What Does it Take to Build a Thriving Medtech Startup?

[00:00:00] Jared: Welcome everyone. Welcome to our latest Design Inspired Healthcare webinar where we invite medical innovators to share their journey with the greater community. This month we're joined by Dr. Steven Goudy. Welcome Dr. Goudy. He's the Vice Chairman of Research at Emory Otolaryngology, very hard word to say.

He's an experienced surgeon and division director of a large multi-site ENT surgical practice, which you can see right there behind you. It's awesome. He's also the founder of Dr. Noze Best where he created the NozeBot. An infant nasal suction device, which has impacted, I think parents almost as much as children with the unique marketing approach that he has going on.

He is also recently the founder of Oridivus as well, which is a company focused on bringing regenerative strategies to oral wound healing. So he's a medical innovator, he's somebody that Ty and I like to say, is a unicorn in the field. We're very happy to have you here today, Dr. Goudy.

[00:00:49] Dr. Steven Goudy: Glad to be here. Thank you.

[00:00:52] Jared Gabaldon: Just kicking things off, I think we're very interested to know the origin story behind Dr. Noze Best. You're a practicing physician for over a decade by that point, and you're getting your MBA I think actually after you started Dr. Noze Best is very interesting. Did the chicken come before the egg? You always wanted to be in the business or, how did all happen for you?

[00:01:12] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think as all of us human beings on this planet, we encounter friction points in our lives, and as a medical provider, one of the things as a parent as well as a pediatric ENT or otolaryngologist is that we deal with a lot of nasal congestion, boogers, and so on.

My wife likes to take credit for developing the Nozebot, which is our first device, Dr. Noze Best, to address nasal congestion in babies. So it's really problem, solution. And then understanding you don't have the background to actually solve that problem, if that makes sense.

[00:01:42] Jared Gabaldon: Absolutely. And so did you decide to undergo your mba because you wanted to navigate the field of business better or just because you love learning and it's your thing as a physician already.

[00:01:55] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah, that's a great question. I undertook it just cuz I think a lot of us are continual life learners.

It depends on what you're interested and willing to do. Being in a healthcare setting, we're constantly surrounded by people. Creating, Excel and PowerPoint and pivot tables and all this other stuff. And, not knowing what people are talking about is a little bit frustrating.

So I think, that's a reason why I got the MBA. But the other one is just to be able to understand how to take some problem. And a potential solution and then understand the route to commercialization. I think that Ty and I have spent a great deal of time talking about how do we help medical practitioners, not just physicians, but nurses, MAs, respiratory therapists and say, How do they understand the language of, entrepreneurship?

How do they identify? Is this a problem we're solving? Particularly in healthcare, if you're running into a friction point that's not only burning out the person that's experiencing the friction, but it's probably also impacting negatively that patient and that patient experience.

So it's, it's probably a lot more than you're asking about, but it really is to understand the language in which you can change things and accomplish, new things. Because if you can't monetize it, it's probably not gonna exist. And in healthcare we don't really think about the money side of things very often. So I think understanding that language and the ways in which we can address these things is important.

[00:03:24] Ty Hagler: Yeah, I'll just add, I mean as a MBA graduate myself, it seemed like a lot of it was learning the language of finance, learning the language of all these different disciplines so that when that conversation is happening, you can also jump in and speak that language as well.

I think one of the challenges with the MBA education is that sometimes it's helpful from an entrepreneurship standpoint, but I think a lot of it is also oriented towards larger organizations and, understanding how those work in strategy formulation in a large company context as well.

So I'm curious with the tracks that you took in the MBA program, were you more focused on the entrepreneurship side or did you see more of the big company financing strategy as well?

[00:04:03] Dr. Steven Goudy: But I think it really depends. I think that it probably more has to do with the house he grew up in versus what you do today.

My dad was an entrepreneur, and I didn't realize it, and I don't know that he knew that word either when he was doing it, but that mindset of: identify problems, be agile, and fix things. So that's not healthcare, right? It's identify problems and try to, ignore them for as long as possible.

So I think it was a yes and right? Honestly the thing I appreciate the most about going to business school is the mindset of, how do businesses work? How do businesses think? Because it's very different than medicine, right? It's like, what is the problem? What's the history of present illness?

What's the chief complaint? What are all the thousand things that you can consider? And then narrowing down on that. Whereas in business, it's, very different strategic thinking, from the CFO versus the CEO, versus, the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. So understanding that lens and the strategies that drive that, you know and understanding push versus pull, all those things. I think understanding the lingo is like the baseline, but really understanding the mindset, and having that agile mindset of entrepreneurship. I think to me, I think every business needs that, whether it's small or big, right?

If you don't evolve, then you're gonna die as a business, even if you're a big business. I don't know. I think it was both, right? Can I sit at a big table with a $2 billion corporation and understand, top line, bottom line, so on reading that, that's important, but understanding how to frame problems relevant to solving your needs to the CMO or to the ceo, I think is also helpful.

[00:05:48] Ty Hagler: I just have to say, we've got this awesome West Wing vibe coming from you right now as you're walking through the hall.

