239 | Creating a Brand to Fund a Bigger Scope | with Ravi Kurani

Ravi Kurani  

If you don't see eye to eye with a particular person, in whatever relationship that is, whether that's an investor, a customer or an employee, you're just going to end up shooting yourself in the foot. 

Chase Clymer  

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. 

And today I'm welcoming to the show Ravi Kurani. He is the innovative CEO of Sutro, a company that's revolutionizing the way we manage and conserve water through smart technology.

Welcome to the show.

Ravi Kurani  

Thanks so much for having me on, Chase. This is awesome.

Chase Clymer  

I'm excited to chat. So for those that are unaware, what types of products do you guys bring into the market over there?

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah, so our flagship product is actually a "floating laboratory" -- [as] I like to call it-- for swimming pools, hot tubs or spas. 

So if you have a home [in] Los Angeles, Austin, Texas, Miami, Florida, you probably have a pool in your backyard and you probably have to test the water to make sure it's safe. 

Our device basically floats in your swimming pool and then we have an app that tells you exactly what chemical to put in and when to make sure that your water is always blue [and] safe to swim in. 

The larger goal of our technology is to move into multiple different arenas. So if you think about where water needs to be measured and where water is used, that's where Sutro wants to live. 

And that can be agriculture, that can be food and beverage, that can be making beer, producing wine, drinking water... 

And so that's eventually the roadmap of where we want to end [up]. But right now we have a swimming pool product.

Chase Clymer  

Oh, that's amazing. So where did the idea for this product come from?

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah. 2 tangential threads. 

So imagine, sunny Southern California, my dad used to have a chain of pool and spa supply stores. 

So I did everything from driving a pickup truck, to servicing pools, all the way to running my dad's pool store and testing people's water. Fast forward to after I graduated grad school, I ended up going into impact investing in India. 

And a lot of the investment theses that we saw [and] a lot of the investment pitch decks that we saw were around people that were pitching water filtration ideas, but nobody was doing anything around water sensing.

And so we're like, "Hey, how are you gonna fix the water if you don't know what's wrong with it?" 

And so we started looking into sensing technology, built out the first prototype, tried selling it to the Indian government, [which is the] stupidest thing a startup can do. 

Don't try to sell to the Indian government. Came back to the United States and flipped the model around with that echo to what I used to do when I was growing up with. 

"Hey, let's go ahead and launch this product into swimming pools, sell them to wealthier pool owners first, make a higher dollar per unit, and then use that capital to reinvest in the technology that we can then deploy in the drinking water stuff later." 

So that's the 2  weird tangential threads that end up connecting Sutro to where we are today.

Chase Clymer  

Oh, that's a wild story. So I guess I need to ask. So you are in the VC world looking at all these ideas and  you see a gap in the market. 

Now, did you jump in with yourself or did you partner with another company to start looking into sensing technology? What was the story from like ideation to the first product?

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah. So my background is actually in mechanical engineering as well. So I initially started napkin sketching the first versions of this. 

I wouldn't say that I'm responsible for the entire thing, because we've had so many people that have had their hands on the product that I really do owe and tip my hat to a lot of the folks that have actually helped get us where we are. 

But in terms of your question, it first started off with a very simple premise of "What does the water sensing ecosystem look like?" And if you look at it, there's 2 very big humps. 

The first hump is on really, really cheap water test strips. You've probably seen these like litmus drip tests, or swimming pool test kits that you just dip in the water and look at the color. 

Those ended up having a lot of accuracy issues because people... One the test strips themselves end up degrading over time if you don't store them properly. But secondarily, you have the human element of being able to read color. That becomes a problem. 

On the other hump, you have really expensive technologies that are sometimes $5000, $10,000, up to $80,000 per unit that only laboratories can afford. And so you're sending in these samples to make sure that laboratories are gonna get them. 

And so there's this really big gap in the middle of something that's autonomous, something that removes the human element, and something that's cheaper. 

And that's where we first came at it from. Initially, we actually did what all startups should do: Build as quickly as you can and deploy products as quickly as you can. 

So we took off-the-shelf sensors. We literally went to Amazon and we were like, "Hey, water sensor off-the-shelf, connected up to a plug, and then put a Wi-Fi chip on top of it." 

And so that really was our first prototype: "How do we take something off-the-shelf, plug it up with a Wi-Fi connector, and then make an app around it?"

Chase Clymer  

Okay, so you've got a prototype, you build out your MVP [which was] the app, do you go and seek funding? Do you go and try to sell this immediately to the government? 

What's the next step? 

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah. Initially, we were in the middle of a prototype. We were trying to pitch the government for funding. And so we were in between getting a prototype built/pitching to the government/validating the idea. 

The problem in India was that even getting to the first person who was going to be a decision maker was taking us weeks and months to even get to that first goal. 

And so that's what launched us back into California again. And the model there actually is a lot more interesting. 

And so what we did when we first landed back in California was we wanted to validate the hypothesis that a homeowner --somebody that had a swimming pool-- would trust a robot floating in their pool, and then basically be able to trust its recommendations that came off of it. 

And so we basically built a prototype that was halfway functional. We wouldn't... 

