80: Shotsy – Aja Beckett

You kind of want the people who are behind these products to be people who actually understand the experience, you know, even though Shotzi is an app with charts and data and everything. It's still a very emotional connection. I love that the people behind the app really understand it and really prioritize their actual experience. Welcome to Launched.

I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the founder of the GLP-1 medication tracking app, Shotzi, Asia Beckett. Asia, welcome to the show. Thanks, Charlie. I'm really glad to be here. Yeah, this is really exciting. As people listening obviously already are aware, this is the first episode back since it's been a very long time since I've had a non-live episode, especially.

And this is all because RevenueCat has acquired this podcast. So now it's officially a RevenueCat podcast. So thank you to RevenueCat. And I'm excited to have you on because it's kind of all tied together because we met finally in person for the first time. Was it two weeks ago? It was two weeks ago in New York. Yeah, in New York at the RevenueCat App Growth Annual Conference, where you gave a talk about Shotzi, which was amazing.

I think this is the perfect kind of reintroduction into Lost and your story is amazing. So I'm really excited to get into that. Me too. And congratulations on officially becoming part of the RevityCat. Thank you. Portfolio, I guess.

So before we get into Shotzi and the amazing story there, I want to give everyone an introduction into who you are. So the three questions I always ask to kind of kick off this show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then kind of let's talk about the career that you had leading up to before you started Shotzi. All right. Well, this is going to be fun. So I'm currently in Portland, Oregon, on the west coast of the U.S.

And I've been here for a while, but I actually grew up in California and then went to school in New York and lived in Texas for a while. So I've been around the U.S. a bit. You spanned the whole country. I did, yeah. So I'm very glad to be here in Portland. It's a great place to live.

And despite what you might see on the news, it's actually really lovely here. Amazing airport. It's on my bucket list of airports I want to see. You have to come to Portland just to come to the airport. It is absolutely incredible. Yeah, we have. Yeah, we're very proud of our airport.

So do I have a formal education? I do. I went to actually Cornell, an Ivy League school, which was a bit of a leap for me because I didn't really come from that kind of background. But is it relevant to what I'm doing? No, I got a degree in film. And was for a while, yeah, I know, film studies, kind of random. And then I got into computer animation. So that's what I did for the first five years after school was I worked on...

TV and movies doing all sorts of character animation. That was actually my, that was my career ambition. Oh, really? Yes. I wanted to move to California, go to film and animation school specifically or visual effects. uh and then for family sickness reasons, I had to stay in Missouri. And the Missouri film and animation education system is not necessarily the most robust. So I went down to my second tier. Yeah, I know this is surprising, given everything.

you know about missouri so i ended up going into computer science which uh turned out to be pretty decent as far as career opportunities go at least here Well, so that's funny. So I took kind of the different path. I did computer animation first and then sort of backed my way into becoming a programmer. They're surprisingly related, I feel like, in a lot of ways. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm still spending all my time in front of a computer.

At the end of the day, we're making pixels light up in certain arrangements. Whether you're converting JSON into that or you're in After Effects or Maxon. tools or whatever uh it's kind of all the same i guess yeah the leap the leap from maya to xcode very straightforward both are very heavy tools i imagine yeah so i guess The third question, my career, it's been maybe a bit...

unorthodox. I got into actually really working on online communities. I was in media tech for a while, sort of building online communities, figuring out how to moderate them. And then that ended up becoming my first startup. Which I didn't know was a thing that you could do when I was younger.

I thought that the choices were just, you know, who are you going to work for? And I honestly didn't, it didn't really start to sink in until my late 20s, early 30s that entrepreneurship was an option. But once I discovered it, you know, it was clearly what. I wanted to do. And so I had an idea for a comment moderation platform that I really wanted to see exist. And the best way to do that was to start a small company to build and sell that product to news companies.

And it was a great run. Maybe we'll talk about it later because it's still very relevant in my current work. But we had a great product and a great team, but it was not a... sustainable business model and so i was only able to run it for uh like two or three years what was the business model this was this was an app or this was a service where you could you built software that media companies could embed in their web pages for comments is that right

Yeah, if you're familiar with Disqus, it was one of these third-party JavaScript plugins. And so it was a full platform to replace something like Disqus, but it had a different approach to moderation.

that really worked in preventing harassment and abuse and making it much easier for the newsrooms to manage. But it was B2B, and it was 2016, and we were trying to sell a commenting platform to news companies, and I had zero experience with... price sales especially yeah so very very different discipline than uh consumer very yeah very challenging yeah so after that shut down i knew i still wanted to work on

tech products and trying to solve interesting problems through apps and technology. I guess backing up just a little bit, we went from you and Maya making 3D animations for film to... You said you wanted to do entrepreneurship, but were you developing? Did you teach yourself how to code? Or were you building a team? that then did that? Yeah, no, I actually never had a team. I was always just kind of off on my own, taught myself how to code when I was working for TED, the TED Talks people.

In New York, I was working remote, and they had hired me to manage their online communities, which were really interesting, fascinating spaces to work with. And there were so many tools that I wanted that the tech team there, I don't know if you're familiar with media tech, but it's often a real challenge to assign resources across the organization. There's just so many things that need to be built.

And so my needs were not a high priority in the company. And so I ended up asking if I could have access to an EC2 instance. on AWS. So just like a little bit of a backend that I could build on. And they said yes. And so I just started slowly developing more and more tools. So initially just like a weekly email that would go out with basic stats about what was happening. You know, so I learned enough.

SQL to be able to pull those queries and send out some reports. Anyhow, yes, it's just been kind of one thing after another. Okay, wow. So you like self-taught out of necessity how to code. And that's what led to... you have the skill set to be able to build this commenting platform. And you started trying to build a business out of that.

struggle with the actual business side of that, not so much the technical side. Sounds like the product itself was really good. Well, fortunately, with the commenting platform, fortunately, I was able to eventually hire people who are much better than me. So I'm very good at building the prototype, building the MVP, and then it's really good to be able to bring in people who are specialized and really good at JavaScript and really good at DevOps.

That makes sense. So then whenever you got to the point where you realized that wasn't going to work as a business, like how did that go about? Did you just kind of shut things down or did you sort of slowly?

wither away into the into the night like what was that process like it was really painful i guess i described it at the time like it was it was like being on a plane that was very slowly crashing you know like i was still the plane was still crashing six months later like it's like nope it's still it's still awful you know i think if you've ever had to shut down especially a product that the customers loved i mean we were on all sorts of news sites and the

It was making a huge difference in the lives of the newsroom editors, not having to sort of spend all of their nights and weekends worrying about what was happening in the comments. It was hard to have to shut it down just because I couldn't figure out how to... how to sell it sustainably to you know these big media companies in that case did you have investors or was this pretty much all you or you and like the people working with you

Yeah, we were a team of seven people, I think, at our biggest. And we had 40 angel investors. It was all angel funded. And so I spent a lot of those two, two and a half years pitching for angel checks. And it was almost like month to month. We needed to constantly raise more funding. And then I was also trying to raise money from venture capitalists at the same time.

