Memoryboard Product Launch - Mastering the Early Levers of Value Creation

Welcome!  Upside/Downside is a podcast about value creation, and how finance business partners, managers and business owners like you can grow your profits and cash flow.  I'm your host, Matt Cooley.  

In this episode, Tyler Zanini, Founder at Memoryboard, shares what it's like launching a physical product in today's dynamic environment and how they are navigating the value creation journey.

Driven by a deep passion to help older adults experiencing memory loss stay in close touch with their families, Memoryboard is on a journey to directly improve quality of life.  We cover business models, sales channels, funding, marketing X-factors and the importance of making decisions with hard data, all in order to drive value creation and fuel the company mission.

Lots to like and learn from in this episode of Upside/Downside.  Join us!

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Transcript

Matt: 0:02

Welcome back, everyone. This is Matt Cooley, host of Upside Downside, where we explore value creation and how the actions we take in business drive profits and cash flow. I'm a unit CFO for a large technology company and a nerd for value creation and how it impacts companies and everyday people. We're continuing our exploration of age technology, or AgeTech for short, and how demographic shifts are uncovering significant business opportunities for companies that can solve real problems. Joining me today is Tyler Zanini, founder and CEO at MemoryBoard, a digital display and app that lets family and other caregivers communicate to loved ones experiencing memory loss. It caught my eye for its simplicity and focus on an important part of the growing age Thank you for being here today on Upside Downside. I look at your product launch earlier this year with huge admiration and think, wow. If Tyler can launch a business in this kind of crazy environment, you can probably accomplish anything. And I really mean that. This is such a special time. Why did you start MemoryBoard? And what are some of the main challenges you're facing launching a product company right now?

Tyler: 1:28

Yeah. Matt, thank you again for having me. Memory board really started from a personal experience with loved ones with memory loss and dementia and Alzheimer's. For me, in my case, it was my grandmother. She's had vascular dementia for over five years at this point. As the years went by, it just became harder and harder to keep in touch with her, keep her updated, let her know what's going on with our family, and really just find a way to communicate. So memory board was really kind of built as a way to bridge that gap. So as you mentioned, memory board is a digital display that would sit in your loved one's home. And through an app, family members and caregivers can send reminders, messages, updates, check-ins, notifications. They can send a photo. And with the photo, you can add a tag to kind of describe the person, the place, or maybe a memory from the photo. all throughout the day from anywhere in the world. So we did this big pilot. We had about 40, 50 families as part of the pilot early on at the beginning of the year. And we kind of saw two things. One, memory board is really a great tool for communication, for keeping in touch. And it's also a great tool for helping to manage the loved ones day to day, help them kind of understand their daily schedule and what's going on to really then reduce the anxiety, kind of provide everybody peace of mind and for everybody to kind of feel connected. So you're exactly right. It's definitely an interesting time to be launching a company. I think every environment is very, very different. I think it's always a really interesting time with different challenges and different opportunities. In the case of Memoryboard, it was a few things that kind of stood out in terms of kind of main challenges. First and foremost was just speed and how quickly we were able to move. For memory board, we haven't gone down the traditional VC path. I'm sure that's something that we'll talk through later on in this conversation. And because of that, we're also constrained in terms of how quickly we are able to move. So I think speed is definitely kind of one piece of it. Marketing and kind of marketing channels and how to think about marketing in the H-Tech sector is another big challenge that we launched, as you mentioned, a couple of weeks ago, earlier this year. And we're still really kind of figuring out what is the right approach to marketing? What are the right channels? What is the right messaging? My view in starting a company and in business in general is really go out there and Test different things. I don't think anybody really knows kind of the answer upfront. It's something that you need to test and iterate on to ultimately figure out what is actually resonating with people and what are the right channels.

Matt: 4:09

And would you say that's particularly true with age tech because it's so disparate, right? It's not like you're selling into one very specific customer that's the same.

Tyler: 4:21

Yeah, absolutely. You know, age tech is kind of unique. It's one market where you're selling to a family member, but ultimately the user is somebody else. You know, I have a young daughter at home and it's kind of the same thing where my daughter's not buying anything. You know, we're buying things for her. So they're marketing to us, but ultimately the user is somebody different. You have kind of the same dynamic here where, you know, we're selling to a family. It's a loved one who's probably not making the purchase that ultimately is going to be using the memory board, but then the family members and caregivers are going to be using the app. So both need to kind of serve different users in kind of different ways.