[00:05:53] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm trying to find a place that I can sit down and then I realize, like going into stairwell, is this gonna sound terrible? So yeah you're getting a tour of the back halls of the hospital right at the moment. Sadly, sorry.

[00:06:05] Jared Gabaldon: That's awesome actually.

[00:06:06] Dr. Steven Goudy: Okay, great.

[00:06:07] Jared Gabaldon: Something that, we talk a lot about at Trig is identifying unmet needs and obviously with a NozeBot you did tackle this unmet medical need, but how did you identify it?

Did it come from your practice, 10 years into practice and you were like, Wow, okay. There's obviously a very inefficient way that we're, using these nasal suction devices. Now there's an opportunity for us.

[00:06:27] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think it's really, because my practice is focused only on children, and most people don't realize that babies are obligate nasal breathers, meaning they have to breathe through their nose pretty much for the first year of life.

Sometimes they'll get admitted in the hospital, and I've had families just look at me like, Look dude, I don't really need you. I just need that suction on the wall. So that's the aha moment. Then the other aha moments of like parents who don't really have that much money or spending exorbitant amounts of money trying to buy something that'll work that they can go home with. Again, I'm not an engineer. I studied biochemistry and medicine. So I didn't really understand how things got put together and worked. So that was part of the development of that ecosystem. How do I put myself in touch with or adjacent to people that know how to build things and I can help tell that story of like, here's the need, here's the friction, here's what patients are telling me.

I listen to a different podcast. I won't name drop it just cuz I don't know if that's out of bounds. It's listen for the echo, right? If you have people telling you the same thing over and over, it's a problem. It's a friction, and having three kids of my own, I knew it was a problem.

I knew it was a friction. Everything is a gamble. What I tell people is that you have to have an unreasonable amount of belief that your idea needs to exist. And be willing to bet the farm on it, to really create something, and see if in this case, the babies will eat the baby food.

[00:07:46] Jared: Welcome everyone. Welcome to our latest Design Inspired Healthcare webinar where we invite medical innovators to share their journey with the greater community. This month we're joined by Dr. Steven Goudy. Welcome Dr. Goudy. He's the Vice Chairman of Research at Emory Otolaryngology, very hard word to say.

He's an experienced surgeon and division director of a large multi-site ENT surgical practice, which you can see right there behind you. It's awesome. He's also the founder of Dr. Noze Best where he created the NozeBot. An infant nasal suction device, which has impacted, I think parents almost as much as children with the unique marketing approach that he has going on.

He is also recently the founder of Oridivus as well, which is a company focused on bringing regenerative strategies to oral wound healing. So he's a medical innovator, he's somebody that Ty and I like to say, is a unicorn in the field. We're very happy to have you here today, Dr. Goudy.

[00:08:35] Dr. Steven Goudy: Glad to be here. Thank you.

[00:08:38] Jared Gabaldon: Just kicking things off, I think we're very interested to know the origin story behind Dr. Noze Best. You're a practicing physician for over a decade by that point, and you're getting your MBA I think actually after you started Dr. Noze Best is very interesting. Did the chicken come before the egg? You always wanted to be in the business or, how did all happen for you?

[00:08:58] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think as all of us human beings on this planet, we encounter friction points in our lives, and as a medical provider, one of the things as a parent as well as a pediatric ENT or otolaryngologist is that we deal with a lot of nasal congestion, boogers, and so on.

My wife likes to take credit for developing the Nozebot, which is our first device, Dr. Noze Best, to address nasal congestion in babies. So it's really problem, solution. And then understanding you don't have the background to actually solve that problem, if that makes sense.

[00:09:28] Jared Gabaldon: Absolutely. And so did you decide to undergo your mba because you wanted to navigate the field of business better or just because you love learning and it's your thing as a physician already.

[00:09:41] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah, that's a great question. I undertook it just cuz I think a lot of us are continual life learners.

It depends on what you're interested and willing to do. Being in a healthcare setting, we're constantly surrounded by people. Creating, Excel and PowerPoint and pivot tables and all this other stuff. And, not knowing what people are talking about is a little bit frustrating.

So I think, that's a reason why I got the MBA. But the other one is just to be able to understand how to take some problem. And a potential solution and then understand the route to commercialization. I think that Ty and I have spent a great deal of time talking about how do we help medical practitioners, not just physicians, but nurses, MAs, respiratory therapists and say, How do they understand the language of, entrepreneurship?

How do they identify? Is this a problem we're solving? Particularly in healthcare, if you're running into a friction point that's not only burning out the person that's experiencing the friction, but it's probably also impacting negatively that patient and that patient experience.

So it's, it's probably a lot more than you're asking about, but it really is to understand the language in which you can change things and accomplish, new things. Because if you can't monetize it, it's probably not gonna exist. And in healthcare we don't really think about the money side of things very often. So I think understanding that language and the ways in which we can address these things is important.

[00:11:10] Ty Hagler: Yeah, I'll just add, I mean as a MBA graduate myself, it seemed like a lot of it was learning the language of finance, learning the language of all these different disciplines so that when that conversation is happening, you can also jump in and speak that language as well.

