Pushkin.
Bathroom infrastructure has always been a problem for me because I need a bathroom a lot, and I get frustrated when a bathroom isn't good. But I wasn't really necessarily sure that that was a problem for everybody. So I started doing this thing where I would interview everyone about their bathroom habits. And the most fun thing to do actually is ask if you ever get in an uber lyft, say, can I ask you a weird question? Where do you go to the bathroom when you're working?
This is Fletcher Wilson. He's the co founder and CEO of a company called Throne Labs.
I would get highly strategic answers, and what was revealing is just how big of a problem it really is if you're working from your car and you don't have an office bathroom.
Right, So, what are some of the strategic answers people gave?
You Never drink water or coffee on the job, which is a bad answer, right, or.
A sad answer?
Sad answer, or I know this one plays this one restaurant that lets me so I'm always trying to know. At four o'clock in the afternom I'm trying to get a ride there the most interesting was I'm driving on mission in San Francisco, and I asked the question, and he turns around and goes, you really want to know? And I said absolutely. He pulls over to the side of the road, which made me nervous, and reaches for his glove compartment, which made me more nervous, and opens
it up and pulls out a rolled up necktie. And I sort of was confused, And he said, with a smile on his face, as if he had sort of solved the mysteries of the universe. You know, all I have to do is whenever I drop someone off at a hotel, I throw this on and they think I am staying there and I get to use their bathroom.
Huh.
He had to put on a costume just to use an office bathroom, right, And that kind of put me on a journey where I was talking to police officers, people without reliable access to homes, parents with young children, athletes, you know, and everyone.
I have the good fortune to have worked in offices where I can always go to the bathroom, but there is on my route to work. It takes me forty five minutes to get to work on the subway, and there's a Whole Foods in the middle. It's the one on Houston Street by second half, and like more than once, I've been running down Houston Street and a sweat I'm halfway to work, heading for the Whole Food's toilet.
We've all been in that sweat run. I mean not all of us, but I'd say forty percent of the population, based on my discussions, has been in that situation before.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Fletcher Wilson. His company Throne Labs is putting new public bathrooms in cities around the country. His problem is this, how do you create public toilets that people actually want to use? As you'll hear, the answer in a combination of physical design, technology,
and a kind of social engineering. The conversation also points to some bigger ideas about how hard it is for cities to build and maintain pretty much anything.
It started by doing a lot of research on why there are many public bathrooms out there, and it's an interesting history to some extent. A lot of people point to this movement in the sixties and seventies called the Coalition to and Pay for Toilets in America.
Oh interesting, So what was the case before that? Like, what was the status quo?
There were a lot of put a quarter in and you can use the bathroom facilities actually in America and certainly in Europe, and that created the right incentives to provide bathrooms in some respects. So a lot of people point to that as why there are better bathrooms in Europe VERSUS America. So I think that's a big part
of it. I think there are more recent issues, I think safety and security, and in a lot of urban areas in the modern US city, there are a lot of cities, as we've talked to them, that are sort of nervous that bathrooms will become sort of a location for nefarious activity like.
Drugs and prostitution. I mean, is that said basically.
Sure, you name it, and it's a private space within a public space, and that makes city officials nervous. And in some cases it's true that it has been difficult with the old school bathroom infrastructure style to solve for that problem.
Okay, so this is why we can't have nice public toilets. What were you doing before, what was your job?
Thrown as my second company. My first company was a medical technology company with a catheter a piece of hardware, so I'm not afraid of building things in the physical world. That company was trying to solve a problem for people whose leg veins aren't able to properly pump blood back to the heart from the legs, and so we had a cather that went in recreated vein valves for people in their legs and so. And that company is still
going and I'm proud of it. But I think the link here is, first of all, it's all plumbing, veins and bathrooms, but really sticky problems that a lot of people don't want to try to solve.
So what's the moment when you decide to start this company.
I'm walking in San Francisco. I have to go to the bathroom and I see a porta potty and I try to go use it, and there's a lock on it. This is sort of a porta potty outside a residential construction site. And it sort of hit me. There are porta potties all over the city. They're not nice to use.
They're being used about one percent of the time. If that what if we could sort of, you know, create some sort of bathroom sharing system where the construction company is incentive ized or the person who's driveway it's on is incentivized to open up an elevated bathroom experience for anyone who needs it. Ha.
So that's Airbnb, but for toilets is essentially what you're imagining there.
