Choose How You Feel Using Technology, with Scott Donnell, Founder of Hapbee Technologies
- Welcome to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I'm so excited you are here because today's episode was epic. It was with the founder of Hapbee, Scott Donnel.
Hapbee is a wearable magnetic field technology company that aims to help people choose how they feel. Yes, imagine wanting to be a bit sleepier, or maybe you need to be a bit more zen or maybe you need to perk up for a Monday morning meeting. Yes.
And instead of taking an exogenous dose of something, instead you choose to mimic the frequencies of the state you're trying to achieve. Wild, right? It sounds a little bit futuristic. And what's so interesting about this company is that the technology has been around for awhile and the Navy has been using it for a really long time.
And now it's just being put to use in a little bit of a different way. When Scott saw this technology, he saw the opportunity to bring this to consumers and he and I got to really dive deep into what it looks like building Hapbee and how he thinks about hiring for his company. He has over 700 employees throughout his couple of companies, so I wanna know all the details around how to find good candidates, how to scale them up quickly, how to find a good executive team.
Plus we also went into his to-do list mentality around who not how, when building a new product or company. And we got to touch on the influencers who are making the biggest wave when it comes to spreading the product right now. I loved having Scott on the podcast and if you love him too, well, you're in luck because we have him coming on a few of our other shows as well. So stay tuned for that and stay tuned for the discount codes that Scott gave us for an epic discount on Hapbee.
Enjoy the episode with Scott Donnell. Hey everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Scott Donnell who's the founder of Hapbee.
Scott, welcome. - Thank you, so good to be here. How are you? - I'm very good. I think this is gonna be a really fun conversation today. Something very different than anything we've had on the show and your story makes it epic. So, I kind of wanna start with that, like your backstory, how you even got into business.
I mean, I heard something about third grade, so start wherever you'd like. - Yeah. Kind of a wild story. I'm a kind of a serial entrepreneur, I guess, is the best way to put it. I'm unemployable. I have to keep doing businesses.
I love it. But yeah, lots of businesses over the last 15 years, about seven or 800 people now work for us across the companies, but I love business, third grade was my first one. At least I made bead geckos-- - [Stephanie] I would have bought one.
- Like little key chains with beads on them. And I was making them for like 5 cents and then selling them for like $1.50 door to door. And then all my friends asked if they could make them with me and I'd pay them like 50 cents and then I go sell them and then it worked great for about a month. And then I got suspended because all of the, none of the kids are going to recess or lunch.
And so, yeah, that was my first business venture in third grade, but I love it. So yeah, I've just launched a school fundraising company called Apex. Now it's the largest school fundraising franchise in the country, we got a banking app for kids we're launching next month. We're launching a Marvel superhero thingy. But the one that we're talking about today, which is the wildest one for sure is the future of mental health. It's called Hapbee, yeah.
So that's been a crazy, crazy ride in biotech and I'm an entrepreneur, I'm not a scientist. And I just got thrown into quantum physics. - Okay. So tell me the behind the scenes of Hapbee, which for everyone it's H-A-P-B-E-E, but tell me what is the technology and where did it come from? - Yeah. Yeah. And we'll give we're, I wanna give your audience a gift. So we'll give you guys 50 bucks off hapbee.com/mission.
- Yes, thank you. - We always wanna give a gift as a thank you. Yeah, so this technology is basically giving you the effect of certain drug molecules that you would want to take throughout your day without any drugs in your body. But it's, there's no drugs. It's just the effect causing a change in your body. So like caffeine, for instance, or melatonin or CBD or things like that.
We have theobromine, which is the stimulant in chocolate, or my favorite, adenosine, which literally knocks you out and puts you to sleep 10 minutes. But yeah, it's this incredible technology called ultra low drug signal therapeutic technology. So our parent company invented this almost 18 years ago and it's been under wraps for a long time as you can imagine.
If you can get the digital imprint of a molecule and play it on somebody and they feel similar, that's a worldwide win. - These are frequencies, right? Like it's essentially mimicking the frequency of what it would for you. - Yeah, yeah. We're using ultra low frequency.
