AI transcript
0:00:01 This is an iHeart podcast.
0:00:59 Bathroom infrastructure has always been a problem for me because i need a bathroom a lot and i get frustrated when a bathroom isn’t good but i wasn’t really necessarily sure that that was a problem for everybody so i started doing this thing where i would interview everyone about their bathroom habits and the most fun thing to do actually is ask if you ever get in an uber or lyft say can i ask you a weird question where do you go to the bathroom when you’re working this is fletcher wilson he’s the co-founder and ceo of
0:01:29 a company called throne labs i would get highly strategic answers and what was revealing is just how big of a problem it really is if you’re working from your car and you don’t have an office bathroom right so what are some of the strategic answers people gave you never drink water or coffee on the job which is a bad answer right um or a sad answer a sad answer or i know this one place this one restaurant that lets me so i’m always trying you know at four o’clock in the afternoon i’m trying to get a ride there
0:01:59 where the most interesting was i’m driving on mission in san francisco and i asked the question and he turns around and goes you really want to know and i said absolutely he pulls over to the side of the road which made me nervous and reaches for his glove compartment which made me more nervous and opens it up and pulls out a rolled up necktie and i sort of was confused and he said with a smile on his face as if he had sort of solved the mysteries of the universe
0:02:06 you know all i have to do is whenever i drop someone off at a hotel i throw this on and they think i am staying there and i get to use their bathroom
0:02:12 huh he had to put on a costume just to use an office bathroom right and that kind of put me on a journey
0:02:18 where i was talking to police officers people without reliable access to homes parents with young
0:02:23 children athletes you know and everyone i have the good fortune to have worked in offices where
0:02:30 i can always go to the bathroom but there is on my route to work it takes me 45 minutes to get to work on the
0:02:36 subway and there’s a whole foods in the middle it’s the one on houston street by second ave and like
0:02:43 more than once i’ve been running down houston street in a sweat i’m halfway to work heading for
0:02:48 the whole foods toilet we’ve all been in that sweat run i mean not all of us but i’d say 40 of the
0:02:52 population based on my discussions has been in that situation before
0:03:02 i’m jacob goldstein and this is what’s your problem the show where i talk to people who are trying to make
0:03:09 technological progress my guest today is fletcher wilson his company thrown labs is putting new
0:03:15 public bathrooms in cities around the country his problem is this how do you create public toilets that
0:03:22 people actually want to use as you’ll hear the answer involves a combination of physical design
0:03:28 technology and a kind of social engineering the conversation also points to some bigger ideas
0:03:34 about how hard it is for cities to build and maintain pretty much anything
0:03:38 i started by doing a lot of research on why there aren’t many public bathrooms out there and
0:03:42 it’s an interesting history to some extent a lot of people point to
0:03:47 this movement in the 60s and 70s called the coalition to end pay for toilets in america
0:03:52 how interesting so what was the case before that like what was the status quo
0:03:59 there were a lot of put a quarter in and you can use the bathroom facilities actually in america and
0:04:04 certainly in europe and that created the right incentives to provide bathrooms in some respects
0:04:10 so a lot of people point to that as why there are better bathrooms in europe versus america so i think
0:04:19 that’s a big part of it i think there are more recent issues i think safety and security and the in a lot of
0:04:23 urban areas in the modern u.s city uh there are a lot of cities as we’ve talked to them that are
0:04:28 sort of nervous that bathrooms will become sort of a location for nefarious activity
0:04:32 like drugs and prostitution i mean is that is that basically
0:04:39 sure you name it and it’s a private space within a public space and that makes city officials nervous
0:04:45 and in some cases it’s true that it has been difficult with the old school bathroom
0:04:53 uh infrastructure style to to solve for that problem okay so this is why we can’t have
0:05:00 nice public toilets what were you doing before what was your job thrown as my second company my first
0:05:07 company was a medical technology company with a catheter a piece of hardware so i’m not afraid of
0:05:11 building things in the physical world that company was trying to solve a problem for people whose
0:05:17 leg veins aren’t able to properly pump blood back to the heart from the legs and so we had a catheter
0:05:22 that went in and recreated vein valves for people in their legs and so and that company’s still going
0:05:29 and i’m proud of it but i think the link here is first of all it’s all plumbing veins and bathrooms but
0:05:33 really sticky problems that a lot of people don’t want to try to solve
0:05:39 so what’s the moment when you decide to start this company i’m walking in san francisco i have to go to
0:05:46 the bathroom and i see a porta potty and i try to go use it and there’s a lock on it this is sort of a
0:05:53 porta potty outside a residential construction site and it sort of hit me there are porta potties all over
0:05:59 the city they’re not nice to use they’re being used about one percent of the time if that what if we could
0:06:04 sort of you know create some sort of bathroom sharing system where the construction company is
0:06:08 incentivized or the person whose driveway it’s on is incentivized to open up an elevated bathroom
0:06:13 experience for anyone who needs it uh-huh so that’s airbnb but for toilets is essentially what you’re
0:06:19 mentioning there yes i i wish i could take credit for air pnp uh but there actually was a predecessor
0:06:23 company to mine that that had that name oh interesting and they were trying to do that
0:06:29 that was more you can use my bathroom in my living room for a fee and it didn’t work i don’t think it
0:06:36 worked yeah okay so you have the idea and you start the company well you got to have a team so pull
0:06:42 together a five-person founding team first company was a solo founder journey this one i decided not to
0:06:49 do that it’s it’s hard to start these things and so i brought in a hardware guy i found two people from
0:06:53 the traditional portable sanitation industry who had owned and run one of those companies for a long
0:06:59 time which was very useful to understand what the old school uh portable sanitation industry does like
0:07:04 basically from the port-a-potty business yeah i always i try to extend it to make it sound even more
0:07:09 glorified but yes port-a-potty business yeah which is great has done a lot of great things but we’re
0:07:15 trying to build sort of a new system on top of that and then uh my last co-founder jess who brings this
0:07:21 sort of grassroots marketing and sales side of how to sell to cities and get a bunch of people excited
0:07:27 about something like this and so at some point you go from selling to people where the port-a-potty is
0:07:30 going to be in their driveway to construction companies it’s like you’re going to have one of
0:07:35 these anyways to selling to cities and you know transit systems selling to the government basically
0:07:38 right that’s the model you land at what how do you figure that part out there are three potential
0:07:46 customers the user the city or companies like uber enterprise right we and we tried actually selling
0:07:52 to uber and lyft and amazon we have drivers right but i think the issue was twofold call us when you
0:07:57 have 10 000 bathrooms all over the country and to some extent some of those companies aren’t as
0:08:02 incentivized to provide a workplace benefit for their non-w2 workers so that’s a rabbit hole we won’t go
0:08:07 into oh so basically like the idea is like hey uber you could attract drivers by giving them
0:08:13 bathrooms which lyft doesn’t but then you’re saying legally if they do that they might have to hire
0:08:19 their workers as w2 workers instead of contractors like that’s a risk that’s a risk interesting and so
0:08:24 a quick aside on selling to the user i think we were never feeling very good about the idea of people
0:08:29 paying to use the bathroom especially in america but we tried it we played around with bathroom credits
0:08:35 and what you find is one out of ten people are willing to do it or maybe one out of five but then if
0:08:40 there is a dribble of pee on the seat you hear from them right you don’t want to pay for a bathroom
0:08:44 and not have a perfect experience and while we try to provide a perfect experience every time it’s
0:08:49 difficult and so that just felt like an uphill battle to convince hundreds of thousands of people a day to
0:08:54 make a different buying decision than they’re used to yeah and so you land on cities so we land on
0:09:00 cities and so the big question is how do you keep people from going in there and doing drugs or like
0:09:05 pooping on the floor or whatever right how do you make it not a terrible public toilet that seems like
0:09:10 the fundamental hard question is that right i think that’s one of two fundamental hard questions
0:09:16 i think if i can back up there’s one other that i think is pretty critical which is the difficulty of
0:09:23 building physical infrastructure uh-huh and the inflexibility of that so the main solution for cities
0:09:27 they don’t use port-a-bodies it’s not a crowd pleaser yeah and so they typically build brick and
0:09:32 mortar bathrooms or install these factory built systems that will plug into the waste and water
0:09:37 infrastructure the problem is that takes two to three years and it usually costs like a million
0:09:43 dollars a bathroom and then once it’s down maybe you pick the wrong spot it’s there for 20 or 30 years
0:09:49 new york in fact just did that and they even they bought like prefab bathrooms but installing them
0:09:54 like basically hooking them up to water and sewer i guess did in fact cost a million dollars a bathroom
0:10:02 which i mean it still seems crazy to me i know enough that it shouldn’t but like i feel like you could
0:10:07 build an apartment for a million dollars and put a toilet in it yeah like you actually could like buy a
0:10:13 condo for five hundred thousand dollars for the toilet and let you know like it’s they’re like
0:10:18 there’s an abundance problem here right i mean i guess this is kind of part of what is enabling your