Yes, I wish I could take credit for AIRPNP, but there actually was a predecessor company to mine that have that meme.
Oh interesting, and they were trying to do that.
That was more you can use my bathroom in my living room for a fee, and it didn't work. I don't think it worked.
Yeah, okay, so you have the idea and you start the company.
Well, you got to have a team, so pull together a five person founding team. First company was a solo founder journey. This one I decided not to do that. It's it's hard to start these things, and so I brought in a hardware guy. I found two people from the traditional portable sanitation industry who had owned and run one of those companies for a long time, which was very useful to understand what the old school portable sanitation industry does.
Like basically from the porta potty business.
Yeah, I always I try to extend it to make it sound even more glorified. But yes, porta potty business, which is great, has done a lot of great things, but we're trying to build sort of a new system on top of that. And then my last co founder, Jess, who brings this sort of grassroots marketing and sales side of how to sell to cities and get a bunch of people excited about something like this.
And so at some point you go from selling to people where the porta part is going to be in their driveway, to construction companies it's like you're gonna have one of these anyways to selling to cities and you know transitisms selling to the government basically, right, that's the model you land at. What how do you figure that part out?
There are three potential customers, the user, the city or companies like Uber enterprise, right, And we tried actually selling to Uber and Lyft and Amazon we have drivers, right, But I think the issue was twofold call us when you have ten thousand bathrooms all over the country, and to some extent, some of those companies aren't as in xentivized to provide a workplace benefit for their non W two workers, So that's a rabbit hole we won't go into.
Soh So basically, like the idea is like, hey, Uber, you could attract drivers by giving them bathrooms, which Lyft doesn't. But then you're saying legally, if they do that, they might have to hire their workers as W two workers instead of contractors. Like that's a risk, that's a risk.
Interesting and so a quick aside on selling to the user. I think we were never feeling very good about the idea of people paying to use the bathroom, especially in America, but we tried it. We played around with bathroom credits, and what you find is one out of ten people are willing to do it, or maybe one out of five. But then if there is a dribble of pee on the seat, you hear from them right, you don't want to pay for a bathroom and not have a perfect experience.
And while we try to provide a perfect experience every time, it's difficult. And so that just felt like an uphill battle to convince hundreds of thousands of people a day to make a different buying decision than they're used to and so you land on cities. So we land on cities, and.
So the big question is how do you keep people from going in there and doing drugs or like pooping on the floor or whatever. Right, how do you make it not a terrible public toilet? That seems like the fundamental hard question is that? Right?
I think that's one of two fundamental hard questions. I think, if I can back up, there's one other that I think is pretty critical, which is the difficulty of building physical infrastructure and the inflight ability of that. So the main solution for cities they don't use poor bodies. It's not a crowd pleaser, and so they typically build brick and mortar bathrooms or install these factory built systems that
will plug into the waste and water infrastructure. The problem is that takes two to three years, and it usually costs like a million dollars a bathroom, and then once it's down, maybe you picked the wrong spot. It's there for twenty or thirty years.
New York, in fact, just did that, and they even they bought like prefab bathrooms, but installing them like basically hooking them up to water and sewer I guess did in fact cost a million dollars a bathroom, which I mean, it still seems crazy to me. I know enough that it shouldn't, but like.
I feel like you could build an apartment for a million dollars and put a toilet in it. Yeah, like you actually could like buy a condo for five hundred thousand dollars or the toilet and it. Let you know, like it's there, Like there's an abundance problem here, right, I mean, I guess this is kind of part of what is enabled in your business. If it didn't cost a millionllion dollars to build a public toilet, literally, your business would be a less compelling proposition to cities.
I think that would take away half of our value proposition, which is this flexibility ability to you know, the original products back was a hotel, lobby bathroom that can be placed in a home depot, parking lot in an hour or less.
Yeah, so flexible installation. And then the sort of social norms. How do you keep very small percentage of people from ruining it for everybody?
And that's the other big piece, So.
Let's take them in order. There's first the how do you build a bathroom that doesn't cost a million dollars and that you can move around if you want to. Presumably that's that's better than a porta potty, right, Like we have a bad answer to that, which is the porta potty. But yeah, so how do you do that one?
