Dr. Erik Korem

Gabriel Flores  0:00  

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the shades of entrepreneurship. This is your host, Mr. Gabriel Flores. Today I'm here with Dr. Eric Korem. How are we doing?

Erik Korem  0:10  

I'm doing great. I'm really thankful for the opportunity to be here.

Gabriel Flores  0:13  

I'm excited because this is this is kind of new. I don't think we actually had an entrepreneur that really focuses on what we're gonna be talking about today. But before we get into AIM seven, give us a little background.

Speaker 2  0:25  

Yeah, so I've been married for 14 years, I've got three boys grew up in Texas in the Dallas area. But then I spent about 16 years in the NFL and college football working as a sports scientist. My career really hit an inflection point in 2011. And I pioneered the use of athlete wearable tracking technology when I was at Florida State University. So for the first time ever, we were able to quantify what was going on in the game, we were putting these GPS, we had these devices that were tasked the athletes that connected to GPS satellites and crazy stuff. And we were able to take millions of data points and turn them into actionable recommendations to help our team improve their performance, reduce injuries. The next season, we had an 88% reduction in injury. The NFL flew in was like okay, what's happening this opened a multi billion dollar market for sports wearable and data here in the US. And so I went on to the University of Kentucky. From there, I was a director of performance I got a PhD studying how sleep impacts our ability to adapt to stress ended up going on to work in the NFL. And that was all before aim seven.

Gabriel Flores  1:39  

Wow. Well, you know, it's kind of funny. You mentioned Florida State. I grew up a huge Seminole fan. Just die hard. Charlie Ward, D. Sanders. You know, just just the Chris Winky also want a good old Heisman over there. actually went to watch Jameis Winston play. But before but enough about Florida State? Yeah, about aim seven. So how did? How did you kind of get to this point? Well, first, how did you get into the sports? This sports science of it? How did you get into this? Well,

Speaker 2  2:12  

sports science didn't exist. When I started this in the US, let me restate that I was a Florida State. My background was as a traditional strength and conditioning coach and I'd worked in with a number of Olympic gold medalists in the sprint events. So I'd had the opportunity to travel the world allotted Jamaican sprinters. And when I was a Florida State, Coach Fisher asked him after my first season, if I'd be the director of football operations, it's essentially like being a GM. And I'm like, okay, but would you also name the Director of Sports Science, he's like, Yeah, call yourself whatever you want. He didn't know what I wanted to do. I went to Australia for about a month to learn about the emerging world of sports science and athlete wearables. So I brought that back. And I was when, when this whole thing went down. It was there a few times, when you really have an opportunity to, you don't realize you're pioneering something or changing the way things are going to be done forever. But now, if you ever watch an NFL game, like AWS, next gen stats, all of that came out of this little hub. And so that's what got me into sport science was the was the tracking of the of the athlete data. And then we started, you know, getting more sophisticated with biometrics, even biomarkers, really, learning from our colleagues in Australia, and then in Europe. And then now in us, almost every major sports program has a date a sports scientists. So fortunately, I was the first, you know, one of the first I have a colleague who's an MLS, I would say Dave 10, he was also he and I kind of started at the same time. Unfortunately, you also, you know, make a lot of mistakes, you know, and I got the scar tissue, and from from making early mistakes, which has benefited me now name seven in a different market.

Gabriel Flores  4:02  

You know, let's take a step back real quick. For the listeners. What in the hell is sports science? Let's let's, what is sports science? Yeah, sports

Speaker 2  4:13  

science is essentially like, using data, understand, like reverse engineering the game, whatever game it is. And really what I was involved in was was high performance, which is like understanding that every, every athletic endeavor, has a physical side, a technical side, a tactical side, and then a like intellectual or psychological side. And sports sciences, you're really using data and other things to understand, you know, what is driving excellence or performance. And so you reverse engineer what a lead is, then you can break it down in all of its constituent parts. And you can build that up to create a winning formula for your team. And so Sports Science, they're the people that are it's just like a biologist, right? You're looking at the date. Uh, you're interpreting that data, you come up with a hypothesis, you test that hypothesis, like what makes a team faster, what allows a team to an athlete to show up, rested and recovered for game day? What's driving injuries, Okay, now let's collect data and understand like, what could be the contributing factors. And then then hopefully, you come up with some really good guesses that turned out to work.