Matt: 5:02

Wow. Okay. It must be challenging. And without going into a lot of details, did you produce offshore the actual boards and did that present any challenges?

Tyler: 5:14

We did. We did. And when we When we were kind of going down the path of looking at manufacturing, looking at factories, again, to the point of testing, we looked at a lot of different options and opportunities. We looked at the U.S., we looked at Mexico, we looked at China, we looked at Southeast Asia, weighed the different kind of pros and cons, and that's... not only costs, but also expertise, right? Who can produce what we need? How quickly can they produce it? What is the cost at which they can produce it at? Do they have the experience? Can we trust them? Can we scale with them? So kind of weighing all these considerations together. Now, today, we're using one manufacturer, using one factory. We're in small, early stage business. But at some point in the future, as we grow, we're going to need to have redundancies. We're going to need to have multiple factories. And that's going to be kind of a different problem and kind of challenge to solve is how do you kind of scale on the manufacturing side? And as you alluded to, there's so many different costs, not just talking about tariffs, which we can obviously get into, but other kind of costs that come into shipping something overseas and other taxes and customs and duties that you have to pay when bringing these things in. And do you buy a full container or do you buy a partial container? And then do you fly it in? So there's all these kind of different cost implications to kind of think about.

Matt: 6:35

Right. And it sounds like that can wait until you really get things started. So that's good to hear. Cool. You alluded to this topic a second ago. Why did Memoryboard decide to bootstrap versus going with Angel or VC?

Tyler: 6:54

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a few reasons. I think first and chief among them, it was really the type of business that I wanted to build was one that was bootstrapped. I come from a dozen plus years working in Silicon Valley, working in different technology companies and understand the nuances between going through the venture capital route, building a bootstrapped business, working at a large technology company where you have a lot of cash in the bank and you don't have to worry about fundraising. And for me, And memory board, it really made a lot more sense to kind of go the bootstrapped path and the implications of that, which meant likely growing more slowly over time, but then also having kind of more control and not being at the... discretion of a venture investor and some of the kind of limitations that come with doing that. And I will also say it's not only a personal reason, I would also say it's also not really a business that I think fits the traditional venture capital model, which is, you know, can this be a billion dollar or $10 billion business in a fairly short period of time? So I also didn't think it kind of fit the path of kind of going the traditional VC route. And as a result, kind of built the business in the way that we did. And

Matt: 8:21

so there's a lot happening with investments in the VC space though, right? So what's your observation on kinds of companies that are getting funded in the age tech space? Because there is a lot of activity going on.

Tyler: 8:35

Yeah, absolutely. I think the company's getting funded not only in age tech, but in venture more broadly. It's really, I mean, the hype right now is AI, right? So it really needs to be, you need to kind of show why you're an AI company and because of that, why you can build a big business. And along those same lines, there are things that come with being AI native and being an AI first business that venture investors are specifically looking for. For example, you need to be able to show that you're able to operate with a very lean team and hire very few employees. Where back in the day, the VC route, five, 10 years ago, when it was all about software investing was Raise as much money as possible, build as big a team as possible. Now it's quite the opposite, where a big team in many respects actually becomes a negative signal because you need to be able to show that you can do more with less.

Matt: 9:32

Okay, so the dynamics really have changed.

Tyler: 9:35

Absolutely.

Matt: 9:35

Is AI part of the memory board product?

Tyler: 9:38

AI is certainly involved in how we operate the business and how we think about a lot of the different kind of functional areas, whether that's finance, operations, product development, design, marketing. We're using AI kind of throughout the business, but I certainly wouldn't call ourselves an AI-first company. There are a lot of opportunities for us to incorporate AI into the product and make it more customer-facing over the next couple of years and product iterations. It's something that we're exploring. And I think it's something that we'll do, but we really want it to be very natural and I don't think I will lead with AI, but I'll kind of lead with the kind of features and benefits. For example, making it easier to send a message because maybe AI is suggesting messages to you because of the types of messages that you've sent in the past. Those are things where it's driven by AI, but the real benefit is saving the family members and caregivers time and making it easier to communicate with their loved ones.

Matt: 10:41

Okay. I mean, that's very interesting. One thing I've noticed about MemoryBoard is its relative simplicity. And I think that's an awesome selling point. You have the board, you have the app, and the caregivers and family members can easily send messages to the board, right? And so setting this up, it just seems very simple. And to me, that seems like a great selling point.