I see now in retrospect that it was pretty clear that there was not a great business model behind this, even though it was a great product. Well, and venture capitalists are looking for not just a good business model, but a specific type of business with... high risk and outsized returns right yeah yeah yeah exactly so yeah so we just we ran on angel funding for as long as we could and then um there just wasn't enough actual revenue to keep it going and then what was it uh

I want to try something new or did you retreat into doing something else? Like what was the next step after that then? Yeah. I mean, it was, I kind of wanted to just crawl into a dark hole. It was, I mean, you know, it's really hard to have to stop doing something like that since you're really passionate about. Well, I imagine your identity was pretty wrapped up in it too.

Yeah, I had been doing it at that point for long enough that I was definitely very attached to it. Maybe somebody who's been in this position knows the very painful moment where... You have to go into the office after everybody else has left and paint over the 13 foot logo that you had painted on the wall. Oh, no, that doesn't sound good at all. I just assume you leave that and walk away.

Oh, my God. Somebody has to go in there with the white paint and roll over it. And yeah, that was me. Wow. That's like a it's it's like a visual metaphor that you have to. sit there and stare at yourself oh my goodness oh yeah it's very cinematic though right i know yeah so remember that when you're painting the 13 foot logo on the wall you might have to paint over it yeah yeah make sure you've got a good business model

Yeah. After that experience, I needed to sort of lick my wounds and recover. My big takeaway from it was that... I have lots of ideas for products. I have lots of ideas for problems that I want to solve. There's lots of problems that I'm interested in working on. But if you're not able to connect it to a sustainable business model, you won't be able to continue working on.

the mission. If there's no money, there's no mission. And that really, that was very visceral, I think, at that point. And so I realized, okay, you know, there's something I'm not understanding here about how businesses work. And whatever I do next, I want to work on that. That's the thing that I want to learn is how do you make money? How do you build revenue? Because then I can actually do the thing that I want to do, which is...

build interesting tools for people. Right. Like solve interesting problems. You have to make money to build things.

versus the other way of building a business is build things to make money. But you already had the build things part, but you have to have the money in order to do that in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. I think finally letting go of that build it and they will come. Feel the dreams ruined an entire generation of people. That's right. Thanks, Kevin Costner.

I don't know, it made sense to me at the time, but that's just sort of how my brain works, I guess, is I thought, okay, well, how can I get better at starting the kind of business that I want to run, but not have to sort of... work with the gatekeepers that I had been struggling with. So I didn't want to have to do enterprise sales. I didn't want to have to do venture capital. I realized, too, that it's not possible to bootstrap.

certain types of businesses. Like some businesses just need to have a big, impressive team from the beginning or else you're not going to be able to sell to the types of customers you want to sell to. And that was not something I understood at first. And so I sat down and I thought, okay, well. Where can I build something on my own without needing anybody's permission and sort of learn the lessons that I need to learn about how to reach customers? And the answer was mobile apps, consumer apps.

You know, I had all the skills or I was, you know, I knew that I could develop the skills to be able to build. I was about to say, you didn't have a mobile app with that company, right? Well, no, but that commenting platform... was using React for the front end. And so I knew a lot about how to build a React app, and somebody told me about React Native, and I thought, okay, I can do that. And so, yeah, that was a pretty easy transition to go from.

building React web apps to React Native apps. I no longer work in React Native, but it was the gateway. Yeah, that was how you got in there. You said the answer was mobile apps, but like... Was there a moment where you were like, oh, this is my way to get around? It's funny to hear somebody say, get around gatekeepers and then land on the app stores because that's...

That's kind of a topic du jour right now. But in a way, it does get you around a lot of gatekeepers because it is a little bit more of a meritocracy environment. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I don't know about the M word, right? But yeah, sorry. Sorry. Yeah, I forget. I live in the Midwest. I'm not used to hearing that constantly. Yeah, I mean, I think when you compare it to at least the type of environment that I had previously.

been in where how can you build a big b2b business to business like platform company without venture capital without a really strong network like i i've been kind of an outsider i haven't worked for the big tech companies very much and when i looked at what my

opportunities were going to be there. It was going to be pretty challenging to just even get to the point where I could start to learn the lessons that I needed to learn. And so with mobile apps, the distance between like, yes, there's a lot of hurdles that you have to

to get through, but they are fairly straightforward, you know, and I wasn't trying to do anything that was particularly, you know, outside of what I knew that Apple would approve. And then once you're on the App Store, there's like zero friction. or potentially right to reaching people who might be interested in your product so it seemed like it made the most sense i'm not sure where else i could have gone really uh yeah that's really interesting so the idea of

building a mobile app came first before the idea for what that mobile app would be came? I think it was kind of hand in hand because I think I started first with what problems do I want to work on? And again, this made sense to me at the time, but maybe is a bit odd in retrospect. I really wanted to work on social anxiety.

Okay. I mean, yeah. Well, especially, I don't know what year we're talking about, but that was digital wellness and all that were pretty hot topics for a while. In fact, this year, I feel like they've kind of come back in terms of, is it Opal? All the apps that are like... for helping you detox from your phone and like blocking apps and stuff. Yeah.

I mean, there are huge problems to be addressed, right? But I think for me, it's always coming from personal problems, right? Like I have a hard time moderating comments or I have social anxiety or, you know, I am taking a medication that doesn't have any support. And so, yeah, this would have... been like 2018 I guess I think I had a string of awkward encounters with grocery store cashiers and I was like you know what I don't want to be like this anymore

I thought, okay, well, that's something I want to work on. Like, I know how to do something like that. And so I thought, okay, let's build, like, practice conversations. Let's use speech recognition. Let's use recorded video. This was a little bit before. AI video was easy to do, but I ended up getting stuck on this idea for so long that AI video became an option as I was still working on different versions of this. But I got really attached to this idea of...