Gabriel Flores  5:23  

Yeah, and you know, for the folks at home, a great example of this is when you're watching golf, and they're telling you how fast the club head is, and how that's the bulk, that sport science, you know, it's kind of funny. Everybody listening is probably actually a scientist, they just didn't know it. Because they are probably at one point, sitting there at home, watching a YouTube video of how to do something and analyzing it in their mind, of what's the best way to get this thing done. The only difference is, you're really capturing this information, putting it in actual data sets, and then really creating something that you can work off of improve.

Speaker 2  6:02  

Yeah, I mean, the key for all of this is it's not collecting data, data is important. What makes it work is you actually have to create actionable recommendations that create a change. So data without insight is completely useless. You know, that from business metrics, like, okay, great. I got all this data. Now what? Yep. And that was the problem we had to solve in the beginning, because there was a lot of friction to be honest. Coaches, like, you know, you're, you're analyzing what I'm doing, you know, you could get somebody fired. I heard that one. I heard like, this is a waste of time I heard you know, you're messing with the game. You know, it's always been done this way. All the things you hear in business, too, right? Well, once we were able to use that data, and the credit goes to our head football coach, because he, you know, he really put his job on the line to do I mean, it was then that's the next natural link. But a lot of people are scared to innovate. And we innovated and we got an advantage. I think in business or in sports, when you copy the model, you copy the airs. Everybody's like, oh, I want to do exactly what so and so did well, great. That's what they did. They've innovated, they're good at what they do, they've innovated forward, and they've realized the mistakes they were making. So you can copy principles, but copying the actual playbook is never a good idea.

Gabriel Flores  7:26  

That is such a great point. You know, I think learning from other people's mistakes is important, but truthfully, you know, it's kind of like the what's what's the definition of insanity? Right? Doing the same, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Exactly. And then what data you know, data is the same thing, right? It's like, data will always give you what you want, but will never give you what you need. Oh, man I loved and you and I are friends. I love this. I loved it. Now let's get into AIM seven. What is aim seven? tell our listeners what is it and what does it do?

Speaker 2  7:58  

Yeah, so our mission is to empower people to live healthy and impactful lives. And the way that we do that is like right now there's over 100 million Americans own wearable devices, like Apple Watch Fitbits, the actual number is around 125 million. Yep, Apple Watch right there on your wrist now. Yep. The reason people wear this, for the most part in the health and wellness context is they want to change their behavior. They want to sleep better, exercise more manage their stress better. But wearables don't change behavior. The research actually demonstrates they do not change long term behavior. They just measure it. The devices show you data, but they don't tell you exactly how to use it to improve your health and fitness. So aim seven solves this problem by delivering daily personalized recommendations for your mind, body and recovery to help you look, feel and perform your best. So for instance, there's two big parts of this acutely every day, you come into the app, we can tell you based off of the types of exercises that you track and love to do the perfect type, intensity, how hard and duration you should exercise today based off of how your body is ready to adapt to stress. So just because you go to the gym, you're like, Okay, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I'm gonna do this. You write it on paper, you're gonna do 50 minutes on your elliptical doesn't mean your body's actually ready for that that day. Because of a lot of things. You could have had a bad night's sleep, you could have gotten in a fight with your spouse and you're all stressed out, your body's not ready to handle that. So we can give you the precise dose, you literally click a button and we're like all the things you do. Here's the perfect thing today. From a mental fitness perspective, we assess your psychological state every day and we'll push you real time interventions to help improve your mood. If you're stressed out, we'll send you a specific tool to use. We also provide you personalized sleep and napping recommendations. Then after seven days, we analyze all your data just like we would do with an elite athlete and we're like here's the one area you should focus on mind body recovery and Then we create a little goal for you. And then we help you move up. We call these different levels one, two, and three, a big giant 30,000 foot view. If you come into the app, we're going to teach you about something called adaptive capacity. We help teach you how to build the capacity to adapt to more physical and mental stress with less cost. Because I think we would all agree we live in a chaotic, stressful world. And stress is not the enemy. It's really the gateway to growth. It's the only way that you improve. If you want to get fit, you have to exercise if you want to learn a new skill, like SEO we were talking about before, you gotta go. It's frustrating, right? That's the only way that you create these plastic changes in your brain. The problem is, is when stress exceeds your capacity to adapt to it, that's when you get injured. That's when you get burnout. That's when you have mental health issues. So not only do we give you the daily recommendations, we show you the exact thing you need to work on. And then we have basically like a library that's like your master class for health and wellness, we curated some of the best experts in the world. And everything is curated for busy people that are time poor, like you got two minutes you don't have 20 minutes to go to the box and eat quinoa with your bros like now they're all CrossFit. We love CrossFitters I'm just saying like, the average American just doesn't have time for that you got kids, you got busy life. So that's who am sevens for we're serving those 120 5 million Americans.

