80: Shotsy – Aja Beckett

Charlie Chapman: Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the founder of the GLP-1 Medication Tracking app, Shotsy, Aja Beckett Aja, welcome to the show! Aja Beckett: Thanks, Charlie. I'm really glad to be here. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, this is really exciting. As people listening, obviously already are aware, this is the first episode back since it's been a very long time since I've had a non-live episode especially, and this is all because Revenue Cat has acquired this podcast, so now it's officially a Revenue Cat podcast. So thank you to Revenue Cat, and I'm excited to have you on because it's kind of all tied together because we met finally in person for the first time, was it two weeks ago? Aja Beckett: It was two weeks ago. In New York? Charlie Chapman: Yeah, in New York at the Revenue Cat Appg Growth Annual conference where you gave a talk about Shotsy, which was amazing. And so I think this is the perfect kind of reintroduction into Lost, and your story is amazing, so I'm really excited to get into that. Aja Beckett: Me too. And congratulations on officially becoming part of the Revenue Cat. Charlie Chapman: Thank you. Yeah, we'll see. Aja Beckett: Portfolio, I guess is that, Charlie Chapman: So before we get into Shotsy and the amazing story there, I want to give everyone an introduction into who you are. So the three questions I always ask to kick off this show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then let's talk about the career that you had leading up to before you started Shotsy. Aja Beckett: Alright, well, this is going to be fun. So I am currently in Portland, Oregon on the west coast of the US and I've been here for a while, but I actually grew up in California and then went to school in New York and lived in Texas for a while. So I've been around the US a bit. Charlie Chapman: You spanned the whole country. Aja Beckett: I did. So I'm very glad to be here in Portland. It's a great place to live. And despite what you might see on the news, it's actually really lovely here. Charlie Chapman: Amazing airport. It's on my bucket list of airports. I want to see. Aja Beckett: You have to come to Portland just to come to the airport. It is absolutely gorgeous. Charlie Chapman: It looks incredible. Yeah. Aja Beckett: Yeah. We're very proud of our airport. So do I have a formal education? I do. I went to actually Cornell an Ivy League school, which was a bit of a leap for me. I didn't really come from that kind of background, but is it relevant to what I'm doing? No, I got a degree in film and then was for a while. Yeah, I know. Film studies kind of random. And then I got into computer animation, so that's what I did for the first five years after school was I worked on TV and movies doing all sorts of character a I'm jealous. Charlie Chapman: That was my career ambition. Aja Beckett: Oh really? Charlie Chapman: Yes. I wanted to move to California, go to film and animation school specifically, or visual effects. And then for family sickness reasons, I had to stay in Missouri and the Missouri film and Animation education system is not necessarily the most robust. So I went down to my second tier, which was not the most, yeah, I know. This is surprising. Given everything about Missouri, I ended up going into computer science, which turned out to be pretty decent as far as career opportunities go, at least Aja Beckett: Here. Well, so that's funny. So I took kind of the different path. I did computer animation first and then sort of backed my way into becoming a programmer. Charlie Chapman: They're surprisingly related, I feel like in a lot of ways. Aja Beckett: Absolutely. Yeah. I'm still spending all my time in front of a computer. Charlie Chapman: At the end of the day, we're making pixels light up in certain arrangements. Exactly. Whether you're converting JSO into that or you're in after effects or Maxon tools or whatever, it's the same, I Aja Beckett: Guess. Yeah, the leap from Maya to Xcode, very straightforward. Charlie Chapman: Both are very heavy tools, I imagine. Aja Beckett: Yeah. So I guess the third question, my career, it's been maybe a bit unorthodox. I got into actually really working on online communities. I was in media Tech for a while, sort of building online communities, figuring how to moderate them, and then that ended up becoming my first startup, which I didn't know was a thing that you could do. When I was younger, I thought that the choices were just, who are you going to work for? And I honestly didn't, it didn't really start to sink in until my late twenties, early thirties that entrepreneurship was an option. But once I discovered it, it was clearly what I wanted to do. And so I had an idea for a comment moderation platform that I really wanted to see exist. And the best way to do that was to start a small company to build and sell that product to news companies. And it was a great run. Maybe we'll talk about it later. It's still very relevant in my current work, but we had a great product and a great team, but it was not a sustainable business model, and so I was only able to run it for two or three years. Charlie Chapman: What was the business model? This was an app. This was a service where you built software that media companies could embed in their webpages for comments. Is that right? Aja Beckett: Yeah, if you're familiar with discuss, it was one of these third party JavaScript plugins, and so it was a full platform to replace something like discuss, but it had a different approach to moderation that really worked in preventing harassment and abuse and making it much easier for the newsrooms to manage. But it was B2B and it was 2016 and we were trying to sell a commenting platform to news companies, and I had zero experience with enterprise sales, especially Charlie Chapman: Very, very different discipline than consumer. Aja Beckett: Very Charlie Chapman: Businesses, Aja Beckett: Very challenging. So after that shut down, I knew I still wanted to work on tech products and trying to solve interesting problems through absent technology. But I guess Charlie Chapman: Backing up just a little bit, we went from, you were in Maya making 3D animations for film to, you said you wanted to do entrepreneurship, but were you developing, did you teach yourself how to code or were you building a team that then did that? Aja Beckett: Yeah, no, I actually never had a team. I was always just kind of off on my own, taught myself how to code. When I was working for Ted, the TED Talks people in New York, I was working remote and they had hired me to manage their online communities, which were really interesting, fascinating spaces to work with. And there were so many tools that I wanted that the tech team there, I don't know if you're familiar with media tech, but it's often a real challenge to assign resources across the organization. There's just so many things that need to be built, and so my needs were not a high priority in the company, and so I ended up asking if I could have access to an EC2 instance on AWS, so just a little bit of a backend that I could build on, and they said yes. And so I just started slowly developing more and more tools. So initially just a weekly email that would go out with basic stats about what was happening. So I learned enough SQL to be able to pull those queries and send out some reports. Anyhow, yes, it's just been kind of one thing after another. Charlie Chapman: Okay. Wow. So you self-taught out of necessity how to code, and that's what led to you have the skillset to be able to build this commenting platform, and you started trying to build a business out of that struggle with the actual business side of that, not so much the technical side. Sounds like the product itself is really Aja Beckett: Good. Well, fortunately, with the commenting platform, fortunately I was able to eventually hire people who were much better than me. So I am very good at building the prototype, building the MVP, and then it's really good to be able to bring in people who are specialized and really good at JavaScript and really good at DevOps. Charlie Chapman: That makes sense. So then whenever you got to the point where you realized that wasn't going to work as a business, how did that go about? Did you just shut things down or did you sort of slowly wither away into night? What was that process like? Aja Beckett: It was really painful. I guess I described it at the time. It was being on a plane that was very slowly crashing. The plane was still crashing Six months later, it's like, Nope, it's still awful. I think if you've ever had to shut down, especially a product that the customers loved, I mean, we were on all sorts of news sites and it was making a huge difference in the lives of the newsroom editors not having to spend all of their nights and weekends worrying about what was happening in the comments. It was hard to have to shut it down just because I couldn't figure out how to sell it sustainably