I, today, would say that I wouldn't lean all of my laurels on this first prototype and expect it to do full-on chemistry management. 

But with that, we basically went into the home and double checked the water chemistry ourselves as humans. And so this is what's called... In prototyping, it's called concierge. 

So when you have a concierge experience that uses a technology as a crutch to validate "Does this entire box actually give the promise that the customer is hoping for?" 

What ended up happening after that actually is we ended up deploying more and more of these dummy prototypes and we ended up building actually a pool route. 

We ended up building a pool service route. We literally had like 30 pools, and we have to pay a pool boy to basically go around and service these pools. 

And at that point in time is where we basically raised our first half a million dollars because we said, "Look, we have to use a human to crutch this really dummy prototype. We need money to basically automate this entire system." 

And the value here is that we've actually proved it that these people will trust a robot if we can actually deploy the capital to build it from scratch all the way up to what the promise is. 

And so that was our first validation and how we got the product out.

Chase Clymer  

Oh, that's awesome. Now, how are you finding these first customers to test the product? And how did that strategy evolve over time?

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah, funnily enough, you can go to maps.google.com, and turn on satellite view,..

Chase Clymer  

(laughs)

Ravi Kurani  

...and see pools. 

In California, you can see pools in people's backyards. A little creepy, but I have house addresses of people that I know have pools because you can see in their backyard. 

And I could have spent a bunch of money on Facebook ads and Google ads. But when you're a startup, you're trying to be as scrappy as possible. 

And so we basically would drop pins in warm neighborhoods: Los Angeles, San Diego, Austin, Houston, Phoenix. And we know where pools are. We will just find neighborhoods that have really, really high density of pools. 

And back then it was a lot easier to get into Nextdoor, which was the "Facebook for neighborhoods" software. 

And we would just basically create fake addresses on Nextdoor and say, "Hey, I just moved in this neighborhood and I have a swimming pool. Do any of you guys have referrals for pool service companies or pool stores I should visit?"

Obviously, the people with the swimming pools are going to comment on that thread. And after we give it a day or two for everybody to comment.

We'll go in at the very end and we're like, "Hey, we found this company called Sutro. What do you think about it?" And  that would drive traffic to our website through this really hacky commenting strategy.

Chase Clymer  

Oh, that is amazing. That is amazing. Obviously, that's one of my favorite things about being a startup and the scrappy ways you acquire first customers. It's not really that scalable. 

Ravi Kurani  

Of course. 

Chase Clymer  

So this was how you got the MVP into all these pools. This is how you acquired the customers to get your first round of funding. 

When did things start to change? Was it the next iteration of the product where you remove the human element?

Ravi Kurani  

We very quickly remove the human element because once we had validated that people wanted the product and once we have validated that this Nextdoor strategy, our "digital marketing" work --I put digital quotes because it was a unscalable, hacked version of digital marketing-- we then went to the drawing board to figure out how do you actually build the product now. 

So we spent the good part of, I would say, 4 years developing a custom sensor. And that's because the stuff that's off-the-shelf that we were able to buy from Amazon just doesn't work. 

And it doesn't work, mostly because the sensor drifts over time. It starts to get inaccurate over time. And so we have to come back to our initial promise of "How do we make sure that if we're going to put a robot in the water, if we're going to put some sort of measurement device in the water, it needs to measure accurately?" 

Because that's the initial starting point. That's the origin to build any of these other models off of water chemistry analysis. If your initial data point on water chemistry is not correct, you have a flawed business model. You have a flawed company. 

And so we went back, really focused on the product, spent a good part of 4 years basically building out our own custom sensor. 

And actually, in the midst of those 4 years, we actually ended up getting acquired by a chemical company in Canada just because we had a really amazing sensor cluster that was accurate. 

Chase Clymer  

Oh, that's amazing. So let's fast forward a little bit. 

You get acquired, you have a better sensor, a better product, and now you have the funding to be able to really tackle the go-to-market strategy with this new, superior product. 

What was the channel that you guys went after first? Were you doing a marketplace release? Were you doing wholesale to pool and spa stores? Were you doing direct-to-consumer through your own website? 

What would you guys try?

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah, our business... 

Funny story, our business model was selling through distribution to pool and spa stores. That was how we initially built all of our documentation. Our launch date was March 2020...

Chase Clymer  

Hmm.

Ravi Kurani  

...which meant that 2 weeks later, basically California and the US was like, "All businesses are going to close their doors now and you guys are all going to sit inside your homes for the next 6 months." So we basically threw that entire business plan in the trash. 

What was the silver lining in this is because everybody was working from home and shelter-in-place sort of stuff, they were at home. They were working from home and their kids were at home. 

And so everybody that had a swimming pool in their backyard, wasn't able to visit a pool store and needed to figure out how to actually manage their water chemistry. 

And it was almost a fortuitous time because we now had a product that was remotely able to tell people what they should do with their water chemistry when they weren't able to go into a pool store. 

And so what started off as an initial model of going B2B selling into pool stores, COVID hit. We're to basically rip up and throw that entire B2B model in the trash and we pivoted really hard to B2C, right at a time when people were stuck at home. And they really needed to figure out how to measure their water chemistry. And so it was a... 

