood sugar's great. You finally did what I told you to do and start exercise, change your diet. And they go, nah, I just started using this thing. Yeah. And the doctor snatches outta hand and goes, what the hell is that? And then they call me, what is this thing? Then I have a conversation just like we're having now. Then they go, I can't work. I'm like, okay, buy one. Try it. They do. Then they become wholesalers. So it's. The, it's the patients coming back to the customers in the medical world that are forcing them saying, I want this thing. Is it okay for me to use this? I bought one. Those type of things you should know about this. And there's more and more, mostly chiropractors, naturopaths, not so many MDs, unfortunately, but there's more and more people coming around to it. 'cause the data keeps growing that it works. And that seems to be a, an interest and that's why I wanted to explore that. 'cause that's a very interesting methodology because basically what you're doing, you're going direct to the consumer. Are you the patient? The patient's then going to their clinician and then because of the results, the clinician's saying, well, how's that happened? They're then getting in contact with you had you done it the other way, which the traditional way it'd cost you a lot more money. Uh, and it. And it continues to cost you a lot more money. 'cause you have to spend a lot of money actually getting to those clinicians, getting in front of those clinicians, et cetera. So that's a really, so, so was that a, a, um, conscious decision based on the best flow or was that a conscious decision based on the cost of actually, uh, going through the standard medical route? It's a, it's a different answer. I'm 64 years old and my runway's not long enough to go the medical route. I'll be dead. That's the honest answer. So, yeah. Okay. The average amount of time for technology to get from inception or clinical trials to the medical world's 12 to 15 years, that's, that's the data. That's old data. The newer data is going to, it's not gonna work because the technology is changing so fast. It may never get the, the model has to change completely for it to actually get to the medical world because if I took the technology I had today and it was available in the hospital in 15 years, it would be 50 years outta date. Yeah. Right. Be so that whole model doesn't work and it's broken. Everyone knows our medical system is broken. So yeah, I just don't have enough time doctors are gonna get mad at me, but here's the conversation. How it normally goes, right, is they'll go explain the mechanism action to me, explain exactly how it works, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah. I go, you know what? Shut up for a minute. You don't know how aspirin works. It's been around for 3000 years. You have theories on how it works, but you've never proven it and you've never proven how any drug works. And they go, you, we know exactly how aspirin works and we know how morphine works. I go, you're full of yourself. You do not. There is no proof whatsoever. You have theories about it. Here's the example I gave him, and almost every doctor he came can't make this bridge, unfortunately. It's like, have you ever heated a slice of pizza in a microwave oven? And they go, huh, have you ever heated pizza in a microwave oven? And they go. People, of course. Well, how does that work? What's the mechanism? Mechanism of action for that? And they go, well, now they know it's a trick question. 'cause rocket scientists ask them that and they go, ah, stuff bounces around it. Does some, I don't know, does some stuff that he, I go, yeah, the theory is that you're hitting the piece of food with the exact frequency, which is the rotational energy of a water molecule to make a water molecule spin on its own axis. And that spinning causes friction to heat up the food. That's the theory. Hakeem. Nobody in the world has ever photographed or videoed a spinning water molecule. It's never happened, and technology doesn't exist. So it's a theory. There is no mechanism, mechanism, action to go prove, and who cares, right? So I always go relief before reason. It sounds weird. Relief before reason. Sounds strange coming from a scientist, I don't actually care how it works. I don't have enough. Time on my, I don't, my runway is not long enough to care. I mean, I wish I could, but I don't. I'd rather just help people as long as there's no side effects, it's not hurting them relief before reason. I don't care how it actually works. Okay. And, and just based on that, 'cause one of the things that you said was obviously that patient, you, you speak to patients on a regular basis, they come to you, they say, oh, um, can you change this? Or, I've noticed this. I mean, because you gave the example of the Apple Watch and the, and the AFib. So what steps do you take to ensure and what steps did you take to ensure that the vibe met genuine patient needs rather than just lots of high? 'cause you've obviously now got 60, 70 protocols. So how, how did that process start? I'm assuming you've, you start with one or two protocols rather than all of them. How, how did you start identifying exactly where you were gonna position it and what protocols you were gonna focus on? So a couple things. I'm gonna correct you 'cause you said it three times. I don't treat any patients and I don't treat anyone. I don't have any patients. I have customers. I'm not a doctor. Okay. That fine. So, no, ISI, like Newton. I stood on the shoulders of other people, right? I took 8,000 practitioners that worked on it for 35 years. I took what they learned and put it in an affordable device. I didn't do all that research. 