to these big media companies. Charlie Chapman: In that case, did you have investors or was this pretty much all you or you and the people working with you? Aja Beckett: Yeah, we were a team of seven people, I think at our biggest, and we had 40 angel investors. It was all angel funded, and so I spent a lot of those two, two and a half years pitching for angel checks, and it was almost like month to month we needed to raise. I needed to constantly raise more Charlie Chapman: To stay alive, Aja Beckett: More funding. And then I was also trying to raise money from venture capitalists at the same time. But I see now in retrospect that it was pretty clear that there was not a great business model behind this, even though it was a great product. Charlie Chapman: Well, and venture capitalists are looking for not just a good business model, but a specific type of business with high risk and outsized returns, right? Yeah, Aja Beckett: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we ran on Angel funding for as long as we could, and then there just wasn't enough actual revenue to keep it going. Charlie Chapman: And then what was it? I want to try something new or did you retreat into doing something else? What was the next step after that then? Aja Beckett: Yeah, I mean, I kind of wanted to just crawl into a dark hole. It's really hard to have to stop doing something like that since you're really passionate about, Charlie Chapman: Well, I imagine your identity was pretty wrapped up in it too. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I had been doing it at that point for long enough that I was definitely very attached to it. Maybe somebody who's been in this position knows the very painful moment where you have to go into the office after everybody else has left and paint over the 13 foot logo that you had painted on the wall. Charlie Chapman: Oh, no, that doesn't sound good at all. I just assume you leave that and walk away. Oh my Aja Beckett: Goodness. No, somebody has to go in there with a white paint and roll over it and yeah, that was me. Charlie Chapman: Wow. It's like a visual metaphor that you have to sit there and stare at yourself. Oh my goodness. Aja Beckett: Oh yeah. It's very Charlie Chapman: Cinematic Aja Beckett: Though, right? I know. Yeah, so remember that when you're painting the 13 foot logo on the wall, Charlie Chapman: You might have to paint over it. Aja Beckett: Yeah, yeah. Make sure you've got a good business model. After that experience, I needed to sort of lick my wounds and recover. My big takeaway from it was that I have lots of ideas for products. I have lots of ideas for problems that I want to solve. There's lots of problems that I'm interested in working on, but if you are not able to connect it to a sustainable business model, you won't be able to continue working on the mission. If there's no money, there's no mission, and that was very visceral, I think, at that point. And so I realized, okay, there's something I'm not understanding here about how businesses work and whatever I do next, I want to work on that. That's the thing that I want to learn is how do you make money? How do you build revenue? Because then I can actually do the thing that I want to do, which is build interesting tools for people, solve interesting Charlie Chapman: Problems. You have to make money to build things, versus the other way of building a business is build things to make money, but you already had the build things part, but you have to have the money in order to do that in the first place. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I think finally letting go of that, build it and they will come Charlie Chapman: Feel the dreams ruined an entire generation of people. Aja Beckett: Yeah, that's right. Thanks, Kevin Costner. I don't know, it made sense to me at the time, but that's just sort of how my brain works, I guess, is I thought, okay, well, how can I get better at starting the kind of business that I want to run but not have to sort of work with the gatekeepers that I had been struggling with? So I didn't want to have to do enterprise sales. I didn't want to have to do venture capital. I realized too that it's not possible to bootstrap certain types of businesses. Some businesses just need to have a big impressive team from the beginning or else you're not going to be able to sell to the types of customers you want to sell to. And that was not something I understood at first. And so I sat down and I thought, okay, well, where can I build something on my own without needing anybody's permission and learn the lessons that I need to learn about how to reach customers? And the answer was mobile apps, consumer apps, I had all the skills or I knew that I could develop the skills to be able to build. I was Charlie Chapman: Say, you didn't have a mobile app with that company, right? Aja Beckett: Well, no, but that commenting platform was using React for the front end, and so I knew a lot about how to build a React app, and somebody told me about React Native, and I thought, okay, I can do that. So yeah, that was a pretty easy transition to go from building React web apps to react native apps. I no longer work in React native, but it was the gateway. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, that was how you got in there. You said the answer was mobile apps, but was there a moment where you were like, oh, this is my way to get around? It's funny to hear somebody say, get around gatekeepers and then land on the app stores kind of a topic jore right now, but in a way it does get you around a lot of gatekeepers because it is a little bit more of a meritocracy environment. Aja Beckett: Yeah. I don't know about the M word, right? Charlie Chapman: Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I forget. I live in the Midwest. I'm not used to hearing that constantly. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I mean, I think when you compare it to at least the type of environment that I had previously been in where how can you build a big B2B business to business platform company without venture capital, without a really strong network? I've been kind of an outsider. I haven't worked for the big tech companies very much, and when I looked at what my opportunities were going to be there, it was going to be pretty challenging to just even get to the point where I could start to learn the lessons that I needed to learn. And so with mobile apps, the distance between, yes, there's a lot of hurdles that you have to get through, but they're fairly straightforward, and I wasn't trying to do anything that was particularly outside of what I knew that Apple would approve. And then once you're on the app store, there's zero friction or potentially to reaching people who might be interested in your product. So it seemed like it made the most sense. I'm not sure where else I could have gone really. Charlie Chapman: That's really interesting. So the idea of building a mobile app came first before the idea for what that mobile app would be came? Aja Beckett: I think it was kind of hand in hand. I think I started first with what problems do I want to work on? And again, this made sense to me at the time, but maybe is a bit odd in retrospect. I really wanted to work on social anxiety. Charlie Chapman: I mean, yeah, well, especially, I don't know what year we're talking about, but that was digital wellness and all of that were Aja Beckett: Pretty Charlie Chapman: Hot topics for a while. In fact, this year I feel like they've kind of come back in terms of is it Opal all the apps that are for helping you detox from your phone and block you out of apps and stuff? Aja Beckett: Yeah, I mean, there are huge problems to be addressed, but I think for me, it is always coming from personal problems. I have a hard time moderating comments or I have social anxiety, or I am taking a medication that doesn't have any support. So yeah, this would've been like 2018, I guess. I think I had a string of awkward encounters with grocery store cashiers, and I was like, you know what? I don't want to be like this anymore are I thought, okay, well, that's something I want to work on. I know how to do something like that. And so I thought, okay, let's build practice conversations. Let's use speech recognition. Let's use recorded video. This was a little bit before AI video was easy to do, but I ended up getting stuck on this idea for so long that AI video became an option as I was still working on different versions of this, but I got really attached to this idea of practice conversations being a fun thing to work on and something I was interested in. I ended up working on practice conversations basically for God, probably like four years in different incarnations. Charlie Chapman: Oh, wow, okay. Aja Beckett: Yeah. Ended up I realized, okay, well, nobody's searching for social anxiety tools right now. At least at that point, I started to realize, okay, well, one of the problems is that had Charlie Chapman: You released this was in the app store? Yeah. Okay, so you were out there hustling, trying to make this thing Aja Beckett: Work. Yeah, absolutely. And so I had a lot of those classic, why is nobody downloading it? Why isn't it immediately a huge hit? So I started to learn about what are people searching for on the app store and what actually can find an audience? And I realized, okay, well, there's no real demand right now for this solution that I'm like, oh, I just made a fool of myself at the Whole Foods. I'm going to go look for an app where I can for Charlie Chapman: A solution. Aja Beckett: Yeah, that's not a thing. Charlie Chapman: So you either have to change the product or at least the messaging around the product so that it does solve a need somebody searching for, or you have to generate demand through marketing campaigns or something like that. Those are the options for distribution at that point. Aja Beckett: Yeah, exactly. And I realized, okay, well, I don't have the resources to go educate people about this. I need to find something that people are already looking for a solution to where I can provide a good solution. And so I said, okay, well, language learning, that's a natural fit for practice conversations. People are already looking for language learning tools, and this is a novel approach at this point. In 20 18, 20 19, people weren't doing video practice conversations. I know now it's really common. Charlie Chapman: It's big into Aja Beckett: Everything. Yeah, that's kind interesting. But it was new, this idea that you could sort of have these simulated conversations, and so I got very attached to that idea. Charlie Chapman: Were you personally into language learning? Aja Beckett: No, and that ends up being a very important part of this. The lesson here after many failed attempts to do different language apps was that, well, two things. One is that you really do have to be an authentic member of the community that you are working for. I was not a language learner. I didn't understand the community really. I wasn't part of their Reddits. I wasn't doing all the things that you do when you're really passionate about learning languages. Unfortunately, I only speak English. That was the first problem. And the second problem is that you should never compete against Duolingo, Charlie Chapman: But I feel like there's a long wake all around them for little side things maybe you could take advantage Aja Beckett: Of. Yeah, yeah. Well, I was not able to figure it out, and so yeah, I struggled through many different variations and then finally ended up well, and I pivoted again to a citizenship education app, which was a good niche, but again, I wasn't authentically a member of that community, and so even though it is a good solution, it was really hard to reach the audience because I wasn't really part of it. So I ended up having to take a day job. At this point, I'd kind of been going in and out of freelancing and taking contracts to pay the bills and money was running out, and so at that point, I had to take a full-time job, and so I ended up taking a job as an iOS engineer at the New York Times, working on the athletic app, which is their sports journalism app, and so that would've been at the end of 2023. Charlie Chapman: Okay. So at this point, are you thinking maybe my entrepreneurship days are behind me? That was a, I'm glad I tried it, but I'm kind of moving on. Aja Beckett: I, yeah, I went into that job thinking, okay, this is it. I've gotten that out of my system. I'm ready to be, I am ready to be an employee. I'm ready to be a grownup and do a job. I was excited to, I hadn't really done that. I hadn't been an on staff engineer before. I'd always been kind of contract and freelance and independent. So yeah, it was exciting to get to work on a team, to be one of many, and to get to learn from people who were working at a really high level and that the athletic app was really exciting because they were one of the first teams, I think, to switch fully to Swift ui. It's a really widely used and very well-built Swift UI app, which was very exciting to get to work on. Charlie Chapman: You've put entrepreneurship behind you, but I'm talking to you here today because of a app that you've built that took off. Where did that come from? Aja Beckett: Yeah, well, so I mean, that lasted six months. I think it would've lasted a lot longer except I was able to start taking one of these new medications. So in addition to all of this long painful story of my journey through entrepreneurship, I've always been a person who struggled with my weight. I have a diagnosis of obesity class one, and it's been, I think I've had that sort of classic up and down struggle for my entire adult life. I think starting when I was probably 14 or 15, I've been on one diet or another, everything, all the different ones, and that was very much true in fall of 2023, I think I was at my highest weight ever. I think because of the job, I was finally able to be able to access the kind of insurance that could make taking a GLP one possible. Charlie Chapman: I mean, that was still pretty new right at that time, that was only, Aja Beckett: It was Charlie Chapman: A few years into it being approved for weight loss specifically. Aja Beckett: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I don't have diabetes, and so it was only just recently available for obesity. I guess if anybody is not familiar with these GLP ones, Charlie Chapman: Oh Aja Beckett: Yeah, I know it's such a big part of my life now, but this is Ozempic or it's all of these new GLP one agonists that's kind of the collective term for it. They're pretty incredible medications. They seem to address a lot of different mental and physical health issues that come with this condition or these conditions. I had been trying to access them for a while. I suspected that it was going to be a big benefit for me, but I wasn't able to afford it until I had good health insurance, Charlie Chapman: And so this was originally a diabetes drug that then through testing they found was really useful for all these other things. But obesity being one of the big ones, so fully FDA approved, all that stuff, but it's still newer, so there's more and more people are getting access to it. There's a lot of things to work out personally and just the community's trying to figure it all out. So I imagine it's, I don't dunno if stressful is the right word, but a drug that as you're taking it, you want to understand more heavily even than most drugs, which is already a thing you want to do, how it's affecting your body and how it's affecting your mood and all that stuff. Aja Beckett: It's a really interesting experience. I think taking one of these medications, there is a huge need for support. I think people get these prescriptions and then they're kind of left to their own devices until their next doctor's visit, which might be months away, and there's a lot of day-to-day stuff to manage, not just remembering to take the injections and rotating injection sites, but also trying to navigate side effects and stay in that kind of sweet spot for getting the most use out of it without feeling nauseous. And then also just managing expectations. I think it's so different for somebody like me who has done so much calorie counting and going to the gym and keto and intermittent fasting and all these mindful eating, all these things, treating the condition with a medication feels very different from these white knuckle willpower kinds of, you have to stay motivated type experience where you're sort of forcing yourself to suffer through these things. And yeah, I think we're seeing a lot of people who stop taking them, not because the medication isn't working, but because they just don't have that support. Their doctors aren't available for day-to-day nutrition counseling or guidance on realistic expectations. I think people sometimes experience more side effects than they need to, or they get more discouraged than they need to if they don't have access to ongoing support and counseling through the experience. Charlie Chapman: So that's kind of the entry point. So you had access to that. There's not a lot of community infrastructure, I guess maybe is the right word, or support tools that are out there for people taking this. Where does that lead you, I guess? Aja Beckett: Yeah, I think a lot of people don't know anybody else who's taking a GLP one and sometimes even just trying to talk to your doctor about it mean, unfortunately, some doctors are still a little behind the curve on these medications, and so some people even face sort of bias and resistance even from the healthcare professionals, but for the people who do get a prescription or access it through telehealth, oftentimes it's kind of isolating. There's not really anybody you can talk to. So because I'm a very sort of tech forward kind of person, for me, it was really natural to join the subreddit communities that were focused on these and to really connect