Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Bathroom infrastructure has always been a problem for me because
Speaker 2: I need a bathroom a lot, and I get frustrated
Speaker 2: when a bathroom isn't good. But I wasn't really necessarily
Speaker 2: sure that that was a problem for everybody. So I
Speaker 2: started doing this thing where I would interview everyone about
Speaker 2: their bathroom habits. And the most fun thing to do
Speaker 2: actually is ask if you ever get in an uber lyft, say,
Speaker 2: can I ask you a weird question? Where do you
Speaker 2: go to the bathroom when you're working?
Speaker 1: This is Fletcher Wilson. He's the co founder and CEO
Speaker 1: of a company called Throne Labs.
Speaker 2: I would get highly strategic answers, and what was revealing
Speaker 2: is just how big of a problem it really is
Speaker 2: if you're working from your car and you don't have
Speaker 2: an office bathroom.
Speaker 1: Right, So, what are some of the strategic answers people gave?
Speaker 2: You Never drink water or coffee on the job, which
Speaker 2: is a bad answer, right, or.
Speaker 1: A sad answer?
Speaker 2: Sad answer, or I know this one plays this one
Speaker 2: restaurant that lets me so I'm always trying to know.
Speaker 2: At four o'clock in the afternom I'm trying to get
Speaker 2: a ride there the most interesting was I'm driving on
Speaker 2: mission in San Francisco, and I asked the question, and
Speaker 2: he turns around and goes, you really want to know?
Speaker 2: And I said absolutely. He pulls over to the side
Speaker 2: of the road, which made me nervous, and reaches for
Speaker 2: his glove compartment, which made me more nervous, and opens
Speaker 2: it up and pulls out a rolled up necktie. And
Speaker 2: I sort of was confused, And he said, with a
Speaker 2: smile on his face, as if he had sort of
Speaker 2: solved the mysteries of the universe. You know, all I
Speaker 2: have to do is whenever I drop someone off at
Speaker 2: a hotel, I throw this on and they think I
Speaker 2: am staying there and I get to use their bathroom.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: He had to put on a costume just to use
Speaker 2: an office bathroom, right, And that kind of put me
Speaker 2: on a journey where I was talking to police officers,
Speaker 2: people without reliable access to homes, parents with young children, athletes,
Speaker 2: you know, and everyone.
Speaker 1: I have the good fortune to have worked in offices
Speaker 1: where I can always go to the bathroom, but there
Speaker 1: is on my route to work. It takes me forty
Speaker 1: five minutes to get to work on the subway, and
Speaker 1: there's a Whole Foods in the middle. It's the one
Speaker 1: on Houston Street by second half, and like more than once,
Speaker 1: I've been running down Houston Street and a sweat I'm
Speaker 1: halfway to work, heading for the Whole Food's toilet.
Speaker 2: We've all been in that sweat run. I mean not
Speaker 2: all of us, but I'd say forty percent of the population,
Speaker 2: based on my discussions, has been in that situation before.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
Speaker 1: make technological progress. My guest today is Fletcher Wilson. His
Speaker 1: company Throne Labs is putting new public bathrooms in cities
Speaker 1: around the country. His problem is this, how do you
Speaker 1: create public toilets that people actually want to use? As
Speaker 1: you'll hear, the answer in a combination of physical design, technology,
Speaker 1: and a kind of social engineering. The conversation also points
Speaker 1: to some bigger ideas about how hard it is for
Speaker 1: cities to build and maintain pretty much anything.
Speaker 2: It started by doing a lot of research on why
Speaker 2: there are many public bathrooms out there, and it's an
Speaker 2: interesting history to some extent. A lot of people point
Speaker 2: to this movement in the sixties and seventies called the
Speaker 2: Coalition to and Pay for Toilets in America.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, So what was the case before that? Like,
Speaker 1: what was the status quo?
Speaker 2: There were a lot of put a quarter in and
Speaker 2: you can use the bathroom facilities actually in America and
Speaker 2: certainly in Europe, and that created the right incentives to
Speaker 2: provide bathrooms in some respects. So a lot of people
Speaker 2: point to that as why there are better bathrooms in
Speaker 2: Europe VERSUS America. So I think that's a big part
Speaker 2: of it. I think there are more recent issues, I
Speaker 2: think safety and security, and in a lot of urban
Speaker 2: areas in the modern US city, there are a lot
Speaker 2: of cities, as we've talked to them, that are sort
Speaker 2: of nervous that bathrooms will become sort of a location
Speaker 2: for nefarious activity like.
Speaker 1: Drugs and prostitution. I mean, is that said basically.
Speaker 2: Sure, you name it, and it's a private space within
Speaker 2: a public space, and that makes city officials nervous. And
Speaker 2: in some cases it's true that it has been difficult
Speaker 2: with the old school bathroom infrastructure style to solve for
Speaker 2: that problem.
Speaker 1: Okay, so this is why we can't have nice public toilets.
Speaker 1: What were you doing before, what was your job?
Speaker 2: Thrown as my second company. My first company was a
Speaker 2: medical technology company with a catheter a piece of hardware,
Speaker 2: so I'm not afraid of building things in the physical world.
Speaker 2: That company was trying to solve a problem for people
Speaker 2: whose leg veins aren't able to properly pump blood back
Speaker 2: to the heart from the legs, and so we had
Speaker 2: a cather that went in recreated vein valves for people
Speaker 2: in their legs and so. And that company is still
Speaker 2: going and I'm proud of it. But I think the
Speaker 2: link here is, first of all, it's all plumbing, veins
Speaker 2: and bathrooms, but really sticky problems that a lot of
Speaker 2: people don't want to try to solve.