99% of it, I borrowed it from what's out there. It. I just found a way to make an affordable portable device. That's all I did. For the most part, that's 99% of it, so I don't want to take credit for most of the protocols 'cause I didn't invent them. There are a few that I did, but 98, 95, 90 8% of the protocols, I did not invent them. They came from the sequence is finding old research from a hundred years ago to a few pioneers starting some stuff to. 8,000 practitioners over 35 years trying to build stuff in a band, right? And then they're still doing all that. And I take what I learned from that and I apply 'em to my device. What it actually is, it's actually an MP three player. It's a music player. 'cause all the protocols are actually songs. They're MP threes that I put on a music synthesizer. The only difference is it doesn't have speakers, it has coils. So the device, lemme see if I can find one. I got the inside of it. There it is right there. This is a battery printed circuit board and two coils. So it's actually an MP three player. If I replace these coils with a speaker, you'd hear it go, you'd hear the frequencies so that it's, it's an MP three player that your body is listening to, but your ears can't hear it. That's how it works. Okay. That makes sense. And that, and actually, it, it makes a lot because lots of, uh, founders are obsessed, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing in. Finding something completely new from scratch. They found that they, they've, a lot of them are clinicians. They've seen a gap in the protocol and they say, oh, I can fill it. But what you've done, which actually seems to me to be a very sensible and rapid way to do it, is say, well, actually, there's all the research out there. There's already a gap in the market. Nobody's actually been able to package it in the way that I want to package it. Similar to a, similar to an iPhone, to be honest. There's, there was millions of phones out there. There just wasn't a phone that was like the iPhone. There's now lots of them, but when they brought it out, there was the first, which actually packaged everything into an attractive package, which was useful to use. And that's pretty much the model you've used, if I'm understanding it correctly. I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, from Mark's opinion, I'm gonna. Say something a little bit different here. Nobody in the world has come up with a unique idea. A hundred percent doesn't exist, never existed in mankind. If they think they have, they're a narcissist, or they're delusional, or just retarded, I don't know. Okay? They, you can't, that's statistically, it's impossible because you're influenced by your environment and people round you and things you learn and stuff you read. Um, mark Twain said, do you know how you become one of the best writers in the world? You read, read, read, read, read, read, and forget what you read. It. Yeah, right. Forget where you read it. Same thing. Nobody. Nobody builds or designs or comes up with a new idea out of the complete blue. You may think you did. You woke up one morning, went, Hey, I got a widget. What? No, you didn't. Some other stuff subconsciously, or you saw this or you saw a need and this other thing that was right. I mean, some of the best designs in the world are people that spend time at Junkyards. Yeah. They walk around, they look at broken stuff and go, why is, okay, there's 20 of those. Why are they broken? Okay. These wheels keep breaking here. I bet I can make a better wheel if I just did this. So that's, I know I'm getting on my soapbox a little bit, but I teach creative thinking and have been for 30 years. I've been a keynote speaker in 300 different pre presentations like that. That's one of the key things I say. You're outta your mind. If you think you actually have an original idea, you may be applying it differently. Adding some frosting to it. Changing a little bit. I didn't come up with these protocols. I didn't invent the MP three player. Right. I didn't invent the MP three protocol. I didn't come up with a music synthesizer. I just took all those things and created a business model. Right? So, and we're talking about one product, we have multiple products. Is this, I didn't invent the sensors for a Fitbit watch. This is a Karao watch. This is our watch. I didn't invent those sensors. I didn't invent what just got delivered yesterday as our Fitbits for dogs and horses. I didn't invent those. I found a partner at a, it's kind of an interesting cut. To, let's go with that string for a minute. I've been looking for a, I've been trying to design a Fitbit for a dog for five years. The reason it doesn't work is you gotta reflect light off the skin. Dogs got fur, you can't shave their neck to put it on there. Okay, so I found this company in France at a conference two months ago at the largest veterinarian conference in Orlando, and they had one that said basically a Fitbit for a dog. Like time, time out. How the hell is this working? And they go exactly what I just said. You ain't got no light going through fur, you ain't doing any of that. He goes, right, we're using accelerometers and gyroscopes so we can infer pain and anxiety through heart rate, variability, heart rate, KY air movement, barking energy levels, blah. I got perfect. So I'm gonna be your best partner you've ever had in your life. 