with people online and to go and read the clinical trial results and really understand, okay, here's the curves, here's the averages, here's what to expect, and then talk through that with other people who were a little further along with the medication on Reddit. That was available to me, I think, because that's just kind of how I am, but a lot of people, they don't have the time, they don't have the energy. They're not like, oh, I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks learning everything I can about prior authorization approvals and learn how to fax a 12 page document to my insurance company. There were so many things to navigate, and I felt like there was just clearly a real need to make that a lot more accessible to people. Charlie Chapman: What was at that point then? You thought there's an opportunity here to build something to help and maybe build a business? Aja Beckett: It was very much one of those solving my own problem kinds of experiences. I was very curious about what was happening in the seven days between taking shots. The medications fluctuate a lot. It's a little different since you're not taking it every day. There's a big, the concentration increases and then it drops off and then it stays in your system for four or five weeks. So each weekly dose builds on what's remaining from the last, and that's very difficult to keep in your head week to week, like, oh, where am I? If you're feeling, if you're starting to feel food noise coming back, it can be difficult to remember like, oh, is that because I'm on day six, or is it because do I need to talk to my doctor about changing dosage? There was a lot that I wanted to have access to in terms of data visualization and metrics in order to have a better conversation with my provider when it was time to change dosage, because GLP ones I think are somewhat unique in the titration schedule. Whether or not you're going to go up a dose or down a dose is based on how the patient is feeling and not blood work, a medication I'm taking. There's six different levels that you can take, and I'm not going to get lab work done to determine that. That's not a thing. You just talk to your doctor about how you're feeling and what side effects you're having and whether or not it feels like it's working, and then you decide together. And so the more the patient can understand about what they're experiencing and the more systematic they are in their Charlie Chapman: Approach right in the moment versus when they're at the office, which you're trying to recall the last four weeks or whatever. Aja Beckett: Exactly. Yeah, no, you want to have an idea of trends. You want to have an idea of where does it feel like you're responding the most to the medication, and then of course, that changes over time. So there's just a lot of data that is helpful to be able to keep track of, and I think that's so different from earlier ways of trying to manage your health or lose weight. It wasn't about I need to pinpoint this number on a chart so that I can make good titration choices with my doctor. Charlie Chapman: Yeah. So did you go straight to, because you're an iOS developer at this point, did you go straight to, I'm going to build an app, or did you have spreadsheets or something that you were starting to try and build up for yourself? Aja Beckett: I started with, I think, what a lot of people do, just Apple Notes. Charlie Chapman: Oh, yeah, yes, yes. The Ultimate app, Aja Beckett: The notes app, and then doing some spreadsheets. People were trading spreadsheets on the subreddit. Charlie Chapman: If you're in a community and you see people trading spreadsheet templates, that's an opportunity for at least a niche market product. Aja Beckett: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, because again, I mean, it's one of those accessibility things. Not everybody has the time and the energy. It's great that people, maybe people like me are totally going to want to take that as far as they can and build all sorts of really cool visualizations, but not everybody is going to be able to prioritize that, and they just need something that works where they can enter their data and then just see all of the charts, see all of the stuff without having to put a lot of time into it. And I think especially the big advantage of doing it on a phone is that you already probably have a lot of access to health data through the Apple Health app. And I think also the mobile device, it's always in your pocket if you're out and about, if you're traveling or whatever, you can always just record what you need to record in the moment and not have to wait until you're back to your computer. So lots of reasons to make it a mobile app instead of a spreadsheet. But yeah, I did start out kind of doing it the old fashioned way. Charlie Chapman: So once you got to the point of making an iOS app, was the initial idea this could be a product or was it one of those, I'm just making it an X code for myself and maybe I'll release it to this community just in this community? Aja Beckett: At the very beginning, it was just for me. I mean, obviously there was a lot that I needed to figure out, is this even going to work? I had this idea to do the estimated medication level charts, really trying to study the results from the clinical trial data and can we model this? Does that work to use this as a way of estimating how much of the medication might be in your system hour by hour. So there was a lot of RD trying to figure out if this was even something that would help me, but I put out a request on that subreddit for beta testers in late April or early May of last year. Charlie Chapman: You already had a bit of a product at that point? Aja Beckett: I was able to get it up into test flight. Charlie Chapman: Okay. Yeah. So you had a product, maybe some screenshots, and you posted it on Aja Beckett: It? Yeah, it was rough. I mean, the post is still there. You can see the screenshots, but I was able to get it into beta testing and I made the request and I was able to take 25 beta testers, and it filled up very quickly. I think in 90 minutes I had 25, actually, I had more than 25. I had to shut it down because there wasn't anything. I mean, nobody, yeah, Charlie Chapman: Exactly. Aja Beckett: Nobody had anything that was on a mobile app, a mobile device at the time. I think as soon as I started to work with the beta testers, I knew that there was going to be a lot of enthusiasm for this. The response was just immediately so enthusiastic, and during the one month of beta testing, the number of testers kept growing, so I think a couple people were sending it to their friends. Charlie Chapman: The link was still open. Aja Beckett: Yeah, it was just a public test flight link. So yeah, it was like every day there was another couple of beta testers. Oh, interesting. Charlie Chapman: How long did you run the beta test then? Aja Beckett: It was one month. Charlie Chapman: Were you getting lots of valuable feedback? Did it impact the product a lot? Aja Beckett: Oh, yeah. It was really helpful. I learned pretty quickly is that everybody's experience with these medications is very different. People are taking them for different reasons. They're at different stages in their journey. Some people come to Shotsy when they've already been taking a GLP one for a year already and they need to enter all of their past shots. And so having a good interface for that and making sure that that was really smooth, and some people never track their weight and they want to track something else instead, or there was a need for customization that was very clear from the start. This needs to be something that people can really make their own, because everybody's journey is a little different. That was a big part of the beta test experience, and then I was struggling to figure out how to let people track their side effects and what the right user experience would be for side effect tracking. And a couple of people pointed out that this was really similar to period tracking, because that's another place where you're thinking about how your hormones are changing over time and what effect that's having on your mood and your sort of physical experience, and then you want to correlate that to, you want to try to keep track of side effects, Charlie Chapman: And you had never made that sort of connection before. Aja Beckett: That was a really good nudge because as soon as they pointed out, I was like, oh yeah, of course. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, exactly. And then there's a large mature industry of inspiration in terms of user interface design. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting the overlap, and I think that's something that is a little counterintuitive about this space is that yes, it's health tracking and for a lot of people it's about weight loss, but it's not a diet and it's not, it's not fitness Charlie Chapman: Tracking. Aja Beckett: Exactly, and it's not about helping you stay motivated suffering a lot. It's more like a period tracker where it's like something is happening to you and a lot of it is sort of outside of your control and you're just kind of Charlie Chapman: Yeah, that's true. You're just noticing it's health and fitness. You control the inputs and they're very varied. Whereas here, the inputs are pretty very regular and not as interesting. It's the kind of results of that that are a bigger deal. Yeah, that's really interesting. Aja Beckett: Yeah, you obviously control when you take the shots and how Charlie Chapman: Much Aja Beckett: Of a dosage you're taking, but then between shots, it's doing the work or it's doing a lot of the work, and then what you want to do is sort of give yourself the best experience as possible, so it's your happy continuing to take this thing. Charlie Chapman: Okay, so you released it to the beta. You got some good feedback. You only ran the beta for about a month. How did you decide when to release? Aja Beckett: That's a good question. I think it's good to remember that at this point, this was, I think my seventh app. I felt very comfortable getting something launched out there. The last step was getting to the point where I felt comfortable building the paywall. I knew from past experience that because I was intending for this to be a freemium product where most of the features are free, but a couple of features are behind a premium paywall. I knew that it was important to have that in place on day one because I didn't want anybody to feel surprised or disappointed when things changed. I was like knowing that there has to be a sustainable business in order to continue building the product and improving the product, I want it to be very clear to everybody on day one, like, okay, this is how we're going to keep this thing going is you can use it for free forever as much as you want. All the actual useful stuff is there, but two features are premium, and if you want the bonus of getting to use these features, then we'll ask you to help support the continued development of this product. Charlie Chapman: How did you draw that line? Because the way you just described, it almost sounds like you didn't put the most valuable things behind the paywall, which is traditionally how you would do that. Otherwise, you're sort of relying on the goodwill of people more than anything. Aja Beckett: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of that comes back to the fact that I am very much authentically a part of this community. I'm very connected to the people who are taking GLP ones. If you have a condition that benefits from taking a GLP one, then you've probably experienced a lot of suffering because of that condition. Being a person in a much larger body is a very difficult thing to, or can be a very difficult thing to experience, and knew that I was building something that was going to be really useful for people and help them get more success from these life-changing medications. I didn't want that to be something where they had to pay for it in order to access that. So anything that is really important to the core experience of keeping track of your shots, remembering to take your shots, having better conversations with your doctor, all of that is totally free and will continue to be free. But knowing that we needed to be able to build a sustainable business and not end up having to shut down the way my first startup did, I decided to choose two features that were kind of nice to have. If you're using this all the time, it would be nice bonus features to be able to do these two things, but you could still do everything you need to do without them. Charlie Chapman: Okay. And I guess you also had the advantage compared to the, at least the previous company, that being a mobile app, your costs are much lower. You don't have a whole bunch of infrastructure that you are keeping up with and moderation and all that stuff. Aja Beckett: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is a need for a team here for sure, and it's really important that we've been able to grow a team so that it's not just me trying to build the iOS app, build the Android app, answer the customer support emails, do all the things, Charlie Chapman: But at that point it was just you, right? Aja Beckett: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, Charlie Chapman: There's some trauma behind that answer. Aja Beckett: Well, no, I mean, because now we're in the window of time where actually Revenue Cat gave me an award for being a solo developer. I think just like two months later, three months later, I won the first Shippy for being a solo app developer in 2024. Charlie Chapman: Before we get to the launch itself, I want to rewind a little bit something you said earlier, which was you've built at this 0.6 or seven different mobile apps, and as we talked about, none of those necessarily took off. Did you feel before the launch that this was different, or did it feel like another one of those, this is another attempt I'm making, Aja Beckett: This was night and day. This was completely different with sales as I know now, which I didn't know 10 years ago. When you're selling something, there's a big difference between trying to push something out to customers and having something pulled in by customers, and there was a huge pull here. Anybody who was taking one of these medications, if I said, oh, yeah, I'm working on a tool to help with this and this, they were like, oh my God, can I join? I want to join the beta tests. Seeing how the testers were responding, seeing how excited the other people on the Reddit community were, and also just knowing firsthand, I understood why people were excited about this because I was excited about it. I am the first user. I don't know what I would do if I didn't have this app. It's a huge part of my experience. And so that was very different from the years that I spent trying to kind of push a solution into a space that I didn't really authentically belong to. Back when I was trying to do a language learning app or a citizenship education app, if I had actually been part of those communities, I would've understood more about what people were looking for and what was resonating, and if there was an opportunity to sort of reach an enthusiastic audience, I think I would've had an easier time navigating that, but it all kind of fell into place. So Charlie Chapman: Then how did the launch itself actually go? Aja Beckett: Well, it was a lot. Launching the beta test, I just went back to my amazing Reddit community and I said, okay, it's live on the app store and would love to get your thoughts, I think. And again, the post is still there, but yeah, I mean, it just immediately took off. I think people had been aware that there was an app in development because I think some of the testers were starting to post screenshots of their charts Charlie Chapman: On that subreddit, Aja Beckett: So people were like, wait, where is this coming from? And it was like, oh, it's this app. Yeah. So as soon as it was available in the app store, people immediately started downloading it. They immediately started signing up for the trial at much higher rates than I'd ever seen in one of my previous apps. The growth from there was really organic. I mean, people were telling their friends, they were posting the charts ended up being a really not viral, but people really like sharing the charts that Shotsy generates. It's a big part of helping understand your journey, and they're really fun to share with people. You can see your weight change over time that's correlated to your dosage strength by color. And so you can see, okay, when I was taking that one, I lost this much, and when I was taking that one, and people really, to me included, it's really fun to get to see, oh, okay, when I was taking five milligrams of that bound, then like, oh, I lost 25 pounds Charlie Chapman: Visualizations, shareable visualizations in your app that tell a story. I think that's the part that a lot of people building social loops into their apps miss, but if it can tell a story that is interesting in its own, those I feel like can really take off on you. Aja Beckett: That was not the intent at all. I mean, to this day, and still people look at the app because there've been a lot of other things to work on, and so people are still screenshotting the results screen and sharing it everywhere. There's been whole threads on Reddit that are just like, share your shotsy charts. You can totally tell we haven't done anything to make that. That's what I was going to ask shareable Charlie Chapman: Ask if you haven't leaned into it and found ways to make that more shareable or more branded or anything. Aja Beckett: No, because working on a lot of other stuff, I mean, we needed to get it onto Android and requests that we get from users, and so we're just working through the list of, and nobody's asking us like, oh, make sure you put your logo on the screen. When we share it on Reddit, Charlie Chapman: It has a look to it. It's not using, well, maybe you are using, you're not using Swift charts or something. It doesn't look like Aja Beckett: It's just Charlie Chapman: The default. Aja Beckett: We've invested a lot in the charts. These are very high-end charts. Charlie Chapman: Visually, it's immediately obvious what it is, and once you have a certain critical mass, it has that kind of, if you know thing where if somebody posts it and it doesn't have, this is a weird social engagement hack that's an accident thing I think most of the time. But if people post a screenshot that doesn't have a logo, it's often enough that people will reply, what app is this? Aja Beckett: And Charlie Chapman: It's well known enough that somebody will almost definitely respond to that. That tells the algorithm that this is a highly engaged post because threads are being formed underneath it, and then it kind of creates this feedback loop that shares it out to even more people. Aja Beckett: I mean, I don't know enough about how all the algorithms work, but it doesn't seem like it's a bad thing that people are asking What app is this? And then typing out shotsy, that's probably not a terrible thing. I wouldn't know the details of how all these things Charlie Chapman: At Revenue Cat, we experience similar things. Our charts are very frequently shared. There's features in there to make it easier to share, but everybody just screenshots it. I think it being visually clear what it is, and then having that sort of, if you know thing, it also signals this company cares about the product. They're not just building perfectly Instagrammable images or whatever. Not that that's bad, but I don't know. I think screenshots are a powerful social loop if it's authentic, I guess, ultimately. Aja Beckett: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty clear when you use Shotsy, this is built by a team that is first and foremost building a good product for our users, and we have not gotten to the point where we're trying to do anything gimmicky. I guess Charlie Chapman: It doesn't seem like you've needed to, like you said, there's high demand there. And I'm curious if you've done, again, it sounds like maybe you don't necessarily need to at this stage, but to figure out where that distribution is sort of coming from. Initially there's a subreddit that's thriving and you can kind of build on there, but as far as I can tell, it's definitely expanded well past the subreddit into the normal non-tech sphere. Is that from search traffic on the stores or is there some other sort of distribution method that seems to be taking off or that you're doing on purpose? Aja Beckett: Yeah. Well, so again, going back to my many years of struggle trying to find a sustainable business model for consumer apps, I eventually learned how important the organic rankings in the app stores are Charlie Chapman: Rankings for search terms or rankings for Aja Beckett: The search term rankings. So again, I slowly figured out, oh, it's really important that you work on something that people are looking for, and then that you are discoverable when they search for that keyword. And so going all the way back to wanting to work on an app for social anxiety, there were no keywords, at least at the time that people were searching for social anxiety. So over the years, I realized, oh, okay, so if you don't have a marketing budget, if you don't have, I'm not an influencer, I don't know how to tell people about an app other than just you're not going to Charlie Chapman: Create demand. Aja Beckett: No, I can't need Charlie Chapman: To go the way of the demand already is Aja Beckett: Exactly. So I learned the hard way that really the only affordable way for an indie developer to reach a wide audience is to rank well in the search terms that people are using for that type of app. Because of that, I kind of knew, oh, alright, well, people are already searching for calorie tracker and fitness tracker. Those are huge search terms. And I thought, okay, well, I think it's very likely that GLP one tracker is going to become an important search term. And sure enough, Charlie Chapman: And at that time it wasn't already. Aja Beckett: I'm guessing Charlie Chapman: It wasn't. Yeah, that's interesting. Aja Beckett: No, it wasn't. Yeah, because there were no apps and nobody was thinking about it. So I had the huge advantage of being the first app in the store and also being somebody who knew how important it was to put in the work to sort of maintain those rankings. Big shout out to everybody who's helped me with a SO app store optimization over the years. It's been a long journey, but it was really helpful to be able to move from the really wonderful word of mouth that I was getting on Reddit, and then people were just telling their Facebook groups and wherever they were talking about these medications, they started to talk about chassis. But then being able to translate that into organic rankings on the app store, and as people did start to search for apps, we were right there. Charlie Chapman: It was a wave, this drug becoming more accessible to more people. There's just a wave of people and probably internationally, I imagine it's still working its way through the world as far as regulatory bodies. And so being there at the beginning and being the ready for those search terms as they come in must have made a huge difference. Aja Beckett: Yeah, it absolutely did, and it's a really gratifying way, I think, to reach your customers. I mean, for one thing, it's very cost effective. It just feels very, it's just very natural. They're looking for a thing, we're providing a thing that is very useful that we think is very valuable, and then they don't even have to pay us for it, which I love that. I love that It's totally up to them. It's just a very straightforward transaction. Charlie Chapman: That's another area where you can get away with that, in part because you're not doing so much paid marketing because as soon as you start having to do those calculations of this is what my cost per acquisition is, then all those free users become more of a burden because it's lowering the lifetime value. And then it's like if you run an ad and don't want to lose money on that ad, you have to either raise prices or put more behind the paywall to convert more people. And you don't really have to play that same game when it comes to organic, either organic word of mouth sharing, but then obviously a SO and search traffic as well. Aja Beckett: It's a really wonderful position to be in, and I did have some idea of this. I mean, of course, everything went much better than I Charlie Chapman: Could have Aja Beckett: Expected, but I did have some understanding of how this could play out. I understood, okay, yeah, if I make good choices early on, if I understand how to make this discoverable in the places that people are already talking about it and using it, then yeah, we will be able to stay kind of on the right side, stay on our user side instead of having to switch more into this more transactional like, oh God, it's expensive to acquire a user, and so therefore we have to charge more. And it's really nice to be kind of above the fray. And especially I think, again, because I am so connected to this community and it matters so much to me that there be good tools and good support for these really traditionally underserved and marginalized communities that we're serving, that I'm part of. I'm really glad that it's kind of amazing that the first app to really break out in this space happens to be made by a person with obesity that I'm not this cynical outsider that's coming in with wanting to do a cash grab. It's not just a ploy to get, I am very personally invested in this. It matters to me that, I mean, kind of going back to the period tracker thing, a lot of the most popular period trackers are run by people who don't have Charlie Chapman: Periods, Aja Beckett: And that's kind of frustrating. It's like you kind of want the people who are behind these products to be people who actually understand the experience. I mean, these are very personal. I feel like even though Shotsy is an app with charts and data and everything, it's still a very emotional connection to have with everybody who's taking a GLP one. We're in their pocket kind of being their day-to-day companion, and I love that the people behind the app really understand it and really prioritize their actual experience. Charlie Chapman: And speaking of people behind the app, like we said at the very beginning, it was just you, but that is very much not the case now. How did we get there? Why did you start expanding the team and how did you expand the team? Aja Beckett: Yeah, well, so yeah, I was completely alone at the start doing all the things. And as anybody who's listening to this knows, being an indie developer, especially when you start to get users and customer support requests, is very difficult to maintain, Charlie Chapman: Especially with Heavy Data App, Aja