How to Build a Brand: Wearable Tech with Carter Fowler

His background is actually in chemical engineering and then moved into the kind of chemical formulation world then into electronics. Was in algorithmic trading for a while before we connected. Uh, but Chase and I met each other while we were both consulting for another startup, and this was two years ago. It was a medical device company. Mm-hmm. Chase was leading all the product development and I was leading all the go to market.

And we're very different people, very different personalities, but we do share a sense of humor and that was the thing that bonded us initially. And uh, chase is, he's one of those guys that always has things that he is working on in his own time. You know, they're always a hit at the party because they have some kind of cool thing they've been working on. And everybody always reacts, oh my God, that's amazing. You should sell it. You would make millions. Right?

And Chase's response to that always was. It's much more difficult to commercialize a product from a cool concept like this than I think you understand. And that's just not the kind of the core skillset that Chase has. Uh, but one day after work, we kind of had our feet kicked up on the desk and he was walking me through just some gadgets and things he'd been working on in his own spare time. And he told me this story about his very first ever music festival, and this caught my ear because.

I come from a long family of musicians, uh, like generations of musicians, in fact. But this is not something that Chase and I necessarily had in common. And so when he told me about this music vessel experience, I was so excited. But that first day at EDC Orlando in 2019, chase had his phone stolen. And you know, there's about 300,000 people that attend this festival in Orlando every year. It's massive.

So. Chase, uh, you know, had his phone stolen within a couple hours, lost his group in the crowd, and then there he was all alone. He'd never been in an environment like this before and he was looking around at all these people wearing various, you know, light up jewelry and accessories and thinking to himself in classic chase fashion, not even really paying too much attention to the set. I think I could make two of those bracelets that are lighting up on everyone's wrists.

You could pair them with each other and a light would revolve around the bracelet and point at its peer at any time. And this could work without cell service or internet connection or wifi or anything. And when he told me this, he told me a couple of other ideas before, but you mentioned that to me and I just stopped him in his tracks. I was like, wait, let me just get this straight.

You think you know how to make a bracelet that can work without any cell service or internet connection whatsoever, and can always point to its peer and just tell you the direction to walk. Said, yeah, I think so. I've got it all kind of scoped out in my head and my response was, well, I don't need to hear any of the other ideas. I would buy that in a heartbeat. I think a lot of other people would as well.

I think I know why they would and, uh, I would love to take that to market with you after this project is completed that we're working on. Uh, so that was, you know, late summer 2023. We began working on the product and you know, going through prototypes very quickly, we left the bracelet idea behind 'cause it just wasn't that great of a user experience. Just on a basic level. Of course, if you think about how you might hold your arm.

When you're navigating with it, the light when you're walking that direction would always be on the opposite side of the wrist, so you couldn't necessarily keep an eye on it. Um, and two, just from my background in go to market and uh, marketing, I understand that when you're bringing a new product, especially if it's based on new technology to market, it makes your life so much easier if you lean on things people already understand.

You know, and you can kind of pull that background context from them already to shorten the learning curve about your product. So what is one thing that everyone in the world, regardless of economic status or culture, knows about the compass? Right? It's one of the most ancient forms of technology that we have today, and people still use it. And so we started putting these ideas two and two together, because if you think about it.

How many words could you use to describe this bracelet that helps you find your people?

It points you to what you want most in the world as long as what you want are the people that you love. And so that allowed us to shorten it down to Friend Finding Compass, which, you know, if you can describe a brand new tech product in three words and it just clicks and everybody understands exactly what it does, wow, it's gonna make your life so much easier. So, uh, early last year we were in our early prototyping phase and we kind of decided on the form factor.

But one thing we wanted to make sure was that it would always remain a wearable, just like that bracelet, because we wanted it to feel like jewelry, feel like something that could be a part of your experience, not just some product you need to lug around with you, um, and actually be very beautiful and eye-catching for others.