'cause I know how to market this stuff. Number two, how many times have you used it on horses? They go, it won't work on a horse. Why? And they sat there and stared at me. I go, okay, here's the next, an next time somebody asks you that question, you tell 'em, we partnered with Mark and re Health and we are the world's leader in Fitbits for horses. 'cause we're gonna go test the hell outta these things and show it works. Hmm. I got 200 of 'em that showed up yesterday and that's what we're gonna go do. Test them on horses to show. So all of that stuff is like, I didn't invent that, but I'm inventing the market for it. Okay, here's another example. The engineer that built it. Awesome guy. Super technical, right? Heart rate variability. Punkier one slash two, the data's awesome. No customer's gonna be able to consume that. So I need a score of zero to a hundred. So I made up the acronym. Okay. Prana made it up last night. Okay? Personal resiliency and neurological assessment. So I'm giving a score of zero to a hundred on your dog or your horse. How does it compare from day to day? How does it compare for your breed to the other dogs? All that stuff with AI and stuff that we can do. Now I can take the API all his data and I can give a scorecard that's on your phones so the pet owner can see their dog score every single day. And it's kind of cool 'cause it has GPS on it and I can see where the dog went and I can put an alarm on there if he runs outta it. But see to your point, I know. On the fly, making this up to your point, not making anything from scratch. I didn't build those from scratch. Right. I did dream up an acronym, but I didn't do it on my own. I went to chat GPT and I said, I need a cool acronym that sounds like this. And you know what? It came up with a URA. So that's what I started with. And I had a four load thing and then I went, ah, crap, that's too close to Aura rings. So when I knock this out of the park and Aura comes screaming at me, I'm gonna have to. I don't want to change it then, so I'm just gonna change it now to prana instead of Aura. And that's why he did that literally 48 hours ago. And I'm just thinking, so I know my thoughts, but that humility to understand that the, there is no unique idea even that yet, as you said, building on the shoulder of the giant, do you think that actually helps or hinders an inventor or a founder in terms of accelerating their product? I'm smart enough to know how stupid I am. So if you could, if you could keep that idea that you don't kn know even one fraction of a truth, of a trillionth, of a percent of anything, even if you're the smartest guy on the planet. Here, I'll give you an analogy. So I used to teach four times a year at Los Alamos National Labs. Okay? The smartest nuclear physicist in the world. I'm just a dumb ass chemical engineer. They're not gonna listen to me about creative thinking, right? So. Hakeem, what I do, I walk in the room, it's a whole audience form. I got a chart. I don't make eye contact with any of 'em. I just walk in the room, don't you know? And I just show the history of physics, okay? And I just start, I spend 12 minutes on it, and I go through this was everyone believed this completely wrong, this completely wrong, this completely wrong, this completely wrong. So I go through 12 minutes of every 12 to 20 years. The physics of the day are completely wrong. So I turn around and finally make eye contact and I go, so statistically speaking, I know you guys understand that there's a 99.999% probability that whatever you did your doctor's thesis on is worthless. Okay? Or it will be. Or, or it will be. And they slouch in the tear and they go, who is this asshole? Right? And you go like, right, I'm trying to tenderize your brain. That's the phrase I use. Tenderize your brain so you can. Listen, pay attention, learn new things. There's a comedian in the seventies on TV 1970s. His name was Rich Hall and he had a thing called Snits. They're words that aren't in the dictionary but should be, and one of 'em was Boone. I love it. It's a combination of bozo and ozone, so it's a invisible gas that surrounds people, stops any new ideas from getting in, so get rid of your damn Bo zone. So to answer your question, yes, you ain't as smart as you think. And. If you're really smart, you'll know what I just said is that you don't know one, 1000000000th of anything. And so be open to it and the thing I always say, like one of my favorite phrases is, how can you fail in two weeks? Right? Quit procrastinating. You don't know until you go experiment it. Now, everything I just said about horses, right? I may be completely wrong. I haven't tested a single horse yet, but I know when I go do it, I'm gonna learn something new. And hey, here's a different angle, or Hey, I'm marketing this incorrectly, here's the right way to market it because of the feedback I got, blah, blah, blah. So how do you get out there in two weeks and test stuff fast instead of procrastinating for eight months and a whole bunch of money? Yeah, I think that that