I think one of the challenges with the MBA education is that sometimes it's helpful from an entrepreneurship standpoint, but I think a lot of it is also oriented towards larger organizations and, understanding how those work in strategy formulation in a large company context as well.

So I'm curious with the tracks that you took in the MBA program, were you more focused on the entrepreneurship side or did you see more of the big company financing strategy as well?

[00:11:50] Dr. Steven Goudy: But I think it really depends. I think that it probably more has to do with the house he grew up in versus what you do today.

My dad was an entrepreneur, and I didn't realize it, and I don't know that he knew that word either when he was doing it, but that mindset of: identify problems, be agile, and fix things. So that's not healthcare, right? It's identify problems and try to, ignore them for as long as possible.

So I think it was a yes and right? Honestly the thing I appreciate the most about going to business school is the mindset of, how do businesses work? How do businesses think? Because it's very different than medicine, right? It's like, what is the problem? What's the history of present illness?

What's the chief complaint? What are all the thousand things that you can consider? And then narrowing down on that. Whereas in business, it's, very different strategic thinking, from the CFO versus the CEO, versus, the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. So understanding that lens and the strategies that drive that, you know and understanding push versus pull, all those things. I think understanding the lingo is like the baseline, but really understanding the mindset, and having that agile mindset of entrepreneurship. I think to me, I think every business needs that, whether it's small or big, right?

If you don't evolve, then you're gonna die as a business, even if you're a big business. I don't know. I think it was both, right? Can I sit at a big table with a $2 billion corporation and understand, top line, bottom line, so on reading that, that's important, but understanding how to frame problems relevant to solving your needs to the CMO or to the ceo, I think is also helpful.

[00:13:35] Ty Hagler: I just have to say, we've got this awesome West Wing vibe coming from you right now as you're walking through the hall.

[00:13:39] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah. I'm trying to, I'm trying to find a place that I can sit down and then I realize, like going into stairwell, is this gonna sound terrible? So yeah you're getting a tour of the back halls of the hospital right at the moment. Sadly, sorry.

[00:13:51] Jared Gabaldon: That's awesome actually.

[00:13:52] Dr. Steven Goudy: Okay, great.

[00:13:53] Jared Gabaldon: Something that, we talk a lot about at Trig is identifying unmet needs and obviously with a NozeBot you did tackle this unmet medical need, but how did you identify it?

Did it come from your practice, 10 years into practice and you were like, Wow, okay. There's obviously a very inefficient way that we're, using these nasal suction devices. Now there's an opportunity for us.

[00:14:13] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think it's really, because my practice is focused only on children, and most people don't realize that babies are obligate nasal breathers, meaning they have to breathe through their nose pretty much for the first year of life.

Sometimes they'll get admitted in the hospital, and I've had families just look at me like, Look dude, I don't really need you. I just need that suction on the wall. So that's the aha moment. Then the other aha moments of like parents who don't really have that much money or spending exorbitant amounts of money trying to buy something that'll work that they can go home with. Again, I'm not an engineer. I studied biochemistry and medicine. So I didn't really understand how things got put together and worked. So that was part of the development of that ecosystem. How do I put myself in touch with or adjacent to people that know how to build things and I can help tell that story of like, here's the need, here's the friction, here's what patients are telling me.

I listen to a different podcast. I won't name drop it just cuz I don't know if that's out of bounds. It's listen for the echo, right? If you have people telling you the same thing over and over, it's a problem. It's a friction, and having three kids of my own, I knew it was a problem.

I knew it was a friction. Everything is a gamble. What I tell people is that you have to have an unreasonable amount of belief that your idea needs to exist. And be willing to bet the farm on it, to really create something, and see if in this case, the babies will eat the baby food.

[00:15:32] Ty Hagler: Yeah. And to that point, there are resources out there to help medical entrepreneurs get going. The small business innovation research grants recently renewed in Congress, and that's been a major funding source to get a lot of these innovation programs started. Although it's not enough.

[00:15:49] Dr. Steven Goudy: It takes forever, right? To your point, we leverage the Georgia Research Alliance, here in Georgia, which is a state sponsor program. Would love for you guys to give links to them because without them, not only their non-dilutive capital, but their mentorship and guidance.

There would not be a Dr. Knows Best. Biolocity is another joint program, so if you look around, you can find it. But my goal is to connect the pieces and the dots for people that are not as stubborn as I am. But yeah, there are things out there.

There's lots of ways to get, non, and even helping people understand what is non-dilutive capital. Cause I didn't know that, at the time.

[00:16:25] Ty Hagler: Yeah. Or the value of that compared to taking equity or let's say you pull in a bunch of equity based investment, and then what does that do for your long term strategic outcome? It just like levers up the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that needs to exist.

Assembling that education and those resources so that, one, we can learn from the mistakes of others, but then also try to make that path going forward. You've brought up tenacity and I guess you said stubbornness, but I heard tenacity.

[00:16:53] Dr. Steven Goudy: Well, there's another word for it too, but I won't, I don't know if we're allowed to curse on this podcast Yeah.