Beckett: A heavy data app. And I had a day job. I mean, I was working, this was nights and weekends on the side. I was also an iOS engineer at the New York Times, working on a big app. Trying to balance all of that was very, very challenging. Summer of 2024 was really busy for me, and I really appreciated the winning the Shippy from Revenue Cat. It was really wonderful. Charlie Chapman: There's a thing where even as you see all these numbers going up, you're still sitting at home on your laptop Aja Beckett: With Charlie Chapman: The news on or whatever, and it doesn't feel like it's this big thing sometimes even when something's taking off. Aja Beckett: Oh, for sure. Yeah. It's like me and my dog on the couch just night after night after night. I mean, people would ask me, what do I do for fun? And it's like, I do this. This is what I do. I work. But they say, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Oh, that's a, this was very much, yeah, I mean, I didn't come up with it, but Charlie Chapman: No, put that, that'll be the quote. It'll have your name under Aja Beckett: It. Yeah. Yeah, right. I deserve credit of it. No, I think it very quickly became clear, this is going to outgrow me, or Sure, this deserves to outgrow just me. And so I held onto the day job as long as I could because the year before, I mean things were pretty rough. I was not doing very well financially and the stability, and I did not want to let go of that job. But eventually it got the point where we really did need, we, me and the users really needed to bring in more help. And I think especially if anybody knows kind of the pain of both answering the customer support queue and then also needing to be the person who fixes the bugs and ships the new features, that is a really difficult to navigate. And people were, somebody found my phone number. Oh my goodness. And everybody was really lovely, but there was a lot of work that needed to be done, and so I was so glad to be able to, at first, just from the revenue, be able to start bringing in really fantastic people to other indie app developers that I was already friends with or that I had met through. Charlie Chapman: So you're getting help at the beginning on the development side, or was it customer support initially? Aja Beckett: I think at first it was help with design. I'm not very good at design help with design, help with the development iOS, and then we realized very quickly that it needed to be on Android and then especially customer support and making sure that people weren't having to wait too long to get responses. That's always been a really high priority for us. That's one of our top metrics is how long people have to wait to get their first response from customer support and we make sure that we are maintaining good levels there. Charlie Chapman: What are you using for that? Was it initially, was it just email? Aja Beckett: Yeah, I think the very first thing was using Forms Spree in the app, but then we needed to be a little more robust, so switched to Zendesk and that's been fine. But yeah, we've got a team now that's making sure, and we've got good global coverage. We make sure that people get their responses as soon as possible. Charlie Chapman: Is it a fundamental part of the business or is it more like a part of the community, I guess, if that makes any sense. Aja Beckett: Yeah, so we knew we needed to be on Android because that was our number one request. People were posting all over the place on Reddit, at Facebook groups. They were emailing us. I think I hadn't really mean, it did not occur to me that this was going to be something where there would be that kind of demand for itt and I'd never built anything for Android, but we had one person write in and say that they were so eager to use Shotsy as an Android developer that they had gone and bought an iPad. We don't even have an iPad app. So they were using the Charlie Chapman: Stretch Aja Beckett: IPhone Charlie Chapman: Version on the iPhone. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I was amazed. Charlie Chapman: Again, what a signal. Aja Beckett: Yeah, yeah, it was definitely a pull. So that made pretty clear. We want to be able to support everybody who's taking a GLP one medication that is not just iOS users. It's really important that we be available for anybody anywhere who is taking one of these things. And so we really prior, and at that point we had a couple of people on the team, thank God really wonderful. It was great because I was already friends with a lot of indie developers. It was wonderful to have Charlie Chapman: On the Android side too. Then is it as far as revenue coming in, is that an important part of the business still? Kind of the stereotype of iOS makes you all the money and Android's not really high converting or anything? Aja Beckett: Yeah, no, actually Android is an important part of the business, I think especially because we've also invested in internationalization and making sure that this is available in a lot of different languages, and of course, especially when you start to leave the US it becomes more and more important that you have Android support and international support. So yeah, I think the bulk of our business is still US iOS, but I think increasingly it's definitely very important for us to be on Android and I think we're seeing conversion rates that are not too far off of what we're seeing on iOS, Charlie Chapman: But the sort of stereotype definitely still exists. Aja Beckett: Yeah, no, it hasn't been true for us. I mean, I think it's maybe a little bit different as a market, but also our product is a little bit different. So I think as we sort of continue to make sure that the Android app has parody with the iOS app and that we're providing a real value, then I think anything people who see value in the product are willing to pay for it regardless of what platform they're on. Charlie Chapman: You've expanded the team, obviously the app is doing well and is profitable, so you're able to pay for that there. But then you've done, you've done another thing which a lot of indie developers who start out bootstrapped don't really, I don't even know that most people even consider you did some fundraising. Can you explain why you decided you wanted to do that? Aja Beckett: Yeah, absolutely. So last I think December, last December, January, I ended up deciding to raise money from a small group of VCs to fund this next stage of growth for the company and the app. And definitely not something I did lightly because at that point we already were making, I think in November of last year the app was making $70,000 a month, and so there was no pressing need. We clearly could have continued to grow organically. Charlie Chapman: You've explained how important your mission is to this and sometimes Aja Beckett: Depending Charlie Chapman: On who you're raising from that can really alter that. So I imagine there's a lot of decisions to make there. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I mean I definitely put a lot of thought into it. I really want to be able to take this as far as I can. I want the category leader to be an app that is authentically part of the community. I think there's such a classic narrative where the early scrappy authentic team gets crushed by the cash grab, whatever, people who are just in it for the money and they come in with the funding and they just sort of obliterate everybody else. I didn't want that to be this story. Charlie Chapman: Had you seen the big competitors coming in already? Aja Beckett: We hadn't, but I knew that it was just a matter of time and it did happen. So I knew that it was going to happen and I was like, okay, well I don't want that to be this story. I don't want it to be like, oh yeah, they were first and they were real, but they weren't able to stay in it when the people with the money came in. So there was that kind of wanting to make sure, alright, let's actually think about the big picture here and how far we want to take this and let's not stay tiny. Let's really think about growing. And then also I knew that I had this previous startup experience. I had a lot of connections already in investor communities. I knew that there were a couple of firms that I actually really wanted to work with that I knew we would be aligned on priorities. That is a real risk when you take outside funding, you're sort of inviting other decision makers into the process that aren't necessarily aligned with how you want the business to run. And so if I hadn't had those existing connections, I would've been a lot more hesitant to bring in people who might've changed the trajectory. But it's not true for every single potential partner out. There are a lot of different VCs that have a lot of different approaches, and I knew that being able to work with teams that were really product focused that really understood the importance of making a great experience for the users and having that be the driver of growth was possible. And