makes, makes a lot of sense. And then, and then kind of circling back to the beginning, 'cause you've obviously founded a lot of companies. You founded health. What are some of the common pitfalls you see? In early stage med tech, and then how would you advise people to avoid those or overcome them not testing your assumptions quickly? Right. It's almost what I was just saying. So minimum viable products, MVPs and stuff, how to get them out there fast. I'll tell you one that I wasted four months of my time and a lot of money on. It was. The LAR largest no kill dog shelter in the world is a couple hours south of me. Here they have 850 dogs. My logic was they probably all have PTSD or a large percentage 'cause they're in jail and they didn't do anything wrong, right? They don't know why they're there. So my logic was, let's go run these devices on 'em actually putting in the water. So we ran the frequencies into the water and I measured cortisol. In their mouth because cortisol relates to stress. So if their stress came down, the cortisol should come down. When I got all the data, the pre-data, the problem was all their cortisol was low to start with. Okay? So that was the wrong marker to use, and I went, that doesn't make any sense So I dove into that and then I learned after the fact, for whatever reason, this isn't true in people and pets. If you have PTSD, your cortisol is already low. Okay, so it's the, and nobody knows why. The, some of the theories are your body's already spent, all the cortisol a can, right? So it's just you're out of cortisol, so it's already low. The right marker is heart rate variability. Now I know that across the board, that's what I would be measuring for that in general, sleep, heart rate variability. There's a couple biomarkers for anything that I would recommend. Those are the main ones to look at, but. Yeah, I learned that the hard way 'cause I didn't go do a quick minimum viable product. I ran the whole study and didn't go test three dogs and go, huh, crap. Why is the cortisol low to start with? So minimum viable product. Don't, you know, get out there, test stuff as fast as you can. How do you fail quickly? How do you fail in two weeks? Yeah. I think that's a really important thing. And it, and it's something that I speak to founders about all the time. 'cause a lot of the time they spend load the money. Regulation, getting everything ready. I haven't really tested anything. And if they've, they've sunk a huge amount of money then to your example, they've then gone out, tested, done a big trial, and then thought, oh, the date is not really what I thought it was gonna be, but I've spent all this money, what do I do now? And the amount of people I that, that I speak to have just said, I've got no runway left. I've just, I've just got, I, I've tested everything. I've got no money, and I now need, now know I need to go in this direction, but I haven't got the money to do it. Uh, so yeah, I think that's a really critical one. You know, MVP testing or something. And actually in non MedTech businesses, people do that all the time. If you're looking at AI or SaaS models, people are getting something out that's really basic. They're testing it, it doesn't work. They iterate it and they don't spend huge amounts of money before they've tested it, which I think that's a, a critically important, um, area. And then almost like flipping kind of the assumption bit, because you're an engineer. And you've used your engineering expertise to influence what you've created, uh, and then the market that you've entered, uh, tie that together with the fact that obviously, uh, your, your dog was, wasn't well. How would you, if you've listeners listening to this and their clinicians or they're in any other sphere, what if you get any advice for how they should leverage their expertise, but without, uh, making assumptions? 'cause the, the, the, the. One of the biggest issues is when I have an expertise, I think I know everything. So I think, oh, well I wanna do this without really testing the assumptions. So, so do you have any advice for those sorts of people? Uh, they've got expertise, but how do you make sure you use that without just assuming lots of stuff? Well, not, I mean, not to repeat myself, but even if you get the world's best experts in the world, doesn't mean they're right. Yes. You gotta go test stuff. So, I mean, I only because it's fresh in my mind is I hired some of the best. Facebook ad guys in the country a year ago, I had to let 'em go today. Okay. It just didn't work. It wasn't lack of effort. It was a combination of whatever they know and Mark Zuckerberg taking all our money versus the industry, it just didn't work for whatever reason and so crap. And I'm friends with 'em now. Right. So it was like, that one's super hard. One of the last things that, and this is kind of funny, is if. Any lawyers are listening, they're gonna get re really angry. But one other thing, going back to how do you start and move fast is I used to do this whenever I had a kickoff meeting. I invited the lawyer to the wrong building on purpose. 'cause I don't want 'em there. I don't want any, I don't want any legal stuff at all. I don't want, here's what I've always told lawyers, I don't want you to have any part, and they're all gonna say, I need to be involved upfront from the very beginning. Nope, I don't want you anywhere near. When I'm done, I'm gonna tell you, this is what I'm doing. Tell me how to minimize my risk. I didn't ask you to tell me how to design the thing or do it. I mean, I did. I don't want that now. Every lawyer goes, he's an idiot. Nope. 