Gabriel Flores  11:26  

Yeah, I think that's a great point is the time commitment. And it's true. Like I have, you know, we mentioned I'm wearing this Apple Watch. And I got the iPhone, and it keeps telling me I have the screen time. Okay, the average screen time is four hours this week and five hours is what am I supposed to do with this data? Thank you for letting me know, I keep looking on my phone, but it was to do so how does aim seven because you kind of mentioned that you're monitoring it. And you mentioned you know, some of these give you data points. How does ame seven specifically help human performance?

Speaker 2  11:57  

Yeah, so one of the I'll just say the differentiator is this is i right now, I am wearing three devices. Okay. I have a, an aura ring on an Apple Watch and a whoop, okay. All of which have great data. The other day, it was it was Saturday, Last Saturday, I had had a really hard week of work. I woke up and I was exhausted. Right? I was tired, put in a hard week, my aura and my whoop, were like you are great today. And I'm like, No, I'm not. I'm not ready to go. If I followed those recommendations and went out and had a crazy hard workout session or really pushed myself whatever I would have gotten sick or injured, when ain't seven does is we take objective biometrics from the device. And then we use subjective measures, we actually ask you how you feel in seven different areas. And research demonstrates that your perception of how you feel is directly related to biomarkers in your body for those things. So for instance, if I asked you daily how your stress this takes 20 seconds, and we do some really sensitive math in the background. If one day you were like if for some reason it was exceedingly higher than normal. If we were to take cortisol samples, your cortisol level would be elevated. Same thing for soreness and different things. So we are algorithms combined subjective and objective measures. And so what we're doing is we're providing you that precise dose of stress that your body's ready for, and then we're giving you the prescription for recovery, because the formula for growth is stress plus rest equals growth. And so that is how we're improving overall health and wellness. And we're also pushing you into these buckets. These in that I talked about the levels in the app, that side of the scientific literature shows it's basically the thresholds you need to hit for physical and mental health. So for instance, if we can get you just to hit the baseline physical metrics that you need for health, we can increase we can decrease all cause mortality by 47%. You add on regular sleep, that's restful and fulfilling you've lowered all cause mortality by 60%. So we're really addressing the most common preventable lifestyle diseases in America which are cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, etc. Which is a four and a half trillion dollar spend every year

Gabriel Flores  14:20  

you know, you mentioned health care and that's that's my area of expertise right? In fact, you mentioned the aura ring. Now we had radiation oncologist talking about the aura ring years ago because they're trying to encourage their patients to use it right to monitor their sleep monitor there because then they can also kind of dictate okay, how well is your body going to tolerate the chemo today or the radiation today? Based on these things? It's the order is very I'm not trying to promote it ladies gentlemen up not great product.

