Bobby Edwards is the C.E.O. and co-founder of Squatty Potty, the device that goes under your feet while sitting on the toilet that helps constipation. The device made it on to Shark Tank, and then Squatty Potty launched the most viral video ever, with unicorns who poo soft serve ice cream. Lately, Bobby has been featured in the news because they had to drop Kathy Griffin who is featured in their newer videos. Welcome Bobby.
Bobby: Hello Jeff, How are you doing?
Interviewer: Good, nice to meet you. Congratulations on your success. Let’s get the elephant out of the room first. Kathy Griffin, I’m sorry I didn’t even get to see those videos because I wasn’t following but it’s a shame. Do you want to comment that?
Bobby: Well we are in the business to help people poop better and everyone poops. We’ve used a lot of different techniques and a lot of different people to help us with that. A lot of different contributors. Early on it was people that we could reach; people like mommy bloggers and carrier bloggers. We were able to find contributors who were able to reach. We reached Howard Stern. You may or may not know but we have used Dr Laura and we have used Glenn Beck. I wanted to target a certain demo; that’s women 35 to 55 years old and reach out to the gay community as well. I was looking for someone that i could use that was within our budget. She came up and she did a great job on the spot.
The concept was “Full of Shit”. Everyone’s full of it because we’re not pooping correctly. Squatty Potty helps with that and she clearly did her stuff very well. It was a funny spot. Then of course the controversy happened. Just like I said, we’re not in the business of politics; we’re not the Ben and Jerry’s of poop stools. We are just trying to help people poop better. The controversy happened and we got so much negative feedback that we just had to pull the spot completely. Then we got some press on that so it’s kind of funny how things worked out. Unfortunately we did spend quite a bit of money on that and we had a pull it. Now I’m scratching my head and thinking well that was kind of a mistake. Maybe don’t choose political people when you are trying to sell poop stool.
Interviewer: It hard to know in this climate who’s going to end up being political. I mean PT Barnum said no press is bad press. It’s good, you end up sounding like an equanimeous person who is just trying to help people rather than being political. So in a way, being neutral is a good thing. I think that’s a positive in our culture right now.
Bobby: The main concept of Squatty Potty is interesting. It’s my parents who are a really traditional Mormon family. So it’s me and my husband, not that there is different categories of that but within our atmosphere we have immigrants and we have Mormons. We are in Utah so there is this weird dynamic here. We all really just like to reach out to everyone. I kind of just let people have a long leash and let them go where they want to. Cathy Griffin came up and i think she is funny, I am a fan and why not. We are all doing what we think is wright. Then we realize sometimes we make mistakes.
Interviewer: But it wasn’t a mistake to, you mentioned Ben and Jerry’s stool earlier but we get back to that in a few minutes. Tell me about the inception of this, I read that your mom had trouble pooping. How did you know that that was the problem to be solved? That’s what they say in business, find a problem to be solved and you have a legit business. How did you know?
Bobby: It’s one of those alternative help things that people have been talking about but it was always alternative help type of things that will cure your problems. There was some buzz about proper toilet procedure and how anatomically we were designed to squat and how we deviated from that procedure in the mid 1800’s. That’s when a lot of the other problems started happening. People are kind of attributing it to a change in diet. I think that’s part of the problem but the anatomic part kind of makes sense to me. My mom was telling me over dinner one night while my dad was there we were talking about her poop problems. She was miserable; she was avoiding traveling and going on trips because when she leaves she becomes so constipated she becomes miserable. So I said have you heard about the anatomy? She tried everything; she tried powders and potions but it only made her more uncomfortable. It didn’t really help.
We started talking about the toilet posture thing. I said I have friends who go on the toilet and squat. She said I can’t squat, what am I going to do, go in the back yard? That’s when we came up with the idea of creating a platform around the base of the toilet so she could achieve that posture. She started using a regular stool and the stool worked. It really helped her but it was not ergonomic. It wasn’t super comfortable so what I want you to do to the stool is this and this. So I sketched it out and we changed the shape of the stool and fit it around the toilet to make it more anatomically correct to mimic a natural squat. We spent about 3 or 4 weeks working on this project and it worked. She said this is it, this changes my life.