'cause you're going to the only lawyer I've met in this world that I loved. Okay. Was he walking to the room in marketing to go, Hey, can we say this on a box? Is this, can you approve this lately? And he'd go, he wouldn't even look at it. He'd just go, uh. He wouldn't pick the box up. It was hilarious. He'd go, are you gonna do what it says it does? Are you gonna do what you say? I mean, whatever it says in the box, are you gonna do your best effort to try and do that? Yeah. Okay. Then I approve it. He didn't care what it said, right? Says they take the legal part out of it, especially early on, they'll just torpedo it and be completely negative. Most of them, I haven't been lucky enough besides that one guy to find somebody that's open-minded like that. It's like keep them outta the loop because. I mean, here's, here's an example to that. I was given a lecture, a keynote presentation at a creativity conference with a thousand people in the audience, and the whole vibe was kind of like, shh, I got this great idea, blah, blah. And everyone's whispering like, Hey, look. From a statistical point of view, let's assume that every person in this room stood up and had a billion dollar idea, and they shared it with the other 999 people. Okay? Let's assume that happened statistically speaking. Five of you would get off your ass and do anything about it. Okay? Secondly, outta U five, let's assume a one in a million chance that all five of you actually created a product that made it to market. Okay? The thousands of steps you would have to go through individually to get to market. By the time it got on the shelf, it would be 100% impossible to draw that back to the original idea. It would've been iterated so many times in designed and changed. So quit worrying about all that stuff up front and somebody stealing your secret. Somebody could steal all my ideas. It's funny, like when I present stuff, they go, Hey, can I get a license? You don't need a license. Just take whatever it had. Do whatever you want with it. I mean, I'm not wor, I'm not worried about anyone stealing my ideas. I have lots more. Right. And the hard work isn't the idea. It's getting it out there and dealing with the. The legal part in the marketing stuff and Zuckerberg taking all your money and how do I get around navigate this world? Right? So you laugh, but dude, I will just tell everyone right now, 70% of my revenue spend goes to Mark Zuckerberg. Yeah, yeah. It's my marketing. It's interesting what you said, 'cause you, you've almost flipped that paradigm on its head because most people would say the idea is the hard part. And, and, and, and this, this is what I'm always arguing with people. I said, yeah, the idea, I said the amount of people who've had ideas and they're sitting on a shelf, running a bin. Uh, the, the I people have ideas every single day and, and they have good ideas every single day, but they don't know how to take, take them from the idea and then get them on the shelf and commercialize them, and that, that process is a long process. It's an iterative process, and it's not easy at all. And having the idea. If, um, I'm not gonna say it's easy, but, but there's a lot more ideas than there is products. Let's put it, let's put it that way. So, I'm, I'm completely with you on that one. And I, and I have this conversation with so many people, stop being obsessed about protecting that idea. And then I don't wanna do anything with it for five years because I don't wanna want anyone to know about it, get it out and test it, because as you said, even if. People know about it. The amount of people that are be gonna be able to, or even want to do anything with it is de minimis. Uh, and I keep telling people that, just get it out, test it, make sure it works, and then let's commercialize it in an effective and, and speedy manner without spending, you know, remortgage in your house. Um, gain billions of pounds worth of loans, et cetera. 'cause you don't wanna do that. I, I don't mind you doing that. Once you know you've got a viable idea and people are giving you money for it, but don't start spending loads and loads of money just because you've had an idea and you think, oh, this is a great idea. Everyone's gonna want it. They might do, but then again, they might not, and you've spent a shed load of money without actually delivering any value to yourself or your patients or your customers. I was gonna take that point just a little bit further. 'cause it's interesting this to get from idea to actually getting it. You know, as a commercial product, super hard. As we just said, I've invented six of 'em, right? Six different devices. My friend, one of the best top infomercial infomercial guy in the world, super good marketer goes, mark the invent tightest thing, you need to quit. Okay? Quit inventing stuff because I have a client who sells beef fat for your skin for wrinkles. He only has one thing. And he's doing a hundred million a year in revenue. 