But precisely because we weren't beginning this with deep pockets, you know, we weren't beginning this with a bunch of investor connections. I know you mentioned our pre-seed round that we've closed, we raised a little over $1.3 million. Only two of the 24 investors in that round did I know before this, and one I met very recently. Mm-hmm. So, you know, we didn't have the connections, we didn't have the massive account, you know, half a million dollars in savings to start this.

And so I learned a very important lesson from studying the founder of Liquid Death. I listened to a couple of interviews from him and about the importance of if you don't have that kind of budget, then you need to make a product that can effectively market itself.

All it needs is a line of sight to the sky. Between two of them. The range goes around two thirds of a mile, but everyone in the area, even if you don't know them, just acts as a node in our mesh network and extends your range. So when you think about it like that, and of course it's peer-to-peer, it's about bringing people together. So there's several layers of network effects that we worked into. The product design itself, how the product performs, and even our pricing. Mm-hmm. So on one hand.

It's kind of the opposite of a phone. You know, the more phones you get in a place, the worse they all work. The more totems you get in a place, the better they all work. The more totems in an area, the more valuable they become and the better they perform. Second, they only increase the value to you as a user. The more of your friends that you know that have one. Right. Just owning one in and of yourself, the best you can do with that is find north and look great. Mm-hmm. Which are.

Both valuable use cases, but it's even better to actually find your friends. So, you know, very few people ever buy one, like our average cart size is four totem compasses. Mm-hmm. Then we also roped that into our pricing strategy from the beginning as well, where as you buy more, they get more affordable.

Just to encourage that adoption, because we always knew that if we nailed the design and we got those network effects, right, once people were wearing them in the real world, it would naturally spread because they're such a great conversation starter, you know? Mm-hmm. In my experience, going to a music festival, at least. Five to seven people approach you every hour. Mm-hmm. And ask what that thing is on your neck. Okay. Uh, because it's just so eye catching. Mm-hmm.

Especially as the night, as the lights go down, you know, it, it just draws all of the attention. So, um, that was a, a huge, huge focus for us. We just never expected those organic network effects to take off before people even had it in the real world, or had ever even seen it in the real world like it did last year when we went viral for the first time in February.

But in music festivals around the world, a totem is a large thing that people carry around with them in the crowd so their friends can see it and find them among the masses of people. So oftentimes it's, you know, like an extendable rod with some hilarious snippet, like a meme on the top, some snippet from a show. Sometimes it's a light up teddy bear on top. Who knows? It could be any number of things that your group identifies with.

And because it had, you know, it was just another layer of leaning on knowledge that people already have in the space to make explaining it simpler. Mm-hmm. So anyone who knows that about the space, when they hear it's called the totem compass, those two things, they can just kind of intuit what it does. So began with the, the name.

We did play for a while with calling it something far more literal Fest Compass, uh, because we thought it might be a little bit more friendly for international users. 'cause Fest is a pretty, it holds its definition mm-hmm. Among a lot of different languages. But once we settled it on totem. We worked this whole brand around appealing to and kind of personifying, really illustrating the environment within which it was designed to be used. Mm-hmm.

So, you know, our original use case in the core was music festivals often happening at night. So, you know, it had a dark background aesthetic. We had a lot of, uh, colors, you know, pink, indigo, purples that kind of mimicked the lights and the lasers you may seen in these settings. Then the really fun process began getting into the, the logo. You know, I designed all of the brand myself. We used no external people, and this is what was so important in allowing us to do this without a budget.

Mm-hmm. Because Chase could prototype and develop these things himself. It was just his time. And I've been doing this for years for clients, uh, you know, building their brand and going through brand strategy. So. Getting into the logo, the brand Mark was actually very thought because we played with a lot of different ideas, but it all kind of came back to this idea of the crystal. The crystal in the middle of this compass year was the one most common theme throughout the entire process.