Practice conversations being a fun thing to work on and something I was interested in. I ended up working on practice conversations basically for, God, probably like four years and different. incarnations oh wow okay yeah ended up i realized okay well nobody's searching for social anxiety tools right now at least at the at that point i started to realize okay well you know

Had you released this? This was like in the app store? Okay, so you were like, you were out there hustling, trying to make this thing work. Yeah, absolutely. And so I had a lot of those classic, like, why is nobody downloading it? Like, why isn't it immediately a huge hit? And yeah, so I started to learn about like...

what are people searching for on the app store and like what, what actually can find an audience? And I realized, okay, well, there's no real demand right now for this solution that I'm, nobody's like, oh,

I just made a fool of myself at the Whole Foods. I'm going to go look for an app or a solution. Yeah, that's not a thing. So you either have to change the product or at least the messaging around the product. so that it does solve a need somebody searching for, or you have to generate demand through marketing campaigns or something like that. Those are kind of the options for distribution at that point. Yeah, exactly. And I realized, okay, well, I don't...

I don't have the resources to go educate people about this. I need to find something that people are already looking for a solution to where I can provide a good solution. And so I said, okay, well, language learning, that's a natural fit for practice conversations. People are already looking for language learning tools. And this is a novel approach. At this point in 2018, 2019, people weren't doing video practice conversations. I know now it's really common. Yeah, that's kind of interesting.

But it was new, this idea that you could sort of have these simulated conversations. And so I got very attached to that idea. Were you personally into language learning? No. And that ends up being a very important part of this. The lesson here after many failed attempts to do different language apps was that, well, two things. One is that you really do have to be an authentic member of the community that you're in.

that you're working for right like i was not a language learner i didn't understand the community really i wasn't part of their reddits i wasn't you know kind of doing all the things that you do when you're really passionate about learning languages unfortunately i only speak english That was the first problem. And the second problem is that you should never compete against Duolingo. But I feel like there's a long wake all around them for little side things maybe you could take advantage of.

Yeah, well, I was not able to figure it out. And so... Yeah, I struggled through many different variations. And then finally ended up, well, I pivoted it again to a citizenship education app, which was a good niche. But again, I wasn't authentically a member of that community. And so even though it is a good solution, it just...

You know, it was really hard to reach the audience because I wasn't really part of it. So I ended up having to take a day job. At this point, you know, I'd kind of been going in and out of freelancing and taking contracts to pay the bills and money was running out.

And so at that point, I had to take a full-time job. And so I ended up taking a job as an iOS engineer at the New York Times working on the Athletic app, which is their sports journalism app. And so that would have been at the end of... 2023 okay so at this point are you thinking like maybe my entrepreneurship days are behind me like that was a i'm glad i tried it but i'm kind of moving on

I was, yeah. I went into that job thinking, okay, this is it. I've gotten that out of my system. I'm ready to be an employee. I'm ready to be a grownup and do a job. I was excited to kind of, you know, I hadn't really done that. I hadn't been like an on-staff engineer. Before, I'd always been kind of like contract and freelance and independent. And so, yeah, it was exciting to get to work on a team, to be one of many.

and to get to learn from people who were working at a really high level. And the Athletic app was really exciting because they were one of the first teams, I think, to switch fully to SwiftUI. You know, it's a really, like... widely used and very well-built SwiftUI app, which was very exciting to get to work on. You've put entrepreneurship behind you. Yep. But I'm talking to you here today because of an app that you've built that took off. Where did that come from?

Yeah, well, so I mean, that lasted like six months. I think it would have lasted a lot longer, except I was able to start taking one of these new medications. You know, so in addition to all of this, like long. Painful story of my journey through entrepreneurship. I've always been a person who struggled with my weight. I have a diagnosis of obesity, class one, and it's been, you know, I think I've had that sort of classic up and down struggle.

entire adult life. I think starting when I was probably 14 or 15, I've been on one diet or another, like everything, all the different ones. And that was very much true in fall of 2023. I think I was at my highest weight ever. I think because of the job, I was finally able to be able to access the kind of insurance that could make.

taking a glp1 possible i mean that was still pretty new right at that time that was only it was a few years into it being approved for weight loss specifically yeah yeah exactly yeah because i don't have diabetes and so um Yeah, so it was only just recently available for obesity.

I guess if anybody is not familiar with these GLP-1s, this is like, yeah, I know it's such a big part of my life now, but this is like Ozempic or Zepbound Majaro. It's all of these new GLP-1 agonists. That's kind of the cult.

collective term for it. They're pretty incredible medications. They seem to address a lot of different mental and physical health issues that... come with this condition or these conditions i had been trying to access them for a while because i suspected that it was going to be a big benefit for me but uh i wasn't able to afford it until i had good health insurance okay and so you know this was originally a

diabetes drug that then through testing they found was really useful for all these other things but obesity being one of the big ones so fully FDA approved all that stuff but it's still newer right so there's more and more people are

getting access to it there's a lot of things to work out personally and just the the community is trying to figure it all out so i imagine it's a i don't know if stressful is the right word but a drug that like as you're taking it you want to understand

more heavily even than most drugs, which is already a thing you want to do, how it's affecting your body and how it's affecting your mood and all that stuff. It's a really interesting experience, I think, taking one of these medications. There is a huge need for support. I think people get these prescriptions and then they're kind of left to their own devices until their next doctor's visit, which might be months away. And there's a lot of day to day stuff to manage, you know, not just.

remembering to take the injections and rotating injection sites, but also trying to navigate side effects and stay in that kind of sweet spot for getting the most use out of it without feeling nauseous. And then also just managing expectations. I think it's so different from, you know, for somebody like me. who has done so much calorie counting and going to the gym and keto and intermittent fasting and all these mindful eating, all these things.

Treating the condition with a medication feels very different from sort of these like white knuckle willpower kinds of, you know, you have to stay motivated type experience where you're sort of forcing yourself to suffer through these things.

And yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of people who stop taking them not because the medication isn't working, but because they just don't have that support. Their doctors aren't available for day-to-day nutrition counseling or guidance on... realistic expectations you know i think people sometimes experience more side effects than they need to or they get more discouraged than they need to if they don't have access to

kind of ongoing support and counseling through the experience okay so that's that's kind of the the entry point uh so you had access to that there's not a lot of community infrastructure i guess maybe is the right word or support tools that are out there for people taking this. Where does that lead you, I guess? Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know anybody else who's taking a GLP-1.

And sometimes even just trying to talk to your doctor about it. I mean, unfortunately, some doctors are still a little behind the curve on these medications. And so some people even face, you know, sort of bias. resistance, you know, even from the healthcare professionals. But for the people who do get a prescription or access it through telehealth, yeah, oftentimes it's kind of isolating. Like you don't, there's not really anybody you can talk to. So, you know, because I'm...

very sort of tech forward kind of person. For me, it was really natural to join the subreddit communities that were focused on these and to really connect with people, you know, online and to go and read the clinical trial. results and really understand like, okay, here's the curves, here's the averages, here's what to expect, and then talk through that with other people who were a little further along with the medication on Reddit.