Speaker 1: So what's the moment when you decide to start this company.
Speaker 2: I'm walking in San Francisco. I have to go to
Speaker 2: the bathroom and I see a porta potty and I
Speaker 2: try to go use it, and there's a lock on it.
Speaker 2: This is sort of a porta potty outside a residential
Speaker 2: construction site. And it sort of hit me. There are
Speaker 2: porta potties all over the city. They're not nice to use.
Speaker 2: They're being used about one percent of the time. If
Speaker 2: that what if we could sort of, you know, create
Speaker 2: some sort of bathroom sharing system where the construction company
Speaker 2: is incentive ized or the person who's driveway it's on
Speaker 2: is incentivized to open up an elevated bathroom experience for
Speaker 2: anyone who needs it. Ha.
Speaker 1: So that's Airbnb, but for toilets is essentially what you're
Speaker 1: imagining there.
Speaker 2: Yes, I wish I could take credit for AIRPNP, but
Speaker 2: there actually was a predecessor company to mine that have
Speaker 2: that meme.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, and they were trying to do that.
Speaker 2: That was more you can use my bathroom in my
Speaker 2: living room for a fee, and it didn't work. I
Speaker 2: don't think it worked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so you have the idea and you start
Speaker 1: the company.
Speaker 2: Well, you got to have a team, so pull together
Speaker 2: a five person founding team. First company was a solo
Speaker 2: founder journey. This one I decided not to do that.
Speaker 2: It's it's hard to start these things, and so I
Speaker 2: brought in a hardware guy. I found two people from
Speaker 2: the traditional portable sanitation industry who had owned and run
Speaker 2: one of those companies for a long time, which was
Speaker 2: very useful to understand what the old school portable sanitation
Speaker 2: industry does.
Speaker 1: Like basically from the porta potty business.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I always I try to extend it to make
Speaker 2: it sound even more glorified. But yes, porta potty business,
Speaker 2: which is great, has done a lot of great things,
Speaker 2: but we're trying to build sort of a new system
Speaker 2: on top of that. And then my last co founder, Jess,
Speaker 2: who brings this sort of grassroots marketing and sales side
Speaker 2: of how to sell to cities and get a bunch
Speaker 2: of people excited about something like this.
Speaker 1: And so at some point you go from selling to
Speaker 1: people where the porta part is going to be in
Speaker 1: their driveway, to construction companies it's like you're gonna have
Speaker 1: one of these anyways to selling to cities and you
Speaker 1: know transitisms selling to the government basically, right, that's the
Speaker 1: model you land at. What how do you figure that
Speaker 1: part out?
Speaker 2: There are three potential customers, the user, the city or
Speaker 2: companies like Uber enterprise, right, And we tried actually selling
Speaker 2: to Uber and Lyft and Amazon we have drivers, right,
Speaker 2: But I think the issue was twofold call us when
Speaker 2: you have ten thousand bathrooms all over the country, and
Speaker 2: to some extent, some of those companies aren't as in
Speaker 2: xentivized to provide a workplace benefit for their non W
Speaker 2: two workers, So that's a rabbit hole we won't go into.
Speaker 1: Soh So basically, like the idea is like, hey, Uber,
Speaker 1: you could attract drivers by giving them bathrooms, which Lyft doesn't.
Speaker 1: But then you're saying legally, if they do that, they
Speaker 1: might have to hire their workers as W two workers
Speaker 1: instead of contractors. Like that's a risk, that's a risk.
Speaker 2: Interesting and so a quick aside on selling to the user.
Speaker 2: I think we were never feeling very good about the
Speaker 2: idea of people paying to use the bathroom, especially in America,
Speaker 2: but we tried it. We played around with bathroom credits,
Speaker 2: and what you find is one out of ten people
Speaker 2: are willing to do it, or maybe one out of five.
Speaker 2: But then if there is a dribble of pee on
Speaker 2: the seat, you hear from them right, you don't want
Speaker 2: to pay for a bathroom and not have a perfect experience.
Speaker 2: And while we try to provide a perfect experience every time,
Speaker 2: it's difficult. And so that just felt like an uphill
Speaker 2: battle to convince hundreds of thousands of people a day
Speaker 2: to make a different buying decision than they're used to
Speaker 2: and so you land on cities. So we land on cities, and.
Speaker 1: So the big question is how do you keep people
Speaker 1: from going in there and doing drugs or like pooping
Speaker 1: on the floor or whatever. Right, how do you make
Speaker 1: it not a terrible public toilet? That seems like the
Speaker 1: fundamental hard question is that? Right?
Speaker 2: I think that's one of two fundamental hard questions. I think,
Speaker 2: if I can back up, there's one other that I
Speaker 2: think is pretty critical, which is the difficulty of building
Speaker 2: physical infrastructure and the inflight ability of that. So the
Speaker 2: main solution for cities they don't use poor bodies. It's
Speaker 2: not a crowd pleaser, and so they typically build brick
Speaker 2: and mortar bathrooms or install these factory built systems that
Speaker 2: will plug into the waste and water infrastructure. The problem
Speaker 2: is that takes two to three years, and it usually
Speaker 2: costs like a million dollars a bathroom, and then once
Speaker 2: it's down, maybe you picked the wrong spot. It's there
Speaker 2: for twenty or thirty years.
Speaker 1: New York, in fact, just did that, and they even
Speaker 1: they bought like prefab bathrooms, but installing them like basically
Speaker 1: hooking them up to water and sewer I guess did
Speaker 1: in fact cost a million dollars a bathroom, which I mean,
Speaker 1: it still seems crazy to me. I know enough that
Speaker 1: it shouldn't, but like.