When I met Chase, he had a prototype of a beacon, which was just a crystal that he had printed out and was like, man, I think people would love to wear this. 'cause who doesn't love crystals? We spent so much time on the design of the crystal itself because it's in the product, but it's also in the brand. And the brand contains the visual of the product. The product contains the brand. It's this whole kind of infinity mirror effect cascading down.

We must have gone through 40 iterations of the crystal itself. Yeah, and it looks very simple when you see it now, right? But you can see it has four aspects here, and even within it, the facet. Makes a T shape, right? Yeah. And so that's the exact shape that we took to use for the T in Totem, in the language. The O in the brand. Mark is an abstract representation of the product itself.

It is a colored circle with a smaller colored circle inside it, and then the crystal in the middle of it, and then of course within the crystal here. You can collect your four friends into the four facets, and so it's like the product is in the brand, the brand is in the product, the t is in the crystal, the crystal's in the name, like it's, it's all this kind of cascading effect because we wanted it to seem totally seamless, the entire experience.

Mm-hmm. But I am happy to share that due to all of our very hard marketing work over the last year, we are now top three on Google. Through SEO for the word totem, which we thought would take much longer time. So we're, we're climbing there.

Our own colloquial language, you know, this is not a button, this is the touch crystal. Right. Okay. Like the language we refer to it is so important and we've been highly precise. Even this ring that goes around it, we don't call it, you know, a dial or a ring. We call it the halo. The language has been so important and really stripping down the feature set, the marketing drove a lot of our product decisions early on. Mm-hmm.

I know how important it is to be able to explain how to use something in three steps on a website, right? Mm-hmm. You want that? 1, 2, 3. Here's how it works. Mm-hmm. And because we can confined our explanation to that, it limited the feature set quite significantly and made the product much simpler and more intuitive for people. So, you know, it was. Bond with your tribe, find your tribe, and then vibe with your tribe. Mm-hmm.

And the bonds is a whole very important thing as well, because if you think about, this is all about human relationships. That's the reason why anyone cares about this. And so when you bond with someone and you're tracking your bonds, we use that language very specifically. So when it comes to websites, once you have the design aesthetic down, you know your general brand guidelines, I'm a firm believer that you need to get the messaging in place first.

The information, the copy, the content that informs the design, the design should be formed around that rather than in the opposite For many years as a consultant, when I was, you know, doing web strategy and web design for clients, that's not the norm. The way it goes usually when you hire a consultant to build a website is they might do some brand strategy work for you, help you build your brand guidelines, and then they design the website. Then you fill it in with what you want it to say.

That's the wrong way. It's you're beginning at the end. You need to begin with the words, because words are what, sell things. Getting your words right is the most important thing, and then you can build the design around it. So, you know, once we kind of built out that language, then I built the whole website myself on Webflow, which is my favorite tool, uh, for building websites. You can do really amazing, dynamic animated things on there without really needing to get too deep into the code.

And it's sitting out in the driveway. You go out and talk to him and you ask him why he bought that car. It's gonna list out all of these reasons, you know, oh, the handling was great. I love the color. It gets great gas mileage. You know, you should sit in the interior. But these are all just justifications that they've worked out after the fact to explain why they made the purchase. Because we all feel like we need some rational explanation for things like this.

We know the real reason he bought that new Mercedes. It was emotion. It was about status. And so to the same extent with this product, people talk about the main reason they bought it was because they need to find their people, whether it's their children, their friends. But I think the bigger reason why they bought it, you know, that's how they justify it. But the much bigger reason is because it looks beautiful.

It just looks really cool and uh, yeah, you can wear it like this and it just accents everything. So emotion drives purchasing behavior more for customers than logic, and that's the power of design.

Yes. Uh, it's just like there's no problem in there, but you just create some, you know, justifications in your mind because you like the other boot matter than the second boot, something like that. Anyway, there is an important thing that I recognize because usually oftentimes with the new product development and getting right funds and so on.