That was available to me, I think, because that's just kind of how I am. But a lot of people, they don't have the time. They don't have the energy. They're not like, oh, I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks learning everything I can about prior authorization approvals and learn how to fax. a 12-page document to my insurance company. There were so many things to navigate and I felt like there was just clearly a real need to make that a lot more accessible to people. What was...

Like at that point, then you thought there's an opportunity here to build something to help and maybe build a business. It was very much one of those solving my own problem kinds of experiences. Right. Like I was very curious about. what was happening in the seven days between taking shots. You know, the medications fluctuate a lot. It's a little different since you're not taking it every day. There's a big sort of the concentration increases and then it drops off.

And then it stays in your system for four or five weeks. So each weekly dose builds on what's remaining from the last. And that's very difficult to keep in your head week to week. Like, oh, where am I? Is it, if you're feeling...

If you're starting to feel food noise coming back, it can be difficult to remember like, oh, is that, you know, is it because I'm on day six or, you know, is it because like, do I need to talk to my doctor about changing dosage? There was a lot that I... wanted to have access to in terms of data visualization and metrics in order to have a better conversation with my provider when it was time to to change dosage because you know glp1s are i think are somewhat unique in the

The titration schedule, whether or not you're going to go up a dose or down a dose, is based on how the patient is feeling and not blood work. The medication I'm taking, there's six different levels that you can take. And like, I'm not going to get lab work done to determine that that's not a thing. You just talk to your doctor about how you're feeling and what side effects you're having and whether or not it feels like it's working. And then you decide together.

And so the more the patient can understand... about what they're experiencing and the more sort of systematic they are in the moment versus when they're at the office which exactly trying to recall the last four weeks or whatever exactly yeah no you want it you want to have an idea of trends you want to have an idea of like

Where does it feel like you're responding the most to the medication? And then, of course, that changes over time. So there's just a lot of data that is helpful to be able to keep track of. And I think that's so different from earlier ways of... of trying to manage your health or or lose weight you know like it wasn't about like i need to pinpoint this like number on a chart so that i can make good like titration choices with my doctor yeah

So did you go straight to, because you're an iOS developer at this point, did you go straight to, I'm going to build an app or did you have like spreadsheets or something that you were starting to try and build up for yourself? I started with, I think what a lot of people do, just Apple Notes. Oh, yeah, yes, yes. You know, it's just like. The ultimate app.

Yep. Notes app. And then, yeah, doing some spreadsheets. People were like trading spreadsheets on the subreddit. If you're in a community and you see people trading like spreadsheet templates, that's an opportunity for at least a niche market product. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, because again, I mean, it's one of those accessibility things like not everybody has the time and energy. Like, it's great that, you know, some people, you know, maybe people like me are totally going to.

want to take that as far as they can and build all sorts of really cool custom visualizations. But... Not everybody is going to be able to prioritize that, and they just need something that works, where they can enter their data and then just see all of the charts, see all of the stuff without having to... you know, put a lot of time into it. And I think especially the big advantage of doing it on a phone is that you already probably have a lot of access to health data.

through like the apple health app well and i think also the the mobile device it's always in your pocket you're you know if you're out and about if you're traveling or whatever like you can always just record what you need to record in the moment and not have to wait until you're back to your computer. So lots of reasons to make it a mobile app instead of a, you know, a spreadsheet. But yeah, I did start out kind of doing it the old fashioned way.

So once you got to the point of making an iOS app, was the initial idea this could be a product or was it one of those like... i'm just making it an xcode for myself and maybe i'll release it to this community just because i'm in this community at the very beginning uh it was just for me i mean obviously like there was a lot that i needed to figure out

You know, is this even going to work? I had this idea to do the estimated medication level charts, really trying to study the results from the clinical trial data. And, you know, like, can we model this? Does that work to use this as a way of estimating?

you know, how much of the medication might be in your system hour by hour. So there was a lot of like kind of R&D trying to figure out if this was even something that would help me. But I put out a request on that subreddit for beta testers in late.

april or early may of last year you already had a bit of a product at that point i was able to get it up into test flight okay yeah yeah so you had a product maybe some screenshots and you posted it on yeah it was it was rough i mean the the post is still there you can see the the screenshots but uh

Yeah, I was able to get it into beta testing and I made the request and I was able to take 25 beta testers and it filled up very quickly. I think in 90 minutes I had 25. Actually, I had more than 25. I had to... shut it down because there wasn't anything i mean nobody exactly you know nobody had anything that was on a mobile app uh our mobile device at the time i think as soon as

I started to work with the beta testers. I knew that there was going to be a lot of enthusiasm for this because the response was just immediately so enthusiastic. And during the one month of beta testing... The number of testers kept growing.

So I think they were sending, like, I think a couple of people were sending it to their friends. Like the link was still open. Yeah, yeah. Because it was just a public test flight link. And so, yeah, it was like every day there was another couple of beta testers. Oh, interesting.

How long did you run the beta test then? It was one month. Were you getting lots of valuable feedback? Did it impact the product a lot? Oh yeah, it was really helpful. I learned pretty quickly is that everybody's experience with... with these medications is very different. People are taking them for different reasons. They're at different stages in their journey. Some people come to Shotzi when they've already been taking a GLP-1 for a year already, and they need to enter all of their past.

shots and so having a good interface for that right and making sure that that was really smooth and some people never track their weight um and you know they want to track something else instead or There was a need for customization that was very clear from the start. This needs to be something that people can really make their own because everybody's journey is a little different. That was a big part of the beta test.

And then I was struggling to figure out how to let people track their side effects and what the right user experience would be for side effect tracking. And a couple of people pointed out that this was really similar to period tracking, because that's another place where you're thinking about how your hormones are changing over time and what effect that's having on your mood and your sort of physical experience.

And then you want to correlate that to, you know, you want to try to keep track of side effects or, you know. And you had never made that like sort of connection before. I, that was, yeah, that was a really good nudge. Like, you know, cause as soon as they pointed out, I was like, oh yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly. And then there's a large mature industry of inspiration, right? In terms of user interface design.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting, the overlap. And I think that's something that is a little counterintuitive about this space is that, yes, it's health tracking. And it's, you know, for a lot of people, it's about weight loss.