So almost the sound floor, right? So a lot of people wonder like, is this, what are you doing? How are you doing this? And is it safe? Of course it's safe. It's 1/30000 of the output of your phone. So if you're worried, you should never be near your phone ever again. Our technology is equivalent to being like 50 feet away from a vacuum cleaner when it's going, but it's actually the sound level of the cells and how they interact.
So here's how the story goes. 2003, EMulate Therapeutics is our parent company in Seattle. So we're the consumer side, okay? So I started this thing three years ago because I invested in the parent company 10 years ago.
And they're the ones who discover this. 15 doctors and quantum physicists and the world's smartest people in a basement in Seattle for the last couple of decades have been building this. - And you learned about it through like your dad's accountant wasn't that like you basically going through the backdoor? - My uncle. - Oh, your uncle, okay. - He literally did their taxes up in Washington. - These guys are legit, run Scott, go invest.
- Up on Whidbey Island. He did their taxes and it was a bunch of scientists, Dr. Mike Butters, and then Dr. Kenneth Ferguson is the chief scientist, he invented Cialis, all these brilliant, brilliant people. And they did it for fun. They literally did it for kicks and giggles in a basement to see if they could.
And so that's how I found out about it. And I invested because they immediately went into brain cancer work and helping people in the medical space and I really wanted to be a part of that. So, the way they do it is they had this idea that what if Einstein was right? What if everything is connected through sound, right? What if our cells communicate through sound, right? You study the body, your brain actually throws off a magnetic field. Your heart does, any electrocardiogram will show that, right? Your body hums at 72 megahertz if you're healthy, your brain at 90 and sickness starts at the high 50s, okay? So this is actually how your cells interact, okay? This is how your protein receptors switch on and off.
This is how a lot of the world works. And that was the crazy idea, what if Einstein was right and can we prove him right? That was the crazy science, so-- - How everything cool starts, what if, what if-- - What if, what if, we're the smartest people on the planet, what if this would work? And so they found this military technology called magnetometer technology. You can look it up. Magnetometers are these propane tank looking things that the military uses them to find out where the submarines are in the Pacific, they have a 2000 mile radius.
They're the world's most powerful recording device for magnetic frequencies. So they can tell when there's a thunderstorm coming 100 miles away, they can tell if there's a tectonic plate shifting. It's unbelievable how sensitive this technology is. But these magnetometers basically are like a little recording meter inside that can sense things from thousands of miles away.
And they thought, what if instead of listening outward like the military does, what if we listened inward to a drug molecule? That was the crazy idea. And so they bought a couple of these. They pulled their cash, bought a couple of these and they put Faraday cages around it, right? That like blocks out any outside noise or interference. They pumped it full of liquid helium, which is like three Kelvin, 413 degrees Celsius below zero.
It's the atmosphere of outer space, which is extremely quiet, extremely slow moving and it gave them this environment where they could actually get the magnetic wake of these molecules. And the way it works is, it comes down to covalent and non-covalent bonds in your body, okay? Covalent bonds, we're going back to 10th grade science for a minute. - I like it, yes. - Covalent bonds we can't replicate. Those are aphysical chemical binding to the receptor sites on your cells. We cannot do that. I can't fill your body full of food or vitamins, okay? But I can suppress your hunger, right? Because there's non-covalent bonds, which all those are are free ranging electrons in your body.
You take ibuprofen, it doesn't actually bind chemically. It sends basically a remote control signal to your cells to switch the protein receptors in a certain way to cause a cascading effect to stop a pain response or inflammation response, or things of the like - Its not actually binding to anything then. - Yeah, we think of it like a remote control for your garage. You know, that's kinda what these non-covalent bonds do.
Any stimulant: caffeine, theobromine, any suppressant: melatonin, CBD, alcohol any hormone, think about that, these are non-covalent and their thought was, what if we could get the non-covalent bonds and sort of make an attempt at giving a similar effect to the body? Like, could you actually feel differently by playing these signals back on the body? So they spent five years working on this and eventually they started to get readings. I was there the day they dropped liquid nicotine in there. - What did it look like? What happened? - It went from the sound floor to seven to 22 kilohertz. You literally saw it start pulsing. You saw all these readings.