Speaker 3: I feel like you could build an apartment for a
Speaker 3: million dollars and put a toilet in it. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: you actually could like buy a condo for five hundred
Speaker 3: thousand dollars or the toilet and it. Let you know,
Speaker 3: like it's there, Like there's an abundance problem here, right,
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess this is kind of part of
Speaker 3: what is enabled in your business. If it didn't cost
Speaker 3: a millionllion dollars to build a public toilet, literally, your
Speaker 3: business would be a less compelling proposition to cities.
Speaker 2: I think that would take away half of our value proposition,
Speaker 2: which is this flexibility ability to you know, the original
Speaker 2: products back was a hotel, lobby bathroom that can be
Speaker 2: placed in a home depot, parking lot in an hour
Speaker 2: or less.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so flexible installation. And then the sort of social norms.
Speaker 1: How do you keep very small percentage of people from
Speaker 1: ruining it for everybody?
Speaker 2: And that's the other big piece, So.
Speaker 1: Let's take them in order. There's first the how do
Speaker 1: you build a bathroom that doesn't cost a million dollars
Speaker 1: and that you can move around if you want to.
Speaker 1: Presumably that's that's better than a porta potty, right, Like
Speaker 1: we have a bad answer to that, which is the
Speaker 1: porta potty. But yeah, so how do you do that one?
Speaker 2: Yes, better than a porta potty. So what you want
Speaker 2: to do is convince a user that they're at a
Speaker 2: nice indoor bathroom. There's a lot of technology. This thing
Speaker 2: is basically a stationary machine with large holding tanks for
Speaker 2: water and waste, humps and sensors and master ration system
Speaker 2: to move this waste and water around, to allow a
Speaker 2: flushing toilet, a running water sink, and then all the
Speaker 2: other accoutrement of an indoor bathroom HVAC, you know, so
Speaker 2: air conditioning, heat, and ventilation, all on solar energy so
Speaker 2: that we don't have to necessarily plug into public infrastructure.
Speaker 2: And so that was the challenge. And we started building
Speaker 2: one of these in my co founder Ben Clark's sideyard,
Speaker 2: turning his you know, two bed, two bath house into
Speaker 2: a two bed, two and a half bath house.
Speaker 1: So we'll talk more about the physical thing that you
Speaker 1: build in a thick but there is this other problem, right,
Speaker 1: how do you keep it from getting ruined by some
Speaker 1: small number of people.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this is a difficult problem to solve.
Speaker 1: Seems harder than the physical piece at some level, or
Speaker 1: more complicated or something.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, there is a social science aspect to this, there's
Speaker 2: an accountability aspect to this, and I think we focused
Speaker 2: our early experiments on sort of those areas. And I
Speaker 2: think the difficult thing you have to give up when
Speaker 2: sort of being excited about this concept a throne is,
Speaker 2: you know, attaching some form of accountability to your actions
Speaker 2: in a public space. And in order to do that,
Speaker 2: many of our users enter via some sort of phone number,
Speaker 2: basically an SMS access system. But what that allows us
Speaker 2: to do is a you know, kind of create the
Speaker 2: sense of let's create a loyal, conscientious user base.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, the point of using a
Speaker 1: phone number is most people have one phone number, So
Speaker 1: it's essentially tying you using the bathroom to your identity.
Speaker 1: You are not an anonymous, truly anonymous user. You are
Speaker 1: one distinct person trackable at some level using the toilet.
Speaker 2: Well, we don't care about your name, we don't care
Speaker 2: about your occupation, we don't want to know anything else
Speaker 2: about you. But you're not going to go get a
Speaker 2: new phone number just to use it.
Speaker 1: So what do you want to know though, Well, like
Speaker 1: why do you want my phone number for me to
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom?
Speaker 2: So two reasons number one and actually this is not
Speaker 2: as much the accountability. We want to ask you how
Speaker 2: clean the bathroom is, and if you enter via phone number,
Speaker 2: a huge percent of people tell us in hilarious detail
Speaker 2: what's going on inside there. So that's another piece of this.
Speaker 1: Like so you text me afterwards and say how is it?
Speaker 1: And I text you back.
Speaker 2: We text you as you go in, how clean is
Speaker 2: the throne or how does the throne smell? And we
Speaker 2: can ask different questions and people tell us they are
Speaker 2: eyes and ears, and we have a roaming labor force
Speaker 2: that is reacting in real time to those prompts.
Speaker 1: So that's one reason.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The other is for the less than one percent
Speaker 2: of people that are just not treating this like they
Speaker 2: would their home bathroom or using it for things outside
Speaker 2: of our sort of general terms and conditions. We can
Speaker 2: warn and block those users, and it's a very small percent.
Speaker 2: This is things like refusing to leave drug use and
Speaker 2: leaving drug paraphernalia behind, other activities outside of bathroom use,
Speaker 2: and so there's obviously a technology problem of how can
Speaker 2: you understand who's doing those things without any creepiness, And
Speaker 2: so one of our company values is don't be creepy.
Speaker 2: There's no cameras, no microphone on the inside or anything
Speaker 2: like that, but like refusing to leave pretty easy to know.
Speaker 2: And by piecing together sort of the comments from each
Speaker 2: user and knowing which, you know, phone number was associated
Speaker 2: with each use, you can start to pick up sort
Speaker 2: of statistically, people that are constantly the problem.
Speaker 1: Basically if the person who comes in after you says
Speaker 1: it was totally disgusting, or there is a needle on
Speaker 1: the floor that gets pinned to the previous user. Just
Speaker 1: to be clear, I mean that seems like the simple version.