Unknown Speaker  14:50  

I got one on right now great,

Gabriel Flores  14:51  

great product check it out. If you if you don't if you haven't heard about it, really. In fact, I believe it's owned by Samsung. It's it's still still one of their private babies. It's not even on their public kind of portfolios, I recall but very interesting.

Speaker 2  15:04  

The problem though, is it's just data. They really don't give you recommendations. Yep. And so it's like, great, I know I'm sleeping six hours a night, how do I create the conditions for restful and fulfilling sleep like, we take you through all of this stuff, even to the point of like, we send you a notification in the morning when the sun comes up with a beautiful picture of the sunrise, because one of the, the number one behavior you should engage in to improve sleep. And this is one of the first things we learned in our Ph. D. program, is you have to anchor your circadian clock. And the they're their primary anchors, or what are called Zeit, givers for the circadian clock, which are light, heat, temperature, food and exercise. Well, light outside is the primary and strongest one, so just getting some, even if it's the sun is occluded by the clouds, getting 10 minutes in the morning is going to anchor your clock, and it's going to help you get more restful sleep at night. So it's like, it's not just good enough to say you need to do the thing. It's how when, how much when my body feels like this, what should I prioritize? And so these devices are great. It's like having a dashboard on your car. Awesome. But it doesn't make you a better driver. We've all been on the highways, right? But oh,

Gabriel Flores  16:25  

man, you're starting to act like my mentor, Dr. Marco Haller, and who is an allergist, but one of the things he told me, you know, when you traveling International, is light therapy, if you aren't getting off, you know, a long flight light therapy because it it restarts that

Speaker 2  16:41  

clock. 100% makes you anchored to your current time zone.

Gabriel Flores  16:45  

Yes, it's phenomenal now. So how did you start this business? How did you kind of how did you finance it? How did you kind of roll it out?

Speaker 2  16:54  

Well, it started with a thought of just like, I wonder if people know how to use these wearables. So a friend of mine, he and I sent out hundreds of surveys to different people we knew at different universities, and they gave it to their students and all sorts of people were like, What do you want out of your wearable, the number one response we got was more energy. If this device could give me more energy, that would be a winner, it makes total sense to think about like the energy market, you know. And then it was stress, sleep sort of stress, sleep and weight loss. So we wanted to see if we could predict somebody's energy level with Apple Watch data and some other unique data sets. And not only could we do that, but we could predict their energy and mood level two days in advance. We had those machine learning algorithms externally validated by some experts at NC State University who are experts in the type of machine learning we used. A friend of mine who's the CEO of a company called Vin Li, they do the same thing we do in the car space. And they have the largest car fleets in the world. And this is all is a lot of very fortunate. And I showed him what I was doing. His name was Mark Hadar and Mark was like, Eric, you have got something here. So he wrote me a check. And like, you need to go build this. Now I've had a 16 year career, I've been very successful. And now I'm gonna go, you know, dive in. But I felt called to do this. I felt like this was what I was supposed to do. And so, you know, I have no experience and lean startup methodology. But I start reading books and listening to podcasts. So the first thing I did was run an MVP, which was a text messaging service where we sucked in their data. And I said, People recommendations that did really well. We had paying customers day one. Then it was like, Okay, how do we turn this into an app because we can't do this at scale. built an alpha version, average 30 average results in the first 30 days people did 38%. More workouts have 34 1%, less stress. They had almost 10% improvement and sleep, it was crazy. We're like, Okay, this is good. raise some capital, a lot of us friends and family. And I had to go out and start getting talent for the team. And that's that's probably been one of the keys to success is early on. I didn't have the talent we needed in football. Like, if you don't have a quarterback, you're dead. You have no shot. In software development, you got to have a lead engineers. And now I have those elite engineers on my team. We've got some I'm just fired up about who we've got. It's been amazing. We're bringing more talent in and so now we've deployed this in the private data. We have paying customers, we have a 94% conversion rate from seven day free trials. 80% are staying with us after a month. But that's just the first part 87 We make money three ways. And here's what's really interesting. We found that we can we're licensing models that we built in this app for b2b health and wellness solutions. So I can't mention names right now. But there's an international gym franchise with over 1700 locations worldwide. We did a pilot, a beta test and our platform solution improve their conversion rates by 50%, over five months, which is an equaling about $125,000 per location. So we just rolled that out this week, two studios in Houston, and Austin, and we're gonna start expanding that. And then where our long term value is, is with agreements with enterprise payers, like insurance companies, because if we can demonstrate that we can help people, it's a behavior change product. Yep. If we can demonstrate that which we're already starting to show, we just got up the large enough model, who wouldn't say I've got an Apple Watch on, I'll take a massive cut of my insurance premium. Aim seven, it's not just tracking, they're helping me get there. Guess what you've lowered risk for everybody use pay less, it's costly, you know, it's less risk for them. And that's where our enterprise values app.