Tyler: 11:09

Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And that is one of the core things that we thought about in building Memory Board is this idea that it just needs to be super, super simple. And that's really what we continue to hear from when we were doing our discovery and kind of market research, talking to families, talking to caregivers, talking to assisted living and independent living companies. The thing we kept hearing over and over again was this term low burden, keeping the burden super low on the loved one. and making it super, super simple. You know, we hear a lot of people say, oh, this is actually something I think we could use because it's so low burden for the loved one. And that's really the kind of goal is to keep things super simple. We want to do one thing super well. We want to kind of reduce the anxiety and provide kind of peace of mind for the loved ones that they don't feel overwhelmed with managing multiple apps. They don't feel overwhelmed with having to charge a device all the time or turn something on. Memory board really is intended to be little to kind of no touch from the loved one. They just need to look at it throughout the day, have it in kind of the space where they spend their most time, whether that's their living room, their kitchen, and really just kind of see the messages as they appear from their family.

Matt: 12:22

Okay. I think that's great. That focus sounds compelling. Let's switch here a little bit. So what are some common business models in the age tech space and how does that impact memory boards? So, you know, one thing that you mentioned is you're really selling to the adult child of the end user. What are some other business models that are relevant in this area and just any comments that you have on that?

Tyler: 12:53

Yeah, absolutely. You know, age tech is interesting, because it's very hardware driven. And you don't really kind of see that every everything, consumer technology nowadays, everything's very app based, right? Everything is kind of done through your iPhone or your Android device. For the most part, you're buying a laptop, but you're not buying a bunch of kind of new hardware all the time. Whereas in age tech, it's actually very hardware heavy, you have things like kind of fall detection, you have things like the medication dispense devices. So there's actually a lot of hardware location, you know, trackers and that sort of thing. So there's actually a lot of kind of hardware when you kind of think about the offerings that are out there kind of intended for older adults. It's very kind of hardware driven. And as a result, I think what a lot of companies do is they typically charge a fairly high, let's say upfront kind of one time for the device, and then they kind of have a ongoing subscription as well. So That, I think, is the typical HTEC model for a lot of these hardware businesses. MemoryBoard has intentionally gone the route of not having a subscription and keeping it just to a one-time purchase of the device so that people don't have to pay an ongoing fee, which we think also makes it pretty compelling for folks to not have to feel like they're continuously paying to use the device so we can keep it at a lower upfront cost for the families that choose to purchase MemoryBoard. That And that's, I think, what we see quite a bit. And then the other kind of thing that's interesting in kind of the HTech space, I think when we use the term HTech, we're really kind of thinking about consumer-oriented technologies, not so much medical devices and drugs and more regulated. More

Matt: 14:38

on the medical side, yeah.

Tyler: 14:40

Yeah, exactly. But that being said, what is potentially really interesting for a device like memory board in the future are avenues like Medicare, Medicaid, insurance. Now, these are like long-term and difficult paths to go down that will require clinical studies. There could be some research that kind of takes place to kind of validate the findings from memory board. But if we can kind of get there eventually over a couple of years, that could be really, really compelling to say, hey, this can now be covered by insurance. I don't know if we've seen a ton of companies do that in the age tech space. I can't think of that many, but I'm sure everybody is kind of thinking about that as a potential path to go down.

Matt: 15:22

Right. Yeah, it seems we've actually discussed that on this podcast in the past where going the insurance route could totally be the right business decision, but it can also just burn a lot of cash while you're cycling through all the speed bumps that you have to maneuver. Are you primarily direct to consumer now?

Tyler: 15:44

Yeah, exactly right. So we're a direct-to-consumer business. We've built a consumer brand, working directly with families. So everything we kind of do is through the website, through social, and that's kind of our main channels today.

Matt: 15:56

Any big learnings on business models that you could share with other folks that are starting up businesses in age tech or otherwise that you learned? Because again, you said something interesting that so many startups are software-based or there isn't a hardware platform. Any big learnings from a business model standpoint that you'd like to share?