Speaker 2: It gets flagged to the previous group of users, And
Speaker 2: if you happen to be in a group over and over,
Speaker 2: that is that is the yellow flag eventually becomes a
Speaker 2: red flag.
Speaker 1: What percent of users wind up getting.
Speaker 2: Flagged zero point one percent of users, one in a thousand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's it take to get banned? Really?
Speaker 2: It is repeated violation of these types of terms and additions,
Speaker 2: or one really bad incident, and sometimes It's as simple
Speaker 2: as one of our customers. The city will say, you know,
Speaker 2: the user that used the throne at ten forty two
Speaker 2: did X, Y and z, and sometimes that will lead
Speaker 2: to a ban. I didn't mention this. Another reason to
Speaker 2: make a bathroom smart is you can do things like
Speaker 2: the following. Our door is an automatic sliding door. It
Speaker 2: sort of acts as the bouncer. That's a safety precaution.
Speaker 2: You don't want people coming in right after you. And
Speaker 2: then also there are incidents of overdose and it's actually
Speaker 2: really great feature that eventually the door will open and
Speaker 2: people will find you. And that has happened many times
Speaker 2: and lives have been saved actually with that feature.
Speaker 1: So you can't like manually lock it from the inside,
Speaker 1: is what you're saying. At some point. It's like an
Speaker 1: electronic lock exactly.
Speaker 2: And that's another big one. We sort of control the
Speaker 2: locking system. An audio feature will tell you, you know, the
Speaker 2: door will close and lock behind you, and we warn people,
Speaker 2: you know, very much before that happens, and the city
Speaker 2: actually gets to set the time limit they want. And
Speaker 2: this is a piece of our technology that rubs some
Speaker 2: people the wrong way. It's one of these crazy trade
Speaker 2: offs and when you're dealing in the bathroom world. But
Speaker 2: if you don't do that, there are real safety concerns
Speaker 2: and people will stay there overnight and whatnot. And so
Speaker 2: we try to provide a good amount of time and
Speaker 2: a lot of notice. But again it helps when there
Speaker 2: is a safety issue there where in a normal locking,
Speaker 2: manual locking bathroom, a lot of people are just found
Speaker 2: in the morning dead right when there's an overdose.
Speaker 1: So how long do cities choose to let people stay
Speaker 1: in the bathroom before it automatically opens?
Speaker 2: Ten minutes is the shortest we use, and in some
Speaker 2: cities fifteen or no time limit.
Speaker 1: Okay, And is there like just a small question that
Speaker 1: comes to mind, like a manual override? If I'm in there,
Speaker 1: can I unlock it if I want manually?
Speaker 2: Absolutely so for anyone who's claustrophobic and thinking this is
Speaker 2: my nightmare, there's a manual handle to get out. It's
Speaker 2: more just that you can't lock it and stop people
Speaker 2: from coming in after the ten or fifteen minute timeline.
Speaker 1: What has been like surprising to you about this sort
Speaker 1: of social dynamics piece of it.
Speaker 2: I think that it's not what society might think would
Speaker 2: be the person causing the most problems I think is
Speaker 2: one of them. We have had city officials, one city
Speaker 2: official and obviously not going to talk about which very
Speaker 2: early on, where like that was the person that was
Speaker 2: causing problems and we stood firm, you know, you're not
Speaker 2: using our bathroom anymore. I think on the flip side,
Speaker 2: I always get the question of like, homeless people are
Speaker 2: always are just going to ruin this thing, and that
Speaker 2: is not the case. I think we have found. We've
Speaker 2: put these in a lot of locations that have historically
Speaker 2: not been able to have bathrooms because of all the
Speaker 2: issues I mentioned with traditional brick and mortar where they
Speaker 2: were having to post up security guards outside, which is
Speaker 2: just not cost effective. And what we found when we
Speaker 2: put in these communities one example is sort of west
Speaker 2: Lake MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, is the people that
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time there become our advocates. They
Speaker 2: come up to our cleaners and say like, we love
Speaker 2: this and oh, by the way, this person's causing problems.
Speaker 2: And it's so impactful for people that don't have regular
Speaker 2: access to a bathroom or have to feel some sort
Speaker 2: of maybe shamed to walk into an establishment to use
Speaker 2: their bathroom. It is not as easy for everyone to
Speaker 2: do that. They do want nice things, and there are
Speaker 2: sort of greatest advocates and so happy about it, and
Speaker 2: that's something that a lot of people maybe wouldn't have
Speaker 2: thought of from the start.
Speaker 1: What do you do for people who don't have phones?
Speaker 2: It's a big one. Not everyone has regular access to
Speaker 2: a phone. It is my co founder, Jess knows. The
Speaker 2: number is better than me. Something like ninety two percent
Speaker 2: of people in urban areas have phones, but not everyone
Speaker 2: has a charged phone. And so we hand out TAP
Speaker 2: cards at various community service organizations or often in partnership
Speaker 2: with the city. Sometimes we even set up tables with education.
Speaker 2: Here's a card. It'll get into any throne for free.
Speaker 2: You can use it as many times as you want,
Speaker 2: but we still can revoke access. So don't hand it
Speaker 2: to a friend, and don't do anything bad in the throne.
Speaker 1: I mean, couldn't you just do something bad and then
Speaker 1: get another card.
Speaker 2: Yes, And the idea here isn't to prevent people who
Speaker 2: make one mistake to ever use the bathroom again. The
Speaker 2: idea is to put some friction, some feeling of I
Speaker 2: might as well just clean up a little bit after
Speaker 2: myself use this bathroom for what it's needed, and that
Speaker 2: alone is sort of a power law improvement on how
Speaker 2: likely the bathroom is to stay nice and clean.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in just a minute. What's the thing
Speaker 1: that you tried that didn't work?