[00:16:59] Ty Hagler: I think getting through the gauntlet of some of these, bureaucratic systems. That seems like it's as much of a hallmark of, if you can make it through this first gauntlet, then okay, you're probably gonna make it through the subsequent ones. There's a filtering effect for just how much pain are you willing to put up with on the entrepreneurship journey.

[00:17:18] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think that's it, but I think also one of the things about healthcare, it's so different than medicine, is when we lose, we are devastated. Lose a patient, make the wrong decision, give the wrong drug. That's devastating, right? To get into medicine, whether you're a nurse or nurse practitioner, whatever, you're not used to things going south. But in business ah, it didn't work. I'm gonna pivot, right? Pivoting in medicine, you do that, but it's not the same.

Oh, this will be just as fine, or Oh, if this doesn't work, I'm gonna go do something else. That's not how we think and how we work. It's really changing that part of your brain and then understanding that's normal in business, for us, though, it's not normal.

Like I get stuck on an idea. I know what the best thing is. There's evidence to support it, and we're gonna do this, and if it doesn't work, I'm gonna be devastated and I'm gonna mull around and think about it. And then we're gonna have 10 meetings. Why didn't this work? Why did you do this?

So on and so forth. Where in business, you're like, eh, Okay, that didn't work. Let's do this.

[00:18:11] Ty Hagler: From a Design Thinking standpoint, you're planning for things to not work and you're trying to spend as little money as you can to learn that lesson so you can pivot to the next thing.

[00:18:22] Dr. Steven Goudy: I know this will be shocking to you, but we're not taught Design Thinking in medical school. It's a totally different mindset.

[00:18:28] Ty Hagler: Which coming from a design standpoint where your whole frame of reference is, of course everybody knows good design. I think there's enormous opportunity to have crossover in that training to teach Design Thinking in ways of reducing risk when you're in a certain domain.

Now, of course, Design Thinking makes no sense whatsoever if you're in a domain where you're following best practice and you don't want your surgeon, prototyping, iterating on during a procedure. No, absolutely. That's out of bounds, but when you're just trying to discover the new and the novel, that's where I think that opportunity and that training can come into play.

[00:19:04] Dr. Steven Goudy: Agreed. Yeah. And it's hard to nuance that. I don't know the data, but there, there may be more innovation as people get further out in their career, right? Cause at the beginning, you're just trying to keep it all together and figure out what to do. Then once you get into your area of focus, then you start looking for the patterns of, things that don't work or frictions or things that need to be there.

Or you're more confident in your ability to not just memorize, but to think about, okay, here are the gaps, or this works 80% of the time, but what are we gonna do about the other 20%?

[00:19:32] Ty Hagler: Some of the workshops I teach about the difference between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence is your ability to encounter something for the first time and problem solve your way through. Whereas crystallized intelligence is the accumulation of knowledge that you have over time and experience to then draw upon your past experience to then come up with a successful solution.

What's interesting is you hit peak fluid intelligence at age 25.

[00:20:00] Dr. Steven Goudy: Interesting.

[00:20:01] Ty Hagler: Then you hit peak crystallized intelligence in your sixties. There's a crossover in your forties or so where your fluid intelligence drops and your crystallized intelligence comes up. I think within medicine is interesting cuz there's so much crystallized knowledge that's needed in order to even start to be effective.

People that are in their peak fluid intelligence usually are just starting their education. So, in that space, it's almost like you need to draw from the younger generation who just doesn't know any better, but have deep mentorship to keep them from going off and creating havoc. So I think really does take a team and a community in order to drive innovation because you need the best of both forms of intelligence.

[00:20:43] Dr. Steven Goudy: Medicine is evolving. It used to be a very top down hierarchical thing where, there's a lot of fear, particularly in surgical fields and lots of minions going and executing and not really talking, and that being part of the landscape or the communication.

But now, people are starting to realize that culture needs to change. Maybe some of these, understandings of the different ways that people can see the gaps or the blind spots and celebrate that versus intimidate. I think it separates the good leaders from the great leaders.

[00:21:13] Ty Hagler: How are you seeing that culture start to change? The evidence of that, is that just broad base across all of the different institutions? Cause I think the culture of healthcare definitely seems to have gone through some significant macro trend changes. Maybe this is more of a broad brush and take this question however you like, but culture trends towards change in transformation and whether or not there's some muscle memory that's there from some of the significant changes that have happened over the past 15 years.

[00:21:39] Dr. Steven Goudy: It is like what's happened in the last two years, right? So the pandemic forced everybody to rethink how they did everything. Obviously it created a lot of anxiety, burnout has been a huge driver. I think for a couple things, right? Big organizations just don't like to change and you can't get things done quickly. Paired with a millennial generation who like change and don't necessarily, just tolerate a bunch of tom foolery, they're just like, I don't care.

I'll go work for somebody else. I don't need you. Honestly, for me personally, I think business school was huge in helping me think through this. Using tools like the Birkman, other personality assessments and understanding how teams work and who on your team plays what role and why you shouldn't ask everybody to do the same thing.

Cuz they have different skill sets and different interests has helped me as a individual and as a leader, and why our personal group of physicians, we're bonded well together. We're still all burned out about, the friction of EMR and, lack of support issues, supply chain, you name it and all that.