But it's not like a diet and it's not fitness tracking. Exactly. Yeah. And it's not about, you know, helping you stay motivated because you're suffering a lot. It's more like a... period tracker where it's like something is happening to you and a lot of it is sort of outside of your control and you're just yeah that's true you're just noticing fitness you control the inputs and they're very varied whereas here the inputs are pretty like

Yeah. Very regular and not as interesting. It's the kind of results of that that are the bigger deal. Yeah. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah. It's like you obviously control when you take the shots and how much. of a dosage you're taking. But then between shots, it's kind of, it's doing the work or it's doing a lot of the work. And then what you want to do is sort of give yourself the best experience as possible. So it's your happy continuing to take this thing.

Okay, so you released it to the beta. You got some good feedback. You only ran the beta for about a month. How did you decide when to release? That's a good question. You know, I think it's good to remember that at this point, this was... I think my seventh app, I felt very comfortable getting something launched out there. The last step was getting to the point where I felt comfortable building the paywall.

I knew from past experience that because I was intending for this to be a freemium product where most of the features are free, but a couple of features are behind a premium paywall. I knew that it was important to have that in place on day one because I didn't want anybody to feel like surprised or disappointed when things changed. I was like knowing that there has to be a sustainable business in order to continue.

building the product and improving the product. I wanted to be very clear to everybody on day one, like, okay, this is how we're going to keep this thing going. You can use it for free, forever, as much as you want. All the actual useful stuff is there. But two features are premium, and if you want the bonus of getting to use these features, then...

We'll ask you to help support the continued development of this product. How did you draw that line? Because the way you just described it almost sounds like you didn't put the most valuable things behind the paywall. which is traditionally kind of how you would do that. Otherwise, you're sort of relying on the goodwill of people more than anything. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of that comes back to the fact that...

I am very much authentically a part of this community. I'm very connected to the people who are taking GLP-1s. If you have a condition that benefits from taking a GLP-1, then you've probably experienced a lot of suffering because of that condition. Being a person in a much larger body is a very difficult thing to, or can be a very difficult thing to experience. I knew that I was building something that was going to be really useful for people and help them get more success from these.

you know, life-changing medications. I didn't want that to be something where they had to pay for it in order to access that. So anything that is really important to the core experience of keeping track of your shots, you know, remembering to take your shots, having better conversations with your doctor, like all of that is, you know, totally free and will continue to be free. But...

Knowing that we needed to be able to build a sustainable business and not end up having to shut down the way my first startup did, I decided to choose two features that were kind of nice to have. If you're using this all the time, it would be... nice like bonus features to be able to do these two things but you know you could still do everything you need to do without them okay and i guess you also had the advantage compared to the previous at least the previous company that

Being a mobile app, your costs are much lower. You don't have a whole bunch of infrastructure that you're keeping up with in moderation and all that stuff, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is a need for a team here, for sure. And it's really important that we've been able to grow a team so that it's not just me trying to...

Build the iOS app, build the Android app, answer the customer support emails, like do all the things. But at that point, it was just you, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's some trauma behind that answer. Well, no, I mean, you know, because now we're in the window of time where we're actually revenue cat.

gave me an award for being a solo developer. You know, I think just like two months later, three months later, I won the first Shippee for being a solo app developer in 2024. Before we get to the launch itself, I want to... rewind a little bit something you said earlier which was you know you've built at this point six or seven different mobile apps and as we talked about none of those necessarily took off right did you feel before the launch that this was different

or did it feel like another one of of those like this is another attempt i'm making This was night and day. This was completely different. With sales, as I know now, which I didn't know 10 years ago, when you're selling something, there's a big difference between trying to push something out to customers and having something pulled in by customers.

And there was a huge pull here. Anybody who was taking one of these medications, if I said, oh, yeah, I'm working on a tool to help with this, this and this, they were like, oh, my God, can I join? Like, I want to join the beta test, like seeing how. the testers were responding, seeing how excited the other people on the Reddit community.

And also just knowing firsthand, I understood why people were excited about this because I was excited about it. I'm the first user. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have this app. It's a huge part of my experience. And so... that was very different from the years that I spent trying to kind of push a solution into a space that I didn't

really authentically belong to. Back when I was trying to do a language learning app or a citizenship education app, if I had actually been part of those communities, I would have understood. more about what people were looking for and what was resonating. And if there was an opportunity to sort of reach an enthusiastic audience, I think I would have had an easier time navigating that. But it all kind of fell into place.

So then how did the launch itself actually go? Well, it was a lot like launching the beta test. I just went back to my amazing Reddit community. And I said, OK, you know, it's live on the App Store and would love to get your thoughts, I think. And again, the post is still there. But yeah, I mean, it just immediately took off. I think people had been aware that there were.

was an app in development, because I think some of the testers were starting to post screenshots of their charts. On that subreddit? Yeah. So people were like, wait, where is this coming from? And I was like, oh, it's this app. And yeah, so as soon as it was available in the App Store, people immediately started downloading it. They immediately started signing up for the trial at much higher rates than I'd ever seen in one of my previous apps.

The growth from there was really organic. I mean, people were telling their friends. They were posting. The charts ended up being a really, not viral, but people really like sharing the charts that Shotzi generates. It's a big part of sort of... helping understand your journey.

And they're really fun to share with people because you can see like your weight change over time that's correlated to your dosage strength by color. And so you can see like, okay, when I was taking that one, you know, I lost this much. And when I was taking that one, I lost, you know, and people really like to. Like me included, you know, it's really fun to get to see like, oh, okay, when I was taking five milligrams of Z-Bound, then, you know, like, oh, I lost 25 pounds.

Visualizations that like shareable visualizations in your app that tell a story. I think that's the part that a lot of people building social loops into their apps miss. But if it can tell a story that is interesting in its own right. Those, like, I feel like can really take off on you.

That was not the intent at all. I mean, to this day, you know, and still people look at the app because there've been a lot of other things to work on. And so people are still screenshotting the results screen and sharing it everywhere. Like there's a whole.

There's been whole threads on Reddit that are just like, share your Shotzi charts. You can totally tell. We haven't done anything to make that shareable. You haven't leaned into it and found ways to make that more shareable or more branded or anything.