Tyler: 16:22

Yeah, absolutely. I think first and foremost, you have to have a compelling product that solves a real problem for people. And I think beyond that, you've spent the time to really test that. with early users, friends and family, early adopters, and you've really incorporated the feedback from those individuals into the commercial version of your product as well. I think a lot of people, I mean, the classic kind of dilemma is first-time founders spend all their time on product and second-time founders spend all their time on distribution. Distribution, yes. You guys had that conversation on a recent podcast. I think that's very true. And beyond the distribution piece, it's also the challenge of kind of talking to users and kind of talking to customers as well. That could be particularly challenging in the age tech space where some of these older adults, maybe they're more difficult to reach out to They're not using the internet like others are. So it's a little bit harder to kind of go out and kind of find those people. But in some respects, that makes it that much more important. So I think that's kind of like step number one is building a product that you know solves a real problem for people. The second piece beyond that, and that's kind of what we're learning as we're kind of getting a few weeks post our official launch, is how important trust is and how much trust matters. And giving people confidence that your product can actually solve their problem. How do you kind of show somebody that, hey, this has worked for other families and we think that this can work for yours. So building trust as a trusted brand, that takes a lot of time and you have to kind of be really mindful of that. So whether you're doing that through organic social, whether you're doing that through influencers, whether you're working with experts in the field who are kind of giving their stamp of approval on your product, you really need to think about how am I building trust ultimately so that when somebody lands on my website, they say, okay, like I actually have kind of confidence that this is what I'm looking for, this can solve my problem. And then I'll kind of go through that path to decide if I want to make a purchase.

Matt: 18:33

Oh, that's great. And how long is that journey? I mean, obviously, building trust is a long-term journey, right? But because this is so many age tech products or things that are in people's homes or directly related to the care that they're receiving, that trust is paramount. So, I mean, is that with memory board... What does that journey look like? It's

Tyler: 18:58

a really good question, and it's something that we are still in the process of figuring out. It's early, right? It is early, but what is amazing is the amount of data that is available today to help inform what that journey looks like, where are the pain points, where are people dropping off. People talk about data all the time. I think the one thing that I found that is often kind of overlooked and not talked about enough is something kind of like keep maps and the ability to kind of monitor how people are spending time on your website, understanding how far do they scroll down the homepage? How many pages do they look at when they're visiting your site? Looking at this kind of on an aggregated basis. So you're not looking at any kind of one individual record, but you're kind of seeing the overall trend of how somebody is experiencing, you know, your storefront, right? Your online storefront. And from there, you can really start to say, oh, people actually aren't making it to my testimonials. And I think that's a really important part of my product. I should probably move those up sooner on the page oh I have this really good page that has you know product feedback and reviews and how-to guides, but people aren't getting to it. So how do I make that more prominent on my website so that more people are getting to that content that they need? And a lot of this should also be informed by what you're hearing from people. So now that we're live in market, we're getting questions every day that says, how does this work? Can it do this? Can it do that? And then for me, it's not only answering a question in a timely manner. It's also then saying, oh, multiple people have asked me about this. I should probably include this in an FAQ. Maybe I should write a blog post about this. Maybe I should make it kind of more front and center because I know other people are asking about

Matt: 20:38

it. And how do you take those metrics as they develop and they're constantly changing and relate that to your profit and cash flow plans? And I don't necessarily, a lot of age tech is mission driven. So I'm not here to say that every startup has to be 100% profit and cashflow driven, but you certainly need that performance in order to fund your continued existence. So how do you relate these stats, if you will, to just profits and cashflow?

Tyler: 21:09

Yeah, absolutely. And because we are bootstrapped and not VC, we do need to be profitable for us to survive as a business. Otherwise, we can't survive and we won't be around for that long if we're not profitable because there's really no other way to structure it. So the way that I think about it is really thinking about the full user journey and the full experience from start to finish. And when I say finish, I don't mean make a purchase. I mean, well beyond that. After you make a purchase, in many ways, that's the start of your journey with the customer. You need to make sure that they're getting the information they need to set up and install the device correctly. Make sure they're using the device. How many messages are they sending? Are they using it on a daily basis? Are they only using it a couple times a day? Is only one person in the family using it or multiple family members using it? and then following up with improvements as well. Hey, we've just made a release on the app, go to the app store, get the latest version. It's got X, Y, Z kind of new features available to you to use at no cost. So the real thinking about kind of the full journey from start to end, and looking at each one from both a data perspective, but also kind of qualitative as well. What are we hearing from comments? What are we hearing from the responses? That's an area where AI is really powerful. You can just plug in all the qualitative kind of feedback you're getting and say, hey, summarize this for me. Give me the three takeaways that I should take action on based on what is coming up most often and what are the questions that are coming up most often. But I would say really just look at every kind of point of the journey and say, what is the data telling me? Are people getting to my website? No. Okay. I need to figure out how to get more people to the website. So I need to kind of do think about more marketing and kind of more marketing channels as well. Are people getting to the checkout? Okay. Well, we're getting kind of good conversion to the checkout, but then there's drop off from checkout to purchase. Well, why is that? Do we need more trust-based signals? Is the checkout flow clunky and something's not working correctly? How quickly are the devices getting to people's houses? Okay. Can we speed that up? And what does that look like? Okay. It's taking some people some time to turn the device on and set up. up the device once they get it to their house? How can we speed up that process? So thinking about each kind of step in the journey. And for me, it's like, one, what is the low-hanging fruit? It's a little bit of kind of effort versus impact. What is the low-hanging fruit that can then have the biggest impact?