Interviewer: So your mom was your beta tester?
Bobby: Yeah mom was the one. I knew that the concept was out there. People have been talking about the concept but there is nothing available. You go on amazon and do the usual search for something you need and it’s not there. People are talking about it and most people are talking about climbing up on their toilet and squatting. We knew that most people with this problem are in their sixty’s couldn’t do that. Only people that are healthy and agile can do that but not the majority of Americans. So we just create the solution to that problem and then we went out and let people know and can educate people. We let them know that if you have a problem this is the solution. Even if you don’t have a problem this is the solution. That’s what it has become.
It’s become something that millennials are using to avoid problem. People of all ages are buying because they just want to have a better elimination. That’s what the Squatty Potty is; it’s a complete one and done even if you are not constipated.
Interviewer: If you pitch it as preventative then you have an even bigger market.
Bobby: Right, that’s true. The other point is that it’s not just preventative. This we use in our marketing as well. Howard Stern knows it; he was the perfect spokesperson He could really get to the point and be as graphic as he wanted to be. The audience just loved it. He said I just love the way i feel after i use the Squatty Potty. When I go in go in a bathroom and I don’t see a Squatty Potty I am sad. When U I go in a bathroom and see a Squatty Potty I am happy because I know it’s going to be this nice feeling of a complete elimination. He didn’t use those words; he just said that’s the best I ever had.
Interviewer: In my notes I saw that you had to invest, this probably doesn’t seem like a lot of money to you now but in theory a lot of people want to start businesses. You had to shell out thirty five thousand dollars to get this started. How do people get the courage to do that? What did you have to do to know that this was a good decision?
Bobby: So we figured that for that we could at least build a website. Then get enough push behind the website, get all the trademarking. By then, we were also just making them by hand and by wood, one at a time. We actually had my neighbour make them; he has a workshop and he put them out for us. We would put in an order for like a couple dozen, he would make them and we would pay him for them. We kind of just bootstrap it from there to the thirty five thousand. That built us the website with the legal stuff we needed. That included the url and trademarking. Then we were supposed to reach out to inferences and other people to help us sell the product. That was really bootstrapping but we invested a little bit more after that initial thirty five grand when we were looking to make plastic injection moulding process. We had to invest more into that so pulled a little more money. We essentially grew it from nothing. This is an all American dream story; it’s just crazy that it really happened with this product but it did.
Interviewer: When you ordered that initial run from China, I know they have minimum amount of a few thousand, did you have to go to China or did you just trust and say it’s going to come back to us?
Bobby: We trusted, we had some sources. We live in Utah where there is an influx of Mormons who have been to china on their mission. So they have connections there. We knew somebody who knew somebody who was manufacturing in china. We sent the drawings over and four months later they built a mould and we got samples of the first plastic one. I want 2000 stools which was like half of a container; a twenty foot container. They arrived in St. George Utah on a hot summer day in the middle of July. We were unloading them into this storage unit that I had rented just for these stools. I thought, we are never going to sell these. How am I ever going to sell this many stools? That’s the story.
Interviewer: When did you get on the shark tank, was that before you got the 2000 or after?
Bobby: That was after. We were reaching out to a lot of different alternative media. About a month after we got that 200 plastic stools, we got a call from Dr Oz. A producer on Dr Oz actually called. She said I am Fiona Wozniak, I’m the producer at Dr Oz and I’d like to put you and the Squatty Potty on the show. My dad was like yeah and I’m President Obama. He didn’t believe; he thought it was a prank call. We like to tease each other so we do prank phone calls in the family all the time. He thought it was one of my brothers or sisters or a friend. He didn’t think it was for real. She said no, I have been using this Squatty Potty ever since somebody recommended it to me via a reading blog that I like and I want to put it on the show.
So we had a few press hits before the show. Actually, Howard Stern started talking about it before Shark tank as well.