'cause he's figured out the marketing part of it. Right? Yeah. So, and he's partially right. I've got, I got another thing I invented here that nobody even knows about, that my wife doesn't know about. Right. And maybe I'll do anything, maybe I won't. So it's like, and yeah, trying to focus like that of it, it's hard because it's fun Yeah. To invent stuff. It is not fun to, the legal stuff is not fun at all. I mean, the good news, bad news, Hakeem, is we're the fastest growing PMF company in the world. We're growing 500% per year. That's the great news. Bad news is I got copycat companies using our logo and our brand name. We just had to sue somebody in federal court this morning. I hate this. I'm involved in six lawsuits. I hate that part of it. Yeah. But it's part of the business like, ah, that's no fun. I don't wanna spend a bunch of money on that crap. But you gotta defend yourself because they're destroying our brand. And are you, are you focused primarily in the, in, in the states or do you, have you got, um, affiliates in, in different parts of the world? No, I mean, so the answer is mostly us now. Most of it's us we ship, which is unique. We ship worldwide for free. Okay. So unfortunately. It was ba it was hard before our president made everyone mad at us. So trying to get any product in any other country is just like that whole customs thing that that's the nightmare. But yeah, I'm looking for distributors and partners in other countries. We don't have any right now. Okay. So that's where we're at. No, that makes sense. But I mean, obviously you, you're doing well. I suppose you, you were doing well internationally from a US base, but obviously Yeah. Now with, um. Without getting political, you probably, the, the, the necessity to have distributors in other countries is probably accelerated. Let's probably like that. You know what's weird is when people go, where do you make 'em at? And I, every time they say that, I know what they're asking is, please tell me you make it in America. No, my answer is, look around your house. Every single electronic you see, plus whatever you're talking to me on, was made in China. Yeah. It just is what it is. It costs 10 to a hundred times more to make here. I wish I could, but I can't. But when I get 'em make, and I have, when people go Chinese and they start badmouth, I was like, it's not their fault. They were born in China. I worked with some of the greatest engineers there in the world. And they're great people. Right. They're one of the best partners ever had our, but our whole politics, I used to have 30 days invoice. Right now it's 24 hours. Yeah. 'cause they don't know what it's gonna cost to ship it here and what the tariffs are gonna be. Yeah. It's um, so it's valid for 24 hours. It's like that's another. Nightmare. I wasn't planning on, yeah, no, it's, uh, the, the, the political situation actually in the, in, in the UK as well with Brexit, and then you've got, now got the tariffs and, uh, the, the, the international marketing for MedTech is a lot more difficult than it once was. Even, you know, when, when I, when I used to work with clients, you know, one of the first markets you would talk about, DUF nowadays, I'm sort of like saying, mm, you could do. But I don't know what the price is gonna be today. I don't know whether he's gonna say, uh oh, well yeah, you can charge a hundred dollars, but actually it's only $20, $20 in the uk so now you can't charge a hundred dollars. You're gonna have to drop your, I said, the amount of uncertainty in the MedTech business if you're in, if you're outside the US try sell into the US is it's just a whole different ball game. And it's a real, it's a really sad because that's where everybody used to come to me and say, ah, how do I get into the US? And now I'm sort of like counseling them. Maybe you want to go to some other markets and then maybe in three years we revisit the US when there's a bit more stability in the marketplace. 'cause it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's all over the place. So. Okay. We're coming to the end. And I've got my, little,, decision scenario that I'm gonna put out, which, which actually, if you've actually listened to the episode, which I'm sure you will have done, then it should be very easy for you to answer the question. But, before I get into that decision episode, if there's, if, if, if there's one thing that you could leave my listeners with today in terms of starting up a business and then getting it to market quickly and actually making some revenue, making a viable business outta it, what would it be? Yeah, it's still the one thing we already covered, I'm sorry I don't have anything new, is just how, how do you fail quickly? Yeah. How do you fail within two weeks and keep failing and keep failing? You're gonna learn something each time. And the you, the analogy we use at the academy is like you got drowners and everyone who knows who that is, you got floaters, you're not drowning, but you're go aware of the currents pushing you. You've got surfers who are moving somewhere, but they're still at the mercy of the wave. And then you have sailors that plot their own course, be a sailor. Yeah, right. You have the mentality of how many corrections are a pilot? Like I'm, I fly hotter balloons and airplanes too. How many times do I have to move that stick to get from point A to point B? Uh, I've actually plotted that on my airplane, my little stick to fly. What looks like a straight line from here to that airport is probably 5,000 