0:10:23 business if it didn’t cost a million dollars to build a public toilet literally your business would
0:10:28 be a less compelling proposition to cities i think that would take away half of our value proposition which
0:10:34 is this flexibility ability to you know the original product spec was a hotel lobby bathroom that can be
0:10:39 placed in a home depot parking lot in an hour or less yeah so flexible installation and then the sort of
0:10:45 social norms how do you keep very small percentage of people from ruining it for everybody and that’s the
0:10:51 other big piece so let’s take them in order there’s first the how do you build a bathroom that doesn’t
0:10:58 cost a million dollars and that you can move around if you want to uh presumably that’s that’s better
0:11:03 than a porta potty right like we have a bad answer to that which is the porta potty but yeah so how do you
0:11:09 do that one yes better than a porta potty so what you want to do is convince a user that they’re at a
0:11:14 nice indoor bathroom there’s a lot of technology this thing is basically a stationary machine
0:11:21 with large holding tanks for water and waste pumps and sensors and maceration system to move this waste
0:11:28 and water around to allow a flushing toilet a running water sink and then all the other accoutrements of an
0:11:35 indoor bathroom hvac you know so air conditioning heat and ventilation all on solar energy so that we
0:11:39 don’t have to necessarily plug into public infrastructure and so that was the challenge
0:11:44 and we started building one of these in my co-founder ben clark’s side yard turning his you know two bed
0:11:49 two bath house into a two bed two and a half bath house so we’ll talk more about the physical thing that
0:11:56 you build in a sec but there is this other problem right how do you keep it from getting ruined by some
0:12:02 small number of people yes and this is a difficult problem to solve seems harder than the physical
0:12:08 piece at some level or more complicated or something absolutely there is a social science aspect of this
0:12:16 there’s an accountability aspect to this and i think we we focused our early experiments on on sort of those areas and i think
0:12:23 the difficult thing you have to give up when sort of being excited about this concept at throne is you know
0:12:26 attaching some form of accountability to your actions in a public space and
0:12:34 in order to do that many of our users enter via some sort of phone number basically an sms access system but
0:12:42 what that allows us to do is a you know kind of create the sense of let’s create a loyal conscientious user base
0:12:47 and just to be clear the point of using a phone number is most people have one phone number so it’s essentially
0:12:56 tying you using the bathroom to your identity you are not an anonymous truly anonymous user you are one distinct person
0:13:01 trackable at some level using the toilet well we don’t care about your name we don’t care about your
0:13:06 occupation we don’t want to know anything else about you but you’re not going to go get a new phone number
0:13:11 just to use so what do you want to know though well like why do you want my phone number for me to go to
0:13:16 the bathroom so two reasons number one and actually this is not as much the accountability we want to ask
0:13:20 you how clean the bathroom is and if you enter via phone number a huge percentage of people tell us in
0:13:25 hilarious detail what’s going on inside there so that’s another piece of this like so you text me
0:13:30 afterwards and say how was it and i text you back we text you as you go in how clean is the throne or
0:13:35 how does the throne smell and we can ask different questions and people tell us they are eyes and ears
0:13:41 and we have a roaming labor force that is reacting in real time to those prompts so that’s one reason
0:13:47 yeah the other is for the less than one percent of people that are just not treating this like they
0:13:53 would their home bathroom or uh or using it for for things outside of our sort of general uh terms and
0:13:58 conditions we can warn and block those users and it’s a very small percent this is things like
0:14:05 refusing to leave uh you know drug use and leaving drug paraphernalia behind um other activities outside
0:14:11 of bathroom use and so there’s obviously a technology problem of how can you understand who’s doing
0:14:16 those things without any creepiness and so one of our company values is don’t be creepy uh there’s no
0:14:21 cameras no microphone on the inside or anything like that but things like refusing to leave pretty
0:14:28 easy to know um and and by piecing together sort of the comments from each user and knowing which you
0:14:33 know phone number was associated with each use you can start to pick up sort of statistically people
0:14:38 that are constantly the problem basically if the person who comes in after you says it was totally
0:14:45 disgusting or there is a needle on the floor that gets pinned to the previous user just to be clear i mean
0:14:50 that seems like the simple version it gets flagged to the previous group of users and if you happen to
0:14:56 be in a group over and over that is that is a yellow flag eventually becomes a red flag what percent of
0:15:04 users wind up getting flagged 0.1 percent of users one in a thousand yeah what’s it take to get banned
0:15:12 really it is repeated violation of these types of terms and conditions or one really bad incident and
0:15:17 and sometimes it’s as simple as one of our customers the city will say you know the user that
0:15:24 used the throne at 10 42 did x y and z and sometimes that will lead to a ban i didn’t mention this another
0:15:30 reason to make a bathroom smart is you can do things like the following our door is an automatic sliding
0:15:35 door it sort of acts as the bouncer that’s a safety precaution you don’t want people coming in right
0:15:42 after you and then also there are incidents of overdose and it’s actually really great feature
0:15:46 that eventually the door will open and people will find you and that has happened many times and lives
0:15:51 have been saved actually with that feature so you can’t like manually lock it from the inside is what
0:15:56 you’re saying at some point it that’s like a electronic lock exactly and that’s another big
0:16:01 one uh we we sort of control the locking system uh an audio feature will will tell you you know the door
0:16:08 will close and lock behind you and we warn people you know very much before that happens and the city
0:16:13 actually gets to set the time limit they want and this this is a piece of of our technology that rubs
0:16:17 some people the wrong way it’s one of these crazy trade-offs and when you’re dealing in the bathroom
0:16:24 world but if you don’t do that there are real safety concerns and people will stay there overnight and
0:16:30 whatnot and so we tried to provide a good amount of time and a lot of notice but again it helps when
0:16:34 there is a safety issue there where in a normal locking manual locking bathroom a lot of people
0:16:41 are just found in the morning dead right when there’s an overdose so how long do cities choose to
0:16:47 let people stay in the bathroom before it automatically opens 10 minutes is the shortest we use and in some
0:16:53 cities 15 or no time limit okay and is there like just a small question that comes to mind like a
0:16:59 manual override if i’m in there can i unlock it if i want manually absolutely so for anyone who’s
0:17:04 claustrophobic and thinking this is my nightmare there’s a manual handle to get out it’s more just
0:17:10 that you can’t lock it and stop people from coming in after the 10 or 15 minute time limit what has been
0:17:17 like surprising to you about this sort of social dynamics piece of it i think that it’s not what
0:17:23 society might think would be the person causing the most problems i think is one one of them we’ve had
0:17:29 city officials uh one city official that you know obviously i’m not going to talk about which very early
0:17:35 on where like that was the person that was causing problems and we stood firm you know you’re not using
0:17:40 our bathroom anymore i think on the flip side i always get the question of like homeless people
0:17:44 are always are just going to ruin this thing and that is not the case i think we have found we’ve put
0:17:50 these in a lot of locations that have historically not been able to have bathrooms because of all the
0:17:54 issues i mentioned with traditional brick and mortar where they were having to you know post up
0:17:59 security guards outside which is just not cost effective and what we found when we put in in these
0:18:05 communities one example is sort of west lake mccarthur park and los angeles is people that
0:18:10 spend a lot of time there become our advocates they’re they come up to our cleaners and say like
0:18:16 we love this and oh by the way this person’s causing problems and it’s it’s so impactful for people that
0:18:21 don’t have regular access to a bathroom or have to feel some sort of maybe shame to walk into a an
0:18:26 establishment to use their bathroom it is not as easy for everyone to do that they do want nice
0:18:32 things and there are sort of greatest advocates and so happy about it and that’s something that a lot
0:18:37 of people maybe wouldn’t have thought of from the start what do you do for people who don’t have
0:18:42 phones it’s a big one not everyone has regular access to a phone it is my co-founder jess knows the
0:18:48 numbers better than me something like 92 percent of people in urban areas have phones but not everyone
0:18:54 has a charged phone and so we hand out tap cards at various kind of community service organizations
0:18:59 or often in partnership with the city sometimes we even set up tables with education here’s a card
0:19:04 it’ll get you into any throne for free you can use it as many times as you want but we still can revoke
0:19:09 access so don’t hand it to a friend and don’t do anything bad in the throne i mean couldn’t you just do
0:19:14 something bad and then get another card yes and the idea here isn’t to prevent people who make one
0:19:20 mistake to ever use the bathroom again the idea is to put some friction some feeling of i might as well
0:19:25 just clean up a little bit after myself use this bathroom for what it’s needed and that alone is
0:19:30 sort of a power law improvement on on how likely the bathroom is to stay nice and clean
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0:20:16 what’s the thing that you tried that didn’t work
0:20:20 forcing people to download an app to use a bathroom