Gabriel Flores  20:58  

Man, that is one of the most sexiest things I have heard in a while because honestly, the healthcare space is so huge insurance space is huge. You're talking about value based care right now, right. And so when you do a procedure review, a surgical procedure, the value based care is essentially saying, Hey, we shouldn't be seeing this patient back with the same issue for a long period of time. And we need individuals like you in the healthcare space to kind of help support that. In fact, I think one area that might be interesting, is actually looking at employers. Like the Oh 100%. Ickes, right? Because put that in their benefit package, right? They have the employee wellness packages, and now you're now you're really cooking,

Speaker 2  21:40  

you're dictating our roadmap right here. And that's fine. That's exactly what we're going to do. I mean, I know a lot of people, it. The scale of AIM seven is enormous. But to me, it goes back to our mission, empowering people to live healthy and impactful lives. If we believe that if we can help you be healthy, then you can live a life of impact, whatever area that is. And so you're exactly right, whether that's going to Walmart's or the Amazons, which we have plans to do. But if we deliver on the fundamental premise vapes, and we are giving you daily personalized recommendations that help change behavior and improve your health, like that's powerful. And so we love the apples and Fitbits, actually the head of Fitbit for Google's on our advisory board. Because he's like, You guys are that data intelligence layer, we don't compete with them, we make their product more valuable, then we drive value for our customers. So it's really what's called a double Metcalf loop. We create value for the customers and for all the data that comes in. We're hardware and data agnostic. So we have a really big vision frame seven, but we're just trying to be very focused right now on how we execute on that.

Gabriel Flores  22:55  

Yeah, it makes sense. Start with those core competencies first and kind of growing from there. And in fact, you know, folks, I hope you're really listening because one of the things I have been stated in this podcast, I think, pretty consistently, last couple of months is value, right? The perception of value, and how do you create value? What Eric's doing right here. It's phenomenal creating value for the consumers, but also creating value for Fitbit for Apple, because they're gonna be like, oh, yeah, now I do want that. I'm telling now I'm gonna go buy the aura watch. I've been thinking about buying it. And I think you convinced me, I'm gonna have to get rid of the wedding ring and put the aura ring on now. And that's what I do. And

Speaker 2  23:30  

Gabriel, I'll give you a I'll give you a free aim seven subscription. And so once you throw that in, you'll be able to hop on and make use of

Gabriel Flores  23:37  

it. Oh, man, I jump on the peloton. I got like 10 workouts this month, because to your point, I got two kids. I got a 10 week old and I got a three year

Speaker 2  23:44  

old. Oh, my goodness. gratulations by the way.

Gabriel Flores  23:48  

Thank you. I'm surprised I still have the hair. I don't. I don't. Yeah. Can you have three boys?

Unknown Speaker  23:55  

Yeah, I think it's more about my genetics than anything else.

Gabriel Flores  23:59  

So you know, you're starting this. This is a new industry, right? Sport Science is relatively new. How difficult was it to start, really, whether you're kind of the pioneer and you're kind of creating a pioneer and a new frontier?

