What's up, DTC Pod?

Today we're joined by Mike Gijo, who is the co founder of Waterboy. So Mike, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, waterboy, what you guys are building and everything like that?

Yeah. How far back do you want me to go? Because, I mean, I can go all the way back.

Let's go back.

I remember, Mike, when we met a while back, you had reached out, you were working on the bags from Bali. Just take it way back.

Okay, yeah, we'll go way back and then you guys can cut out whatever you okay, I guess I'll even explain maybe my odd last name. I was born in Albania, moved to the US in 6th grade, and then throughout high school just knew I really wanted to do finance, primarily investment banking, and that let me go to UT. I'd worked in investment banking for a year after college. Didn't like it. It was not very creatively, fulfilling. And then after that I had an idea of like, hey, you have all these photo apps out there where people can create and share photos, they can create and share music, et cetera. There's nothing for workouts. So I was working. This was 2013. Started working on an app where people can create and share workouts. It was kind of fairly early days of Instagram and fitness, and I saw a rise in social media influencers, but a lot of them didn't have a way to monetize. So we took some of our software stack and started private labeling them apps. That led me to start a company called Body Plan Fitness. Did that for a little over five years. And then while I was in Bali on vacation, my girlfriend at the time wanted to get some bags for her friends, and it took up so much suitcase for him. So I was like, Let me see if I could buy these on Amazon. Realized there's not much on Amazon. There's a ton of search traffic because I had tools like Jumble, Scott, et cetera, to look at demand. And then randomly for one summer, I was like the biggest ratten bag women's purse seller. I knew that wasn't going to be like a lasting thing. That was just like a trendy fad. But it was very cool to get experience on Amazon and then fast forward a couple of years, start of 2020. I sold the company I was working on for the fitness apps and took six months off to decompress. And then I was thinking through what products and needs was I excited about in the market? And that led me to create Waterboy. And I can dive in further into what waterboy is.

Yeah, why don't you talk a little bit about what waterboy is and the background of that company?

Yeah. So for me, honestly, the products out of a personal need. It was like nights I'd go out with friends and they'd get away from me and I'd wake up feeling rough in the morning. It felt like the main two products that were on the market were either Liquid IV, which did a pretty good, decent job at Hydration, really good job at marketing, and Pedialyte, which I felt like did an even better job at Hydration. But it was branded for kids. And to me, it's whenever I am waking up feeling rough, I'm not just dehydrated, but there's other symptoms I'm feeling around, like nausea, anxiety, fatigue. So the premise was, can I make a better product for this use case? Because we're making it specifically for that. And can we have a bit more fun with the branding? Because we're in a space that's you take these products around fun times in your life, but a lot of brands have to be overly clinical or very safe. So that was the premise of the company. Put out the message on TikTok, it took off. And since then, we've just been focused on what's next.