And I just, I was literally in shock watching this happen. And they, what they do is they extract this into a file and they can play it back through our device, right? This product, it's a simple necklace that you put on. It's a couple hundred bucks and you click play in the app. It's as simple as that, it's a Spotify playlist for feelings.
We call them feelings because it's not a drug and we're not making medical claims, the parent company is doing all the medical stuff. But my crazy thought was, hey, wait a second. If I could get an alert energy, like at the click of a button, through caffeine, or if I could help myself sleep better at the click of a button when I go to bed, or if I could relax my brain a little bit after like two o'clock when I'm like a bunch of meetings and I'm tired and I need to relax for 30 minutes, could I get an endocannabinoid trigger in my body? That to me at the click of a button on a playlist, I'm talking like that's 100 years in the future. We could make that happen today. - Its epic.
- And so these guys basically have been doing this for 15 years in the labs and doing a bunch of FDA work with brain cancer. They're going into pain now. And I raised my hand as an investor and said, you guys ever thought about other ways of making money and helping a lot more people and, 'cause FDA trials take forever. I mean, if you wanna make a medical claim, they're gonna have to charge you $75,000 for a therapy. And one brain cancer study takes four years.
So this is a, it was a longterm, long haul. You know, they're finally getting through it, which has been an amazing run, but they're like, well, we're a little older. We don't know anything about the apps and the consumer tech. I said, well, that's my whole world. And they said, you do it. So I said, okay, hired an executive team from my other business and we were off to the races.
So we licensed their tech and we launched Hapbee. So anyway, we just started. And I called my four closest smartest PhD nerds, friends. And I said, beat this technology up for the next three months for me. And I put all the money in. I said, I'm paying whatever we need to do to get the animal studies, I wanna make sure that these signals work on mice, that it's safe.
We did all the workups, pathology, everything. And we watched the mice pass out on melatonin. We watched them jumpy and grooming and eating nonstop on caffeine signal, signal, not the actual drug, the signal.
I watched them splayed out all four limbs on the ground on CBD. And that was, and there's eight signals now in the app and there's 20 blends. 'Cause we can actually pulse more together and give you amazing blends for like morning commute, afternoon nap, email mastery, focus, creative work, deep zen meditation, you know, out on the town. We have a party signal actually now. And so-- - And would they keep it on the whole time or is it like, can you only do a certain amount of time or would you say I'm ready to party, I'm gonna keep it on for the next two hours so I don't have to have any drinks? - So, Some people, they just wear it for a few minutes to get them primed. And then they're good.
I mean, look, if you need to get a prescription, go get a prescription because we're not making medical claims here, but a lot of people wanna reach these altered states to help them be more productive, to help them relax more, to help them enjoy their family more, to help them with stress and to help them with aches and soreness and lack of sleep. So that's the kind of stuff that these people want. So, now I thought it was just gonna be fun. I was like how, really it was, how cool would it be if you could put 1,000 feelings on a playlist and you know, we get the world off drugs. And what we didn't realize is that military vets are flocking to this, mental health and psychiatrists are flocking to this.
The wellness space is going nuts. You know, we were at Modern Nirvana. We were at the Biohacking Conference went to all these wellness conferences now, and people are starting to find out about us. We're literally up in Seattle today and heading to Chicago later, there's a bunch of pro sports teams that are wanting to use this now because there's no drug tests needed. It's just, you take it off and you're back to normal within 20 minutes.
And so everybody loves it on a flight after the game or before they're pitching, or if they've got a really long race and they need to prime themselves and get ready, pre-game they call it. Yeah. So we didn't, that's the kind of stuff I didn't really think about at the beginning because you put this out there to the world and we sold our first, I think six or 7,000 units, kinda ran out real quick and now we're making a bunch more. So now we finally have stock, but all these awesome people are like, all right, this is the coolest technology I've ever seen. Let me help you get it out to the audience.