0:20:27 that seems like a reasonable proposition i mean maybe it’s maybe you have to be a regular use i don’t
0:20:32 know i’m i i would think that that might work i would do it and we have an app and people do use
0:20:37 it uber drivers love it because it lets you you know see where other bathrooms are yeah across the
0:20:42 city and my favorite memory is walking through ann arbor michigan and seeing an uber driver pull up to
0:20:46 a throne and the door opens as he’s getting out of his car clearly showing that you know he’s been
0:20:51 doing that every day and knows exactly the timing of hitting so like he’s opened it on his app from
0:20:57 from the car and he’s yeah yeah i was just like we’ve arrived but i think early days we put one in
0:21:04 georgetown in dc at a farmer’s market back when you had to download an app and it’s crowded it takes
0:21:10 four minutes to download an app sometimes people are so angry when you have to pee and download an app
0:21:15 that like we were shamed i was like about to take my throne shirt off uh and hide but it was a great
0:21:21 learning and that’s when we installed the paul wilson rule that my dad is paul wilson 76 year old
0:21:26 man not the most facile with technology and we said paul wilson better be able to get in in 10 seconds or
0:21:32 less uh-huh so how does it work now so you walk up to a throne it will say free bathroom scan to use
0:21:40 and there’s a large qr code you scan the qr code it automatically pulls up your sms module with a
0:21:45 phone number already pre-populated and a message pre-populated sms module meaning a text a text yeah
0:21:52 yeah sorry uh send it’ll say send this message to use the throne so all you do is scan a qr code hit send
0:21:58 and this door opens okay a chime welcomes you and a voice welcomes you and you walk in the door slides
0:22:04 behind you okay you have a flushing toilet a running water sink music uh you use the bathroom and everything
0:22:08 is touchless and you even wave to exit on the way out so let’s talk a little bit more about the
0:22:14 physical thing since we’re in the room now does it smell like a porta potty tell me the truth
0:22:21 no okay our smell score right now is 4.1 out of 5 so we have quantitative answers to this
0:22:28 and physically how do you make that work yeah it’s hard it’s hard your bathroom is not connected to the
0:22:33 water or the sewer system of the city right so like what’s going on kind of behind the scenes it just
0:22:38 looks like a bathroom basically it looks like a bathroom it looks like a cube it is yeah eight feet
0:22:44 by ten feet by nine feet okay it’s a pretty big bathroom right that’s pretty big for a bathroom yeah
0:22:49 it’s a pretty large bathroom it has a ramp and it’s fully ada compliant most people say it’s much bigger
0:22:53 than i thought it would be it’s like four porta potties maybe five or six actually in square footage
0:22:58 and there’s you know vinyl wrapping design on the outside and sort of these instructions to get in
0:23:04 as you walk in we have this kind of jungle print uh wallpaper feel all of this is intentionally
0:23:11 designed uh to kind of dissuade graffiti um all of it is anti-graffiti coated so if someone does do
0:23:18 something we can sort of wash it away with isopropyl alcohol or slap another leaf sticker on top uh is
0:23:23 another cool tactic that we’ve we’ve learned you know as for your question about smell i’d say our earlier
0:23:28 units and the only reason i hesitated is we’re a company iterating all the time our earlier
0:23:32 units were not as good about isolating these bad smells when you are holding a large amount of waste
0:23:37 on board but we’ve gotten so much better so our new units do not smell like a port-a-potty how does
0:23:43 it work like how does the plumbing work you flush a toilet we do use a vacuum assisted flush so it still
0:23:49 has water but it’s about a quarter of the water usage per flush so like on a plane is it that kind of
0:23:54 vibe great question in the design sessions i said i don’t want this to feel like a plane there’s a whole
0:23:59 another tangent there about why that’s so loud and and the kind of uh hydrodynamics happening there but
0:24:06 no it’s not quite that intense it’s more just a light pull to allow kind of a quarter gallon of water to
0:24:11 to flush which is very important right you need less water because you you just have a tank of water there
0:24:17 on the building such as it is right you don’t have you have a very limited water supply yes yeah and so it
0:24:23 flushes through a macerator system so we’re just this you know if you’re eating breakfast uh sorry uh
0:24:29 we we kind of grind up what’s what’s going down there which is helpful also if people put unwanted
0:24:34 items down the toilet uh and this is a very robust system it’s it’s our most expensive component on on
0:24:38 the unit which is sort of grinding things up and then using pumps to pump it into a separate large
0:24:43 holding tank and all these things have sensors and in the back end we know when we need to add
0:24:49 fresh water or pump the waste and then you know all the traditional indoor plumbing techniques to keep
0:24:55 smells from seeping in are used plus some since we’re holding you know basically a septic tank on
0:25:01 board uh to kind of extra ventilate the system and then you know the other solve to this is just ask
0:25:06 people when it smells and so every once in a while particularly at low use units where we have to pump
0:25:11 less frequently and that waste is sitting there longer will a user every once in a while will say it’s
0:25:16 starting to smell and we will go clean the tanks or pump and and kind of do a clean and then what
0:25:20 happens when you leave so you go to the bathroom you just open the door manually right to get out
0:25:26 and then what happens yeah you either wave at a sensor so you don’t have to touch anything the whole
0:25:32 experience or use a manual lever to leave that’s when you’ll get this text how clean was your throne
0:25:37 and we’re only going to bother you once but it helps to get a one to five score on cleanliness
0:25:41 and and that’s really it the door is going to close behind you and if there’s someone else waiting
0:25:47 on the ramp they’ll walk in next uh on a separate use account right but that’s pretty much it you’re
0:25:54 on with your day we’ve solved your problem what percent of people reply to the how was it text
0:26:02 30 to 40 percent of text users and 60 to 70 percent of app users uh-huh so about half yeah which i guess
0:26:07 this is a lot replying to a random text about a toilet and it’s all we need and i think the more
0:26:12 important piece is it’s probably biased negative people are more likely to tell you when something’s
0:26:19 wrong and the open text part you know you should see the messages we get it’s definitely a fun part of my
0:26:24 end of my day to have a glass of wine and look through the comments but you know people tell you
0:26:29 sometimes it’s just nice things about thanks for providing the service but sometimes it’s
0:26:35 hilarious details about something that needs uh help and so our users are our best sensors by far
0:26:39 so where’s the company now like how many bathrooms do you have out in the world and where are they
0:26:47 we have 74 bathrooms across four metropolitan areas right now okay we’re in dc la the bay area and
0:26:54 ann arbor detroit and you know deciding where to to set up shop uh because we you might have realized
0:26:58 by now we have a pretty significant operation right we control the entire design of the system
0:27:03 uh we partner with the manufacturer satellite industries to build them uh and then we ship
0:27:08 them to the city but then we have local ops team to run the clean team the pumping operations team and
0:27:15 the technician team and presumably you need some density of of toilets for that to be at all
0:27:22 economical right you can’t have one as then it’s uh too expensive exactly and you know around 10 to 15
0:27:28 units is sort of the starting point to justify our setting up local operations and what’s it cost
0:27:34 and what’s the business model more generally like how’s how’s the money side work yeah so we’ve kind
0:27:39 of taken i’d say the high risk but long-term value approach here which is a recurring revenue business
0:27:44 model and so that’s what’s very different about that means toilets as a service toilets as a service
0:27:49 yeah and you mentioned the new york bathroom you know those are companies that are just selling a
0:27:53 piece of hardware and then the city’s in charge of doing all the insulation and by the way all the
0:27:57 cleaning and servicing so a big part of our value proposition is we take care of everything
0:28:02 but that means we get sort of a monthly piece of revenue from the city which is based on how
0:28:07 difficult that location is that might be high usage or an environment that’s just going to take more
0:28:12 oversight if that makes sense what’s it cost to have one of your toilets for a year
0:28:17 like if i buy whatever what more or less what’s the range for the city fifty to a hundred thousand
0:28:22 dollars a year per bathroom okay which like if i didn’t know how messed up cities were would seem
0:28:28 like a lot to me right like whatever seventy five thousand dollars to have one toilet for a year
0:28:33 on a certain level it’s crazy i’m not saying it’s a bad deal relative to the alternatives but just
0:28:38 in the abstract it’s sad that that’s what we’ve come to at some level not your fault
0:28:43 right i’m not this is not this is not your but but it is wild at some level no
0:28:48 i think it there is the sticker shock idea i think people underestimate how hard it is to provide a nice
0:28:55 bathroom for the public but yes it might feel high again what really matters in a market is how much
0:28:59 would it cost otherwise and i think the thing we’ve learned and our customers have started learning
0:29:06 is there’s almost no better value to get a ton of public appreciation no matter your political
0:29:13 affiliation than that amount of money for all these users to just be surprised with this amenity that
0:29:18 is actually nice i think it doesn’t work if it’s a porta potty it has to be surprisingly nice and it has to
0:29:24 be in the right location but i think we have to get over that initial sticker shock but we i’ll say
0:29:29 right now we have not lost one customer in over two years i mean what i want as a citizen is for
0:29:33 somebody else to come along and do what you’re doing to be the lift to your uber right i want
0:29:40 people to get competed down to the marginal cost essentially i mean presumably also scale will allow
0:29:44 you to lower the price if somebody’s competing with you right like presumably if you could do a