Maybe it is the business thinking or it's just the burnout, forcing people to change and reevaluate, the five whys of why are you burned out. If you have a leader that's not responsive, then you're gonna figure that out pretty quickly. Cuz people will leave, right?

Cause they just don't care anymore. They'll just say, This is terrible, I'm leaving. Most people quit because of the boss, not because of the organization. The great resignation followed by quiet, quitting, and burnout are all kind of bringing to bear the need for better leadership and better empowerment, of people from the very top to the very bottom.

[00:23:15] Ty Hagler: That reminded of the expression the fish rots at the head. But, there's opportunities for innovation like in a forest where it's densely packed and you've got all these big old trees.

Then where one tree falls down and allows sunlight to come in, that allows a lot more new growth to flourish as you have these times of transformation. Which is where some of those big opportunities for innovation and growth come in, is you just have those big cycle changes.

[00:23:42] Dr. Steven Goudy: One of the things getting back towards the innovation and entrepreneurship thing is what I've been really unknowingly fortunate to be a part of is the ATDC, which is our accelerator program here in Atlanta. You described the little pockets of development where the sunlight comes in and you grow to a certain size and then maybe another tree falls and then you get a little higher. So I think incubation, as far as I can tell, has these little pockets of acceleration that you may have. You may just go to Y Combinator and then go to the moon or you may not get into Y Combinator, then you go to Techstars and then you go to this and then that. There's a bunch of these inflection points and handoffs and everybody's taking points in your cap table. Again, beginning back to persistence or stubbornness, I called Jane McCracken. I called her once a week for several months. Hey, I wanna get in. Hey, I wanna get in. Hey, I want to get in. And now that we finally got in, cuz they were like, I'm tired of these phone calls. They have a soup to nuts, beginning to end kind of pathway for companies, to scale, right?

And to derisk, you get mentors and the farther you get along, the more mentors you get, the more support you get, so on and so forth. Looking for those unique gems in your own environment, whether, if you live close to Y Combinator and they'll let you in, that's amazing.

If you live in Tulsa, Oklahoma I know somebody that runs their innovation cuz she used to be here in in Atlanta. There are pockets of development, and they all want to help you to a certain degree. The very few of them are actually gonna give you the soup to nuts of things that you need.

There are lots of resources now. Stanford has tons of YouTube videos you can read the Lean Startup. There's a lot of ways you can piece it together, but I think the mentorship both in a big organization as well, is in a startup is the most important thing for your success.

[00:25:22] Jared Gabaldon: Would you say that there is one piece of mentorship that has really stuck with you throughout your journey? It's been a long journey of entrepreneurship, but is there one thing that really changed it for you?

[00:25:34] Dr. Steven Goudy: Hire smart people and get outta their way. Really, yeah, that's really it, right? Surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and just don't micromanage them and make sure that they see the vision that you do. Hire people that are more capable than you, which I've done with our new CEO hire, which I've done with our, director of operations at the business, give them autonomy, help them grow. I mean, Our board of advisors is amazing. And again, very smart people that have agreed to help us and we listen and say, Okay, that seems great. We're gonna do it.

[00:26:02] Ty Hagler: Jim Collins talks about who luck the people you're able to surround yourself is a certain amount of luck and the outcomes you have. It seems like you've been blessed with that, with some amazing people you've been able to surround yourself with and, the ecosystem that you find yourself in.

[00:26:17] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah. It's also your personality traits. I'm an extrovert. I just sit here, I'll just talk. You and I could talk for four hours. If you're an inventor or an entrepreneur, but you're an introvert, then you need to recognize that and okay, I'm not gonna have good luck with that. My who, luck is not gonna be very good. The self-awareness part, we've been dancing around that, but I'm a better husband, I'm a better dad. Nowhere perfect, better, boss, partner, friend, whatever, because my self-awareness is increased. People aren't gonna help you be more self-aware unless you give them permission and you create that psychological safety in that environment and the desire that you want to know and get better. I think probably the most important thing in addition to hiring smart people is just being self-aware.

[00:26:58] Ty Hagler: That was an enormous amount of self-awareness to step down as CEO and fire yourself and replace with somebody who you felt could do the job better than you. That not every entrepreneur is capable of doing that.

[00:27:12] Dr. Steven Goudy: I agree, was that my plan? No, but did it become obvious? Yes. Number one people said, We're not gonna invest in you anymore unless you get a full-time CEO. So I made a decision, but it was, getting back to business school and arbitrage, I'm like, I can pay somebody else that knows a hell of a lot more about this than me, less than what I make.

But yeah, it really does take that self awareness. Again, that's where your mentors come in too, and it's Hey man, there's different types of CEOs. There's a CEO that gets it off the ground, which is you. There's a CEO that takes it from, 1 million to 10 million and then from 10 million to a hundred is a different CEO. And understanding that's actually a, like a thing. Like I never thought about it. It's okay, it's the CEO. Everybody's the same. But it's not.