We were scratching our heads and being like, "Hey, this might just be the death of us because we had this entire marketing model and stores are closed." 

What turned out to end up being a boon for us because people were at home and they actually needed the product more than ever.

Chase Clymer  

After you realized that this was the time to launch direct-to-consumer, what was the strategy to get it in front of new eyes? Did you go with a more traditional channel like advertising through Facebook or Meta and Google? 

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah, it was the traditional channels. So we... 

At that time, I think the world wasn't entirely uprooted. There were no more physical stores anymore, there were people... 

People weren't on the streets. And so digital was just the way to go. 

And what we built in terms of our stack, very tactically, was we had top-of-funnel on Facebook. So we had a lot of brand recognition through Facebook ads. 

We then did intent-based search through Google, Google ads. 

We also really beefed up our SEO campaigns to make sure that we had enough of the answers for the people that were asking questions on Google because Google is nothing but a Q&A engine. 

And then we really beefed up our conversion rate optimization on the website itself, which we use Shopify for, to make sure that if people were on the website, they were able to explore enough and get enough trust and basically spend $500 for something that they're not able to touch and feel. 

And so that's how our stack was tactically deployed.

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. Thanks for sharing all that and getting into the details there. I know our listeners really love when our guests do that. 

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Chase Clymer  

Looking back on the journey, is there anything that stands out to you as maybe we could call it a mistake now or a hiccup along the way that you might want to point out for other listeners to be like "Maybe don't do this."?

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah, I would say find the right people. 

There's been a lot of people that I have gotten with in the makings of the company, in hiring and firing. 

The people are what makes the product at the end of the day. The people are [the ones] who buy the product, the people are [the ones] who invest in the company. 

And so when I say people, just make sure you're surrounding yourself with the right people across the board. 

That could be investors, that could be finding the right customers, that could be finding the right employees, that could be finding the right co-founders, that could be finding the right acquirer because at the end of the day, people work with people. 

And products, and investments, and dollars, and bank accounts... All those things are vehicles to make things move. 

But at the end of the day, if you don't see eye to eye with a particular person, in whatever relationship that is --whether that's an investor or a customer or an employee-- you're just going to end up shooting yourself in the foot. 

And so I would say the biggest mistake I've made is not focusing on people in my own life before and I take a real hard look at who I bring into the circle now.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely. It's "Hire slow and fire fast." It's the old mantra that I always hear. 

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah, yeah, entirely. 

Chase Clymer  

Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Ravi Kurani  

I think one thing that folks in startups or people that are working in Ecommerce or have an Ecommerce style business that should realize is, the world is constantly changing. 

We could have never predicted COVID, we could have never predicted the rise of Facebook ads for that matter. Everybody... 

If you were to talk to somebody on Mad Men right in the 1960s, they would have probably never envisioned a digital world that is off the back of 3G, of which Steve Jobs then invented the iPhone, which then people got really comfortable with using their phones. 

And now they can then use Facebook as an app to then get advertised to. 

All that to say is make sure that the world, that you understand that the world is changing. And you have to make sure that you're pivoting your strategy to what is relevant to your particular audience. 

And what might be relevant today, maybe irrelevant tomorrow. And it's not that your model doesn't work, it's just that you need to understand that everything is changing around you and you need to change with it. 

And many times when I mentor founders, they just get so stuck on: "Well, that was my business model. And that's what I planned for. And that's what this is." 

It's like, "Well, you made a plan for it but the world doesn't want to eat that plan right now. It has a different plan for you." 

And so make sure that you just keep your eyes open, and keep an ear to the ground, and make sure that you're listening to what the world is telling you to see how you should pivot to make sure that you're the most successful and what you're doing today and tomorrow.

Chase Clymer  

Absolutely, Ravi. You saying that made me think about just how people get really wrapped up in the decisions that they've made. 

And a tactic versus strategy is something that they aren't really comprehending. 

Ravi Kurani  

Mm-hmm.

Chase Clymer  

And it's "Well, the strategy is sound. The tactic and the approach you're taking is not working right now. So maybe it's time to pivot." 

And marketing is the same as it was 50 years ago, as it was 100 years ago. It's the same exact thing once you learn the concepts of awareness and trust, and getting the sale. 

It's a simple 3-step funnel, but the tactics at each part change... 

Ravi Kurani  

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer  

...and they evolve. Back then, it was magazine ads. And now you've got...

Ravi Kurani  

True.

Chase Clymer  

...Facebook ads. And retargeting is a lot easier these days and intent-based search. But the strategy behind it hasn't changed in over 100 years. So I think that's some great advice as well. 

Back to Sutro though. If I'm listening to this, and I have a pool, and I don't want to do it the old way, and I want to check out the product. Where should I go? What should I do?

Ravi Kurani  

Go to mysutro.com. That's M-Y-S-U-T-R-O.com. You can order there and we'll get it delivered to your doorstep in 3 -5 business days.

Chase Clymer  

Awesome. Ravi, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Ravi Kurani  

Thanks for having me, Chase.

Chase Clymer  

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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Until next time!