0:29:50 hundred in a city it’s going to be cheaper for you than 10 in a city yes to the second point i think
0:29:53 also we’re starting with the hardest spots when you say the hardest spots what do you mean just to be
0:30:00 clear extremely high usage and high vandalism potential i see and i think we will come up with
0:30:06 other product lines that serve other locations that can be cheaper to to really satisfy our mission of
0:30:11 you know dramatically expanding bathroom access for everybody uh so it might sound expensive but keep
0:30:16 in mind that’s solving the problem where a security guard is typically needed which which is like
0:30:20 twenty thousand dollars a month uh-huh in those locations uh that’s for like round the clock
0:30:25 security guard presumably which is tends to be what it takes in some of these locations to have a
0:30:30 bathroom not fall apart within a couple months i i know that you have a couple of patents one two
0:30:35 three four oh six four four b two systems and methods for managing publicly accessible amenities
0:30:39 system and method for advanced portable bathroom facilities pending
0:30:43 like what is the competitive landscape like
0:30:49 first of all the hilarious part of the intellectual property landscape is like every farmer in america has
0:30:56 some toilet patent right uh so yes i did wonder about the defensibility of those patents to be honest like
0:31:02 you know non-obviousness to someone skilled in the art as a criterion right so i’d be curious to see
0:31:07 yeah the white space all comes down to this accountability side of things yeah the how do
0:31:15 we use a smart piece of hardware to kind of you know basically manage a distributed bathroom user base
0:31:20 i’d say that’s more where we focused on the intellectual property side but you know not trying to kind of
0:31:27 patent a sensor in a bathroom or something like that yeah but i think broadly the defensibility here
0:31:33 is like six or seven fold and it really comes down to how difficult it is to stand up an organization
0:31:39 with a scaled manufacturing capability a distributed municipal sales and marketing force and local
0:31:46 operations it’s just difficult to do all these things and i think no one has has really ever put
0:31:52 all the effort and by the way capital risk to get this thing off the ground yes so you mentioned capital
0:31:56 risk which is particularly pertinent given the business model you’ve chosen right it’s not like
0:32:01 somebody’s like give us a bathroom here’s a million dollars and you go spend a million dollars to give
0:32:05 them a bathroom it’s like we’ll pay you whatever seventy five thousand dollars a year if you put a
0:32:10 bathroom in and then so you have to pay for the bathroom up front what’s your cost more or less to
0:32:15 get that physical bathroom fifty thousand more or less and we’re working to get that down tell me
0:32:19 about growth we’re on a little bit of an inflection point we have yeah seventy four bathrooms but
0:32:24 another fifty or so already contracted and sort of on the way out in that same set of
0:32:31 metros in that same set of cities exactly but we are kind of prospecting for the next three markets
0:32:38 which i think will be you know in the first half of next year new york new york so new york is
0:32:44 boys it on my list and we’ve had kind of a long history of discussions there some some uh political
0:32:50 uncertainty in that city right now and it’s a tricky operational city so i think need the right
0:32:55 kind of deal to make it worth our while as well tricky operational just like hard to drive hard
0:33:01 to move hard to get around in that city right yeah but there’s also and just each of those units is
0:33:06 going to be 170 uses a day but absolutely we want to come to new york i think 2027 is our goal for new
0:33:12 york if anyone’s listening and we would love you know there’s mandates in new york to bring 2 000 more
0:33:17 bathrooms over the next 10 years and we’d love to do that in one or two years and we think we have the
0:33:22 solution for that but i think what cities to choose is a is a huge uh question and we have a lot of
0:33:27 interesting insights from you know we’ve got east coast west coast we’ve got cold climate warm climate
0:33:33 and political differences uh walkability drivability all these different things that feed into it i think
0:33:37 and to some extent we’re at this place where we have cities a little bit competing with each other
0:33:41 you know uh do you really want thrown here let’s get 15 or 20 and we will come to you
0:33:47 uh so that we can kind of set up shop in an economically efficient way and there’s also
0:33:51 the more bathrooms more density the better service we can provide you think you’ll expand beyond toilets
0:34:00 no i think there’s so many temptations an early pitch deck i had a sort of food locker for doordash
0:34:04 to drop food off on the side of the outside of the bathroom people could come pick it up and i had
0:34:11 early investors say never put food next to a bathroom again so and you know you could do scooter
0:34:16 charging you could do all these other things i think where we have come as sort of a management team
0:34:22 is there’s there’s so many other bathroom problems to solve outside of i don’t think this will be our
0:34:27 only product i think we are really interested in existing bathroom infrastructure and how to make
0:34:33 that better and in other kind of ways to solve people’s bathroom problems but i think we are
0:34:37 focused on just being the best bathroom company and having thrown be associated with a pleasant
0:34:42 bathroom experience has a lot of interesting knock-on effects and other kind of revenue streams associated
0:34:49 with it i mean you mentioned existing bathrooms like could you just put a new door on an existing
0:34:54 bathroom and have it tied to somebody’s cell phone number i mean that seems like that would do
0:34:59 a ton of useful work like there are already a lot of bathrooms they just suck
0:35:07 yes i think if you think of it as supply and demand you know the and i do i think of bathroom demand as
0:35:12 a thing and you can you can kind of picture a city with these kind of hot spots and different times
0:35:16 like this is when people need to pee and this is when people need to poop and we we decided to start
0:35:21 by that you know dramatically expanding supply but i think there’s another approach which is you know
0:35:26 increasing the quality or efficiency of existing supply and there have been companies that have
0:35:31 sort of tried this i think what we would do is sort of yes bring this sort of accountability feature
0:35:40 and kind of user driven kind of real-time you know feedback to that space and we’re doing it that is going
0:35:45 to be a future piece of thrones offering because there’s just so many of our own customers who say like
0:35:50 we love what you’re doing we’ve got all this infrastructure can you help us manage those
0:35:54 because it’s a headache and and so you know absolutely that’s going to be a piece of our future
0:36:01 we’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round
0:36:17 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
0:36:22 ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart’s twice as
0:36:26 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they’ll hear your message
0:36:32 plus only iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help
0:36:39 your business think iheart streaming radio and podcasting call 844-844-iheart to get started
0:36:41 that’s 844-844-iheart
0:36:49 let’s finish with the lightning round with the what a lightning round oh i ask you a bunch of fast
0:36:55 random questions like what’s one thing you learned doing stand-up comedy oh my gosh where did you find
0:37:03 this um on the internet that i am not as good of a comedian as my sister your sister who by the way
0:37:07 was a cast member on saturday night live non-trivial but let’s not talk about her she gets all the
0:37:13 credit this one’s about me fair i’m kidding oh one other thing i one other thing i learned in stand-up
0:37:17 comedy is don’t invite your boss to your comedy show what happened when you invited your boss to your
0:37:21 comedy show i bombed and the next two months were the most miserable working months of my life
0:37:29 was that causal yeah i don’t know probably not unrelated could have been it’d be amazing if it was
0:37:35 so you have four kids as i understand how many toilets do you have in your house
0:37:41 we have three toilets which is one fewer than how many kids we have so three for six people that seems
0:37:50 fine it’s it’s enough but i i need more toilets proportionally per capita than than most uh-huh yeah we
0:37:56 had two kids and we had had lived in a one bathroom apartment a two-bedroom one bath and like the one
0:38:01 toilet was much more of a constraint than the two bedrooms for four people that’s a tough ratio it was
0:38:10 a tough ratio best public bathroom you’ve ever used i was recently in charlotte airport i feel like
0:38:17 airports have really stepped up their game recently and you have these sort of just red and green sort of
0:38:23 available stalls that you just sort of have hand washing everyone goes in and it’s very private
0:38:31 each stall is like its own space with a floor to ceiling door and smells and materials um air quality
0:38:37 everything was just on point so i think airports are starting to do it right thank you for your time
0:38:42 it was great to talk with you you too jacob that was so fun thank you very much good luck i truly hope
0:38:48 your bathrooms or someone’s bathrooms come to new york and when they do i hope to see a message through
0:38:53 sms from you you better not know it’s me i won’t but if you say if you write your name in i’ll know
0:38:58 i’m not writing my name i’ll respond okay i’m still not gonna die
0:39:12 gladger wilson is the co-founder and ceo of throne labs please email us at problem at pushkin.fm we are
0:39:18 always looking for new guests for the show today’s show was produced by trina menino and gabriel hunter
0:39:25 chang it was edited by alexandra garrettin and engineered by sarah burgher i’m jacob goldstein and
0:39:27 we’ll be back next week with another episode of what’s your problem
0:39:37 this is an iheart podcast
0:00:59 Bathroom infrastructure has always been a problem for me because i need a bathroom a lot and i get frustrated when a bathroom isn’t good but i wasn’t really necessarily sure that that was a problem for everybody so i started doing this thing where i would interview everyone about their bathroom habits and the most fun thing to do actually is ask if you ever get in an uber or lyft say can i ask you a weird question where do you go to the bathroom when you’re working this is fletcher wilson he’s the co-founder and ceo of