Speaker 2  24:13  

Yeah. It's hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. It was hard starting sports science and sports. You know, a lot of skeptics know, but it was a lonely. I used to actually be on Nikes Performance Council for five years. And I heard Tinker Hatfield speak once it was a small closed door meeting. Tinker Hatfield is the one that does design, Air Jordan. And he said, If you want to be a creator, if you want to, you know, change things, be prepared to be alone. And that just hit me between the eyes because I've always felt alone and swimming upstream. And so this is just another extension of that. Now I have another team of lunatics that you know, we all believe that and we're, you know, the Apple kind of thing you know, here To the, you know, the, you know, the the crazy ones, right? Um, I think it's when I talk to people about this other get it? It doesn't take very long like, yeah, 100% I can go meet anybody on the street with an Apple watch or a Fitbit. And I'm like, it's just data that in their head is nodding, right? So for me, you know, you sent me a question in advance, like, what keeps you up at night, I actually sleep pretty good at night, it's what wakes me up early. You know, I get up early, ready to go because I want to deliver for our customers. One of our core values is stewardship. I want to deliver for our investors, I want to be a good steward of the money that they've invested. And I want to build an industry defining product, and continue to build a world class team. And so every day I wake up, and I'm, I'm just ready to go. Doesn't mean I'm not tired, doesn't mean, you know, I'm a real human being just like everybody else. And, you know, if it wasn't frame seven, you know, actually building these algorithms and like taking my own recommendations, I'd be a freaking wreck. Because of the stress, this is a tremendous amount of stress. And I've had to learn to invest a lot in my mental fitness, as I've really taken a deep dive on that. And we brought in some world leading experts on the subject, like I invested my own mental health a lot more than I used to. And so it's really been a journey of helping others and self exploration.

Gabriel Flores  26:40  

You know, that's a great point in you know, you mentioned, entrepreneurship, sometimes it's a very lonely path, right? You spend time by yourself. And sometimes people don't understand because you have this passion. And I think what you're hitting right now is your zone of genius, right? Where something that you're probably doing, and you don't even know, the time just kind of ticks away next, you know, it's midnight, because you're just kind of engrossed into what you're doing. But have you ever had a moment of self doubt?

Speaker 2  27:07  

Oh, my gosh. Of course, I one of the things that we really focusing in on and we're actually building a new series on this in the app is on leading yourself. Because 90% of the thoughts that go on your head are subconscious, you really don't control them. When you train to awareness, and you understand what your thought patterns are, then you can direct your thought process to a positive action directed towards a positive outcome. It's a fool's errand to think that you can control the future. If that was the case, it'd be good jillion, there'd be 4 billion billionaires on the planet, right? It just doesn't happen. But you can take your best shot. And so you know, that's one thing that I've just really focused on a lot is like trying to control that, that dialogue between my own ears, and when I start getting negative, because everybody does. directed towards you know, for me, my faith is really important. I have a strong community, I engage with other people, I share burdens with others, I I don't keep it inside, I'll go talk to my wife, I got to talk to my friends. Don't want to be a complainer. Rather, it's like, Hey, here's what I'm going through, would you would you you know, would you walk through this with me. And that's one of the five pillars for building adaptive fascias community. And so I have to live that out. Right. And it's really cool to do that in an authentic way.

Gabriel Flores  28:42  

That's a great point. And you know, fact, you mentioned communion. And one of the things I now put on my tagline, when I'd send out people questions and kind of get them ready is a former guest says, you know, if our community members aren't doing well, our economy never will. And I thought that was very, very, very true. Now, you know, you've you've, you're growing this aim seven, you've started in the sport science world was again, very new. How do you market yourself? How do you brand something that is so novel?