Speaker 2: Forcing people to download an app to use a bathroom.
Speaker 1: That seems like a reasonable proposition. I mean maybe it's
Speaker 1: maybe you have to be a regular use. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I would think that that might work.
Speaker 2: I would do it, and we have an app and
Speaker 2: people do use it. Uber drivers love it because it
Speaker 2: lets you, you know, see where other bathrooms are across
Speaker 2: the city. And my favorite memory is walking through Ann Arbor,
Speaker 2: Michigan and seeing an Uber driver pull up to and
Speaker 2: thrown and the door opens as he's getting out of
Speaker 2: his car, clearly showing that you know, he's been doing
Speaker 2: that every day and knows exactly the timing of hitting.
Speaker 1: So like he's opened on his app from the car
Speaker 1: and yeah.
Speaker 2: I was just like, we've arrived. But I think early days,
Speaker 2: we put one in Georgetown in DC at a farmer's market,
Speaker 2: back when you had to download an app and it's crowded.
Speaker 2: It takes four minutes to download an app. Sometimes people
Speaker 2: are so angry when you have to pee and download
Speaker 2: an app that like, we were shamed. I was about
Speaker 2: to take my throne shirt off and hide. But it
Speaker 2: was a great learning and that's when we installed the
Speaker 2: Paul Wilson rule. That my dad is Paul Wilson, seventy
Speaker 2: six year old man, not the most facile with technology,
Speaker 2: and we said, Paul Wilson better be able to get
Speaker 2: in in ten seconds or less.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. So how does it work now?
Speaker 2: So you walk up to a throne, it will say
Speaker 2: free bathrooms, scan to use, and there's a large QR code.
Speaker 2: You scan the QR code, it automatically pulls up your
Speaker 2: SMS module with a phone number already prepopulated and a
Speaker 2: message prepopulated.
Speaker 1: SMS module meaning a text.
Speaker 2: A text yeah sorry send, it'll say send this message
Speaker 2: to use the throne. All you do is scan a
Speaker 2: QR code, hit s end and this door opens. A
Speaker 2: chime welcomes you, and a voice welcomes you, and you
Speaker 2: walk in. The door slides behind you. You have a
Speaker 2: flushing toilet, a running water, sink, music, You use the
Speaker 2: bathroom and everything is touchless, and you even wave to exit.
Speaker 2: On the way out.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit more about the physical thing.
Speaker 1: Since we're in the room now, does it smell like
Speaker 1: a porta potty? Tell me the truth?
Speaker 2: No, Okay, our smell score right now is four point
Speaker 2: one out of five. So we have quantitative answers.
Speaker 1: To this, and physically, how do you make that work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.
Speaker 1: Your bathroom is not connected to the water or the
Speaker 1: sewer system of the city, right, so, like what's going
Speaker 1: on kind of behind the scenes. It just looks like
Speaker 1: a bathroom.
Speaker 2: Basically, it looks like a bathroom. It looks like a cube.
Speaker 2: It is eight feet by ten feet by nine feet.
Speaker 3: It's a pretty big bathroom, right, that's pretty big for
Speaker 3: a bathroom.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a pretty large bathroom. It has a ramp
Speaker 2: and it's fully eighty eight compliance. Most people say it's
Speaker 2: much bigger than I thought. It would be like four
Speaker 2: porta potties, maybe five or six actually in square footage.
Speaker 2: And there's you know, vinyl wrapping design on the outside
Speaker 2: and sort of these instructions to get in as you
Speaker 2: walk in. We have this kind of jungle print wallpaper feel.
Speaker 2: All of this is intentionally designed to kind of dissuade graffiti.
Speaker 2: All of it is anti graffiti coated, so if someone
Speaker 2: does do something, we can sort of wash it away
Speaker 2: with isopropyl alcohol or slap another leaf sticker on top.
Speaker 2: Is another cool tactic that we've learned, you know. As
Speaker 2: for your question about smell, I'd say our earlier units,
Speaker 2: and the only reason I hesitated is we're a company
Speaker 2: iterating all the time. Our earlier units were not as
Speaker 2: good about isolating these bad smells when you are holding
Speaker 2: a large amount of waste on board. But we've gotten
Speaker 2: so much better, so our new units do not smell
Speaker 2: like a porta potty?
Speaker 1: How does it work? Like, how does the plumbing work?
Speaker 2: You flush a toilet? We do use a vacuum assisted flush,
Speaker 2: so it still has water, but it's about a quarter
Speaker 2: of the water usage per flush.
Speaker 1: So like on a plane, is it that kind of
Speaker 1: vibe question?
Speaker 2: In the design sessions, I said, I don't want this
Speaker 2: to feel like a plane. There's a whole nother tangent
Speaker 2: there about why that's so loud and the kind of
Speaker 2: HydroD and namics happening there. But no, it's not quite
Speaker 2: that intense. It's more just a light pull to allow
Speaker 2: kind of a quarter gallon of water to flush, which
Speaker 2: is very important, right.
Speaker 1: You need less water because you just have a tank
Speaker 1: of water there on the building such as it is, right,
Speaker 1: you don't have you have a very limited water.
Speaker 2: Supply, yes, yeah, And so it flushes through a macerat
Speaker 2: or a system. So we're this, you know, if you're
Speaker 2: eating breakfast, sorry, we kind of grind up what's going
Speaker 2: down there, which is helpful also if people put unwanted
Speaker 2: items down the toilet. And this is a very robust system.