Matt: 23:35

Oh, that's great. That's great. That's a good way to put it. What do you think are some X factors that could really accelerate your profits and cash flow? You mentioned influencers and a couple other things. But I know it's early for you guys, but... What are you kind of thinking that could really just put this business on full throttle?

Tyler: 23:55

Yeah, absolutely. For us, we're still in this kind of testing phase where we don't really know what the right go-to-market channel is. And we want to test different channels to kind of figure that out. So that's really the X factor in my mind is making sure that we're testing enough channels to then have conviction there. where we should double down, spend more time, spend more resources, spend more dollars. And that's kind of the process that we're going through. So whether that's organic social, whether that's paid social, I was just having a conversation with somebody in this space last week, and they were talking a lot about snail mail and sending snail mail. And I believe you guys did that as well for my age tech lab. And that's really interesting as well. I have no idea what that costs. I have no idea what the conversion of that looks like. But it's something worth testing, right? Allocating a small amount of budget and sending a number of flyers and kind of seeing what the performance of that looks like. So I think that's when we kind of think about what can really kind of accelerate things and allow us to move a lot more quickly. It's really just the results of all this testing and experimentation that we're doing.

Matt: 25:08

That's great. And you sound like a data guy, so I'm sure you're enjoying

Tyler: 25:11

actually

Matt: 25:11

this journey.

Tyler: 25:13

Yeah, it's honestly, I mean, it's funny because before we really launched, we didn't have that much kind of data to go off of. So we were talking about vibes, right, before the conversation started. It was a little bit of that to an extent, but now that we have a lot of data and in some ways we're just getting more and more data, it's really becoming pretty amazing how we can kind of now make decisions based on the data.

Matt: 25:36

Oh, that's great. That's great. So last question for you, Tyler, where do you see memory board a year from now on its value creation journey?

Tyler: 25:46

Yeah, absolutely. For us, I just, I always come back to the mission and that's really about empowering families and their loved ones to stay connected. you know, and helping kind of families and loved ones with memory loss and dementia and Alzheimer's. And that's really the focus. And that's really the goal. Again, did not kind of build this to be a VC backed $10 billion business, really kind of built this business with the mission in mind and kind of the goal of supporting families like ours, you know, and our families really benefited from the memory board and, you know, our belief is as many others can as well. So that's going to really kind of guide what the next year looks like and really the value If we're helping families and they're getting value out of our product and then we're hearing from families how their loved one is doing more because of memory board, has lower anxiety because of memory board, everybody feels more connected, that's going to be success for us. But that's also then going to impact what the product looks like and new features that we're adding, new hardware that we might be developing, and ultimately how we kind of go to market based on all of that. I think Memoryboard will continue to be a business that scales and grows slowly over time as more people become aware of the product, as we figure out what the right channels are, as people kind of get to know us better, and we build kind of trust and confidence in the market with families, we'll continue to kind of get our names out there and kind of further grow the business and kind of expand our footprint.

Matt: 27:21

That's nice. And that's one thing that I really like about AgeTech is the direct connection you can make to actually helping people improve their lives. So that's great to hear. Well, we'll certainly be watching your progress, Tyler. I want to thank you for sharing with us today. Thanks, Matt. Really enjoyed the time. All right. And thank you to listeners of Upside Downside. Tell your friends about us. And if you need help with a specific value creation problem, please don't hesitate to reach out. Have a great day, everyone.