No, because we're working on a lot of other stuff. I mean, you know, we needed to get it onto Android and, you know, requests that we get from users. And so we're just working through the list of, and nobody's asking us like, oh, make sure you put your logo on the screen when we share it on Reddit, you know, so. It has a look to it.

it's not using well maybe you are using you're not using like swift charts or something it doesn't look like it's just the default we've invested a lot in the charts these are yeah so like uh high-end charts visually it's immediately obvious what it is

And once you have a certain critical mass, it has that kind of, if you know, you know thing where if somebody posts it and it doesn't have, this is a weird, like a social engagement hack. That's an accident thing. I think most of the time, but like. If people post a screenshot that doesn't have a logo, it's often enough that people will reply, what app is this? And it's well known enough that somebody will almost definitely respond to that. That tells the algorithm that this is a highly engaged.

post because like threads are being formed underneath it and then it kind of creates this like feedback loop that shares it out to even more people i mean i don't know enough about how all the algorithms work but um but yeah it doesn't seem like it's a bad thing that people are constantly asking you know what app is this and then yeah

typing out Shotzi, that's probably not a terrible thing. I wouldn't know the details of how all these things... At RevenueCat, we experience similar things. Our charts are very frequently shared. There's features in there to make it easier to share, but everybody just screenshots it. I think it being visually clear what it is and then having that sort of if you know, you know thing, it also signals like this company cares about.

the product they're not just building you know perfectly instagramable uh images or whatever not that that's bad but i don't know i think screenshots are like a powerful social loop if it's authentic i guess ultimately yeah Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear when you use Shotzi, like this is built by a team that is first and foremost...

building a good product for our users. And we have not gotten to the point where we're trying to do anything gimmicky, I guess. It doesn't seem like you've needed to. Like you said, there's high demand there. And I'm curious if you've done the...

Again, it sounds like maybe you don't necessarily need to at this stage, but like to figure out where that distribution is sort of coming from. Like initially there's a subreddit that's thriving and you can kind of build on there. But as far as I can tell, it's definitely expanded well past.

the subrata into sort of the normal non-tech sphere. Is that from search traffic on the, on the stores or is there some other sort of distribution method that seems to be taking off or that you're doing on purpose? Yeah, well, so again, going back to my many years of struggle trying to find a sustainable business model for consumer apps, I eventually learned how important the organic rankings in the app stores are.

rankings for search terms or rankings for the search term rankings yeah yeah so again like i i slowly figured out like oh it's really important that you you know work on something that people are looking for and then you know that you are discoverable when they search for that keyword and so going all the way back to wanting to work on an app for social anxiety there were no keywords at least at the time

that people were searching for like social anxiety. So over the years I realized, oh, okay. So if you don't have a marketing budget, if you don't have, you know, like I'm not an influencer, I don't know how to tell people about an app other than just. You're not going to create demand. No, I can't. Go to where the demand already is. Exactly. Yeah. So I learned the hard way that really the only affordable way for an indie developer.

to reach a wide audience is to to rank well in the search terms that people are are using for that type of app you know because of that i kind of knew like oh all right well

People are already searching for like calorie tracker and, you know, fitness tracker. Those are huge search terms. And I thought, OK, well, I think it's very likely that GLP-1 tracker is going to become. an important search term. And sure enough, at that time, it wasn't already. It wasn't. Yeah, that's interesting. It wasn't. Yeah, because there were no apps and nobody was was thinking about it. So I had the huge advantage of being the first app.

And also being somebody who knew how important it was to, you know, to put in the work to sort of maintain those rankings. Big shout out to everybody who's helped me with.

aso app store optimization over the years like it's been a long journey but it was really helpful to be able to to move from the really wonderful word of mouth that i was getting on on reddit and then people were just telling you know their facebook groups and wherever they were talking about these medications they started to talk about shotsy but then being able to translate that into

you know organic rankings on the app store and as people did start to search for apps like we were right there yeah because it's it's like a it was a wave you know this drug becoming more accessible to more people there's just a wave of people And probably internationally, I imagine it's still, you know, working its way through the world as far as regulatory bodies. And so being there at the beginning and being the like ready for those search terms as they come in.

must have made a huge difference. Yeah, it absolutely did. And it's a really gratifying way, I think, to reach... your customers. I mean, for one thing, it's very cost effective. It's also just, it just feels very, it's just very natural. They're looking for a thing. We're, you know, providing a thing that is very useful, that we think is very valuable.

And then they don't even have to pay us for it, which I love that. I love that it's totally up to them. It's just a very straightforward transaction. And that's another area where you can get away with that in part because you're not doing so much paid. marketing because as soon as you start having to do those calculations of like this is what my cost per acquisition is

Then that all those free users become more of a burden because like it's lowering the lifetime value. And then it's like if you run an ad and don't want to lose money on that ad, you have to. either raise prices or put more behind the paywall to convert more people and you don't really have to play that same game uh when it comes to like organic either organic you know word of mouth sharing but then obviously aso and search traffic as well

It's a really wonderful position to be in. And I did have some idea of this. I mean, of course, it all everything went much better than I expected. But I did have some understanding of how. how this could play out, I understood like, okay, yeah, you know, if I make good choices early on, you know, if I understand how to make this discoverable.

in the places that people are already talking about it and using it, then yeah, we will be able to stay kind of on the right side, like stay on our user side instead of having to switch more into this like...

Yeah, more transactional, like, oh, God, like, it's expensive to acquire a user. And so therefore, we have to charge more. And, you know, it's really nice to be kind of above the fray. And especially, I think, you know, Again, because I am so connected to this community and it matters so much to me that there be good tools and good support for...

These really traditionally underserved and marginalized communities that we're serving, that I'm part of, I'm really glad that it's kind of amazing that the first app to really break out in this space happens to be by... you know like made by a person with obesity you know that it's not like i'm not this like cynical outsider that's coming in with you know wanting to do a cash grab

It's not just like a ploy to get, you know, like I am very personally invested in this. Like it matters to me that, I mean, kind of going back to the period tracker thing, like a lot of the most popular period trackers are run by people who don't. have periods yeah you know and that's kind of frustrating it's like you kind of want the people who are behind these products to be you know people who actually understand the the experience i mean these are very personal i feel like

You know, even though Shotzi is an app with charts and data and everything, it's still a very emotional connection to have with everybody who's taking a GLP-1. Like we're in their pocket, like kind of being their day-to-day companion. And I love that the people behind the app really understand it and really prioritize their actual experience. Yeah. And speaking of people behind the app.

Like we said, at the very beginning, it was just you, but that is very much not the case now. How did we get there? Like, why did you start expanding the team and how did you expand the team? Yeah, well, so yeah, I was completely alone at the start, you know, doing all the things. And as anybody who's listening to this knows, like being an indie developer, especially when you start to get users and customer support requests.

is very difficult to maintain. Especially with a heavy data app. Yeah, a heavy data app. And I had a day job. I mean, I was working. This was nights and weekends on the side. I was also an iOS engineer at the New York Times working on a big app.