Speaker 2  29:10  

Yeah, so I'm probably three things right now as far go to market strategy on the b2c side. So I have a podcast called The Blueprint. I started this in mid 2020. Before we really didn't have a product early 2020. And we just still cutting edge science leadership and life skills. And we couldn't say a simple tactics. So it's 15 minute episodes. Same audience that I'm curating for him seven. So I started reading some marketing stuff about like, go build the audience first. So now we got about 15,000 downloads a month and it's growing pretty good. Now, that alone is not going to drive our entire business, but what we do is like and so right now I'm on a podcast tour. Right? My friend Sam Corcos, the CEO of levels health, I asked him like how did you build this massive waiting list and he was like, podcast or go right to the audience that needs to hear this message. So we're going out and reaching out to specific audiences. One of them is entrepreneurs, and others people that are specifically focused on health and wellness and parents busy parents, right. So I'm doing 100 podcasts this year, it's a great way to get right in front of your audience, because they're, they're already interested in the subject. Then we direct them back to font top of funnels, they go from there to usually they'll sign up for the product, or they'll stop filing on AIM seven, you know.com They'll go to our newsletter, or they'll follow me on social media or my writing or whatever. Also, we're doing Ambassador marketing. So we call it community hunting. We're not paying for paid social, we're leveraging people that already have audiences that are already interested, and we're paying them for conversion, we pay him well. And so we do, we're not in the app store right now. So what we're doing is we're in private beta, and it's a very white glove experience for our customers, meaning they get four zoom calls in the first month, it's $15. This is an expensive product. And that Ambassador, if we do a cohort with that Ambassador, that Ambassador joins, so now they get to be with like their favorite, you know, whoever it is in that area, and me and my team talking about these things, plus they get the experience in the app, and it builds our community. And so we're really focused on building this red hot community and then going into the App Store. So it's those are those are the that's kind of the top of funnel like how we're doing it from a b2c side. From a b2b perspective. We're really focused on this for the next like 12 months really focused on this specific franchise that we're in because we can hit a significant amount of MRR with small market penetration, build really good algorithms, because it's a platform solution. And then we can use parts of that for other solutions. So we're not paying for advertising. We want this to be an organic thing. And we want to have a groundswell. And so we're starting, we're trying to identify the red hot communities that really catch on to this and it'll grow.

Gabriel Flores  32:03  

That's a great strategy. In fact, you know, for folks listening at home, I would leverage this market. This is exactly what I do, as well leverage the free advert to like, Eric, how much did you pay to be on this podcast today? Nothing, nothing. Exactly. That's free advertisement. And guess what? I'm going to be putting aim seven, which is a great opportunity to let everybody notice, subscribe to the shades of entrepreneurship newsletter, you can do that by visiting the shades of e.com. Because we will have this information on the newsletter, again, Eric coming out doing this the same thing other entrepreneurs can do. Networking is free. Jumping on other people's podcast is free. Writing a newsletter is free. These are all things that you can do. You should

Speaker 2  32:45  

be a prolific digital writer, by the way, sorry to cut you off. It's free. Yep. Like, you need content, don't you for your show? Correct. Right. Like I just had Carmine Gallo, on the guy that wrote the Bezos blueprint talk like Ted, you know, communications, one thing we talked about, right? Kelly stearic just really is doing a book tour, right? These people need to get on shows. So like if you have a compelling story around something that delivers value for people, like start with the value that you're going to be able to deliver to somebody and then go create a compelling pitch and go hire an EA to go do a you know, go through a campaign. That's how I got on your show.

Gabriel Flores  33:27  

That's very true. It's very true. Yeah, I had an executive send an email from an EA said, Hey, got Dr. Eric. Carmen's interested me on your show. Let's do it. Let's get it going. Sent me. So hopefully I delivered and then, but then the value, right, the value back because again, the entire intent of this podcast is also to create value to these entrepreneurs. How did individuals build their multi million dollar or $100,000 company? Because it's important to also understand that this this is perfectly curated social media accounts aren't truthfully accurate of what the entrepreneurship life is. It's lonely, there are very long nights, you can go broke, you know, there are these different things that you kind of have to go down. Now. What would you what advice you know, you've been doing this now for several years, what advice would you have for other entrepreneurs that are aspiring entrepreneurs?