0:01:29 a company called throne labs i would get highly strategic answers and what was revealing is just how big of a problem it really is if you’re working from your car and you don’t have an office bathroom right so what are some of the strategic answers people gave you never drink water or coffee on the job which is a bad answer right um or a sad answer a sad answer or i know this one place this one restaurant that lets me so i’m always trying you know at four o’clock in the afternoon i’m trying to get a ride there
0:01:59 where the most interesting was i’m driving on mission in san francisco and i asked the question and he turns around and goes you really want to know and i said absolutely he pulls over to the side of the road which made me nervous and reaches for his glove compartment which made me more nervous and opens it up and pulls out a rolled up necktie and i sort of was confused and he said with a smile on his face as if he had sort of solved the mysteries of the universe
0:02:06 you know all i have to do is whenever i drop someone off at a hotel i throw this on and they think i am staying there and i get to use their bathroom
0:02:12 huh he had to put on a costume just to use an office bathroom right and that kind of put me on a journey
0:02:18 where i was talking to police officers people without reliable access to homes parents with young
0:02:23 children athletes you know and everyone i have the good fortune to have worked in offices where
0:02:30 i can always go to the bathroom but there is on my route to work it takes me 45 minutes to get to work on the
0:02:36 subway and there’s a whole foods in the middle it’s the one on houston street by second ave and like
0:02:43 more than once i’ve been running down houston street in a sweat i’m halfway to work heading for
0:02:48 the whole foods toilet we’ve all been in that sweat run i mean not all of us but i’d say 40 of the
0:02:52 population based on my discussions has been in that situation before
0:03:02 i’m jacob goldstein and this is what’s your problem the show where i talk to people who are trying to make
0:03:09 technological progress my guest today is fletcher wilson his company thrown labs is putting new
0:03:15 public bathrooms in cities around the country his problem is this how do you create public toilets that
0:03:22 people actually want to use as you’ll hear the answer involves a combination of physical design
0:03:28 technology and a kind of social engineering the conversation also points to some bigger ideas
0:03:34 about how hard it is for cities to build and maintain pretty much anything
0:03:38 i started by doing a lot of research on why there aren’t many public bathrooms out there and
0:03:42 it’s an interesting history to some extent a lot of people point to
0:03:47 this movement in the 60s and 70s called the coalition to end pay for toilets in america
0:03:52 how interesting so what was the case before that like what was the status quo
0:03:59 there were a lot of put a quarter in and you can use the bathroom facilities actually in america and
0:04:04 certainly in europe and that created the right incentives to provide bathrooms in some respects
0:04:10 so a lot of people point to that as why there are better bathrooms in europe versus america so i think
0:04:19 that’s a big part of it i think there are more recent issues i think safety and security and the in a lot of
0:04:23 urban areas in the modern u.s city uh there are a lot of cities as we’ve talked to them that are
0:04:28 sort of nervous that bathrooms will become sort of a location for nefarious activity
0:04:32 like drugs and prostitution i mean is that is that basically
0:04:39 sure you name it and it’s a private space within a public space and that makes city officials nervous
0:04:45 and in some cases it’s true that it has been difficult with the old school bathroom
0:04:53 uh infrastructure style to to solve for that problem okay so this is why we can’t have
0:05:00 nice public toilets what were you doing before what was your job thrown as my second company my first
0:05:07 company was a medical technology company with a catheter a piece of hardware so i’m not afraid of
0:05:11 building things in the physical world that company was trying to solve a problem for people whose
0:05:17 leg veins aren’t able to properly pump blood back to the heart from the legs and so we had a catheter
0:05:22 that went in and recreated vein valves for people in their legs and so and that company’s still going
0:05:29 and i’m proud of it but i think the link here is first of all it’s all plumbing veins and bathrooms but
0:05:33 really sticky problems that a lot of people don’t want to try to solve
0:05:39 so what’s the moment when you decide to start this company i’m walking in san francisco i have to go to
0:05:46 the bathroom and i see a porta potty and i try to go use it and there’s a lock on it this is sort of a
0:05:53 porta potty outside a residential construction site and it sort of hit me there are porta potties all over
0:05:59 the city they’re not nice to use they’re being used about one percent of the time if that what if we could
0:06:04 sort of you know create some sort of bathroom sharing system where the construction company is
0:06:08 incentivized or the person whose driveway it’s on is incentivized to open up an elevated bathroom
0:06:13 experience for anyone who needs it uh-huh so that’s airbnb but for toilets is essentially what you’re
0:06:19 mentioning there yes i i wish i could take credit for air pnp uh but there actually was a predecessor
0:06:23 company to mine that that had that name oh interesting and they were trying to do that
0:06:29 that was more you can use my bathroom in my living room for a fee and it didn’t work i don’t think it
0:06:36 worked yeah okay so you have the idea and you start the company well you got to have a team so pull
0:06:42 together a five-person founding team first company was a solo founder journey this one i decided not to
0:06:49 do that it’s it’s hard to start these things and so i brought in a hardware guy i found two people from
0:06:53 the traditional portable sanitation industry who had owned and run one of those companies for a long
0:06:59 time which was very useful to understand what the old school uh portable sanitation industry does like
0:07:04 basically from the port-a-potty business yeah i always i try to extend it to make it sound even more
0:07:09 glorified but yes port-a-potty business yeah which is great has done a lot of great things but we’re
0:07:15 trying to build sort of a new system on top of that and then uh my last co-founder jess who brings this
0:07:21 sort of grassroots marketing and sales side of how to sell to cities and get a bunch of people excited
0:07:27 about something like this and so at some point you go from selling to people where the port-a-potty is
0:07:30 going to be in their driveway to construction companies it’s like you’re going to have one of
0:07:35 these anyways to selling to cities and you know transit systems selling to the government basically
0:07:38 right that’s the model you land at what how do you figure that part out there are three potential
0:07:46 customers the user the city or companies like uber enterprise right we and we tried actually selling
0:07:52 to uber and lyft and amazon we have drivers right but i think the issue was twofold call us when you
0:07:57 have 10 000 bathrooms all over the country and to some extent some of those companies aren’t as
0:08:02 incentivized to provide a workplace benefit for their non-w2 workers so that’s a rabbit hole we won’t go
0:08:07 into oh so basically like the idea is like hey uber you could attract drivers by giving them
0:08:13 bathrooms which lyft doesn’t but then you’re saying legally if they do that they might have to hire
0:08:19 their workers as w2 workers instead of contractors like that’s a risk that’s a risk interesting and so
0:08:24 a quick aside on selling to the user i think we were never feeling very good about the idea of people
0:08:29 paying to use the bathroom especially in america but we tried it we played around with bathroom credits
0:08:35 and what you find is one out of ten people are willing to do it or maybe one out of five but then if
0:08:40 there is a dribble of pee on the seat you hear from them right you don’t want to pay for a bathroom
0:08:44 and not have a perfect experience and while we try to provide a perfect experience every time it’s
0:08:49 difficult and so that just felt like an uphill battle to convince hundreds of thousands of people a day to
0:08:54 make a different buying decision than they’re used to yeah and so you land on cities so we land on
0:09:00 cities and so the big question is how do you keep people from going in there and doing drugs or like
0:09:05 pooping on the floor or whatever right how do you make it not a terrible public toilet that seems like
0:09:10 the fundamental hard question is that right i think that’s one of two fundamental hard questions
0:09:16 i think if i can back up there’s one other that i think is pretty critical which is the difficulty of
0:09:23 building physical infrastructure uh-huh and the inflexibility of that so the main solution for cities
0:09:27 they don’t use port-a-bodies it’s not a crowd pleaser yeah and so they typically build brick and
0:09:32 mortar bathrooms or install these factory built systems that will plug into the waste and water
0:09:37 infrastructure the problem is that takes two to three years and it usually costs like a million
0:09:43 dollars a bathroom and then once it’s down maybe you pick the wrong spot it’s there for 20 or 30 years
0:09:49 new york in fact just did that and they even they bought like prefab bathrooms but installing them
0:09:54 like basically hooking them up to water and sewer i guess did in fact cost a million dollars a bathroom
0:10:02 which i mean it still seems crazy to me i know enough that it shouldn’t but like i feel like you could
0:10:07 build an apartment for a million dollars and put a toilet in it yeah like you actually could like buy a
0:10:13 condo for five hundred thousand dollars for the toilet and let you know like it’s they’re like
0:10:18 there’s an abundance problem here right i mean i guess this is kind of part of what is enabling your
0:10:23 business if it didn’t cost a million dollars to build a public toilet literally your business would
0:10:28 be a less compelling proposition to cities i think that would take away half of our value proposition which
0:10:34 is this flexibility ability to you know the original product spec was a hotel lobby bathroom that can be
0:10:39 placed in a home depot parking lot in an hour or less yeah so flexible installation and then the sort of