Trying to balance all of that was very, very challenging. The summer of 2024 was really busy for me. And I really appreciated the... winning the shippy from revenue cat it was really wonderful there's a thing where even as you see all these numbers going up you're still sitting at home on your laptop you know

Yeah. With the news on or whatever. And like, it doesn't feel like it's this big thing sometimes, even when something's taking off. Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's like me and my dog on the couch, like, you know, night after night after night. I mean, people would ask me. you know what do i do for fun it's like i do this this is what i do i work but uh you know but they say like

You know, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And this was very much. Yeah. I mean, I didn't come up with it, but. No, we'll put that. That'll be the quote. It'll have your name under it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I deserve credit. Now, you know, I think if it very quickly became clear, like this is going to outgrow me or this shirt, this deserves to outgrow just me. And so I.

I held on to the day job as long as I could because, you know, like the year before, I mean, things were pretty rough. Like I was... not doing very well financially and and the stability and like you know i did not want to let go of that job but uh but eventually it just it got to the point where we really did need we you know me and the users

to bring in more help. And I think especially if anybody knows kind of the pain of both answering the customer support queue and then also needing to be the person who fixes the bugs and ships the new features. That is really difficult to navigate. And like people were, somebody found my phone number. Like, you know, there were. And everybody was really lovely. But like there was a lot of work that needed to be done. And so I was so glad to be able to.

You know, at first, just from the revenue, be able to start bringing in really fantastic people to like other indie app developers that I was already friends with or that I had met through. So you're getting help at the beginning on the development side or was it customer support kind of initially?

I think at first it was like help with design because I'm not very good at design. Help with design, help with the development, iOS. And then we realized very quickly that it needed to be on Android. And then, yeah, especially customer support and making sure that.

people weren't having to wait too long to get responses. That's always been a really high priority for us. That's one of our top metrics is how long people have to wait to get their first response from customer support. And we make sure that we are...

maintaining good levels there what are you what are you using for that was it initially was it just email yeah i think the very first thing was using form spree in the app but uh but then we needed a little more robust yeah so switch to zendesk and that's been fine

But yeah, we've got a team now that's making sure and we've got good global coverage. We make sure that people get their responses as soon as possible. Is it a fundamental part of the business or is it more like... part of the community, I guess, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, so we knew we needed to be on Android because that was our number one request. Like people were posting all over the place on Reddit, Facebook groups. They were emailing us, I think, because I hadn't really, I mean, it did not occur to me that this was going to be something where.

there would be that kind of demand for it. And I'd never built anything for Android. But we had one person write in and say that they were so eager to use Shotzi as an Android developer that they had gone and bought an iPad.

we don't even have an iPad app. So they were using like the stretched iPhone version. Yeah, I was amazed. Again, what a signal. Yeah, yeah, it was definitely a pull. So that... made it pretty clear, okay, like, you know, we want to be able to support everybody who's taking a GLP-1 medication. That is not just iOS users. It's really important that we be available for anybody anywhere who is taking one of these things. And so we really prior, and at that point, yeah, we had a couple of people.

on the team thank god um really wonderful like it was great because uh because i was already friends with a lot of indie developers it was wonderful to have on the android side too then is it Like as far as revenue coming in, is that an important part of the business still? Because there's like kind of the stereotype of iOS makes you all the money and Android's not really high converting or anything.

Yeah, no, actually, Android is an important part of the business, I think, especially because we've also invested in internationalization and making sure that this is available in a lot of different languages. And of course, especially when you start to leave the US. it becomes more and more important that you have Android support and international support. So, yeah, I think, you know, the bulk of our business is still U.S., iOS, but I think increasingly it's definitely very important.

for us to be on android and i think we're seeing conversion rates that are not too far off of what we're seeing on ios but the the sort of stereotype definitely still exists yeah No, that hasn't been true for us. I mean, I think it's maybe a little bit different as a market, but also our product is a little bit different. So I think as we sort of continue to make sure that the Android app has parity with the iOS app and that we're providing a real value, then I think...

I think people who see value in the product are willing to pay for it regardless of what platform they're on. You've expanded the team. Obviously, the app is doing well and is profitable, so you're able to pay for that there. But then you've done another thing, which a lot of... Indie developers who start out bootstrapped don't really, I don't even know that most people even consider you did some fundraising. Can you explain like why you decided you wanted to do that?

Yeah, absolutely. So I so last, I think, December, last December, January, I ended up deciding to raise money from from a small group of VCs to fund kind of this next stage. of growth for the company and the app. And definitely not something I did lightly because, you know, at that point we already were making, I think, you know, November of last year.

The app was making $70,000 a month. And so there was no pressing need. Yeah. Like, you know, we could clearly could have continued to grow. And you've explained how important your sort of mission is to this. And sometimes. depending on who you're raising from, that can really alter that. So I imagine there's a lot of decisions to make there. Yeah, I mean, I definitely put a lot of thought into it. I really want to be able to take this as far as I can. I want the...

category leader to be an app that is authentically part of the community. I think there's such a classic... narrative where the early scrappy authentic team gets crushed by sort of the cash grab like you know kind of whatever like people who are just in it for the money and they come in with the funding and they just sort of obliterate everybody else. I didn't want that to be this story. Had you seen the big competitors coming in already?

we hadn't but i was uh i knew that it was just a matter of time yeah yeah and it did it did happen so you know i knew that it was going to happen and i was like okay well I don't want that to be this story. I don't want it to be like, oh, yeah, they were first and they were real, but they weren't able to stay in it when the people with the money came in.

And so so there was that kind of wanting to make sure, like, all right, let's let's actually think about the big picture here and how far we want to take this. And like, let's not say like. tiny. Let's really think about growing. And then also I knew that I had kind of this previous startup experience. I had a lot of connections already.

In investor communities, I knew that there were a couple of firms that I actually really wanted to work with, that I knew we would be aligned on priorities, because that is a real risk when you take outside funding, you know, you're sort of inviting.

other decision makers into the process that aren't necessarily aligned with how you want the business to run. And so if I hadn't had those existing connections, I would have been a lot more hesitant to bring in people who might have changed the trajectory.

But that's not true for every single potential partner out there. There are a lot of different VCs that have a lot of different approaches. And I knew that... being able to work with teams that were really product-focused, that really understood the importance of making a great experience for the users and having that be the driver of growth.

was possible. And so, so yeah, it seemed like a real kind of like a win-win for both, you know, our users and the investors to be able to, you know, build something great that could be as big as possible.