There is a tendency in the startups postponing the branding and marketing part a little bit towards the other phases, and then making something scrappy because just make sure that you have an initial product that you can showcase to the. Investors so that you can get some funding, and with that funding money, you can do branding and marketing.

I see that you did product design, product development and marketing hand in hand, which is not always the case for many of the startups, and I understand that you seen a lot of value in that.

To really create a movement and create something that people are passionate about and want to share with other people. 'cause of course, if you can unlock that desire, people want to share it, then it's going to make your whole life so much easier to do that. You need something more than just something for people to buy. You need something for people to buy into.

Yeah. And so that's where a story, that's where a brand comes in and I think, uh, a lot of founders get pulled off base because that doesn't just apply to customers. That applies to investors as well. Mm-hmm. You know, it has to be a pretty wild product solving a huge problem. And they probably need to know you earlier as a founder. For you to be able to get funding just on that. Right. But we didn't have those deep connections, so we needed to build a brand and a story.

Hmm. That's something for people to get excited about, for people to follow along with. Mm-hmm. And ethos for them to buy into, you know, if you get your branding down at the beginning, and it makes such a big impact on your marketing down the road because you get compound interest off of every single post, every single campaign you make. 'cause it's all building from a central, consistent place. And that is your brand identity.

Um, and do customer research. During the early days from October, 2023 to January, 2024, I probably spent at least three hours a day every day just talking to people in this space about their experience, how they think about this problem, memories, stories that they have had. The important thing when you're going through that is to not bring up your product. It is not about your product. It is about them.

The second you start bringing up your product and asking questions about that, they will give you leading dishonest answers because we all want to make people happy and we want to please them, and so they will start telling you what they think you want to hear. So I think that was actually a huge role in. Setting the stage for us to have that viral glow up.

Um, starting last February, which has continued even through last week, a year later was because when that initial post went up, that ended up doing like 45 million views online. We only had about 600 followers online, but I would say half of those I had talked to for hours. And so they all felt connected with it, and I had learned so much from them about how they would like to use this and the ways that it would help their lives.

What's important to you, because we could have made it something that was bigger and heavier that could go a week on a battery charge. Now, there were a lot of design decisions to make. You can kind of work around it a bit if you're targeting the right market for yourself. You know, people talk so much about product market fit, but far more important than that as founder market fit. You know, are you the right person to bring this product to this market?

That's the most important thing, and it allows you to shorten the timeline in this learning because you can, to an extent, do customer research just by writing in your own journal. Yeah. Because you are in that segment and so it makes things easier, but that can only take you so far. And so the customer research, all these conversations over and over again were very important.

But of course you need to take them all with a grain of salt because a lot of those conversations I had early on, especially with, you know, experts in the space and investors. Told me that this was a dumb idea. The customers didn't think that that was the case, but many people who you would classically pay more attention to said, no one wants another piece of hardware. No one wants something to lug around with them. Why are you targeting festivals with this?

I think the real market for this is defense applications. You need to be pursuing, you know, grants from the government, et cetera. But the answer is, well, this is the market I know. We are going to focus on what we know. 'cause I don't know anything about the defense industry. Maybe I could learn it in three years enough to sell at a mediocre level. But you know, we know this space and that has proven very effective for us because it allowed us to get all of this traction.

And now we're in a position where we can make intentional steps into other markets from this beach head that we've established.

So it's just like, I. That you might wanna pilot to another direction, uh, but at least you are now building a brand based on a very clear understanding of the audience, in my opinion. So after you spoke with these people and then mm-hmm. You mentioned about a post that went viral. Was it the first post or what type of a post is that and why that viral.

So to take us back, you know, this was about two or three weeks before South by Southwest, the Creative Industries Expo in 2024. We had gotten accepted into their startup village there, which was super exciting. That was the moment when we thought the world would find out about the totem compass for the first time. I'd actually applied for that before we even incorporated a company. I. Because I know the importance, like what we were saying earlier, you need something for people to buy into.