So, for instance, Jim Kwick, we had an amazing time last month, we recorded a couple of podcasts, he's gonna be launching them soon and he loves it for sleep. He struggled with sleep for decades and it really, really helps him get ready for bed. We have a bedtime signal that basically makes you really tired.
And then you can put this under your pillow for eight hours. So you can play the signals up to eight hours. Most people play them for on average an hour at a time, put it by their work desk, take it with them in their bags when they're going on trips and then by their nightstand at night. And those are the main uses of it. But we're also in the works of making a bed right now, like a mattress topper-- - Pretty awesome.
- It's like pressure-sensored and it gives you signals all night long. Imagine like getting melatonin every 90 minutes and adenosine and CBD for your lower back and then wake up with caffeine based on your, when you want the alarm to go off. - And you're gonna be tracking all the signals from your body to then know, okay, this is what kind of stage of sleep you need to enter.
Okay, now this time, it's time to start waking up. - Yep, I've been talking with my friend, Todd who owns ChiliSleep. And they've got half a million people sleeping on the heat and cooling water mattress toppers. And his team has been phenomenal in helping us create these next products. Because our technology now we found a way to put it in material like clothing. - Oh, cool.
- And so we wanna eventually put it in car seats and work chairs and yoga mats and massage beds and clothes, right? So, it's gonna be wild. I mean, it already is wild, but we're only tip of the iceberg here. - Gosh, that's great.
So, I mean, when thinking about this new technology, I can definitely see the biohacker community getting really excited about this and wanting to test it out. I mean, I'm one of those where I'm like, yes, please I'll test out whatever you're doing just send it my way. But how would you get it in front of like, how are you guys exploring new customers right now who might, you know, they see a lot of things that promise a lot of things right now, there's so many DTC companies popping up with like the best thing ever.
How are you guys kind of educating people like this is what it is, this is what it's not, here's why not to be worried and like getting in front of this new consumer who probably would be interested, but just has a lot of questions. - Yeah. So, I mean, the first thing is, we've done all the blinded placebo controlled studies with third parties as well. We do our animal studies with third-parties, CROs, clinical research organizations. So we've done all the background. We have hapbee.com/science.
People can read our white paper, they can see everything we've done. They can go see our parent company, EMulate's work. So we're educating people on that front. But the main things that people need to know like consumers is there's a 30 day money back guarantee period, right? If you don't want it, there's someone else in line who wants it.
So try it out, and if you don't like it, we're happy to give all your money back. Luckily that doesn't happen very much 'cause people, they get it and they love it right away. The problem with this is it's so new and futuristic, it's woo-woo it's who-who science. People were like, what the heck? Signal's making me feel a certain way. Am I gonna get, you know, am I gonna get cancer from this? Like, what are you doing? - The questions they ask around something like this compared to like, look, what's in your pocket, look what you're surrounded by all the time, all the speakers around you, like everything is blasting you all day. What are you living under these towers? It's crazy that people are worried about frequencies.
- Actually, well said. I have an EMF blocker on my phone. Like, this signal actually repels other EMF. So, because this is a copper coil around your neck and your shoulders so that you can actually block out other things and just drive a pure, very, very tiny signal to your cells where literally the volume, the volume level of your cells interacting.
So, it's the safest type of therapy we could think of, or, you know, way to give you an altered state. But a lot of people, you know, we had skeptics through the nose, okay? So, when we launched our initial kickstarter, like the goal was 20 grand on Indiegogo. This was like a couple of years ago. And in one day we sold like half a million dollars worth.
- Were you worried? Like, oh, can I actually fulfill all these? - Yeah. I was like, oh crap. What are we gonna do? We're still like six months away from delivering. But everybody got excited because we had prototypes that all these big names were testing and loving. And so people really got excited. But then our competitor, like some competitors in the space, they got real shocked and nervous right away, 'cause this isn't just, this isn't PEMF, this isn't direct stim.