0:10:45 social norms how do you keep very small percentage of people from ruining it for everybody and that’s the
0:10:51 other big piece so let’s take them in order there’s first the how do you build a bathroom that doesn’t
0:10:58 cost a million dollars and that you can move around if you want to uh presumably that’s that’s better
0:11:03 than a porta potty right like we have a bad answer to that which is the porta potty but yeah so how do you
0:11:09 do that one yes better than a porta potty so what you want to do is convince a user that they’re at a
0:11:14 nice indoor bathroom there’s a lot of technology this thing is basically a stationary machine
0:11:21 with large holding tanks for water and waste pumps and sensors and maceration system to move this waste
0:11:28 and water around to allow a flushing toilet a running water sink and then all the other accoutrements of an
0:11:35 indoor bathroom hvac you know so air conditioning heat and ventilation all on solar energy so that we
0:11:39 don’t have to necessarily plug into public infrastructure and so that was the challenge
0:11:44 and we started building one of these in my co-founder ben clark’s side yard turning his you know two bed
0:11:49 two bath house into a two bed two and a half bath house so we’ll talk more about the physical thing that
0:11:56 you build in a sec but there is this other problem right how do you keep it from getting ruined by some
0:12:02 small number of people yes and this is a difficult problem to solve seems harder than the physical
0:12:08 piece at some level or more complicated or something absolutely there is a social science aspect of this
0:12:16 there’s an accountability aspect to this and i think we we focused our early experiments on on sort of those areas and i think
0:12:23 the difficult thing you have to give up when sort of being excited about this concept at throne is you know
0:12:26 attaching some form of accountability to your actions in a public space and
0:12:34 in order to do that many of our users enter via some sort of phone number basically an sms access system but
0:12:42 what that allows us to do is a you know kind of create the sense of let’s create a loyal conscientious user base
0:12:47 and just to be clear the point of using a phone number is most people have one phone number so it’s essentially
0:12:56 tying you using the bathroom to your identity you are not an anonymous truly anonymous user you are one distinct person
0:13:01 trackable at some level using the toilet well we don’t care about your name we don’t care about your
0:13:06 occupation we don’t want to know anything else about you but you’re not going to go get a new phone number
0:13:11 just to use so what do you want to know though well like why do you want my phone number for me to go to
0:13:16 the bathroom so two reasons number one and actually this is not as much the accountability we want to ask
0:13:20 you how clean the bathroom is and if you enter via phone number a huge percentage of people tell us in
0:13:25 hilarious detail what’s going on inside there so that’s another piece of this like so you text me
0:13:30 afterwards and say how was it and i text you back we text you as you go in how clean is the throne or
0:13:35 how does the throne smell and we can ask different questions and people tell us they are eyes and ears
0:13:41 and we have a roaming labor force that is reacting in real time to those prompts so that’s one reason
0:13:47 yeah the other is for the less than one percent of people that are just not treating this like they
0:13:53 would their home bathroom or uh or using it for for things outside of our sort of general uh terms and
0:13:58 conditions we can warn and block those users and it’s a very small percent this is things like
0:14:05 refusing to leave uh you know drug use and leaving drug paraphernalia behind um other activities outside
0:14:11 of bathroom use and so there’s obviously a technology problem of how can you understand who’s doing
0:14:16 those things without any creepiness and so one of our company values is don’t be creepy uh there’s no
0:14:21 cameras no microphone on the inside or anything like that but things like refusing to leave pretty
0:14:28 easy to know um and and by piecing together sort of the comments from each user and knowing which you
0:14:33 know phone number was associated with each use you can start to pick up sort of statistically people
0:14:38 that are constantly the problem basically if the person who comes in after you says it was totally
0:14:45 disgusting or there is a needle on the floor that gets pinned to the previous user just to be clear i mean
0:14:50 that seems like the simple version it gets flagged to the previous group of users and if you happen to
0:14:56 be in a group over and over that is that is a yellow flag eventually becomes a red flag what percent of
0:15:04 users wind up getting flagged 0.1 percent of users one in a thousand yeah what’s it take to get banned
0:15:12 really it is repeated violation of these types of terms and conditions or one really bad incident and
0:15:17 and sometimes it’s as simple as one of our customers the city will say you know the user that
0:15:24 used the throne at 10 42 did x y and z and sometimes that will lead to a ban i didn’t mention this another
0:15:30 reason to make a bathroom smart is you can do things like the following our door is an automatic sliding
0:15:35 door it sort of acts as the bouncer that’s a safety precaution you don’t want people coming in right
0:15:42 after you and then also there are incidents of overdose and it’s actually really great feature
0:15:46 that eventually the door will open and people will find you and that has happened many times and lives
0:15:51 have been saved actually with that feature so you can’t like manually lock it from the inside is what
0:15:56 you’re saying at some point it that’s like a electronic lock exactly and that’s another big
0:16:01 one uh we we sort of control the locking system uh an audio feature will will tell you you know the door
0:16:08 will close and lock behind you and we warn people you know very much before that happens and the city
0:16:13 actually gets to set the time limit they want and this this is a piece of of our technology that rubs
0:16:17 some people the wrong way it’s one of these crazy trade-offs and when you’re dealing in the bathroom
0:16:24 world but if you don’t do that there are real safety concerns and people will stay there overnight and
0:16:30 whatnot and so we tried to provide a good amount of time and a lot of notice but again it helps when
0:16:34 there is a safety issue there where in a normal locking manual locking bathroom a lot of people
0:16:41 are just found in the morning dead right when there’s an overdose so how long do cities choose to
0:16:47 let people stay in the bathroom before it automatically opens 10 minutes is the shortest we use and in some
0:16:53 cities 15 or no time limit okay and is there like just a small question that comes to mind like a
0:16:59 manual override if i’m in there can i unlock it if i want manually absolutely so for anyone who’s
0:17:04 claustrophobic and thinking this is my nightmare there’s a manual handle to get out it’s more just
0:17:10 that you can’t lock it and stop people from coming in after the 10 or 15 minute time limit what has been
0:17:17 like surprising to you about this sort of social dynamics piece of it i think that it’s not what
0:17:23 society might think would be the person causing the most problems i think is one one of them we’ve had
0:17:29 city officials uh one city official that you know obviously i’m not going to talk about which very early
0:17:35 on where like that was the person that was causing problems and we stood firm you know you’re not using
0:17:40 our bathroom anymore i think on the flip side i always get the question of like homeless people
0:17:44 are always are just going to ruin this thing and that is not the case i think we have found we’ve put
0:17:50 these in a lot of locations that have historically not been able to have bathrooms because of all the
0:17:54 issues i mentioned with traditional brick and mortar where they were having to you know post up
0:17:59 security guards outside which is just not cost effective and what we found when we put in in these
0:18:05 communities one example is sort of west lake mccarthur park and los angeles is people that
0:18:10 spend a lot of time there become our advocates they’re they come up to our cleaners and say like
0:18:16 we love this and oh by the way this person’s causing problems and it’s it’s so impactful for people that
0:18:21 don’t have regular access to a bathroom or have to feel some sort of maybe shame to walk into a an
0:18:26 establishment to use their bathroom it is not as easy for everyone to do that they do want nice
0:18:32 things and there are sort of greatest advocates and so happy about it and that’s something that a lot
0:18:37 of people maybe wouldn’t have thought of from the start what do you do for people who don’t have
0:18:42 phones it’s a big one not everyone has regular access to a phone it is my co-founder jess knows the
0:18:48 numbers better than me something like 92 percent of people in urban areas have phones but not everyone
0:18:54 has a charged phone and so we hand out tap cards at various kind of community service organizations
0:18:59 or often in partnership with the city sometimes we even set up tables with education here’s a card
0:19:04 it’ll get you into any throne for free you can use it as many times as you want but we still can revoke
0:19:09 access so don’t hand it to a friend and don’t do anything bad in the throne i mean couldn’t you just do
0:19:14 something bad and then get another card yes and the idea here isn’t to prevent people who make one
0:19:20 mistake to ever use the bathroom again the idea is to put some friction some feeling of i might as well
0:19:25 just clean up a little bit after myself use this bathroom for what it’s needed and that alone is
0:19:30 sort of a power law improvement on on how likely the bathroom is to stay nice and clean
0:19:47 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
0:19:53 ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart’s twice as
0:19:58 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they’ll hear your message plus
0:20:03 only iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help
0:20:09 your business think iheart streaming radio and podcasting let us show you at iheartadvertising.com
0:20:12 that’s iheartadvertising.com
0:20:16 what’s the thing that you tried that didn’t work
0:20:20 forcing people to download an app to use a bathroom
0:20:27 that seems like a reasonable proposition i mean maybe it’s maybe you have to be a regular use i don’t