Speaker 2  34:18  

Go test your idea before you actually go all in. Like make sure that people actually want the thing that you think that they want. I did that. I validated that there was a need for what we did for what we've done. You know, I think that's the number one, number one mistake number two, get a co founder. Unless it's like a an educational business or it's something where you're the expert or or you have the skills. If you're doing anything technically related. I do think it's helpful to have a co founder because now you are not alone. You share the burden, especially if like maybe you're doing marketing and you're the face and they're the technic Go expert like, that's a wonderful partnership right there. Um, I would also say like, go get paying customers ASAP unless, like start with paying customers because that'll validate whether this thing is real or not. If people aren't willing to pay for it, then it's not going to work. And you know, was it Reed Hoffman says, if you're not embarrassed to the first version of the thing you put out, you launch too late. So that's a Perfection is the enemy of getting this thing done. And I'm still, you know, have these ideas of what this is going to become. And then like, we get these stories back, or people were like, I've been losing weight, or my resting heart rate went down 10 beats this month, or I'm a more present parent, you're like, the version of what you're doing is good enough, it's making an impact, and it's only gonna get better and better and better and better if you serve, serve, serve, serve. So, you know, if you're not embarrassed of the first version, it's your way too late to the game.

Gabriel Flores  35:57  

Man, that is a great point. In fact, folks, if you want to see some embarrassment, just go listen to the first like, 50 episodes versus the last 50 episodes. Very huge, huge learning point. In fact, shout out to my neighbor who Jeremy Inman, first guest on the show, who literally came in and basements like, Alright, let's do this podcast. I'm like, I don't think I'm ready. He's like, you're ready. You're either you, you know, shit, or get off the pot kind of thing. Yeah, we did it. And now here we are over 100 episodes later. It's just continuing the crime. And I think that's a great point. One, just just getting out there and trying it in misery loves company. You know, finding the co founder, I think is a very important aspect too. Because it's it is a lonely, lonely road. But there are other people out there. In fact, there's probably somebody out there right now that wants you to succeed more than anybody I've ever met in your entire life.

Erik Korem  36:44  

You just gotta go meet him. Amen. Love that.

Gabriel Flores  36:47  

So Eric, give the folks at home. Where can they find you? If they want to learn more about aim seven website social site? How can we get in contact with you?

Speaker 2  36:55  

Yeah, aim seven.com. Aim seven, signup. We'd love to have you the beta free trial for seven days. The blueprints and other place to get plugged in. It's for busy people. Like I said, cutting edge science leadership and life skills. And then on all social media platforms. It's at Eric Coram

Gabriel Flores  37:15  

at Eric calm, that's K O R E M and again, this information will be on the newsletter. So again, go ahead and plug the newsletter visit the shades of e.com. You can also follow us on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook at the shades of E. And please subscribe to the podcast at the shades of entrepreneurship. Eric, is there any last word you'd like to let the listeners know?

Speaker 2  37:39  

I would just say hey, look like you're not alone. Life is hard. Find a community. And then you know if you if you're using a wearable, like make sense of it, you know what I'm saying? Or honestly just get rid of it because it will cause you more heartache than it will you know anything else just staring at these numbers and not knowing what to do and aim sevens here to serve you and walk along this journey. And I'm just very thankful for the opportunity to be here today.

Gabriel Flores  38:05  

No, thank you so much for coming on. I really do appreciate it. A lot of great information. So folks, I really do hope you had the pen and pad out today. Dr. Eric Corman aim seven such a very phenomenal product. I'm looking forward to get into it. I'm gonna I'm telling you right now I'm going to tell the wife I'm buying the aura watch. I don't care what you say I'm doing. Doing it. Thank you so much. For those folks listening at home. Please subscribe to the shades of entrepreneurship on where you listen to podcasts or visit the shades of e.com Thank you and have a great night.