Yes, better than a porta potty. So what you want to do is convince a user that they're at a
nice indoor bathroom. There's a lot of technology. This thing is basically a stationary machine with large holding tanks for water and waste, humps and sensors and master ration system to move this waste and water around, to allow a flushing toilet, a running water sink, and then all the other accoutrement of an indoor bathroom HVAC, you know, so air conditioning, heat, and ventilation, all on solar energy so that we don't have to necessarily plug into public infrastructure.
And so that was the challenge. And we started building one of these in my co founder Ben Clark's sideyard, turning his you know, two bed, two bath house into a two bed, two and a half bath house.
So we'll talk more about the physical thing that you build in a thick but there is this other problem, right, how do you keep it from getting ruined by some small number of people.
Yes, and this is a difficult problem to solve.
Seems harder than the physical piece at some level, or more complicated or something.
Absolutely, there is a social science aspect to this, there's an accountability aspect to this, and I think we focused our early experiments on sort of those areas. And I think the difficult thing you have to give up when sort of being excited about this concept a throne is, you know, attaching some form of accountability to your actions in a public space. And in order to do that, many of our users enter via some sort of phone number,
basically an SMS access system. But what that allows us to do is a you know, kind of create the sense of let's create a loyal, conscientious user base.
And just to be clear, the point of using a phone number is most people have one phone number, So it's essentially tying you using the bathroom to your identity. You are not an anonymous, truly anonymous user. You are one distinct person trackable at some level using the toilet.
Well, we don't care about your name, we don't care about your occupation, we don't want to know anything else about you. But you're not going to go get a new phone number just to use it.
So what do you want to know though, Well, like why do you want my phone number for me to go to the bathroom?
So two reasons number one and actually this is not as much the accountability. We want to ask you how clean the bathroom is, and if you enter via phone number, a huge percent of people tell us in hilarious detail what's going on inside there. So that's another piece of this.
Like so you text me afterwards and say how is it? And I text you back.
We text you as you go in, how clean is the throne or how does the throne smell? And we can ask different questions and people tell us they are eyes and ears, and we have a roaming labor force that is reacting in real time to those prompts.
So that's one reason.
Yeah. The other is for the less than one percent of people that are just not treating this like they would their home bathroom or using it for things outside of our sort of general terms and conditions. We can warn and block those users, and it's a very small percent.
This is things like refusing to leave drug use and leaving drug paraphernalia behind, other activities outside of bathroom use, and so there's obviously a technology problem of how can you understand who's doing those things without any creepiness, And so one of our company values is don't be creepy. There's no cameras, no microphone on the inside or anything like that, but like refusing to leave pretty easy to know.
And by piecing together sort of the comments from each user and knowing which, you know, phone number was associated with each use, you can start to pick up sort of statistically, people that are constantly the problem.
Basically if the person who comes in after you says it was totally disgusting, or there is a needle on the floor that gets pinned to the previous user. Just to be clear, I mean that seems like the simple version.
It gets flagged to the previous group of users, And if you happen to be in a group over and over, that is that is the yellow flag eventually becomes a red flag.
What percent of users wind up getting.
Flagged zero point one percent of users, one in a thousand.
Yeah, what's it take to get banned? Really?
It is repeated violation of these types of terms and additions, or one really bad incident, and sometimes It's as simple as one of our customers. The city will say, you know, the user that used the throne at ten forty two did X, Y and z, and sometimes that will lead to a ban. I didn't mention this. Another reason to make a bathroom smart is you can do things like the following. Our door is an automatic sliding door. It sort of acts as the bouncer. That's a safety precaution.
You don't want people coming in right after you. And then also there are incidents of overdose and it's actually really great feature that eventually the door will open and people will find you. And that has happened many times and lives have been saved actually with that feature.
So you can't like manually lock it from the inside, is what you're saying. At some point. It's like an electronic lock exactly.
And that's another big one. We sort of control the locking system. An audio feature will tell you, you know, the door will close and lock behind you, and we warn people, you know, very much before that happens, and the city actually gets to set the time limit they want. And this is a piece of our technology that rubs some people the wrong way. It's one of these crazy trade offs and when you're dealing in the bathroom world. But if you don't do that, there are real safety concerns
and people will stay there overnight and whatnot. And so we try to provide a good amount of time and a lot of notice. But again it helps when there is a safety issue there where in a normal locking, manual locking bathroom, a lot of people are just found in the morning dead right when there's an overdose.
So how long do cities choose to let people stay in the bathroom before it automatically opens?
Ten minutes is the shortest we use, and in some cities fifteen or no time limit.