0:20:32 know i’m i i would think that that might work i would do it and we have an app and people do use
0:20:37 it uber drivers love it because it lets you you know see where other bathrooms are yeah across the
0:20:42 city and my favorite memory is walking through ann arbor michigan and seeing an uber driver pull up to
0:20:46 a throne and the door opens as he’s getting out of his car clearly showing that you know he’s been
0:20:51 doing that every day and knows exactly the timing of hitting so like he’s opened it on his app from
0:20:57 from the car and he’s yeah yeah i was just like we’ve arrived but i think early days we put one in
0:21:04 georgetown in dc at a farmer’s market back when you had to download an app and it’s crowded it takes
0:21:10 four minutes to download an app sometimes people are so angry when you have to pee and download an app
0:21:15 that like we were shamed i was like about to take my throne shirt off uh and hide but it was a great
0:21:21 learning and that’s when we installed the paul wilson rule that my dad is paul wilson 76 year old
0:21:26 man not the most facile with technology and we said paul wilson better be able to get in in 10 seconds or
0:21:32 less uh-huh so how does it work now so you walk up to a throne it will say free bathroom scan to use
0:21:40 and there’s a large qr code you scan the qr code it automatically pulls up your sms module with a
0:21:45 phone number already pre-populated and a message pre-populated sms module meaning a text a text yeah
0:21:52 yeah sorry uh send it’ll say send this message to use the throne so all you do is scan a qr code hit send
0:21:58 and this door opens okay a chime welcomes you and a voice welcomes you and you walk in the door slides
0:22:04 behind you okay you have a flushing toilet a running water sink music uh you use the bathroom and everything
0:22:08 is touchless and you even wave to exit on the way out so let’s talk a little bit more about the
0:22:14 physical thing since we’re in the room now does it smell like a porta potty tell me the truth
0:22:21 no okay our smell score right now is 4.1 out of 5 so we have quantitative answers to this
0:22:28 and physically how do you make that work yeah it’s hard it’s hard your bathroom is not connected to the
0:22:33 water or the sewer system of the city right so like what’s going on kind of behind the scenes it just
0:22:38 looks like a bathroom basically it looks like a bathroom it looks like a cube it is yeah eight feet
0:22:44 by ten feet by nine feet okay it’s a pretty big bathroom right that’s pretty big for a bathroom yeah
0:22:49 it’s a pretty large bathroom it has a ramp and it’s fully ada compliant most people say it’s much bigger
0:22:53 than i thought it would be it’s like four porta potties maybe five or six actually in square footage
0:22:58 and there’s you know vinyl wrapping design on the outside and sort of these instructions to get in
0:23:04 as you walk in we have this kind of jungle print uh wallpaper feel all of this is intentionally
0:23:11 designed uh to kind of dissuade graffiti um all of it is anti-graffiti coated so if someone does do
0:23:18 something we can sort of wash it away with isopropyl alcohol or slap another leaf sticker on top uh is
0:23:23 another cool tactic that we’ve we’ve learned you know as for your question about smell i’d say our earlier
0:23:28 units and the only reason i hesitated is we’re a company iterating all the time our earlier
0:23:32 units were not as good about isolating these bad smells when you are holding a large amount of waste
0:23:37 on board but we’ve gotten so much better so our new units do not smell like a port-a-potty how does
0:23:43 it work like how does the plumbing work you flush a toilet we do use a vacuum assisted flush so it still
0:23:49 has water but it’s about a quarter of the water usage per flush so like on a plane is it that kind of
0:23:54 vibe great question in the design sessions i said i don’t want this to feel like a plane there’s a whole
0:23:59 another tangent there about why that’s so loud and and the kind of uh hydrodynamics happening there but
0:24:06 no it’s not quite that intense it’s more just a light pull to allow kind of a quarter gallon of water to
0:24:11 to flush which is very important right you need less water because you you just have a tank of water there
0:24:17 on the building such as it is right you don’t have you have a very limited water supply yes yeah and so it
0:24:23 flushes through a macerator system so we’re just this you know if you’re eating breakfast uh sorry uh
0:24:29 we we kind of grind up what’s what’s going down there which is helpful also if people put unwanted
0:24:34 items down the toilet uh and this is a very robust system it’s it’s our most expensive component on on
0:24:38 the unit which is sort of grinding things up and then using pumps to pump it into a separate large
0:24:43 holding tank and all these things have sensors and in the back end we know when we need to add
0:24:49 fresh water or pump the waste and then you know all the traditional indoor plumbing techniques to keep
0:24:55 smells from seeping in are used plus some since we’re holding you know basically a septic tank on
0:25:01 board uh to kind of extra ventilate the system and then you know the other solve to this is just ask
0:25:06 people when it smells and so every once in a while particularly at low use units where we have to pump
0:25:11 less frequently and that waste is sitting there longer will a user every once in a while will say it’s
0:25:16 starting to smell and we will go clean the tanks or pump and and kind of do a clean and then what
0:25:20 happens when you leave so you go to the bathroom you just open the door manually right to get out
0:25:26 and then what happens yeah you either wave at a sensor so you don’t have to touch anything the whole
0:25:32 experience or use a manual lever to leave that’s when you’ll get this text how clean was your throne
0:25:37 and we’re only going to bother you once but it helps to get a one to five score on cleanliness
0:25:41 and and that’s really it the door is going to close behind you and if there’s someone else waiting
0:25:47 on the ramp they’ll walk in next uh on a separate use account right but that’s pretty much it you’re
0:25:54 on with your day we’ve solved your problem what percent of people reply to the how was it text
0:26:02 30 to 40 percent of text users and 60 to 70 percent of app users uh-huh so about half yeah which i guess
0:26:07 this is a lot replying to a random text about a toilet and it’s all we need and i think the more
0:26:12 important piece is it’s probably biased negative people are more likely to tell you when something’s
0:26:19 wrong and the open text part you know you should see the messages we get it’s definitely a fun part of my
0:26:24 end of my day to have a glass of wine and look through the comments but you know people tell you
0:26:29 sometimes it’s just nice things about thanks for providing the service but sometimes it’s
0:26:35 hilarious details about something that needs uh help and so our users are our best sensors by far
0:26:39 so where’s the company now like how many bathrooms do you have out in the world and where are they
0:26:47 we have 74 bathrooms across four metropolitan areas right now okay we’re in dc la the bay area and
0:26:54 ann arbor detroit and you know deciding where to to set up shop uh because we you might have realized
0:26:58 by now we have a pretty significant operation right we control the entire design of the system
0:27:03 uh we partner with the manufacturer satellite industries to build them uh and then we ship
0:27:08 them to the city but then we have local ops team to run the clean team the pumping operations team and
0:27:15 the technician team and presumably you need some density of of toilets for that to be at all
0:27:22 economical right you can’t have one as then it’s uh too expensive exactly and you know around 10 to 15
0:27:28 units is sort of the starting point to justify our setting up local operations and what’s it cost
0:27:34 and what’s the business model more generally like how’s how’s the money side work yeah so we’ve kind
0:27:39 of taken i’d say the high risk but long-term value approach here which is a recurring revenue business
0:27:44 model and so that’s what’s very different about that means toilets as a service toilets as a service
0:27:49 yeah and you mentioned the new york bathroom you know those are companies that are just selling a
0:27:53 piece of hardware and then the city’s in charge of doing all the insulation and by the way all the
0:27:57 cleaning and servicing so a big part of our value proposition is we take care of everything
0:28:02 but that means we get sort of a monthly piece of revenue from the city which is based on how
0:28:07 difficult that location is that might be high usage or an environment that’s just going to take more
0:28:12 oversight if that makes sense what’s it cost to have one of your toilets for a year
0:28:17 like if i buy whatever what more or less what’s the range for the city fifty to a hundred thousand
0:28:22 dollars a year per bathroom okay which like if i didn’t know how messed up cities were would seem
0:28:28 like a lot to me right like whatever seventy five thousand dollars to have one toilet for a year
0:28:33 on a certain level it’s crazy i’m not saying it’s a bad deal relative to the alternatives but just
0:28:38 in the abstract it’s sad that that’s what we’ve come to at some level not your fault
0:28:43 right i’m not this is not this is not your but but it is wild at some level no
0:28:48 i think it there is the sticker shock idea i think people underestimate how hard it is to provide a nice
0:28:55 bathroom for the public but yes it might feel high again what really matters in a market is how much
0:28:59 would it cost otherwise and i think the thing we’ve learned and our customers have started learning
0:29:06 is there’s almost no better value to get a ton of public appreciation no matter your political
0:29:13 affiliation than that amount of money for all these users to just be surprised with this amenity that
0:29:18 is actually nice i think it doesn’t work if it’s a porta potty it has to be surprisingly nice and it has to
0:29:24 be in the right location but i think we have to get over that initial sticker shock but we i’ll say
0:29:29 right now we have not lost one customer in over two years i mean what i want as a citizen is for
0:29:33 somebody else to come along and do what you’re doing to be the lift to your uber right i want
0:29:40 people to get competed down to the marginal cost essentially i mean presumably also scale will allow
0:29:44 you to lower the price if somebody’s competing with you right like presumably if you could do a
0:29:50 hundred in a city it’s going to be cheaper for you than 10 in a city yes to the second point i think