Speaker 2: It's it's our most expensive component on the unit, which
Speaker 2: is sort of grinding things up and then using pumps
Speaker 2: to pump it into a separate, large holding tank. And
Speaker 2: all of these things have sensors and in the back
Speaker 2: end we know when we need to add fresh water
Speaker 2: or pump the waste. And then you know, all the
Speaker 2: traditional indoor plumbing techniques to keep smells from seeping in
Speaker 2: are used, plus some since we're holding you know, basically
Speaker 2: a septic tank on board to kind of extra ventilate
Speaker 2: the system. And then you know, the other solved to
Speaker 2: this is just ask people when it smells. And so
Speaker 2: every once in a while, particularly at low use units
Speaker 2: where we have to pump less frequently, and that ways
Speaker 2: to sitting there longer. We'll a user every once in
Speaker 2: a while will say it's starting to smell, and we
Speaker 2: will go clean the tanks or pump and kind of
Speaker 2: do a clean.
Speaker 1: And then what happens when you leave? So you go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, you just open the door manually right
Speaker 1: to get out, and then what happens.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you either wave at a censor so you don't
Speaker 2: have to touch anything the whole experience, or use a
Speaker 2: manual lever to leave. That's when you'll get this text
Speaker 2: how clean was your throne? And we're only going to
Speaker 2: bother you once, but it helps to get a one
Speaker 2: to five score on cleanliness. And that's really it. The
Speaker 2: door is going to close behind you, and if there's
Speaker 2: someone else waiting on the ramp, they'll walk in next
Speaker 2: on a separate use account. Right, But that's pretty much it.
Speaker 2: You're on with your day and we've solved your problem.
Speaker 1: What percent of people reply to the how was it? Text?
Speaker 2: Thirty to forty percent of text users and sixty to
Speaker 2: seventy percent of app users.
Speaker 1: So about half yeah, which I guess is a lot
Speaker 1: replying to a random text about a toilet.
Speaker 2: And it's all we need. And I think the more
Speaker 2: important piece is it's probably biased. Negative people are more
Speaker 2: likely to tell you when something's wrong. And the open
Speaker 2: text part, you know, you should see the messages we get.
Speaker 2: It's definitely a fun part of my end of my
Speaker 2: day to have a glass of wine and look through
Speaker 2: the comments. But you know, people tell you know, sometimes
Speaker 2: it's just nice things about thanks for providing the service,
Speaker 2: but sometimes it's hilarious details about something that needs help.
Speaker 2: And so our users are our best sensors by far.
Speaker 3: So where's the company now? Like, how many bathrooms do
Speaker 3: you have out in the world.
Speaker 1: And where are they?
Speaker 2: We have seventy four bathrooms across four metropolitan areas right now.
Speaker 2: We're in DC, LA, the Bay Area and ann Arbor, Detroit,
Speaker 2: and you know, designing where to set up shop because
Speaker 2: you might have realized by now we have a pretty
Speaker 2: significant operation. Right We controlled the entire design of the system.
Speaker 2: We partner with the manufacturer, Satellite Industries to build them
Speaker 2: and then we ship them to the city. But then
Speaker 2: we have local ops team to run, the clean team,
Speaker 2: the pumping operations team, and the technician team.
Speaker 1: Presumably you need some density of toilets for that to
Speaker 1: be at all economical. Right, you can't have one then
Speaker 1: it's too expensive.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And around ten to fifteen units is sort of
Speaker 2: the starting point to justify our setting up local operations.
Speaker 1: And what's it cost and what's the business model? More generally, like,
Speaker 1: how's how's the money side work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we've kind of taken i'd say the high
Speaker 2: risk but long term value approach here, which is a
Speaker 2: recurring revenue business model. And so that's what's very different about.
Speaker 1: That means toilets as a service, toilets as.
Speaker 2: A service, and you mentioned the New York bathroom. You know,
Speaker 2: those are companies that are just selling a piece of
Speaker 2: hard hardware and then the city is in charge of
Speaker 2: doing all the insulation and by the way, all the
Speaker 2: cleaning and servicing. So a big part of our value
Speaker 2: proposition is we take care of everything. But that means
Speaker 2: we get sort of a monthly piece of revenue from
Speaker 2: the city, which is based on how difficult that location
Speaker 2: is that might be high usage or an environment that's
Speaker 2: just going to take more oversight.
Speaker 1: If that makes sense, what's the cost to have one
Speaker 1: of your toilets for a year, Like if I buy
Speaker 1: whatever more or less, what's the range for the city.
Speaker 2: Fifty to one hundred thousand dollars a year per bathroom.
Speaker 1: Okay, which, like if I didn't know how messed up
Speaker 1: cities were, would seem like a lot to me, right,
Speaker 1: like whatever, seventy five thousand dollars to have one toilet
Speaker 1: for a year. On a certain level, it's crazy.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying it's a bad deal relative to the alternatives,
Speaker 3: but just in the abstract, it's sad that that's what
Speaker 3: we've come to at sub level. Not your fault, right,
Speaker 3: I'm not this is not your but it is wild
Speaker 3: at some level.
Speaker 2: No, I think there is the sticker shock idea. I
Speaker 2: think people underestimate how hard it is to provide a
Speaker 2: nice bathroom for the public. But yes, it might feel high. Again,
Speaker 2: what really matters in a market is how much would
Speaker 2: it cost otherwise? And I think the thing we've learned
Speaker 2: in our customers have started learning is there's almost no
Speaker 2: better value to get a ton of public appreciation, no
Speaker 2: matter your political affiliation, than that amount of money for
Speaker 2: all these users to just be surprised with this amenity
Speaker 2: that is actually nice. I think it doesn't work if
Speaker 2: it's a port of body. It has to be surprisingly nice,
Speaker 2: and it has to be in the right location. But
Speaker 2: I think we have to get over that initial sticker shock.