Okay, And is there like just a small question that comes to mind, like a manual override? If I'm in there, can I unlock it if I want manually?
Absolutely so for anyone who's claustrophobic and thinking this is my nightmare, there's a manual handle to get out. It's more just that you can't lock it and stop people from coming in after the ten or fifteen minute timeline.
What has been like surprising to you about this sort of social dynamics piece of it.
I think that it's not what society might think would be the person causing the most problems I think is one of them. We have had city officials, one city official and obviously not going to talk about which very early on, where like that was the person that was causing problems and we stood firm, you know, you're not using our bathroom anymore. I think on the flip side, I always get the question of like, homeless people are always are just going to ruin this thing, and that
is not the case. I think we have found. We've put these in a lot of locations that have historically not been able to have bathrooms because of all the issues I mentioned with traditional brick and mortar where they were having to post up security guards outside, which is just not cost effective. And what we found when we put in these communities one example is sort of west Lake MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, is the people that
spend a lot of time there become our advocates. They come up to our cleaners and say like, we love this and oh, by the way, this person's causing problems. And it's so impactful for people that don't have regular access to a bathroom or have to feel some sort of maybe shamed to walk into an establishment to use their bathroom. It is not as easy for everyone to
do that. They do want nice things, and there are sort of greatest advocates and so happy about it, and that's something that a lot of people maybe wouldn't have thought of from the start.
What do you do for people who don't have phones?
It's a big one. Not everyone has regular access to a phone. It is my co founder, Jess knows. The number is better than me. Something like ninety two percent of people in urban areas have phones, but not everyone has a charged phone. And so we hand out TAP cards at various community service organizations or often in partnership with the city. Sometimes we even set up tables with education. Here's a card. It'll get into any throne for free. You can use it as many times as you want,
but we still can revoke access. So don't hand it to a friend, and don't do anything bad in the throne.
I mean, couldn't you just do something bad and then get another card.
Yes, And the idea here isn't to prevent people who make one mistake to ever use the bathroom again. The idea is to put some friction, some feeling of I might as well just clean up a little bit after myself use this bathroom for what it's needed, and that alone is sort of a power law improvement on how likely the bathroom is to stay nice and clean.
We'll be back in just a minute. What's the thing that you tried that didn't work?
Forcing people to download an app to use a bathroom.
That seems like a reasonable proposition. I mean maybe it's maybe you have to be a regular use. I don't know. I would think that that might work.
I would do it, and we have an app and people do use it. Uber drivers love it because it lets you, you know, see where other bathrooms are across the city. And my favorite memory is walking through Ann Arbor, Michigan and seeing an Uber driver pull up to and thrown and the door opens as he's getting out of his car, clearly showing that you know, he's been doing that every day and knows exactly the timing of hitting.
So like he's opened on his app from the car and yeah.
I was just like, we've arrived. But I think early days, we put one in Georgetown in DC at a farmer's market, back when you had to download an app and it's crowded. It takes four minutes to download an app. Sometimes people are so angry when you have to pee and download an app that like, we were shamed. I was about to take my throne shirt off and hide. But it was a great learning and that's when we installed the
Paul Wilson rule. That my dad is Paul Wilson, seventy six year old man, not the most facile with technology, and we said, Paul Wilson better be able to get in in ten seconds or less.
Uh huh. So how does it work now?
So you walk up to a throne, it will say free bathrooms, scan to use, and there's a large QR code. You scan the QR code, it automatically pulls up your SMS module with a phone number already prepopulated and a message prepopulated.
SMS module meaning a text.
A text yeah sorry send, it'll say send this message to use the throne. All you do is scan a QR code, hit s end and this door opens. A chime welcomes you, and a voice welcomes you, and you walk in. The door slides behind you. You have a flushing toilet, a running water, sink, music, You use the bathroom and everything is touchless, and you even wave to exit. On the way out.
So let's talk a little bit more about the physical thing. Since we're in the room now, does it smell like a porta potty? Tell me the truth?
No, Okay, our smell score right now is four point one out of five. So we have quantitative answers.
To this, and physically, how do you make that work?
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.
Your bathroom is not connected to the water or the sewer system of the city, right, so, like what's going on kind of behind the scenes. It just looks like a bathroom.
Basically, it looks like a bathroom. It looks like a cube. It is eight feet by ten feet by nine feet.