[00:27:56] Ty: Certainly wanna open it up to questions cuz I've know a couple people that are in attendance here might want this question asked as they're thinking about it, which is how did you go about finding that CEO in the first place? Was that something that the investors put forward for you? Or did you happen to know this individual? Or how did you go about finding that individual ?

[00:28:14] Dr. Steven Goudy: Man, we started and again, it's the who luck. So you started like leveraging your network, talking to everybody. We had already talked about who our ideal CEO candidate would be. We had said this for a long time, ideally it's a woman, a mom, somebody knows how to raise money, somebody knows marketing. We had been saying that forever cuz we realized that would be helpful and it would reflect our consumers, right?

At the end of the day we met and got a lot of different introductions through different people that we had met. But she ended up knowing one of our mentors from the ATDC, our startup incubator and for whatever reason she decided to do it. Even after she met me and my partner she still decided to do it, so it was super lucky.

We had also looked at a bunch of search firms and engaged them and that's confusing and very expensive. So I feel fortunate that we were able to find somebody that was local, has lots of experience, and has that shared passion, making things better for children.

[00:29:14] Jared Gabaldon: Something I'm also curious about as well is, when you think about medical professionals, particularly physicians, work tons of hours every week already. How do you manage your time to be able to start your own company? And now you have a second one, right? How did you even come to be able to allocate that kind of time every week?

[00:29:32] Dr. Steven Goudy: Again, is like hiring really smart people, leveraging, focusing on things that align with what I do. Our consumers are people I see every day. I'm working in the business and working on the business at the same time, some of it is skills, right? Some of it's like time boxing, other types of HBR, reading lots of HBR articles and understanding how people approach these types of things. As long as for me, if what I'm doing clinically, aligns with what I'm doing in the research lab, aligns with what I'm doing in the businesses.

It's a lot of synergism, if I had started like a taco stand or something that would be very different. And I would be using different parts of my brain. I wouldn't be thinking about the business, of tacos while I was, seeing patients in the clinic or what have you.

Really just paying attention, by giving up running the business to somebody else, it frees me up to go do other things. It's really, digging deep when I need to and then giving it over to other people when I can. In the Dr. Noze Best business, we operate on the entrepreneurial operating system or EOS, and so it's really about need to do. Want to do hard, to do easy, figuring out the only things I can do and things I like to do. That's what I do. Things that either I don't like to do or they're hard to do and somebody else can do just as well. Then delegating those to other people.

[00:30:49] Ty Hagler: That's awesome. You brought up EOS. Do you have an EOS implementer you're working with?

[00:30:53] Dr. Steven Goudy: So I use EOS in Dr. Noze Best, and then I also implemented it in my lab just on my own, just cuz, it's expensive to implement not crazy, but it was more than I was willing to pay outta the lab. So I use it to run, multiple facets of my life.

[00:31:09] Ty Hagler: For anybody who's not familiar with EOS and the book Traction, do you mind doing a quick summary of what that's about?

[00:31:16] Dr. Steven Goudy: It's a business framework that is created to be used in companies that are between like 2 million and a hundred million in revenue. I had never really heard of it. Those numbers may be a little bit fuzzy, but one of the people that was looking at investing in us, ultimately said Hey, if we invested, you have to use this framework. This is what all our businesses use, and in the same week, one of my other friends who, lives in Kentucky, was telling me their business runs on it.

So I'm like, Okay, if I'm getting it from all these people, I might as well just use it and my business partner is super excited about it, but, it's a weekly meeting. Everybody has quarterly goals. You're working on either weekly goals or quarterly goals. You hold everybody accountable.

You're having the same meetings, it's timebound, so you don't have these meetings that go on forever, and it's about leading, managing, and accountability. It's not like, Oh my God, this is something I didn't think of, but it's very structured and the implementers are hugely helpful cuz they figure out, write down what all your values are. What does the accountability chart look like? What are your rocks? What are your quarterly goals? Dude, it's just easy. It just fits in there.

It feels good and you don't have this dread to meetings anymore cuz you know what it's gonna be, people are gonna be held accountable. If there's problems, you can escalate it. If there's things that need to be, communicated. They get communicated.

The book is narrated by this guy know Wickman, whose dad was an entrepreneur and he tells a lot of very, he's just a storyteller. So you have to indulge that part, but it's just easy. It's just easy and it's good and it works, I guess is what I would say.

[00:32:47] Ty Hagler: Yeah. It's almost like it's a checklist version of your MBA education where it breaks it down into, you're familiar with all of those topics from the MBA education, and this breaks it down into these are the explicit things we need to be working on right now in order to have a functioning small business.

[00:33:04] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah. I use it in my lab where we're not making any money. You can apply it to almost anything. There's a program called Ninety.io , which you can pay 10 or $20 a month and just use the framework to drive regularity, accountability, visibility to any type of organization, whether it's making money, losing money, whatever. It brings rigor, expectations, and, accountability, which I think are what some of the biggest reasons why, things fail. Like you're either working too far into the business and you need to delegate it, or you have the wrong people, in the wrong seats, most of the time.