There's a lot, there's 100 companies that will sell you a product that just stimulates your body. And we don't knock those guys. We're just completely different, right? They're never gonna be able to curb your hunger appetite. They're never gonna be able to like help you with brain triggering and memory. And they're never gonna help you with like sexual health. They're never like, these are all the things that we're working on.
And so a competitor paid this guy out of the UK, this like troll, his name is Thunder Foot. - Such a good name. I would trust him fully. - And he, yeah, really. And he has like a million subscribers and they paid him to make this video against us.
Like he made this-- - What was it showing? - It was just a 30 minute hit video. And he loves doing this because as we drive advertising to Google, to like, you know, people search us and they find his YouTube videos, so he's got like half a million views already saying that we're complete scam and that we're evil and how dare we steal people's money and it's all fake. And we're like, wait a minute here, man. Like, we've never, we didn't even publish our science yet. Like nobody's even tried this in the public and you're coming after us like this. So luckily he's kind of fallen down, but-- - Do you know who actually paid him to do it? - We have our, you know-- - [Stephanie] You have your suspicions, okay.
- A lot of people posted to try to get him to like, you know, 'cause he makes money off of us driving traffic so that everyone watches it and then they get spooked. So he knows he makes more money as we try to grow. And it's actually a terrible way to live if you think about it. - Yeah, always relying on other people and their platforms and their ad budgets, which could go away. I mean, have you worried about other people kind of coming at like, I think about like big pharma companies, like when you told me what was it a month or two ago? Like what you guys are up to, I was like, I was a little scared for you.
I was like, you might have some big companies coming after you because of this, because you could be essentially eliminating, you know, a very big profiting industry right now. In some areas, of course, like you said, there are certain things that you can not do with it, but there are a lot right now that could kind of go away potentially. Have you guys thought about that? - Yeah, no, it's definitely a fear, but at the same time, you know, they tried to, a lot of them tried to buy us early, the parent company. And it was like, well, you guys are just gonna kind of shelf this.
You know, we don't really want you to do that because we kinda wanna change the world and-- - Who knew. - Pharma, they help people in a lot of ways, but they actually kind of have the world in chains in ways too. And the good part about our company is that we're not making any medical claims, okay? So we don't actually have the target you think we'd have because the pharma companies basically go through FDA and they lobby and they get in and then they hold their position and we wanna be a grassroots movement. So we're not making any medical claims. And we also say like, you know, if you wanna get, if you have an illness or an issue or a medical problem, like seek professional help, get the help you need. We're not anti-drug, we're just, there's a lot of things out there that you don't need.
And if we can be a help to you without needing to use things, great, we have a lot of people that are cutting back on smoking, stopped drinking alcohol, you know, they can help with hunger, they can help with all these different things with our technology. And they don't have to spend crazy money on going to the store and buying a bunch of drugs to help them out. But at the same time, you know, if we're not making the medical claims, we don't have that target. So I don't even think we're on their radar right now.
We're in the consumer side of things. And the parent company, that's why they go through the FDA for all this stuff because they are gonna be working through physicians in hospitals and doctors. But again, that's gonna be 50, $70,000 to do a medical side of this technology.
Our job is all the nonmedical side that can help people feel alert, relaxed, calm, sleepier, feel better. Nootropic signals are huge. A lot of people love the focus that they can get from our technology. So yeah, definitely there's security around some of our board members and yeah, there's a lot of that. And we are very careful about the things that we say and don't say, but yeah, at the end of the day, if you could get the effects of certain things and get the altered state you want, it's a lot cheaper and it's a lot more helpful for you.
And there's been zero adverse events so far. Millions of hours, or at least a million, I didn't check the tab lately, but there's thousands of people using this, each of these signals every day. And so we've never had an issue.
There's no metabolic or toxicological side effects. I mean, that's kind of the brilliance of this technology. So anyway, we're just, we had this dream, we brought the dream to life and now it's just starting to get out there and educate people. So, we actually love podcasts like this because it's a long form way to educate people, right? It's hard to do in a 30 second soundbite, right? In fact, if we go on a YouTube ad or an Instagram ad, like e-com, it's very difficult 'cause everyone goes, yeah right.