Speaker 2: But we I'll say right now, we have not lost
Speaker 2: one customer in over two years.
Speaker 1: I mean, what I want as a citizen is for
Speaker 1: somebody else to come along into what you're doing, to
Speaker 1: be the lyft to your uber right. I want people
Speaker 1: to get competed down to the marginal cost essentially. I mean,
Speaker 1: presumably also scale will allow you to lower the price
Speaker 1: if somebody is competing with you, right, Like, presumably if
Speaker 1: you could do one hundred in a city, it's going
Speaker 1: to be cheaper for you than ten in a city.
Speaker 2: Yes, to the second point, I think, all so we're
Speaker 2: starting with the hardest spots.
Speaker 1: When you say the hardest spots, what do you mean,
Speaker 1: just to.
Speaker 2: Be clear, extremely high usage and high vandalism potential. I see,
Speaker 2: And I think we will come up with other product
Speaker 2: lines that serve other locations that can be cheaper to
Speaker 2: really satisfy our mission of you know, dramatically expanding bathroom
Speaker 2: access for everybody. So it might sound expensive, but keep
Speaker 2: in mind, that's solving the problem where a security guard
Speaker 2: is typically needed, which which is like twenty thousand dollars
Speaker 2: a month in those locations.
Speaker 1: That's for like round the clock security guard presumably.
Speaker 2: Which is tends to be what it takes in some
Speaker 2: of these locations to have a bathroom not fall apart
Speaker 2: within a couple months.
Speaker 1: I know that you have a couple of patents one
Speaker 1: two three four oh six four four B two Systems
Speaker 1: and Methods for Managing Publicly Accessible Amenities System and Method
Speaker 1: for Advanced Portable Bathroom Facilities pending. Like what is the
Speaker 1: competitive landscape?
Speaker 2: Like? First of all, the hilarious part of the intellectual
Speaker 2: property landscape is like every farmer in America has some
Speaker 2: toilet patent, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, I did wonder about the defensibility of those patents
Speaker 1: to be honest, like, you know, non obviousness to someone
Speaker 1: skilled in the art as a criterion, Right, So I'd
Speaker 1: be curious to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the white space all comes down to this accountability
Speaker 2: side of things, you know, the how do we use
Speaker 2: a smart piece of hardware to kind of, you know,
Speaker 2: basically manage a distributed bathroom user base. I'd say that's
Speaker 2: more where we focused on the intellectual property side, but
Speaker 2: you know, not trying to kind of patent a sensor
Speaker 2: in a bathroom or something like that. But I think
Speaker 2: broadly the defensibility here is like six or sevenfold, and
Speaker 2: it really comes down to how difficult it is to
Speaker 2: stand up an organization with a scale manufacturing capability, a
Speaker 2: distributed municipal sales and marketing force, and local operations. It's
Speaker 2: just difficult to do all these things. And I think
Speaker 2: no one has has really ever put all the effort
Speaker 2: and by the way, capital risk to get this off
Speaker 2: the ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you mentioned capital risk, which is particularly pertinent
Speaker 1: given the business model you've chosen. Right, It's not like
Speaker 1: somebody's like, give us a bathroom. Here's a million dollars,
Speaker 1: and you go spend a million dollars to give them
Speaker 1: a bathroom. It's like, we'll pay you whatever, seventy five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year if you put a bathroom. And
Speaker 1: then so you have to pay for the bathroom up front.
Speaker 1: What's your cost more or less to get that physical bathroom?
Speaker 2: Fifty thousand more or less. And we're working to get
Speaker 2: that down.
Speaker 1: Tell me about growth.
Speaker 2: We're on a little bit of an inflection point. We have, yeah,
Speaker 2: seventy four bathrooms, but another fifty or so already contracted
Speaker 2: and sort of on the way out.
Speaker 1: In that same set of metros, that same set of
Speaker 1: cities exactly.
Speaker 2: But we are kind of prospecting for the next three markets,
Speaker 2: which I think will be you know, in the first
Speaker 2: half of next year.
Speaker 1: New York, New York.
Speaker 2: So New York is buoys it on my list, and
Speaker 2: we've had kind of a long history of discussions. There
Speaker 2: some political uncertainty in that city right now, and it's
Speaker 2: a tricky operational city, so the right kind of deal
Speaker 2: to make it worth our while as well.
Speaker 1: Tree operations just like hard to drive, hard to move.
Speaker 2: Hard to get around in that city, right Yeah, but
Speaker 2: there's also and just each of those units is going
Speaker 2: to be one hundred and seventy uses a day. But
Speaker 2: absolutely we want to come to New York. I think
Speaker 2: twenty twenty seven is our goal for New York, if
Speaker 2: anyone's listening, and we would love you know, there's mandates
Speaker 2: in New York to bring two thousand more bathrooms over
Speaker 2: the next ten years, and we'd love to do that
Speaker 2: in one or two years. And we think we have
Speaker 2: the solution for that. But I think what cities to
Speaker 2: choose is a huge question, and we have a lot
Speaker 2: of interesting insights from you know, we've got East coast,
Speaker 2: West coast, we've got cold climate, warm climate, and political differences,
Speaker 2: walk ability, drive ability, all these different things that feed
Speaker 2: into it, I think, and to some extent, we're at
Speaker 2: this place where we have cities a little bit competing
Speaker 2: with each other. You know, do you really want thrown here.
