Projects

Shine Bathroom automates chores around cleaning, maintenance, and delivery of personal care products. The Shine Bathroom Assistant was a major innovation in the connected bathroom space with 50,000+ satisfied customers, $8M+ lifetime revenue, and over $1M in ARR.

Career Takeaways:

✅ As a founding member of the startup, I was deeply involved in the day-to-day processes of the business as well as the product development lifecycle. I learned what it took to take a hardware product from Zero-to-1; in the middle of a pandemic. I led the creation of the Connected Bathroom category, and developed revenue strategies that resulted in $8M in revenue and $1M in ARR from subscriptions.

Project Overview:

We leveraged the power of electrolyzed water to create a cleaning solution for the toilet that passed the test as verified by third-party labs.

Challenges:

Hardware. It’s hard y’all.
Manufacturing during pandemic.
Novel category.
Convincing people that the environment matters. (Seriously)
Typical startup stuff.

The Process

The Product

Our core belief was simple: we spend too much time taking care of a room that should be taking care of us. With in-home health and wellness being tied to the bathroom, we wanted to create an automated bathroom experience that improved the daily lives of people around the world. We were building a suite of products, both hardware and software, that solved common problems for people and for the CPG industry.

The Approach

We began with a lot of interviews and surveys that were designed to set our direction for the first 5 years. Our first product was much more complicated than what we launched on Indiegogo. We originally had an all-in-one seat with toilet cleaner product, with a lot of bells and whistles. However, we learned during testing that the one thing people cared about the most was the cleaning aspect of our potential product. So we pared down our initial offering, which helped us reduce a ton of cost and complexity–which in turn allowed us to achieve better margins while still providing excellent value for our customer.

We created multiple market test campaigns in order to understand what motivated potential customers, and we used those findings to build our campaign on IGG, as well as to inform the marketing message for our own website.

We were a small and very agile team, and made the decision early on to focus first on iOS customers, as we had development experience with Apple and our primary demographic mostly consisted of iPhone users early on. This led to some issues later for the company as after hitting the market, the number of Android users grew considerably, which led the team to move quickly on the development of the Android app which was very buggy in the early stages for certain versions.

Overall our roadmap was centered around the Bathroom Assistant, but we had a suite of hardware products in the pipeline that included water tracking for the shower and sink, and a novel smart mirror product which we received a provisional patent for in 2021.

Quantitative & Qualitative Research

Ethnographic research was performed locally in Santa Barbara to understand the experience customers go through when using the restroom, cleaning the toilet, fixing the toilet, and ordering replacement products (toothpaste, toilet paper, facial creams, etc.).
Combination of open and proctored surveys were used to understand what the current customers thought of the mobile app and hardware experience.

Define Phase:

Understand the user

Identify the primary user
Identify profiles (user, task, environmental)
Develop personas
Define what users want/need to do
Pinpoint user goals
Develop user stories

Understand current state

Document current experience
Analytics review
Pinpoint usability issues
Competitive analysis
Benchmarking

Ideation Phase:

Identify design scope

Identify user testing scenarios
Storyboard user flows (inputs/outputs)
Identify screens for user validation
Explore multiple design options (parallel)
Level set on UX scope (happy path vs. all possible designs)
Determine level of functional fidelity needed (paper, wireframe, proto, etc.)
In-house or outsourced design

Develop iterative, low/medium fidelity designs

Brainstorm design options through sketching
Mock up basic concepts
Develop wireframes (static, click-thru, mobile, etc.)
Explore information architecture

Develop high-fidelity prototypes

Determine best tool for simulation (iRise, HTML, other)
Determine number of screen sizes for simulation

Apply GUI standards

Wires & Flows:

Testing & Prototyping

While I was involved in testing and prototyping across all facets of our product offering, both hardware and software, I’ll focus on our software efforts and process.

We had a very eager customer base which made recruiting for testing easy, but were deep in a pandemic, which meant a lot of Zoom calls. In the early days, before launch, I was on a Zoom call with 1-3 customers a day for a couple of months. Gathering information about lifestyle, demographics, habits, and early usability data using lo-fi prototypes.

We used Usability Hub to perform rounds of testing around navigation flows and to collect qualitative feedback. We used Zoom calls and more structured tests with customers in our Alpha and Beta groups to more holistically test customer onboarding with actual devices and the latest versions of our application.

Final Designs & Product:

The Results

The Indiegogo campaign was an absolute success bringing in $500,000 in preorders. We achieved an additional $500,000+ in preorders over the first 6 months after closing our IGG campaign, eventually scaling to $1M+ ARR with the launch of our app and our AI, SAM. Our company was selected for a major TV show (🦈) in which we pitched, and landed an offer, but subsequently walked away from the offer for investment during negotiation. We shipped thousands of units and successfully fulfilled all remaining orders from our Indiegogo launch campaign. We achieved a peak iOS App Store rating of 4.2 before my exit of the company, which was a major achievement for us given the difficult road of launching a DTC electronics and software company in the middle of a pandemic.