And then, so really all we're doing is letting our customers speak for us. We're trying to educate our customers on how it exactly works so that they can tell their friends and their networks and their family. So that's why the Dave Aspreys and the Jim Kwicks and the Ben Greenfields and the Shawn Wells, like those people and all the doctors, they can articulate this so much more powerfully. I just had a podcast with Dr. Porter with BrainTap and he literally explained my technology in five minutes, better than I've ever been able to explain it. Okay. It was, and I was like, can I take that?
Can I take that and just use it? And he's like, sure. But he's like the godfather of like understanding how the body and the brain work. And so we're trying to use experts now to be our mouthpieces, and then we're letting the customers and their reviews and let everything kind of speak for itself. But yeah-- - I mean, that seems like the best strategy for this kind of product is finding the experts in the field. They've already got the audiences.
You're essentially leveraging very big influencers like the Dave Aspreys of the world. So, I mean, is that how you guys are gonna move forward when it comes to like spreading this product around and like really leaning into the influencers? - Yeah, to this point, that's been our best strategy to grow. And, we've had a lot of people come to us and I mean, the thing is like 3.99, that's it. And we've had a lot of people say you could be charging thousands for this and make 80% margins and blah, blah, blah. But we have a different mission, right? I eventually wanna get this in the hands of third world countries and imagine how we could help villages in India and Africa.
And there's no drugs being stopped at the border and there's no shelf life. And I solved Elon Musk's problem of signals in space. If you're ever gonna go to Mars, how are you gonna ship all the stuff you need to get there just in case something goes wrong with your body. And I can't wait for that conversation. We have a lot of mutual friends. - Yeah, come on, Elon.
He listens to this show, so you'll definitely get a warm intro right after this. - All right. Let's do it. He's writing a book with Peter Diamandis. One of my mentors now.
- Yep, oh, I love Peter. - And so, you know, Peter and Dan Sullivan and a lot of those voices, those mouthpieces have been amazing for us to get the word out. And we're just in it, we're in the baby stages.
You know, this takes decades to really get out there to the world. So we have a very long-term vision for the company. - That's so cool. So when you were building up the company, what were some of the, maybe like the most surprising things that happened that you weren't really expecting? Maybe less around the text I feel like everything around that is surprising. I can imagine like every day is a whoa, I can, you know, I didn't even think that would happen. But like when it came to actually building up the company, I mean, I know you've done this before, I know you have tons of employees, but like what was different this time? - Well, COVID hit.
That was painful. You know, we sold that half a million dollars in kickstarter three weeks before the pandemic hit. And it was wild. And we had chips in supply chains and right now for our bed, more of these products, you can't even get TCBA boards and chips, like they're six months, eight months, 10 months out. So we're having to take big risks and order ahead of time to try to get ahead of like the big car companies that are buying out the whole world. - So I was just talking to someone actually on an interview where she used to do a lot with different car companies.
And she was like, if you have a car right now and your lease is coming up. You better extend it 'cause there's nothing out there. And you better order ahead because basically there's no chips. And I told her, I was like, I feel like this is something that Elon could solve. Like he needs to, probably he needs lots of them and he can probably scale up a factory way quicker than five years, so. - Well, so here's the issue that people don't realize, there's like five major chip factories in the world, most in Asia.
Those companies cost $1 billion just to get the supply chain going again, right? Like people think is these like dirty factories and it's sweatshop, no, no, no. It's like cleaner than any hospital room you can imagine. There's not a speck of dust because if there is a speck of dust, it can ruin a hundred million dollars worth of chips. So they're extremely clean, extremely expensive. And people are in full-on body suits and masks just before COVID like, that's how you have to build these.
And so they're nervous starting up their lines again for a billion dollars. And so yes, they have the demand, but who knows if there's ever gonna be another shutdown or another virus or another problem. I mean, you put so many companies dang near bankruptcy going through this. And so there's that issue. That's a long tail issue that people don't really understand. They're like, why can't you just air freight them over and get them quicker and get them going and hire more people? - Yeah that's not the problem.