0:29:53 also we’re starting with the hardest spots when you say the hardest spots what do you mean just to be
0:30:00 clear extremely high usage and high vandalism potential i see and i think we will come up with
0:30:06 other product lines that serve other locations that can be cheaper to to really satisfy our mission of
0:30:11 you know dramatically expanding bathroom access for everybody uh so it might sound expensive but keep
0:30:16 in mind that’s solving the problem where a security guard is typically needed which which is like
0:30:20 twenty thousand dollars a month uh-huh in those locations uh that’s for like round the clock
0:30:25 security guard presumably which is tends to be what it takes in some of these locations to have a
0:30:30 bathroom not fall apart within a couple months i i know that you have a couple of patents one two
0:30:35 three four oh six four four b two systems and methods for managing publicly accessible amenities
0:30:39 system and method for advanced portable bathroom facilities pending
0:30:43 like what is the competitive landscape like
0:30:49 first of all the hilarious part of the intellectual property landscape is like every farmer in america has
0:30:56 some toilet patent right uh so yes i did wonder about the defensibility of those patents to be honest like
0:31:02 you know non-obviousness to someone skilled in the art as a criterion right so i’d be curious to see
0:31:07 yeah the white space all comes down to this accountability side of things yeah the how do
0:31:15 we use a smart piece of hardware to kind of you know basically manage a distributed bathroom user base
0:31:20 i’d say that’s more where we focused on the intellectual property side but you know not trying to kind of
0:31:27 patent a sensor in a bathroom or something like that yeah but i think broadly the defensibility here
0:31:33 is like six or seven fold and it really comes down to how difficult it is to stand up an organization
0:31:39 with a scaled manufacturing capability a distributed municipal sales and marketing force and local
0:31:46 operations it’s just difficult to do all these things and i think no one has has really ever put
0:31:52 all the effort and by the way capital risk to get this thing off the ground yes so you mentioned capital
0:31:56 risk which is particularly pertinent given the business model you’ve chosen right it’s not like
0:32:01 somebody’s like give us a bathroom here’s a million dollars and you go spend a million dollars to give
0:32:05 them a bathroom it’s like we’ll pay you whatever seventy five thousand dollars a year if you put a
0:32:10 bathroom in and then so you have to pay for the bathroom up front what’s your cost more or less to
0:32:15 get that physical bathroom fifty thousand more or less and we’re working to get that down tell me
0:32:19 about growth we’re on a little bit of an inflection point we have yeah seventy four bathrooms but
0:32:24 another fifty or so already contracted and sort of on the way out in that same set of
0:32:31 metros in that same set of cities exactly but we are kind of prospecting for the next three markets
0:32:38 which i think will be you know in the first half of next year new york new york so new york is
0:32:44 boys it on my list and we’ve had kind of a long history of discussions there some some uh political
0:32:50 uncertainty in that city right now and it’s a tricky operational city so i think need the right
0:32:55 kind of deal to make it worth our while as well tricky operational just like hard to drive hard
0:33:01 to move hard to get around in that city right yeah but there’s also and just each of those units is
0:33:06 going to be 170 uses a day but absolutely we want to come to new york i think 2027 is our goal for new
0:33:12 york if anyone’s listening and we would love you know there’s mandates in new york to bring 2 000 more
0:33:17 bathrooms over the next 10 years and we’d love to do that in one or two years and we think we have the
0:33:22 solution for that but i think what cities to choose is a is a huge uh question and we have a lot of
0:33:27 interesting insights from you know we’ve got east coast west coast we’ve got cold climate warm climate
0:33:33 and political differences uh walkability drivability all these different things that feed into it i think
0:33:37 and to some extent we’re at this place where we have cities a little bit competing with each other
0:33:41 you know uh do you really want thrown here let’s get 15 or 20 and we will come to you
0:33:47 uh so that we can kind of set up shop in an economically efficient way and there’s also
0:33:51 the more bathrooms more density the better service we can provide you think you’ll expand beyond toilets
0:34:00 no i think there’s so many temptations an early pitch deck i had a sort of food locker for doordash
0:34:04 to drop food off on the side of the outside of the bathroom people could come pick it up and i had
0:34:11 early investors say never put food next to a bathroom again so and you know you could do scooter
0:34:16 charging you could do all these other things i think where we have come as sort of a management team
0:34:22 is there’s there’s so many other bathroom problems to solve outside of i don’t think this will be our
0:34:27 only product i think we are really interested in existing bathroom infrastructure and how to make
0:34:33 that better and in other kind of ways to solve people’s bathroom problems but i think we are
0:34:37 focused on just being the best bathroom company and having thrown be associated with a pleasant
0:34:42 bathroom experience has a lot of interesting knock-on effects and other kind of revenue streams associated
0:34:49 with it i mean you mentioned existing bathrooms like could you just put a new door on an existing
0:34:54 bathroom and have it tied to somebody’s cell phone number i mean that seems like that would do
0:34:59 a ton of useful work like there are already a lot of bathrooms they just suck
0:35:07 yes i think if you think of it as supply and demand you know the and i do i think of bathroom demand as
0:35:12 a thing and you can you can kind of picture a city with these kind of hot spots and different times
0:35:16 like this is when people need to pee and this is when people need to poop and we we decided to start
0:35:21 by that you know dramatically expanding supply but i think there’s another approach which is you know
0:35:26 increasing the quality or efficiency of existing supply and there have been companies that have
0:35:31 sort of tried this i think what we would do is sort of yes bring this sort of accountability feature
0:35:40 and kind of user driven kind of real-time you know feedback to that space and we’re doing it that is going
0:35:45 to be a future piece of thrones offering because there’s just so many of our own customers who say like
0:35:50 we love what you’re doing we’ve got all this infrastructure can you help us manage those
0:35:54 because it’s a headache and and so you know absolutely that’s going to be a piece of our future
0:36:01 we’ll be back in a minute with the lightning round
0:36:17 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than
0:36:22 ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart’s twice as
0:36:26 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they’ll hear your message
0:36:32 plus only iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help
0:36:39 your business think iheart streaming radio and podcasting call 844-844-iheart to get started
0:36:41 that’s 844-844-iheart
0:36:49 let’s finish with the lightning round with the what a lightning round oh i ask you a bunch of fast
0:36:55 random questions like what’s one thing you learned doing stand-up comedy oh my gosh where did you find
0:37:03 this um on the internet that i am not as good of a comedian as my sister your sister who by the way
0:37:07 was a cast member on saturday night live non-trivial but let’s not talk about her she gets all the
0:37:13 credit this one’s about me fair i’m kidding oh one other thing i one other thing i learned in stand-up
0:37:17 comedy is don’t invite your boss to your comedy show what happened when you invited your boss to your
0:37:21 comedy show i bombed and the next two months were the most miserable working months of my life
0:37:29 was that causal yeah i don’t know probably not unrelated could have been it’d be amazing if it was
0:37:35 so you have four kids as i understand how many toilets do you have in your house
0:37:41 we have three toilets which is one fewer than how many kids we have so three for six people that seems
0:37:50 fine it’s it’s enough but i i need more toilets proportionally per capita than than most uh-huh yeah we
0:37:56 had two kids and we had had lived in a one bathroom apartment a two-bedroom one bath and like the one
0:38:01 toilet was much more of a constraint than the two bedrooms for four people that’s a tough ratio it was
0:38:10 a tough ratio best public bathroom you’ve ever used i was recently in charlotte airport i feel like
0:38:17 airports have really stepped up their game recently and you have these sort of just red and green sort of
0:38:23 available stalls that you just sort of have hand washing everyone goes in and it’s very private
0:38:31 each stall is like its own space with a floor to ceiling door and smells and materials um air quality
0:38:37 everything was just on point so i think airports are starting to do it right thank you for your time
0:38:42 it was great to talk with you you too jacob that was so fun thank you very much good luck i truly hope
0:38:48 your bathrooms or someone’s bathrooms come to new york and when they do i hope to see a message through
0:38:53 sms from you you better not know it’s me i won’t but if you say if you write your name in i’ll know
0:38:58 i’m not writing my name i’ll respond okay i’m still not gonna die
0:39:12 gladger wilson is the co-founder and ceo of throne labs please email us at problem at pushkin.fm we are
0:39:18 always looking for new guests for the show today’s show was produced by trina menino and gabriel hunter
0:39:25 chang it was edited by alexandra garrettin and engineered by sarah burgher i’m jacob goldstein and
0:39:27 we’ll be back next week with another episode of what’s your problem
0:39:37 this is an iheart podcast
Fletcher Wilson is the CEO and co-founder of Throne Labs.
Fletcher’s problem is this: How can you create public toilets that people actually want to use?
On today’s show, Fletcher explains how his company is trying to make public bathrooms cleaner, safer and more accessible. The conversation also points to a bigger idea: why it’s so hard for cities to build and maintain pretty much anything.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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