[00:33:41] Ty Hagler: Yeah. There's another book, called Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. Based on the Rockefeller habits and everything, which is a elaboration on kind of what's happening with where traction might have been a little bit more on the simple side Scaling Up is, probably your organization dividing line of 50 million and up.

That's probably where Scaling Up really starts to come into play. We have a question from one of our attendees hey, Early. Glad you could join us. So your question was, I invented a reflexology device that naturally relieves menstrual pain without the use of meds, switching to an e-com and supply distribution into the doctor's offices.

All the doctors have come to me so far for my product to be in their offices, but I'd like to reach to be larger now. Do you have any advice as far as vendor expos, ads and journals. I think Dr. Noze Best, your marketing and your reach for that has been certainly a case study. So curious if you have any thoughts on, I guess like a, an entrepreneur like Early who is getting going and getting some traction.

[00:34:40] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think e-comm is very different than, using distributors and all that stuff, and I think it's a different business model, so I think it's probably a yes and.

We did e-comm, we're mostly Amazon and somewhat Shopify. There's lots of good podcasts to think about and read. There's one podcast called eCommerce Fuel, and they have lots of stuff to scale e-commerce, which is really more under your control and it doesn't cost as much.

But I think doctors are really tough people to deal with just cuz we don't want to be bothered by things. We're not in general very good business people. And there's so much consolidation of medical practices, so you're not even dealing with individual physicians.

Versus 200 million billion dollar business, like selling in their office is gonna be a little bit of a challenge. So I would say distributors are great ways. If they're in there selling other OBGYN products, finding medical sales. People that are distributors, would be a good model.

If you're selling to the hospital, then sell the patient. The value analysis process and B2B sales, that's just painful. It takes a long time and it could be very capital intensive. So I would just think about that, if you do have traction in the market, direct to consumer.

I think that's great. Making sure that you are FSA, HSA available, I mean our device is, cuz it's a medical product. De-risking it for the consumer, I think is good. Ultimately, if it doesn't require prescription, CVS, some of these other channels maybe. Channel strategies is very complicated and for us personally, we're only in e-com right now because the amount of capital it takes to get into a distribution or retail is very high and it can kill your business pretty quickly.

So I would find somebody that is a consultant in that industry. Cuz if you're selling hardware right, the term is hardware is hard. It takes a ton of money. Your supply chain is always screwed up. It's not easy. Maybe boutiques, like if there's boutiques or individual practices, I think that's good. Trade shows, maybe. I think medical distributors is probably the way to go in that arena, just cuz they already have the relationships with the physicians. So the physicians aren't like, Dude, I don't know who you are, or Ma'am, I don't know who you are. Get outta my office. They're bringing one thing and then they happen to bring your stuff along with them, will be how I would get in their office.

But if you're really just selling it to the consumer. You may be better off with influencers, right? If you go on TikTok and Instagram, there's a thousand different physical therapists that focus on women's health and peraneal issues and all this other stuff, like stuff I never know.

I would just think about all of your different channel options. There's a different book called Traction that's about marketing. I don't know, have you read that book? I would recommend reading that and then that'll tell you what channels you wanna plan because it's really a channel strategy question. So that's how I would think about it.

[00:37:36] Jared Gabaldon: Digging into, the marketing behind Dr. Noze Best as well. I think it's a very fun marketing strategy just as a consumer. I was going through your videos. To me it almost seems like episodes of Modern Family or something like that, and they're like funny, they're witty and it gets the point across as well for, why the product is so useful. How did you get to that stage where you're actually shooting these full blown, almost like episodes of a TV show for your product?

[00:38:02] Dr. Steven Goudy: I just hire good people, get outta their way and execute on what I'm told to do. The TikTok thing is just informational and that's the goal. The YouTube stuff. We're gonna do more and more of that. I think that, again, tikTok is very short form. You have to have, like something eye catching. They want you to play music.

It's a very specific genre. Instagram, that's where, more moms are there and curating different things and that's more glam. Then YouTube, I think is more informational. So it really depends on the channel, like the social media channel.

Facebook is dead to most people under, 30. We're getting to different demographic there. So the strategy on each channel is very different in how you approach it. But I just do what people tell me to do and okay, today we want you to make a video. Like some of it's spontaneous, right?

So some it's Hey, I was just in the ER and I saw. X, Y, Z. Whereas sometimes our social media folks will be like, All right, we want you to do the five things that people need to do know about taking out tonsils or what have you.

[00:38:56] Jared Gabaldon: Something that I'm also curious of as well, just along your journey, there's a lot of people. They are where you were 10 years ago and, they might have an idea. They think that maybe they could do it, they don't know if they have the time or they're just like afraid of their idea and they're maybe afraid of their execution. What I'm curious of is maybe if you have any advice of what you would tell yourself 10 years ago when you were just getting started, what would you tell someone in those shoes?

[00:39:19] Dr. Steven Goudy: I think finding that, the people in your ecosystem that actually do it and understand it are, a lot of the folks you come in contact where they're like, Oh yeah, I'll help you. That sounds interesting. Or that sounds like finding your people and then, leveraging it from there versus taking a lone wolf approach.

Obviously the internet has changed things in your ability to locate resources and the ecosystems are changing. America's mostly made up of small businesses, right? So economically it makes sense for each area of the country to invest in that.