- Well, there's a lot more to the issue. You know, the whole world works through globalization and interconnectedness and people have to trust that what they're making can be sold and the higher the investment and the higher the risk, the harder it is to press go. So that's been a tough issue for us just to get the supplies, right? Like we've had to almost gate the audience, you know. We're getting the word out now more and more, but it took us a long time to get our products in hand and get it right. And you know, the last year and a half since we launched.
Actually, it's only been a year since we're to market. We, you know, we're fixing our app, there's all these bugs we had to fix. There's all these different things people were telling us to do differently. And so the first year has just been like fixing everything and then the learning of, you know, what the customers want.
That's why we just launched all the blends that I mentioned earlier. People are loving the blends and then we're launching our major partnerships right now. But that was probably the biggest lesson was like the supply chain lesson in terms of, you know, I'm just getting, I feel like I'm getting a PhD in e-com, understanding tax and marketing spend and audience build. And I think we've gotten pretty smart pretty quick on how to get the word out.
The biggest lesson of all though, is this thinking of, for me, it's been, who not how. There's a book by Dan Sullivan called "Who Not How," it's a bestseller. Dr. Ben Hardy, he's a dear friend, brilliant author,
brilliant guy, humble as they come. And that book has really changed my thinking. I got to read it first and kind of give a review for the audience. And it helped me think through how to find the who's across all my companies, really, but especially for Hapbee, find all of the right people that are 10 times smarter than me in specific areas and let them take the company forward.
And so, for starters, I stepped down as the CEO halfway through this year. And I brought in the Entrepreneur of the Year in Canada, his name is Yona Shtern, amazing guy. He built Beyond the Rack and Arrive the parking app.
He's got all these incredible companies that he's built and scaled and exited under his belt. He went into retirement for 13 days and then our recruiting firm found him and he spent two days with me in Phoenix and he was like, I got to do this. - So do you recommend using a recruiting firm? 'Cause I know we talked about this before and I was very impressed with how you find people and just telling me like the caliber of people who you're kind of attracting into your companies. So like, is that the way that you go about finding these talented folks or like, how do you think about that? - We have a lot of strategies that we deploy, but recruiting firms are great if you're looking for high level execs and C-suite, or if you're in one specific niche like software or HR or customer service, like getting help, I would do anything you can to find the right people. So we do a lot of LinkedIn resume searches, we had for, you know, a couple of our other companies, we had 300 amazing applicants for like our CTO and our CMO positions and head of products. So, I would just say, and my network is incredible now, like just incredible people that we can send a job description to and say, who fits the bill that you know and we immediately get a dozen amazing people.
So, your network is your net worth at the end of the day. And that sounds kind of Machiavellian because for me it really is about relationships. Like all these people I've mentioned are actually very good, close friends of mine now. And that's the beauty is, you know, if you're just trying to do business with someone, it's very high level and I don't think it's not impacting and it's not meaningful and it doesn't help your heart. So, my thing is just, I like just to build good relationships with people and care for them and whatever they need to be there for them and help them out.
And, you know, entrepreneurship is, it can be very lonely too. And so I've become very, very good friends with some incredible entrepreneurs around the world. And however we can support each other, we do it. I never charged anybody a penny for anything.
I'm just like, what do you need? Who can I connect you with? How can I solve your problem? And if you go about the world that way you can make a huge dent in the universe for good. So who not how is probably the biggest business building lesson of my life. So now I don't even have a list of tasks. I have a list of who's.
So the moment something comes on my list to do, the first word on the line is the person's name who's the perfect hoof to do that. And that's what a really high-level entrepreneur has or leader has to be able to do is mobilize people and give people a purpose for their genius, right? There's a lot of people out there that are brilliant in some specific area and they just need an outlet for it. They need a purpose for their unique ability.
So, my job is to find those people and put them in the right positions across all companies. - Yeah, that's great, okay. So I know we only have a couple of minutes left, maybe three or so. And for anyone who's like, I want more, Scott, he's coming on more of our shows, don't you worry.