And when was this that you raised that round? It finished in like January, so 10 months ago. So it's been a little while. How has that changed things? Like you said, you already had, you know... profitable business so it's not like we were about to die and now we're not but like right has it changed the trajectory or changed how it feels to to work at the company yeah i think well i think so i mean for me and a lot of the people i wanted to work with we're not coming from

family money or like generational wealth. Like we didn't have the kinds of safety nets I think that people sometimes have when they take the leap to work at a startup. And so even though the company's revenue was already... good it was still sort of month to month and there was the risk of like well what if we have a couple of bad months like yeah

You know, can people really afford the risk of joining this company? So it gave all of us the peace of mind to be able to jump into this. You know, I left my day job. You know, the people. Was that the point when you left your day job? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. So like even just at a purely personal level, it gave you that confidence that...

I can go all in this now. Yeah, exactly. So I think having that baseline of like, OK, we're going to be able to navigate this, even if we have a couple of bad months, we're going to be all right. So that immediately changed the trajectory because we were able to really invest in full-time employees in a way that it had been sort of part-time contracting before, including me. It's also opened up a lot of connections into...

communities that I didn't already have a lot of access to. And it's given us the resources to be able to invest in being able to bring on people who I think would have been challenging otherwise if we were trying to... bootstrap this so like we brought on our first chief science officer a couple of months ago and he's amazing his name's eric praxless like he was formerly uh

Chief scientist and CIO for informatics at the FDA had to handle data privacy in a consumer health app. So that was a really important... you know, higher for us was like making sure like, okay, we're working with consumer. health data like people are entering sensitive information here like we're not a medical device but we want to make sure that we're doing this the right way and so yeah he's really helping us navigate that and making sure that we're

you know, staying safe and like making sure that privacy is our number one priority when we're working with the data. And then also like, you know, helping us with the science behind it and making sure that we're presenting accurate information to people and that we're being as helpful as possible without being a medical device. These types of...

Things would be hard to do if we were trying to stay a scrappy bootstrap team. Yeah, for sure. If I remember correctly, you don't have a traditional board, but something like a board, right? With the investors. Yeah, so our... So we don't have a board, so the... Funding that I raised earlier this year, you know, late last year was a pre-seed round and it was on a, you know, the YC like safe note. So we're kind of too early to have a proper board.

What we do have is, you know, because our investors are just so smart and so well connected and, you know, so good at this, I ask them. if they could participate in a monthly check-in call. And so we all get together. And I think it kind of feels like that type of thing. Yeah. And so it's great. I get a chance to sort of update them on what we're doing. And then they are able to.

give me their input and advice. And a lot of really wonderful stuff has come out of that. Like, I mean, you know, honestly, like the connections into, I didn't know anybody at the FDA. Yeah, exactly. I think that's one of the... underappreciated i mean anybody in like startup world is going to laugh at me because it's probably highly appreciated but in the like indie or enterprise world like i've always grown it up in i think one of the underappreciated things about

raising around is having advisors, like getting people who are well connected or have a lot of experience that you don't have. I know companies that don't need more money, but they will take a dilutive round that lowers their, you know.

ownership of the company to get a board member because that's such a powerful thing and so i think i always think about it or grew up thinking about it as like you're giving up you're giving yourself a boss and it's like it changes everything but you're also getting a partner Yeah, I mean, I think it definitely helped that I already kind of had some experience navigating the investor space and that I understood kind of how their business works on their side of it.

You know, I think something that's so important when you're trying to decide on the trade-offs between, you know, growing organically versus taking outside funding is it is so crucial that you understand what their priorities are and that your priorities are aligned. Because the last thing you want to do is raise money and then, you know, raise money on sort of false pretenses and then, you know, have to follow through on that, you know, because I have a very clear idea about how I want.

this business to grow and you know how i want the users to be the top priority and you know like for me it was really important to work with investors who who shared the same vision for the growth journey here and you know We both agree that this is a venture scale opportunity because of the nature of the market and all of the advantages that we have being the first player in the space. But if I had tried to work with somebody who...

wanted to go after the opportunity from a different angle. Like I talked to investors who I did not go with who were like, who saw an opportunity to do this as an advertising. funded business. I was like, I've worked for companies that were ad funded before. And that's a very different model that I think really changes the relationship with the user. And so for me, it was really important to

to find partners that we could really share the vision and where it feels like we really are working together on building this. That definitely makes sense. And I've not gone through that journey personally, but... It's scary, but also it's really cool whenever you see the sort of alchemy work out. It's, I think, rare to be in a position when you're early on to be able to choose your investors. Yeah, where you're not just desperately taking whatever money you can get. Yeah.

All right. Well, I am basically at time here. So I want to make sure I have some time to ask the question that I always ask in the show. even though it's been a while since I've done this. And that is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you that you'd recommend others check out?

When it comes to running this business and going through the day-to-day experience of building this app and building the company, the people that are most inspiring to me are the users. It's the people who are using the app. paying for the app and most of all the ones who are writing into our customer support inbox being able to listen to what they want and then and turn that into

The sort of the product roadmap and turn it into the tools that they want to be able to use things that I wouldn't necessarily think of that, you know, aren't just living in my head. That's what keeps us going. I think that's what gives us the. the desire to keep working on this is knowing that there's all of these important things that people want to use.

that's what inspires all of us working on, on Shotzi. So I don't know if that's, maybe that's not, uh, no, no, I think you're the first person who said that, but that's, that's really interesting. What, I guess the, uh, You know, if I had to pick a link to something, would it be the sort of original subreddit that is that the sort of if you had to pick a single place that the community exists for you?

I know that isn't obviously representative of your user base anymore. But like with that, what is that original subreddit? I mean, unfortunately, I don't get to participate there as much as I used to. But yeah, it was the subreddit for ZepBound. Z-E-P-B-O-U-N-D. And yeah, huge shout out to the community there and especially to the moderators there who do a lot of really important work to keep that community high quality. I know how hard that is. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Awesome. Well.

Thank you so much. You made this very easy for me to get back into doing these. So I really appreciate that. This was super fun. Where can people find you and your work? Yeah, well, definitely, if you are taking a GLP-1 medication or interested in taking a GLP-1, definitely check out the Shotzi app. It's just shotziapp.com. And we're on iOS and Android. And yeah, we'd love to have you.

you awesome thank you so much charlie uh it's it's really been fun getting to talk to you about this and i i hope that we uh get to cross paths again at the at the next big event definitely thank you so much for listening You can find more launched at launchedfm.com. And you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm at underscore Chucky C on Twitter or Charlie M. Chapman pretty much everywhere else.

And of course, huge thanks to RevenueCat for making this episode and all future episodes of Launched possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.