It's not just about a brand, but a story as well, right? You need like these points, these central plot points, especially in your first year or two of a company to really build this compelling story. And I knew that product debut at the world's largest music and tech conference. Perfect for us. So here we were about three weeks before South by Southwest. Again, we still had maybe 50 subscribers to our newsletter, totem Tuesday, and then maybe we had 500 something followers on Instagram.

I think this was our only account at the time, probably. Here I was getting ready to go to this big conference. We are a tiny little startup with two full-time co-founders and no real funding. Uh, we did get a one $10,000 check from an investor just to help us cover the cost of travel and lodging to South by Southwest

And so I went to produce this myself, built the whole thing. Um, and that Friday when I finished published it on the website, I just took one clip from that homepage video and threw it up on Instagram without much of a thought. Simple, simple video. It's just my hand over my desk at home. You know, we didn't even have an office at this point with three prototypes.

Two of them are on the desk and I'm just rotating it and it's just a demo, like it's just two lights on it pointing at those other two, and it's about six seconds long. And all it says is Friend finding Compass for festivals. Incredibly simple. I went to sleep, didn't think much of it. Woke up the next morning, went to the gym, et cetera, uh, around 3:00 PM I opened Instagram and the emotions in that moment, it was so insane.

Um, to take you back to that, you know, like I said, we had about 500 followers. That next day when I logged on, we had about 30,000 and it was growing quickly. We had thousands of dms. That post had over, I think now it has maybe around 40,000 comments on this. Right. And it's exciting. It's also terrifying, like considering the fact that this many people, um, are all coming on there. It's hard to even conceptualize that these are individual human beings.

Um, and so, you know, every time logging on the account, I had never seen this before and I realized how novel of an experience this is. You know, if you have more than 99 notifications. Or hundreds of notifications or dms. Um, on Instagram, when you log in, it just says 99. 99 99 across it. And so usually, you know, some of us might be able to experience that if you had a big Instagram account and didn't check it for a few months. Right. You know?

Yeah. But this was every time I would open Instagram. Even if it was two minutes later, it would be all 90 nines across as well. It was flooding in, our website was breaking, um, our wait list spreadsheet was coming apart. Like we literally didn't have enough bandwidth to handle the traffic on the website. Um, and it was chaos at the time. It was just me and Chase. And Chase isn't gonna be over there. Um, you know, answering comments on Instagram, that's not his role.

And all of a sudden I basically had a, what had turned from a concept and an early stage startup to. A company almost overnight. And so we needed to run all these things because we'd just gone from, I mean, iter, we put up our wait list three days before this on the website, before it went viral. And thank God that we did because we were able to capture that moment and that really kickstarted things for us because that was about two and a half weeks before South by.

We made our first employee hire the week of South by, I onboarded her that Monday and her first job was to book our flights to Austin because we're going to South by Southwest on Thursday. And so, yeah, we had to scale incredibly quickly because all of a sudden there were tens of thousands of people all around the world who considered themselves our customers, despite the fact that it was just a wait list. And you know, we hadn't taken any funds yet.

So we were in this interesting position with massive international demand. You know, this had spread because anything that spreads organically and virally like that, it crosses countries, demographics, interests, like it just becomes a natural phenomenon. And we needed to scale incredibly quickly to meet that demand because it happened before we even had a fully functioning product.

And so that's where the idea for Totem Tuesday came about. And that was the very first piece of marketing that we did. Mm-hmm. And I think the first Totem Tuesday got sent out to 11 people. Mm-hmm. Um, but the concept has stayed the same the entire time. Every week we've been doing this for about 18 months now. We share three things. We accomplished, two things we learned. One thing to look forward to, and that's kind of been the hub of it all for us.