Speaker 2: Let's get fifteen or twenty and we will come to
Speaker 2: you so that we can kind of set up shop
Speaker 2: in an economically efficient way. And there's also the more bathrooms,
Speaker 2: more density, the better service we can provide.
Speaker 1: You think you'll expand beyond toilets.
Speaker 2: No, I think there's so many temptations. An early pitch
Speaker 2: deck I had a sort of food locker for door
Speaker 2: desh to drop food off on the side of the
Speaker 2: outside of the bathroom and people could come pick it up.
Speaker 2: And I had an early investor say, never put food
Speaker 2: next to a bathroom again. So and you know, you
Speaker 2: could do scooter charging, you could do all these other things.
Speaker 2: I think where we have come as sort of a
Speaker 2: management team is there's so many other bathroom problems to
Speaker 2: solve outside of I don't think this will be our
Speaker 2: only product. I think we are really interested in existing
Speaker 2: bathroom infrastructure and how to make that better and in
Speaker 2: other kind of ways to solve people's bathroom problems. But
Speaker 2: I think we are focused on just being the best
Speaker 2: bathroom company, and having thrown be associated with a pleasant
Speaker 2: bathroom experience has a lot of interesting knock on effects
Speaker 2: and other kind of revenue streams associated with it.
Speaker 1: I mean you mentioned existing bathrooms, like could you just
Speaker 1: put a new door on an existing bathroom and have
Speaker 1: it tied to somebody's cell phone number. I mean that
Speaker 1: seems like that would do a ton of useful work,
Speaker 1: Like there are already a lot of bathrooms they just suck.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think if you think of it as supply
Speaker 2: and demand, you know the and I do. I think
Speaker 2: of bathroom demand as a thing, and you can kind
Speaker 2: of picture a city with these kind of hot spots
Speaker 2: and different times like this is when people need to
Speaker 2: pee and this is when people need to poop. And
Speaker 2: we decided to start by that, you know, dramatically expanding supply.
Speaker 2: But I think there's another approach, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: increasing the equality or efficiency of existing supply, and there
Speaker 2: have been companies that have sort of tried this. I
Speaker 2: think what we would do is sort of, yes, bring
Speaker 2: this sort of accountability feature and kind of user driven
Speaker 2: kind of real time feedback to that space, and we're
Speaker 2: doing it. That is going to be a future piece
Speaker 2: of Thrones offering, because there's just so many of our
Speaker 2: own customers who say, like, we love what you're doing.
Speaker 2: We've got all this infrastructure, can you help us manage
Speaker 2: these because it's a headache, and so you know absolutely
Speaker 2: that's going to be a piece of our future.
Speaker 4: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 4: Let's finish with the lightning round, with the what a
Speaker 4: lightning round?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: I ask you a bunch of fast, random questions, like
Speaker 3: what's one thing you learned doing stand up comedy?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, where did you find this on the internet?
Speaker 2: That I am not as good of a comedian as my.
Speaker 1: Sister, Your sister, who, by the way, was a cast
Speaker 1: member on Saturday Night Live. Not trivial, but let's not.
Speaker 2: Talk about her. She gets all the credit. This one's
Speaker 2: about me, fair, I'm kidding. Oh. One other thing, I
Speaker 2: one of the thing I learned in stand up comedy
Speaker 2: is don't invite your boss to your comedy show.
Speaker 1: What happened when you invited your boss to your comedy show?
Speaker 2: I bombed In the next two months were the most
Speaker 2: miserable work months of my life.
Speaker 1: Was that causal?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know, Probably not unrelated.
Speaker 1: Could have been. It'd be amazing if it was.
Speaker 3: So. You have four kids, as I understand, how many
Speaker 3: toilets do you have in your house?
Speaker 2: We have three toilets, which is one fewer than how
Speaker 2: many kids we.
Speaker 1: Have, So three for six people.
Speaker 2: That seems fine, it's enough, but I need more toilets
Speaker 2: proportionally per capita than most.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. Yeah. We had two kids, and we had
Speaker 1: had lived in a one bathroom apartment a two bedroom,
Speaker 1: one bath and like the one toilet was much more
Speaker 1: of a constraint than the two bedrooms for four people,
Speaker 1: that's a tough ratio. It was a tough ratio. Best
Speaker 1: public bathroom you've ever used?
Speaker 2: I was recently in Charlotte Airport. I feel like airports
Speaker 2: have really stepped up their game recently, and you have
Speaker 2: these sort of just red and green sort of available
Speaker 2: stalls that you just sort of have hand washing. Everyone
Speaker 2: goes in and it's very private. Each stall is like
Speaker 2: its own space with a floor to ceiling door and
Speaker 2: smells and materials, air quality. Everything was just on point.
Speaker 2: So I think airports are starting to do it right.
Speaker 1: Thank you for your time. It was great to talk
Speaker 1: with you.
Speaker 2: You too, Jacob, that was so fun. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Good luck. I truly hope your bathrooms or someone's bathrooms
Speaker 1: come to New.
Speaker 2: York, and when they do, I hope to see a
Speaker 2: message through SMS from you.
Speaker 1: You better know it's me. I won't.
Speaker 2: But if you say, if you write your name in,
Speaker 2: I'll know I'm not writing my name.
Speaker 1: I'll respond, Okay, I'm still not going to do it.
Speaker 1: Pledger Wilson is the co founder and CEO of Throne Labs.
Speaker 1: Please email us at problem at pushkin dot fm. We
Speaker 1: are always looking for new guests for the show. Today's
Speaker 1: show was produced by Trinamanino and Gabriel Hunter Chang. It
Speaker 1: was edited Alexander Garriton and engineered by Sarah Bruguer. I'm
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another
Speaker 1: episode of What's Your Problem