corrections in a two hour flight, right? Just know that's gonna happen. You're gonna have to make those corrections. You're gonna have to make these, sometimes you're gonna have to do more than a little correction. You're have to do. Lemme give you an example, an analogy yesterday, instead of little corrections, I was looking down at my iPad, looking at the traffic and stuff, which we can now see. I look up right in the windshield is a hawk, and I'm going 150 miles an hour. Rapid turn bank, he went under the left wing. That was a major pivot I had to make in my flight yesterday. You're gonna have to have do those in your company as well. You're gonna have these micro things every day that you gotta make adjustments and sometimes you're just gonna have to make a pivot because stuff you didn't control or weren't expecting, or literally, I, I picked on Zuckerberg four times and I'm gonna do it one last time. He can ruin my business right this second by just changing his algorithm. Yeah. If the cost acquisition doubled in the next, by the time we hang up, I'm out. I get, I'm out of that part of the business. I gotta regroup. One of my big notes I have right here is. Strategy. What would I do if I Facebook and Google ads did not exist. Yeah. If I had either one of those platforms and I'm spending a bunch of time thinking through that hard because they may not, right. You can't target any more. Right. And if they get too expensive, and it's a fine line, right? If, if cost you a hundred dollars to sell one, but you only sold for $50, two plus two equals chicken, that doesn't work that much. And I think that's really important. I mean that, that, that's one of the biggest questions. I think every business should always ask them what can possibly go wrong And if it does a, what can possibly go wrong in my business model? And if it does, what would I pivot to as opposed to, which is so your cellular analogy as opposed to, let me wait till it goes wrong and then start panicking about, and then think, ah, what should I do? Uh, I think that's, that's always. What you should be thinking about in any business is, okay, so if that was to go wrong, what would I do? What, what are my contingencies? Basically, I remember, I remember a football, guy saying he said, when I was playing football, soccer, you know, people used to say, what's your plan B? And he said. Well, there's 26 letters in the alphabet. Why have I only got a plan B? And I thought, I, I really, I really like that, that that sentiment of thinking, oh yeah, that's true actually. 'cause we only, we only ever have a plan B. What about C, D, et cetera. Uh, so I thought that was a, I thought that was a really nice way of saying you should always have many, many contingency plans. 'cause especially in business, if you think your business is gonna be linear, I think you should go and do something else actually. 'cause you're gonna be. Horrifying. And you're probably not gonna be very good at it. 'cause, because there's, there's things that are coming from left field all the time and, and if you're not prepared for it and you're not prepared to pivot, you're gonna have a challenge. So, no, I really appreciate that. That's a, a really good thing. So, onto my decision scenario, and for everyone listening, I'll give you a scenario. Uh, mark will then give me an answer, not on the episode. He'll then gimme an answer. Uh, and explain why that's the answer, and then I will go through that in the next episode. So you'd obviously have to tune into the next episode to find out what he says. So the scenario is this, you are at a critical juncture where you've developed a functional prototype of your MedTech device. So that's exactly what Mark was talking about, an MVP. But you're ensure about the next step, should it be securing funding or pursuing clinical trials to validate your product. So which option do you choose? Do you a. Focus solely on securing funding to scale production. Do you be invest time in clinical trials to validate the prototype before seeking funding? Do you see split your efforts evenly between securing funding and conducting clinical trials, or do you de seek partnership with a larger institution that can provide both funding and validation of the idea? So. We're not, I'm not gonna get into it 'cause I know Mark could answer it quite clearly and easily now, but then you won't listen to the next episode. So Mark will answer that, he'll gimme the rationale around it, and then I'll go through that on the next episode. So on that note, I wanna say thank you very much to Mark. I've been actually illuminating given a really different, take I think on how to get a device, from concept to actually market and the key elements that you may need to take into account. So I really appreciate your time, mark. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And if you're building a MedTech business and you're not sure whether your next move should be around evidence, market access, commercialization, distributor strategy, or adoption. Don't guess. Booker Healthcare export accelerated diagnostic Call with me. Use the link in the show notes and in that session I'll help you identify the specific constraints blocking your momentum and the commercial move, most likely to unlock your progress. Until next time. Thanks for listening. Keep challenging your assumptions and keep growing.