so yeah, it seemed like a real kind of a win-win for both our users and the investors to be able to build something great that could be as big as possible. Charlie Chapman: And when was this that you raised that round? Aja Beckett: It finished in January, so 10 months ago, Charlie Chapman: So it's been a little while. How has that changed things? Like you said you already had a profitable business, so it's not like we were about to die and now we're not, but has it changed the trajectory or changed how it feels to work at the company? Aja Beckett: Yeah, I think, well, I think so mean for me and a lot of the people I wanted to work with were not coming from family money or generational wealth. We didn't have the kinds of safety nets I think that people sometimes have when they take the leap to work at a startup. And so even though the company's revenue was already good, it was still sort of month to month and there was the risk of, well, what if we have a couple of bad months? Can people really afford the risk of joining this company? So it gave all of us the peace of mind to be able to jump into this. I left my day job the people. Charlie Chapman: Was that the point when you left your day job? Aja Beckett: Yeah. Charlie Chapman: Oh wow. Okay. So even just at a purely personal level, it gave you that confidence that I can go all in this now. Aja Beckett: Yeah, exactly. So I think having that baseline of like, okay, we're going to be able to navigate this even if we have a couple of bad months, we're going to be all right. So that immediately changed the trajectory because we were able to really invest in full-time employees in a way that it had been sort of part-time contracting before, including me. It's also opened up a lot of connections into communities that I didn't already have a lot of access to, and it's given us the resources to be able to invest in being able to bring on people who I think would've been challenging otherwise if we were trying to bootstrap this. So we brought on our first chief science officer a couple of months ago and he's amazing. His name's Eric Praxis. He was formerly a chief scientist and CIO for informatics at the FDA, how to handle data privacy in a consumer health app. So that was a really important hire for us was making sure, okay, we're working with consumer health data, people are entering sensitive information here. We're not a medical device, but we want to make sure that we're doing this the right way. And so He's really helping us navigate that and making sure that we're staying safe and making sure that privacy is our number one priority when we're working with the data and then also helping us with the science behind it and making sure that we're presenting accurate information to people and that we're being as helpful as possible without being a medical device. These types of things would be hard to do if we were trying to stay a scrappy bootstrap team Charlie Chapman: For sure. If I remember correctly, you don't have a traditional board, but something like a board, right? With the investors. Aja Beckett: So we don't have a board, so the funding that I raised earlier this year, late last year was a pre-seed round and it was on the YC safe note, so we're kind of too early to have a proper board. What we do have is because our investors are just so smart and so well connected and so good at this, I ask them if they could participate in a monthly check-in call. And so we all get together and I think it kind of feels like that's type Charlie Chapman: Of a board kind of thing. Aja Beckett: And so it's great. I get a chance to update them on what we're doing and then they are able to give me their input and advice and a lot of really wonderful stuff has come out of that. I mean, honestly, the connections into I didn't know anybody at the F fda. Charlie Chapman: Yeah, exactly. But Aja Beckett: Yeah, Charlie Chapman: I think that's one of the underappreciated, I mean, anybody in startup world is going to laugh at me. It's probably highly appreciated. But in the indie or enterprise world, I've always grown up in, I think one of the underappreciated things about raising around is having advisors, getting people who are well connected or have a lot of experience that you don't have. I know companies that don't need more money, but they will take a dilutive round that lowers their ownership of the company to get a board member because that's such a powerful thing. And so I think always think about it or grew up thinking about it as like you're giving yourself a boss and it's like it changes everything, but you're also getting a partner. Aja Beckett: Yeah, I mean I think it definitely helped that I already kind of had some experience navigating the investor space and that I understood how their business works on their side of it. I think something that's so important when you're trying to decide on the trade-offs between growing organically versus taking outside funding is it is so crucial that you understand what their priorities are and that your priorities are aligned because the last thing you want to do is raise money and then raise money on sort of false pretenses and then have to follow through on that because I have a very clear idea about how I want this business to grow and how I want the users to be the top priority. And for me, it was really important to work with investors who shared the same vision for the growth journey here. And we both agree that this is a venture scale opportunity because of the nature of the market and all of the advantages that we have being the first player in the space. But if I had tried to work with somebody who wanted to go after the opportunity from a different angle, I talked to investors who I did not go with who saw an opportunity to do this as an advertising funded business. And I was like, I've worked for companies that were ad funded before and that's a very different model that I think really changes the relationship with the user. And so for me it was really important to find partners that we could really share the vision and where it feels like we really are working together on building this. Charlie Chapman: That definitely makes sense and I've not gone through that journey personally, but it's scary, but also it's really cool whenever you see the sort of alchemy work out, Aja Beckett: I think rare to be in a position when you're early on to be able to choose your investors, and Charlie Chapman: I'm really Aja Beckett: Glad that Charlie Chapman: Where you're not just desperately taking whatever money you can get. Aja Beckett: Yeah. Charlie Chapman: Alright, well, I am basically at time here, so I want to make sure I have some time to ask the question that I always ask end the show, even though it's been a while since I've done this. And that is, what's a person or people out there that have inspired you that you'd recommend others checkout Aja Beckett: When it comes to running this business and going through the day-to-day experience of building this app and building the company? The people that are most inspiring to me are the users. It's the people who are using the app, paying for the app, and most of all the ones who are writing into our customer support inbox, being able to listen to what they want and then turn that into sort of the product roadmap and turn it into the tools that they want to be able to use. Things that I wouldn't necessarily think of that aren't just living in my head. That's what keeps us going. I think that's what gives us the desire to keep working on this, is knowing that there's all of these important things that people want to use. That's what inspires all of us working on. So I don't know if that's, maybe that's not Charlie Chapman: Answer, but what keeps us going? No, I think the person, you said that, but that's really interesting. If you had to pick a single place that the community exists for you, I know that isn't obviously representative of your user base anymore, but what is that original subreddit? Aja Beckett: I mean, unfortunately I don't get to participate there as much as I used to. But yeah, it was the subreddit for Zep bound, Z-E-P-B-O-U-N-D, and yeah, huge shout out to the community there and especially to the moderators there who do a lot of really important work to keep that community high quality. So I know how hard that is. Charlie Chapman: Yeah. Yeah. Seriously. Well, thank you so much. You made this very easy for me to get back into doing these, so I really appreciate that. This was super fun. Where can people find you and your work? Aja Beckett: Yeah, well definitely. If you are taking a GLP one medication or interested in taking a GLP one, definitely check out the shotsy app. It's just shotsy app.com and we're on iOS and Android and yeah, we'd love to have you. Charlie Chapman: Awesome. Aja Beckett: Thank you so much, Charlie. It's really been fun getting to talk to you about this, and I hope that we get to cross paths again at the next big event. Charlie Chapman: Definitely.