It's a pretty big bathroom, right, that's pretty big for a bathroom.
Yeah, it's a pretty large bathroom. It has a ramp and it's fully eighty eight compliance. Most people say it's much bigger than I thought. It would be like four porta potties, maybe five or six actually in square footage. And there's you know, vinyl wrapping design on the outside and sort of these instructions to get in as you walk in. We have this kind of jungle print wallpaper feel. All of this is intentionally designed to kind of dissuade graffiti.
All of it is anti graffiti coated, so if someone does do something, we can sort of wash it away with isopropyl alcohol or slap another leaf sticker on top. Is another cool tactic that we've learned, you know. As for your question about smell, I'd say our earlier units, and the only reason I hesitated is we're a company iterating all the time. Our earlier units were not as good about isolating these bad smells when you are holding
a large amount of waste on board. But we've gotten so much better, so our new units do not smell like a porta potty?
How does it work? Like, how does the plumbing work?
You flush a toilet? We do use a vacuum assisted flush, so it still has water, but it's about a quarter of the water usage per flush.
So like on a plane, is it that kind of vibe question?
In the design sessions, I said, I don't want this to feel like a plane. There's a whole nother tangent there about why that's so loud and the kind of HydroD and namics happening there. But no, it's not quite that intense. It's more just a light pull to allow kind of a quarter gallon of water to flush, which is very important, right.
You need less water because you just have a tank of water there on the building such as it is, right, you don't have you have a very limited water.
Supply, yes, yeah, And so it flushes through a macerat or a system. So we're this, you know, if you're eating breakfast, sorry, we kind of grind up what's going down there, which is helpful also if people put unwanted items down the toilet. And this is a very robust system. It's it's our most expensive component on the unit, which is sort of grinding things up and then using pumps
to pump it into a separate, large holding tank. And all of these things have sensors and in the back end we know when we need to add fresh water or pump the waste. And then you know, all the traditional indoor plumbing techniques to keep smells from seeping in are used, plus some since we're holding you know, basically a septic tank on board to kind of extra ventilate the system. And then you know, the other solved to
this is just ask people when it smells. And so every once in a while, particularly at low use units where we have to pump less frequently, and that ways to sitting there longer. We'll a user every once in a while will say it's starting to smell, and we will go clean the tanks or pump and kind of do a clean.
And then what happens when you leave? So you go to the bathroom, you just open the door manually right to get out, and then what happens.
Yeah, you either wave at a censor so you don't have to touch anything the whole experience, or use a manual lever to leave. That's when you'll get this text how clean was your throne? And we're only going to bother you once, but it helps to get a one to five score on cleanliness. And that's really it. The door is going to close behind you, and if there's someone else waiting on the ramp, they'll walk in next on a separate use account. Right, But that's pretty much it.
You're on with your day and we've solved your problem.
What percent of people reply to the how was it? Text?
Thirty to forty percent of text users and sixty to seventy percent of app users.
So about half yeah, which I guess is a lot replying to a random text about a toilet.
And it's all we need. And I think the more important piece is it's probably biased. Negative people are more likely to tell you when something's wrong. And the open text part, you know, you should see the messages we get. It's definitely a fun part of my end of my day to have a glass of wine and look through
the comments. But you know, people tell you know, sometimes it's just nice things about thanks for providing the service, but sometimes it's hilarious details about something that needs help. And so our users are our best sensors by far.
So where's the company now? Like, how many bathrooms do you have out in the world.
And where are they?
We have seventy four bathrooms across four metropolitan areas right now. We're in DC, LA, the Bay Area and ann Arbor, Detroit, and you know, designing where to set up shop because you might have realized by now we have a pretty significant operation. Right We controlled the entire design of the system. We partner with the manufacturer, Satellite Industries to build them
and then we ship them to the city. But then we have local ops team to run, the clean team, the pumping operations team, and the technician team.
Presumably you need some density of toilets for that to be at all economical. Right, you can't have one then it's too expensive.
Exactly, And around ten to fifteen units is sort of the starting point to justify our setting up local operations.
And what's it cost and what's the business model? More generally, like, how's how's the money side work?
Yeah, so we've kind of taken i'd say the high risk but long term value approach here, which is a recurring revenue business model. And so that's what's very different about.
That means toilets as a service, toilets as.