Interviewer: Yeah Howard Stern does seem like the constipated type.
Bobby: He is not afraid to talk about bowel movements. That’s what made him. he has a huge following and people don’t know he has twenty five million listeners of Sirius XM that are following Howard Stern. I listened to it once but he’s got a huge following.
Interviewer: There’s a lesson in this for everyone who’s listening. You are reaching out to press and to bloggers. Vegan blogger gave it to Fiona Wozniak who is a producer on Dr Oz, she called up, your dad didn’t believe it but it was true.
Bobby: You never know where things are going to happen. That’s what got this ball rolling with those three dozen stools that I had made for influencers and bloggers. It seemed like a big expense because we had to ship them. To ship a Squatty Potty, a big wooden stool, it was eighteen dollars. I had about three dozen of them made and our cost on the stools was about twenty five dollars at the time. My mow was like, are you and I’m like we need to get this to the people. They will talk about it. That really got the ball rolling.
Interviewer: I see this too. I just published a book, a guy from Buzz Feed just asked for it and a guy from Washington Post. So I sent it off but every time I do it costs me money. It makes you worry, this is insane direct marketing because you’re throwing money out the window and you hope more comes back in than you threw out.
Bobby: They could have hated the stool. That was our biggest fear. I guess we believed it enough to know that it works for enough people. So if there was some kind of market out there. A lot of my friends and people who tried it and said I don’t want this thing around my toilet. This thing is ridiculous.
Interviewer: It’s odd to look at until you get used to it but this is the classic childhood fear or human fear of rejection. I have kids and I remember one of my sons saying so and so don’t like me. I said you know, tomorrow he might. The next day my son said you were right dad. It turned around. When I first saw the Squatty Patty I was like what in God’s name but now I think I get it.
Bobby: It was extremely hard six years ago when we first got started; we got a lot of rejection. It was pretty difficult but then it got so many acceptances. My biggest fear was like; people aren’t going to want to put this thing in their bathroom. This is changing something they have been doing their whole life. Especially if you are asking them to put this thing around their toilet that their friends and family are going to see. How do you make this into something that is socially acceptable, cool and fun?
Interviewer: Speaking of cool and fun, the unicorn ad, and as soon as I saw it I thought, you guys are going to be gazillionaires. I use to work in advertising, I’ve made all kinds of ads but that add is genius. For anybody who hasn’t seen it, search for unicorn squatty potty YouTube and watch. How did that happen?
Bobby: It won the Webby that year. This is the academy awards of the internet. It was a popular ad. I can take credit for giving it the green light but I can’t take credit for creating it.
Interviewer: I didn’t research it, was it an agency?
Bobby: It’s a small marketing team out of Utah called the Harmon Brothers. They were on our radar because my mom’s friend invented this tongue scraper called the Orabrush. It scrapes your tongue. Jeffrey Harmon started out marketing this Orabrush for my mom’s cousin. He did it really successfully. He got this thing in the Wal-Mart because of his YouTube ads.so he trademark the term as seen on YouTube. He created a big following around this simple tongue brush. So he was on my radar for how they marketed what was a random product. They did it in a way that they got enough followers to get it in a Wal-Mart which I thought was really cool and also sell millions of dollars of the product.
When we first talked to him with this idea of the Squatty Potty and concepts on how to sell this product. How do we educate and entertain with a product that helps a poop better? He came back to me with a bit and without of what it would cost. It was about two hundred thousand dollars. I thought it was a lot of money so I said; one of these days when I can afford you guys I’ll use you guys. They had been thinking about it too and about a year later we got back in touch with them. We had gotten the money from Shark Tank so we had a little bit of money and a little publicity. I was like finally we can afford you guys. They were like, we have been thinking about this product nonstop and we have the best idea. That’s when they pitched the unicorn and the ice cream. The call got a little quiet, I got the unicorn but I couldn’t quite get everyone on our Squatty Potty on board with this concept. They were like, we are a help product, and we are not a novelty. We spent all this time getting credibility for our product; let’s not throw that all down the toilet.