So there are going to be components of that. Everywhere you are. So just finding that out, and even walking down to the local VFW, you could probably find somebody that knows a little bit about starting a business. If you don't have that idea but at the end of the day you have to ask yourself, is this the right time?

Cuz if you just have, newborn triplets, it's probably not the right time to do anything. You're gonna be in the weeds for a while. It gets back to the self awareness. What do I really want? What is your risk tolerance?

If you have zero risk tolerance, then meet with some people, share your ideas and let them have it. If you believe it needs to exist to make the world a better place, but you're just like, I have zero risk tolerance, then give it away. Versus. Try to do it, but knowing that you as a person are just not willing to risk anything and, or you have other things that are going on in your life that won't let you do that.

[00:40:37] Jared Gabaldon: Absolutely. As we're wrapping up just outta curiosity and maybe shameless plug. What's coming up next for Dr. Noze Best and we didn't even talk about Oridivus. Curious like what's going on for both of those things in the future.

[00:40:49] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah, I think for Dr Noze Best, I'm not the CEO so I can't speak for what Christie has plans exactly. Again, we're creating an ecosystem by which families and caregivers can help support their children. Particularly focused on upper respiratory health and wellness.

We'll be launching a product in Q1 or Q2 of 2023. That again, goes along with, supporting the upper respiratory space for babies and then, probably start working on the third product in 2023. So really building out suite or creating an environment in which the baby will be supported, that we can measure outcomes and ultimately partner with the different folks in the ecosystem, whether it's the pediatricians or the sleep consultants or the lactation consultants feeding. There's so many people supporting families these days. So that's it, I think and then I'll be there making TikTok videos, trying to educate people.

Oridivus is really a different thing. It's focused on tissue regeneration in children and how do we train the body to want to heal more quickly and reduce the need for revision surgeries and other things in children that have cleft palletes. It's a little bit more nascent and, e-commerce direct to consumers very different than med tech. Drug device development that I'm learning, so I'm basically starting all over with that

[00:42:11] Jared Gabaldon: We did actually have one more question pop on through. All right, Jesse Bragdon. So he's wondering from your lessons learned what do you look and listen for from a design and engineering firm to ensure that they understand your goals and intentions and outcomes of your business? Really?

[00:42:29] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah, again, we've wandered around and dealt with a lot of those different folks. I will say that, not a shameless plug, Ty knows what he's doing and you guys at Trig really know what's up. So I think it's like understanding.

What is a customer journey? What are you trying to get out of it? How sophisticated are you? Cause people will take your money, right? And I've had that happen. But do they understand have you articulated and really confirmed the problem that you're trying to solve and helping the would be entrepreneur understand the different ways in which they de-risk this project to see whether there is a path to commercialization or not. But again, it's all about who do you know? I ran into some random person that helped me get in touch with Ty. Ty and I haven't done anything yet, but like the people that actually did the first iteration of the NozeBot, I just got introduced by somebody else just cuz I had no idea.

I would get out the yellow pages or Google and just say, okay, product development. So really it's about finding people in your ecosystem that can make those warm intros that have used, the people. Because otherwise then, I would vet everybody a little bit before you just invest money and time with them.

[00:43:35] Ty Hagler: Yeah, Jared and I were talking about this before the webinar here where the difference between design engineering is engineering will be focused on solving the problem that they're given, whereas design strategy asks, are we solving the right problem and is it validated and what can we do to de-risk it?

So there's kind two different lenses and both have their strengths, but one comes before the other.

[00:43:56] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah, and really just building out an ecosystem of people that can help you. If you're a solo practitioner that lives in, Billings, Montana, whatever, it may be a little bit harder.

But again, the internet is available to everybody and you can find, different ecosystems of inventors and so on. That can help each other.

[00:44:15] Ty Hagler: Dr. Goudy, you've been very generous with your time to come on with us and to talk to us. This has been such a fun conversation. We probably need to wrap up cause I imagine you're probably getting called back here. Is there anything else that, I don't know Jared, if you have any parting thoughts or questions or anything like that?

[00:44:29] Jared Gabaldon: We're absolutely locked in and just very appreciative of Dr. Goudy for you taking your time out. We pulled a lot out of you today and I know that you, as inspiring the next generations to come after you. The impact that you have will be the years from now as well. So we just really thank you for that.

[00:44:43] Dr. Steven Goudy: Yeah. No, it's fun. I think you all are doing the right things and definitely, I think the ecosystem of folks that are taking their time out to meet, I think anybody on this call will be more than happy to talk to anybody that happens along this podcast now, or 10 years from now and say, Hey. Tell me how I can help you. What are the things that we can do to de-risk your next best idea? Cuz shoot I'm gonna get older soon and I hope that there's newer products to take care of me when I'm old. So hopefully some of the people out there are developing products for old, the old people that we're gonna turn out to be.

[00:45:14] Jared Gabaldon: I think the same thing quite a bit as well. On that note though, have a fantastic week. Thank you for taking the time out. We just really appreciate it and I know everyone else on the call did as well.