It brought us almost all of our investment for the pre-seed round. Mm-hmm. It, you know, inspired trust and familiarity among our customer base. When we were going through all the pains of trying to roll out a brand new tech product to tens of thousands of people all around the world and all the hiccups and unexpected bends in the road of that. It was the gift that kept on giving. Mm-hmm. And I don't, we wouldn't be here today without it.

You know, I recently learned all about, uh, red Bulls founder and how he kind of actually encouraged those myths. I don't know if you remember this back in the day when people were all spreading myths that, um, red Bull actually maybe contained like bull semen. Do you remember this? Back in the day, there's like this cult, I didn't know that Urban legend and Red Bull and Red Bull actually fed this. They didn't create this, but they fed this.

And so maybe some of the speculation actually served us. Mm-hmm. Uh, but I do know it would've made things simpler if we had at least some FAQs on the website. If we had not just a wait list, but had a way for people to actually pre-order, because all that we were taking from people was your name, your email, and then with this projected pricing up here, how many do you think you will like?

We didn't have a online store set up yet, and so we knew that we would probably go into Shopify long term and ended up looking at is there any way to run this through Shopify? Shopify is not exactly made to do pre-orders or pre-sales, but uh, we found a company that has an app add-on that's called Submarine that is used to doing kind of similar like presale things for. Mattel in the past and some other big companies, and it was a, you know, kind of a complicated process.

Uh, merging that in through submarine actually giving everybody a link because what we wanted to do, the ideal was send an email out to everybody, have them click the link and it already pre-populated with their order info. Right? Make it as simple as possible.

This is a pretty complicated thing to pull off in digital marketing, and I still remember the day that we sent it out with all that custom code in that email with that link going on and just like praying that it would work for everybody and then sitting back and watching as the orders rolled in very triumphantly. It was great.

Using with the kids, especially before they hit that teenage where you wanna have a smartphone in their hands.

So all the feedback early on, as I mentioned earlier, was very skeptical, got very little traction. You know, people kind of viewing it as like. A flippant thing, uh, not too serious, you know, it's for music festivals. People who go to music festivals aren't even that serious of people. Um, you know, it's pretty like, this is too simple of a problem to solve. Getting lost. Uh, why not do it with an app?

So I think I pitched maybe the first 12 in a row and got resounding rejections every single time. But you know, we just kept going and kept seeding that Totem Tuesday newsletter every week to those people so they could watch our progress. And of course, it came down to the reason we were able to get that first check in the door was because we had something big coming up that could be big for the company that was south by Southwest. That was the reason for that first check to come in.

And again, it was just enough to cover our like travel and lodging, but it was something substantive for someone to invest in that if it went well, of course this could result in a great return.

I don't really regret any of it, although it was very demoralizing at the time.

Um, what are the things that impress them a lot?

Like I mentioned earlier, you know, based off of watching this and feeling that this was a team who was on admission and was gonna do something big, just because we proved it with the work and with the progress, how many people do you know during that early of a stage that take time to put together a thorough, long newsletter filled with all kind of details every single week? Uh, you know, I think for that first year I probably spent.

Four hours every single Tuesday, and that's a lot of time when there's just two people on the team and this is the CEO doing it. So the story is the most important thing, getting your pitch down, understanding who you're talking to and what things to emphasize. After that first conversation, they get about 60% there and kind of know whether they're going to invest or not. Then they're just looking for. Reasons to back out, and so that's the role of the deck. Mm-hmm.

That's the role of the details and the materials is just to show them that you have done the thinking, you have covered the details, and just make sure that they don't get any reasons to back out, but that doesn't get them to Yes. That just gets them to not come off of. Yes. Off of the initial interaction.

We've still, to this day, spent less than $2,000 in ads in the whole lifetime of the company, and we generated about 130 million views on social media last year alone with practically no ad budget. So we wanna keep feeding what works. Feeding the community, making it very shareable. We don't plan for advertising to ever be a big part of this for us. I especially over the last year, have come to feel very strongly that advertising is the cost that you pay.