I feel like you're gonna fill out our entire network of shows after maybe a month or so-- - Lets do it. Lets do it. - But to kind of end off this episode, I wanna hear from you, when you think about starting a business, what are the goals for you? I've read a couple of them that you've maybe quoted in other areas of like, what you think about when you're even starting a new business and why it needs to make a lot of money and what your thought is behind that. But how would you kind of summarize your thoughts every time you think about starting something new? - Start with why. My friend, Simon Sinek said it better than anybody else. If you don't have the why, the money will not work for you.
Like there have been so many times in Hapbee where we're like, what the heck are we doing? This is hard. This is painful. This is exhausting. This is, we're broke. But the why and the mission, right? We wanna impact a hundred million people's lives and reduce their suffering. For Hapbee, just that company. That mission brings the right people on board. There's staying power to it.
You can get through so much with the right mission and the right why. Every single person at the company, we just did this kind of round table like, why are you here thing at our last huge executive retreat. And I didn't even know there was a dozen people there and the stories they were telling about how Hapbee has changed their life and their kid's life and their parents' life and their spouse that hadn't slept in a decade. And their kids with, you know, one of them has autism and they're like, this was like the first thing that helped them relax. And so things like that keeps our business going. And so any business you have, you've gotta start with the impact and the mission.
And it's gotta be something that's visceral. A deep need in the world that you need to solve and that you want to see solved. I mean, my quick story, my grandma is the reason I'm doing Hapbee. Late 80s, she just passed a few months back, rest her soul.
But three years ago, when we got the signal, the first signals, I was like, all right, if this is gonna work, I'm gonna try it on Grandma Joyce. And she has had arthritis for decades. She had arthritis for decades. Never slept well at all.
No more than a couple hours at a time. Lot of aches. And I put it on her and it was the CBD relaxed signal. I didn't tell her anything.
I didn't say what it was I didn't say what do we do for her, I just wanted to see. - I love that she was just like, okay, go ahead. - Yeah, she is awesome.
She is like-- - I can trust you Scott. - She's like the happiest, sweetest lady, unbelievable. And she put it on and in 10 minutes she was just like totally relaxed and jovial and hugging people. And she was like, I feel incredible right now. And that night she put it on right before bed for like a half hour and she slept 11 hours. And she hadn't done that in decades.
And then the next morning, my grandpa, Papa Barney gave me $100,000 for the business. - Holy cow! - And we don't do that. That's not like a thing in our family. You don't pass on the money like it's, he's like, Scotty, we're gonna die someday soon, probably in the next few years, who knows, but whatever you did to grandma, you need to do this with as many people around the world as you possibly can. That was my why. And so I was like-- - I have goosebumps right now.
- I was like, I'm in, I'm dropping everything else and I'm doing this. And if you don't have that moment, you're not gonna last. It's just, it's hard. - It gets hard, yeah. So hard. - And when you have that mission, you make the right decisions too. Because every leader is always faced with decisions that are difficult and people decisions, and profit decisions and business decisions.
But if you have that right mindset and the longterm mindset, you will make the right decisions to grow the best and help the most people. - Yeah, I love that. That was the perfect place to end this interview on, Scott.
Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your magic. Where can people find a Hapbee, try one out and learn more about you? - Yeah. So, Hapbee.com/mission. We'll give you guys a discount on there, H-A-P-B-E-E.com/mission.
Go there and grab one before they're out. And then Instagram is like our main social right now. It's GetHapbee. Pretty simple.
You can follow us there, but yeah, we're doing this thing now where people can just try it out. You know, 30 day money back guarantee. You can even finance if you want a few bucks a month and you get a couple of signals for life if you wanna use it, or you can upgrade, there's a small membership if you wanna do like every single one forever. So not everybody wants to pay subscription.
So we're gonna give people a few for life, whatever they want. But yeah, that's our mission and the motto. So, go grab one. - I love that.
Thanks so much, Scott. - Thank you.
2021-11-26 01:57