Interviewer: What was the offensive part, what was the most shocking part? Was it feeding soft serves?
Bobby: It was just a unicorn pooping. It was a kind of using a mystical magical unicorn. Now it seem so real, it seem like the perfect fit but at the time it was very scary because we had built this credibility as a product that actually works. Three or four times in the video we say yes, this is the real product and yes it really works. That was written in the script because I didn’t.
Interviewer: Like a joke add.
Bobby: It was so funny it could make it seem like it’s not a real product.
Interviewer: I thought that when I first saw it. They did something though that’s a classic Proctor and Gamble device; they do in our R.T.B. a reason to believe. You know when you see a shampoo commercial and a molecule bond to the blah blah blah? Well they do this thing where the colon straightened out and that’s a reason to believe this thing actually works. It’s very well done.
Bobby: That’s embedded four or five times in the commercial.
Interviewer: A friend of mine who is an old mentor was responsible for the drain-o ads where they showed side by side, look Drain-o works. It’s quite a similar thing oddly.
Bobby: Yeah it is similar. It is funny now.
Interviewer: Well like is more and more interesting as things fragment into weirder particle. Do you have advice? We’ve covered a lot of stuff that I think other entrepreneurs might be interested in.
Bobby: There is so much information out there about how to make your product successful. One of the models that we use at Squatty Potty is, before we went to the market we had a product that we had pretty much nailed. We had the messaging down, we had the product down and it was ready to go. So when Dr Oz called, it was ready. We had pretty much everything ready to go. When Howard Stern talked about it, it was ready. When it was time to scale we could do it very quickly. I think that is very important. If we were unprepared and Dr Oz called, it could have been a disaster. A lot of people put things on kick starter and they put it on too early and by the time they get their product ready and out (I’ve seen this happen hundreds of times) there are knockoffs on Amazon. So you have to have everything nailed before you go out there to scale it. That’s the scale model. At least put up a manufactured product. When we are releasing new product now, I just want to make sure the product is ready to scale before we release it. We have made a few mistakes on some of our products because they weren’t ready and we suffered.
Interviewer: That’s very good. We often hear people giving development advice in that context so that’s all true. My last question is a little bit of levity but tell me about Dukie. This is interesting. You have a plush story unicorn that poops.
Bobby: You never know what the market will demand and we are opportunistic and it can become pretty popular. He can become even more famous than me or any of us. So people like him; he is cute, he is funny and he was the start of the commercial. We file that under the merchandise category of our website. We sold a lot of this little stuff and he poops ice cream which is cute.
Interviewer: It’s funny you said he is more famous than me. There is a chapter in my book about creating a character that could become more famous than you. A friend of mine named Rob Ragger created Emily the strange and nobody knows Rob Ragger but everybody knows Emily the strange. Also Toshi Nakamoto created bit coin except Toshi Nakamoto doesn’t exist and Tweety Bird and so on. I know the inventor of Tweety Bird daughter and people don’t know about Bob Clampett so much. Dukie, now that you mention it, you can go to CAA in LA and say Dukie can be in movies. Even Amazon Studios for example.
Bobby: Now we have requests for licensing and video game usage. So we are kind of trying to figure out what to do with Dukie.
Interviewer: What to do with Dukie? OK, perhaps we could we could end it with that and in a couple of years have a follow-up: a Dukie reprise.
Bobby: My favourite line in the unicorn commercial is the Squatty potty haiku. It says Squatty Potty you fill me with endless joy, yet leave me empty.
Interviewer: I remember that. You know what’s odd bobby? twelve years ago I did a book called Cafe haiku, I should send you a copy of it. That book I got a ton of press around but it didn’t sell well because it’s a cute book and nobody needed it. Fame on the other hand I think a billion people want for various reasons. Be it for a career, they want to famous, they want to do good in the world but haiku it’s just too ephemeral. I love that, when I read it I completely forgot there was a haiku associated with that. Well thank you very much Bobby. I appreciate the time.
Bobby: Thanks Jeff for having me.