For making a undifferentiated and or mediocre product. Um, if you're having to advertise it, then that means that people aren't willing to talk about it themselves and you wanna make something that's worth talking about. So most of our marketing investment will probably be related to things for our community and potentially working with more influencers and content creators because.

This next step we're making with our marketing, um, is based on some learnings that we found through talking with our customers over the last few months that's expanding to cover the families and parents market because about 10 to 15% of our pre-order customers, as we learned over the last few months, were parents who bought it to use with their kids and. That's pretty interesting. If you look at our marketing online, you know, it's pretty sexy.

Like there's like lasers and lights, you know, and women in body suits and you know, I'm even out there sometimes wearing a full body suit myself. And yeah, you look at this and you say, this does not make me think of something I need for my 7-year-old. But nonetheless, of our, you know, 24,000 units that were pre-ordered, about 3000 of them were pre-ordered for that purpose. And so we were hopping on calls with these parents to understand their psychology and what led them to this.

Because we're a young team here at Totem. You know, I have a lot of marketing experience, but I don't have any kids. I'm the second oldest guy here and I'm 32. There are no kids on this team. In fact, no one has any children. And this is segment that we wanted to learn about. And the interesting thing was almost none of those parents said anything about festivals. They were talking about using them for everyday purposes, amusement parks, trips with the kids.

So as we expand into that market, that's probably where we'll be leaning on external partners much more who understand that because, you know, we had so much success bring it to festivals because like I said, founder market fit is perfect there and that's what you need when you're initially going to market. But, um, there's a lot for us to learn about how parents think, and especially how five-year-olds use devices like this.

Does that scare you? Yeah.

Um, there are many, many family friendly festivals all around the world, and many of these festival goers, the first thing they do as they grow up, as they want to keep going, bring their kids along, you know, involve them in that culture. Uh, but another thing that we realized as well is maybe the greatest use case of them all for these families is.

While talking to them, we learned that there are thousands upon thousands of family friendly festivals that don't just take place for a couple of days. They take place every single day of the year all around the world. And those are called amusement parks. Mm-hmm. And amusement park is basically a permanent stationary festival at all times.

And so as long as we stay focused on this entertainment aspect and it being this fun product that solves the problem, I think we can thread the needle very well. But it is a really important thing, and we're even working through those problems ourselves right now. Particularly, how do we adjust our product page so that we're not tanking our conversion rate with either or, but it's a little bit more appealing to parents than it is right now.

There's definitely a lot of considerations to, to take into account.

Parents would be buying 40 or five or six years olds, but still maybe the vibe and the energy and the communication is really focused on that 18-year-old concert goer, uh mm-hmm. Vibrant young person. Um, so yeah, that might be a nice consideration to think, and this is why building brands is such a nice thing and, um, congratulations on this journey. It is. Thank you. Like I'm, I'm really proud of you really.

You know, we managed to get here to this point without really benefiting from any of them in person, but the reality is they're going to be tens of thousands of these at music festivals this year already, because that's what most people bought it for. And so I'm optimistic that the word of mouth, the just attraction to it, so many people, I mean, over 40 million people interacted with our content last year, just interacted with it.

That 40 million people trickle down into about 200,000 followers, trickle down to about 25,000 email subscribers. Trickle down to about, you know, six or 7,000 people who bought bundles of totems for them and their people. So

And, um, Chattanooga, it's kind of in a current heyday because it's the home of the world's first commercial quantum network and they were one of the first cities in the country to provide fiber optic internet 10 years ago. But originally it was known for the. Trains, you know, Uhhuh. And there was a very famous song in the early 19 hundreds called the Chattanooga Choocho. So there's this huge train station there that's kind of the iconic venue of Chattanooga. It's now turned into a hotel.

Um, and there's several pretty cool restaurants within that. And Frothy Monkey is a very vibey place. Uh, great food, great coffee. The only thing is a lot of people love it, so they're almost always out of something on the menu, so we might need to come in with a contingency plan.