A service, and you mentioned the New York bathroom. You know, those are companies that are just selling a piece of hard hardware and then the city is in charge of doing all the insulation and by the way, all the cleaning and servicing. So a big part of our value
proposition is we take care of everything. But that means we get sort of a monthly piece of revenue from the city, which is based on how difficult that location is that might be high usage or an environment that's just going to take more oversight.
If that makes sense, what's the cost to have one of your toilets for a year, Like if I buy whatever more or less, what's the range for the city.
Fifty to one hundred thousand dollars a year per bathroom.
Okay, which, like if I didn't know how messed up cities were, would seem like a lot to me, right, like whatever, seventy five thousand dollars to have one toilet for a year. On a certain level, it's crazy.
I'm not saying it's a bad deal relative to the alternatives, but just in the abstract, it's sad that that's what we've come to at sub level. Not your fault, right, I'm not this is not your but it is wild at some level.
No, I think there is the sticker shock idea. I think people underestimate how hard it is to provide a nice bathroom for the public. But yes, it might feel high. Again, what really matters in a market is how much would
it cost otherwise? And I think the thing we've learned in our customers have started learning is there's almost no better value to get a ton of public appreciation, no matter your political affiliation, than that amount of money for all these users to just be surprised with this amenity that is actually nice. I think it doesn't work if it's a port of body. It has to be surprisingly nice, and it has to be in the right location. But I think we have to get over that initial sticker shock.
But we I'll say right now, we have not lost one customer in over two years.
I mean, what I want as a citizen is for somebody else to come along into what you're doing, to be the lyft to your uber right. I want people to get competed down to the marginal cost essentially. I mean, presumably also scale will allow you to lower the price if somebody is competing with you, right, Like, presumably if you could do one hundred in a city, it's going to be cheaper for you than ten in a city.
Yes, to the second point, I think, all so we're starting with the hardest spots.
When you say the hardest spots, what do you mean, just to.
Be clear, extremely high usage and high vandalism potential. I see, And I think we will come up with other product lines that serve other locations that can be cheaper to really satisfy our mission of you know, dramatically expanding bathroom access for everybody. So it might sound expensive, but keep in mind, that's solving the problem where a security guard is typically needed, which which is like twenty thousand dollars a month in those locations.
That's for like round the clock security guard presumably.
Which is tends to be what it takes in some of these locations to have a bathroom not fall apart within a couple months.
I know that you have a couple of patents one two three four oh six four four B two Systems and Methods for Managing Publicly Accessible Amenities System and Method for Advanced Portable Bathroom Facilities pending. Like what is the competitive landscape?
Like? First of all, the hilarious part of the intellectual property landscape is like every farmer in America has some toilet patent, right.
Yes, I did wonder about the defensibility of those patents to be honest, like, you know, non obviousness to someone skilled in the art as a criterion, Right, So I'd be curious to see.
Yeah, the white space all comes down to this accountability side of things, you know, the how do we use a smart piece of hardware to kind of, you know, basically manage a distributed bathroom user base. I'd say that's more where we focused on the intellectual property side, but you know, not trying to kind of patent a sensor
in a bathroom or something like that. But I think broadly the defensibility here is like six or sevenfold, and it really comes down to how difficult it is to stand up an organization with a scale manufacturing capability, a distributed municipal sales and marketing force, and local operations. It's just difficult to do all these things. And I think no one has has really ever put all the effort and by the way, capital risk to get this off the ground.
Yeah, so you mentioned capital risk, which is particularly pertinent given the business model you've chosen. Right, It's not like somebody's like, give us a bathroom. Here's a million dollars, and you go spend a million dollars to give them a bathroom. It's like, we'll pay you whatever, seventy five thousand dollars a year if you put a bathroom. And then so you have to pay for the bathroom up front. What's your cost more or less to get that physical bathroom?
Fifty thousand more or less. And we're working to get that down.
Tell me about growth.
We're on a little bit of an inflection point. We have, yeah, seventy four bathrooms, but another fifty or so already contracted and sort of on the way out.
In that same set of metros, that same set of cities exactly.
But we are kind of prospecting for the next three markets, which I think will be you know, in the first half of next year.
New York, New York.
So New York is buoys it on my list, and we've had kind of a long history of discussions. There some political uncertainty in that city right now, and it's a tricky operational city, so the right kind of deal to make it worth our while as well.
Tree operations just like hard to drive, hard to move.
Hard to get around in that city, right Yeah, but there's also and just each of those units is going to be one hundred and seventy uses a day. But absolutely we want to come to New York. I think twenty twenty seven is our goal for New York, if anyone's listening, and we would love you know, there's mandates in New York to bring two thousand more bathrooms over the next ten years, and we'd love to do that in one or two years. And we think we have
the solution for that. But I think what cities to choose is a huge question, and we have a lot of interesting insights from you know, we've got East coast, West coast, we've got cold climate, warm climate, and political differences, walk ability, drive ability, all these different things that feed into it, I think, and to some extent, we're at this place where we have cities a little bit competing with each other. You know, do you really want thrown here.
Let's get fifteen or twenty and we will come to you so that we can kind of set up shop in an economically efficient way. And there's also the more bathrooms, more density, the better service we can provide.
You think you'll expand beyond toilets.
No, I think there's so many temptations. An early pitch deck I had a sort of food locker for door desh to drop food off on the side of the outside of the bathroom and people could come pick it up. And I had an early investor say, never put food next to a bathroom again. So and you know, you could do scooter charging, you could do all these other things.
I think where we have come as sort of a management team is there's so many other bathroom problems to solve outside of I don't think this will be our only product. I think we are really interested in existing bathroom infrastructure and how to make that better and in
other kind of ways to solve people's bathroom problems. But I think we are focused on just being the best bathroom company, and having thrown be associated with a pleasant bathroom experience has a lot of interesting knock on effects and other kind of revenue streams associated with it.
I mean you mentioned existing bathrooms, like could you just put a new door on an existing bathroom and have it tied to somebody's cell phone number. I mean that seems like that would do a ton of useful work, Like there are already a lot of bathrooms they just suck.
Yes, I think if you think of it as supply and demand, you know the and I do. I think of bathroom demand as a thing, and you can kind of picture a city with these kind of hot spots and different times like this is when people need to pee and this is when people need to poop. And we decided to start by that, you know, dramatically expanding supply. But I think there's another approach, which is, you know, increasing the equality or efficiency of existing supply, and there
have been companies that have sort of tried this. I think what we would do is sort of, yes, bring this sort of accountability feature and kind of user driven kind of real time feedback to that space, and we're doing it. That is going to be a future piece of Thrones offering, because there's just so many of our own customers who say, like, we love what you're doing.
We've got all this infrastructure, can you help us manage these because it's a headache, and so you know absolutely that's going to be a piece of our future.
We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Let's finish with the lightning round, with the what a lightning round?
Oh?
I ask you a bunch of fast, random questions, like what's one thing you learned doing stand up comedy?
Oh my gosh, where did you find this on the internet? That I am not as good of a comedian as my.
Sister, Your sister, who, by the way, was a cast member on Saturday Night Live. Not trivial, but let's not.
Talk about her. She gets all the credit. This one's about me, fair, I'm kidding. Oh. One other thing, I one of the thing I learned in stand up comedy is don't invite your boss to your comedy show.
What happened when you invited your boss to your comedy show?
I bombed In the next two months were the most miserable work months of my life.
Was that causal?
Yeah, I don't know, Probably not unrelated.
Could have been. It'd be amazing if it was.
So. You have four kids, as I understand, how many toilets do you have in your house?
We have three toilets, which is one fewer than how many kids we.
Have, So three for six people.
That seems fine, it's enough, but I need more toilets proportionally per capita than most.
Uh huh. Yeah. We had two kids, and we had had lived in a one bathroom apartment a two bedroom, one bath and like the one toilet was much more of a constraint than the two bedrooms for four people, that's a tough ratio. It was a tough ratio. Best public bathroom you've ever used?
I was recently in Charlotte Airport. I feel like airports have really stepped up their game recently, and you have these sort of just red and green sort of available stalls that you just sort of have hand washing. Everyone goes in and it's very private. Each stall is like its own space with a floor to ceiling door and smells and materials, air quality. Everything was just on point. So I think airports are starting to do it right.
Thank you for your time. It was great to talk with you.
You too, Jacob, that was so fun. Thank you very much.
Good luck. I truly hope your bathrooms or someone's bathrooms come to New.
York, and when they do, I hope to see a message through SMS from you.
You better know it's me. I won't.
But if you say, if you write your name in, I'll know I'm not writing my name.
I'll respond, Okay, I'm still not going to do it. Pledger Wilson is the co founder and CEO of Throne Labs. Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was edited Alexander Garriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem