Experience Relief And Empower Recovery With Knee Plus

Roy Morejon:
Welcome entrepreneurs and startups to Art of the Kickstart, the podcast that every entrepreneur needs to listen to before you launch. I’m your host, Roy Morejon, President and Founder of Enventys Partners, the world’s only turnkey product launch company that has helped over 2,000 innovations successfully raise over $400 million in capital since 2010. Each week, I interview a crowdfunding success story, an inspirational entrepreneur, or a business expert in order to help you take your startup to the next level. This show would not be possible without our main sponsor, Product Hype, a 300,000 member crowdfunding media site and newsletter that’s generated millions of dollars in sales for over a thousand top tier projects since 2017. Check out producthype.co just subscribe to the weekly newsletter.

Roy Morejon:
Now let’s get on with the show. Welcome to another edition of Art of the Kickstart. Today I am super excited because I am speaking with the gentleman from Reviiv, Mr. Forrest Smith, and Mr. Tom Sanderson, CEO and COO of Reviiv. They are about to bring an amazing product called Knee Plus to the market so I’m super excited to have this conversation today. Forrest, Tom, thank you so much for joining us today on Art of the Kickstart.

Forrest Smith:
Absolutely.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. So this campaign will be live once this recording comes out, but let’s talk a little bit to the audience in terms of the product right, Knee Plus, this is the next generation of at-home light therapy that you guys have developed, advanced technology, professional level treatment from the comfort of your own home. And I think if we’ve all learned anything during the pandemic, it’s so nice to do things at home, especially when it comes to health and wellness. So talk to our audience a little bit about this product as if we’ve never heard it before.

Forrest Smith:
Absolutely. Let’s, I’ll jump in a little bit from the technical side on, it’s a light therapy product. We’ve, we’ve actually developed this with next generation lasers, which are, are, and without going too far into the, the nerdy weeds on this are vertical cavity surface mission lasers. And it’s a, it’s a new type of technology. They’re, they’re a little bit different from some of the lasers that have been used in the past, but because of that, we can, we can use them in ways that are more effective for penetrating joint and muscle tissue for treating inflammation and pain. And we’re super excited to bring it out to market because it’s something that actually, Tom and I met in the first place around this. We, we both had knee pain, we met through his, his younger brother who I played rugby with in China, as we all live in, in south China at some point in time. And the laser piece of this is a, is a big one. The, the, treating knee pain is something that’s kind of very personal to us and we’re super excited about getting these out to market, mainly because it’s one of the things that’s going to allow us to get our own hands on it as well, and, bring it to a larger audience at the same time.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. So I know this laser technology is brand new, that the targeted aspect I think is really interesting because we’ve seen some red light therapy products before crowdfund have extreme success. But I think the fact that you guys have some really interesting technology first for the knee in terms of obviously helping out with better blood flow, the cartilage regrowth side of things, reducing inflammation. How did you decide to tackle, let’s say knee pain first, in terms of the initial mission on the outset of launching this innovation?

Forrest Smith:
Excellent question, Tom, you want to jump in for that one?

Tom Sanderson:
Yeah, that sounds great. So as far as mentioned, the, the, the idea for the actual tech side of it has come basically from our experience, workforce experience mainly in manufacturing of LED well, lighting products specifically. So if I spend enough about 10, 15 years, but we got chatting about it because we wanted to launch a really cool product that actually help people in this world and myself, Forrest, and my brother, Max, we all play rugby together, we play, love sports, we’re very passionate about CrossFit and exercise and just general health and wellbeing. But one thing that we all have in common is we all have knee pain and when we started this campaign, both myself and Forrest, we’re in our late thirties, we’re now in our early forties, from the point of first discussing it to actually bringing it to market.

Tom Sanderson:
So as we are getting older and as we see other people around us getting older, we can see that other people are suffering from knee pain as well and the product itself will actually work for any joints, any body parts, which is in discomfort. So elbow, wrist, ankles, anything like that, that you’ve suffered any kind of injury or develop some arthritis. But the really cool thing that we noticed is that, well, as a personal story of mine is that my father is in his early seventies and he played rugby about 30 years ago, and he’s in his mid, late thirties, early forties. So about 30 years ago, he was playing rugby, and since then he has a [inaudible 00:05:01] because of his knee pain. And he’s had 30 years of knee pain. And what we realize is, unless people who have the knee pain now actually resolve it today, take real ownership of that, they’re going to suffer with the knee pain for the next 30 years themselves. And too often, we’re hearing stories about people having knee replacements or various surgeries that still keep the pain there.

Tom Sanderson:
So when me and Forrest were talking, we thought, well, we’ve got this great technology, all the knowledge and experience and scientific experience that Forrest has on this product, but we want it to focus on something that was, as far as that, was going to really impact and improve our lives and we feel like the knees is such a funky joint anyway, that if we can give people a bit more stability and improve their strength around their knees and around their legs, they’re going to have a much better improved quality of life. So in a shortest version, that’s why we started on the knees specifically, but absolutely as a product and a technology, this works for all, all body parts, all body joints.

Roy Morejon:
So, I know both of you guys.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah, go ahead Forrest.

Forrest Smith:
I was going to say, just to drag that on there, there’s a, there’s also a gap for what’s available for people. And, and so the, the standard rest, ice, compression, elevation really doesn’t do much for long-term inflammation and chronic pain in the knee. And it’s such a quality of life thing where if you can’t, if your, if your knees aren’t working, you can’t get up and around. And some of the, the earlier products that we’ve seen in the market for these, which are just LED only, don’t penetrate the actual joint tissues of the synovial fluid and cartilage don’t really get any benefit from the kind of LED only products. So our goal is to be able to bring something to market that actually fills that gap where there’s a, if you’re, if you’re treating what you have right now with pharmaceuticals, or with ice, or with a LED only products, this is a significant and substantial step up in the outcomes and results that you can expect from.

Roy Morejon:
Amazing. So I know you guys are both international right now, Tom, you’re over in the UK, Forrest, you’re in Mexico, and we kind of skipped over this, but let’s talk a little bit about your backgrounds, which led you both to being entrepreneurs and teamed up to build this amazing innovation.

Forrest Smith:
Absolutely, yeah. Tom, you want to go first there?

Tom Sanderson:
Yeah, sounds good. So myself, yeah, as you mentioned, Roy, I’m based in the UK, I’m from the UK, from the north of England, small town called [inaudible] and then God’s country, North Yorkshire. And I, what moved over to China actually in about 2008, late 2008, and then myself and one of my brothers set up a film production company. So we ran, we started from the ground up just the two of us over in South China and grew the company up over, over a decade. So we made film and production and marketing videos for everything from big schools, governments, events, documentaries, company introduction videos, and a lot of music, music, videos, and music concerts as well. And that company that culminated in a one of well in a 90 minute feature length documentary, and one of China’s biggest rock stars where we followed them for three years and taught in Australia and all his concerts all around China and that released onto Beijing red carpet cinema.

Tom Sanderson:
And so that as an experience, it was pretty impressive. But the part that for me, from a, from a let’s talk about the entrepreneur side of it, and then bringing it into what we’re doing now is that the,

Forrest Smith:
[inaudible 00:08:30]

Tom Sanderson:
the ability to work with teams work with people, problem solve. And I think that one of the, one of the challenges of any business when you’re getting started is that you have to overcome, constantly overcome hurdles and challenges and find ways to collaborate with people that are outside your comfort zone. And, and that’s something that’s been an amazing blessing for me, especially being based in China, which is not only a different culture, but in the film music industry in general. So that was my that’s my background in terms of the last say, 10 years, and then obviously started up this company with Forrest as he’s described. And also my brother, Max, is also very much involved in it. And actually my father, Ed, is our financial sort of controller, CFO, and Max is running all our brand and strategy on film brand and messaging in general.

Roy Morejon:
Amazing. So it sounds like you guys have put together this global education surrounding and focusing in on this, this one pain point, which I think is critical. I, myself, a torn MCL with a late night game of spike ball with someone diving into me. So now I have this knee pain and I’m glad that they’re, you know, obviously precise solutions like what you guys are coming up here with that will be able to resolve that. But also the fact that I love with your product is that it truly can go anywhere on your body where it just clips on like a watch where basically, if you’ve got elbow pain, it can clip there. If you’ve got ankle pain, it can clip onto there. And it really allows for the focus of medicine, if you will, and health benefits to that individual part of the body.

Forrest Smith:
Yeah, you’re exactly right. And I think just to touch on one thing, since you brought up the, the MCL tear, cause I’ve also had a meniscus tear and a lot of the people that we’ve we’ve dealt with and we’ve interviewed as far as potential users and users for us in with the Knee Plus have had traumatic injuries to joints. One of the things that we’ve found that is not commonly known about this is traumatic injuries to the joints aren’t just affecting the joint tissue. So there was a recent study on the past two years of 3,500 NFL players who have ACL tears and who don’t. So just just 3,500 as a retired NFL players. And what they found is there was a 50% increase in the, in cardiovascular disease and in traumatic cardiovascular disease in those people, in those players who had had a, an ACL tear and the reason for that, and it seems very counterintuitive, what’s what does my heart attack or, cardiovascular disease have to do with my, my ACL tear, but chemically, biochemically, there is a lot of downstream effects from a traumatic injury to a joint.

Forrest Smith:
And so when you see the microvasculature and tissue damage in a joint, that’s not just damaged in the joint, that’s damaged both in the joint and in the region. So if you damaged your knee tissue, you’ll see your, if, for example, if you’ve torn a, an MCL or an ACL in your left knee, your quads and the gastric muscles above and below the knee are now colder if they show up on a thermography because they’re not getting as much that the microvasculature in the region is actually damaged and there’s effects from an inflammation standpoint as systemic. So you’ll have localized effects for the joint where the joint tissue is really in a bad way longer-term because you can’t get as much blood flow to it and you can’t get the, the healing that you need in that space because the blood flow is constricted.

Forrest Smith:
And you’ll see it in a, in a regional aspect, but also again, systemically where we’re inflammation is now increased overall in your, in your body. And that, that has impacts on cardiovascular outcomes, but also it can help. It can actually cause your body to, to develop imbalances longterm as well. So, and there was movement imbalances we, we call it the pain spiral cause once you had a damaged joint like that, you find yourself moving lower and lower so, you’re in pain, you don’t move as much when you do move, the muscles aren’t there to support that joint as much and you find yourself going into a worse and worse state and we’ve seen a lot of potential users that we’ve interviewed for the, the Knee Plus have these issues and find themselves in a place where they’re having to look at knee replacements, they’re, they’re bone on bone, they don’t have any cartilage left. And it all starts from these traumatic injuries to joints and the Knee Plus photo biomodulation and particularly with the infrared light in general is, is a great way to increase the amount of nitric oxide, open those, dilate those blood vessels, and deliver more healing blood to the area and really kind of fix some of those imbalances before they get started.

Forrest Smith:
And that’s, that’s such a powerful message to get out to people because again, most of the people that we’ve talked to about this, who aren’t medical practitioners don’t know about it, and don’t know about the downstream effects, and don’t know about this pain spiral, as you can get into, if you have just one traumatic injury to a joint. And so again, we’re, we’re just happy to be out here educating people about these types of things that the risks that they’re putting themselves out by not treating their joints and, and rehabbing them in a holistic way.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah. So talking about pain points, let’s talk a little bit about the design side of things, because usually this is one of the bigger hurdles for startups and entrepreneurs to kind of get through. So how did you guys go about deciding what features to include in the design and then any of the challenges that you guys have encountered along the way of designing this product?

Tom Sanderson:
[inaudible 00:13:57].

Forrest Smith:
And identifying the a, and I’ll just jump in here Tom if you don’t mind, in identifying kind of the feature set and the performance levels that we, we’d like to be able to deliver with the Knee Plus, originally we started with the best products in the world. So these are clinical level products that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and that will be typically seen in professional sports training facilities or kind of high-end medical clinics or, or physiotherapy clinics. And one of the things that was our goal with this is having, having lived for 20 years in China, in the middle of the supply chain, having set up and run manufacturing businesses there, and R and D groups, we really have kind of our fingers on the pulse for what’s coming on the pipeline from a, a part standpoint, from a component standpoint.

Forrest Smith:
And one of the things that’s been extremely helpful for us is being able to take these hundred thousand dollar laser devices that are built for medical use and design them around parts that are now becoming more commonly, commonly available. And so, as an example, I think I mentioned earlier, the, the vessel parts, the, the vertical cavity surface [inaudible 00:15:07], laser parts that are because of things like cell phones, where you, you are starting to see infrared lights be used with sensors to be able to take better pictures in the dark, because of things like LIDAR with autonomous cars, there’s been a, an increase in the adoption of these type of parts and the development funds and, and teams that have gone into the, the amount of funding and the level of experts that have actually been addressing these parts and also the amount of production that has been ramped up around them have really driven down the cost of adoption for these type of parts.

Forrest Smith:
And so we we’ve been able to leverage a lot of these supply chain benefits to be able to build a home use device, that wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago, and build it around a spec that’s again, something that you would see in, in a, in a professional sports clinic. So that’s been our goal is to deliver something that’s a clinical level device, and we’ve, we’ve never really wavered from that because it’s great having, having some of these LED devices where you have red light therapy and you’ll, you’ll see a lot of them out there in the market from a consumer standpoint is good. It’s better than doing nothing, but what our goal is, is to be able to deliver what’s optimal. And when you don’t need to be a professional sports athlete to, to have that, that kind of treatment right now, you can actually do that in your home. It just took a lot of engineering and, and some lucky supply chain timing from our side.

Tom Sanderson:
Could I add something just briefly to that as well Roy?

Roy Morejon:
Of course.

Tom Sanderson:
So you mentioned it as well, one of the great things about putting this team together that we have done is that everything that Forrest has said that is and Forrest, there’s, there’s over 500 clinical trials on light therapy and the positive impacts on the knee and other body joints and things and Forrest summarized it there quite well but there’s obviously a lot of layers to this and people, sometimes people, we’ve spoken to people, many people who’ve been suffering with knee pain for sometimes decades, multiple decades, and they’ve tried a lot of different things. And so with, would the ability to work with Max, my brother, in terms of filmmaking, in terms of storytelling, one of our big differentiators as well is that we really want to build a stronger passionate community that help each other, that we can actually take everything that Forrest has just said and put it into bite size videos, documents, even an app that we’re developing with the Knee Plus and it will be a free app with the Knee Plus. And by way of that, we can actually educate the community.

Tom Sanderson:
The community can become empowered themselves and then actually help each other. So we’ve got quite a lot of depth that we’re bringing to this, and we’re bringing both the business and the tech together, so that it’s not just a tech product that hasn’t just fizzles around an industry. It’s actually making an impact and empowering people to change their own life.

Roy Morejon:
Yeah, I mean, in terms of speaking about impact and bringing this product to market, let’s dive into the crowdfunding side and I know while we’re recording this, the campaign hasn’t launched yet, it launches in three days while we’re recording this, but it’ll definitely be active once this podcast goes live, so let’s talk a little bit about your experience with crowd funding so far, the prep work, and what made you guys decide that crowdfunding was the right method to launch this innovation with.

Tom Sanderson:
Right. Maybe I’ll start with this one first, if that’s okay.

Forrest Smith:
Sure.

Tom Sanderson:
So the idea started that we wanted to bring this product to market or a product to market, as we’ve mentioned and then obviously you need to decide how to do that. We were introduced to, to crowdfunding and also to yourself by, by a mutual friend of ours who actually, we did some videos for about 10 years ago, eight years ago, who launched on crowd funding and they went on to create the company into China, which is Nick and his team over there. And it was Nick that introduced us to you Roy as well, and the great team over at Enventys that you’ve got there running and so the, the, as a process, this crowdfunding process is absolutely fantastic. It’s been a real blessing to work with really good people to set it up.

Tom Sanderson:
But if we just talk about the formula for crowd funding, it’s absolutely ideal for somebody like goes to launch on, we get to build the concepts of the product, we have decided to run prototypes, but you do not need to run prototypes to have a successful campaign. It means that we can actually communicate with our target audience and actually validate the product, validate the price, validate the small details, like color size price points, and so when we launch on crowdfunding within a capacity to be able to create our community on day one, engage with that community, and then when we’ve actually completed the crowd funding, we have a community, we have a, or the be a lower amount of cash, we have amount of cash, which means that we can do our tooling, we can do all the product development, and we can actually deliver a quality product off the bat directly to a community and continue to engage them on either iterations of that product in the future, or new product relation releases. And we have a product pipeline of new ideas that are coming through, and we will, we plan to do all our product, major product releases through crowdfunding it such a fantastic formula.

Roy Morejon:
Amazing.

Forrest Smith:
And I think just a tag on the end of that, the, the two main things that drove us to making the decision around crowdfunding were community and product market fit. And I think both of those are super important to understand if we, if we had our idea of bringing a clinical level product to a home use device, and nobody wanted that, and no one found a value for it, then its a great idea, but it needs to go on a junk pile. But what we’ve found is by conducting user interviews and engaging with people around the product and the problems that they have, we found that actually there’s a, there’s an amazing product market for this, that this is something that people really need. And again, they’re, they’re treating their pain with right now solutions that don’t get them out of the pain long-term, that they’re kind of numbing the pain versus actually treating the underlying causes for the pain.

Forrest Smith:
And they’re excited when you can give them an opportunity to be able to come back and, and take a quality of life increase by taking ownership of their own problems and being able to heal these problems longer term, being able to regrow cartilage is, is super exciting for people.

Forrest Smith:
And so that, that was a, you know, that, that product market fit and understanding that that people would actually take this on and use it and build it into their daily habits was super powerful for us. And, and then building a community of people around them. So interacting with those, those people in a meaningful way. And it, it sounds, it sounds a little cheesy, but I, trying to find what people’s journey was and benefit them in their quality of life in the most meaningful way has really guided a lot of our product development and our, our messaging for how we’re going about this.

Forrest Smith:
And I think we would have not found those, those same product market fit pieces without the crowdfunding model. I think it’s something that’s very unique to crowdfunding and how you interact with an early adopter group, because there, again, you, you find these people who are so excited about improving, and in our case, we found kind of a bio hacking and, and a personal improvement group. And again, people who have a long standing chronic pain that you can help them with it’s just extremely gratifying from a product development and launch standpoint, to be able to engage with those people.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. Well, you’ve queued me up well for us to enter us into the launch round where you drew the short straw and you’ll be answering my rapid fire questions. So Forrest, are you good to go?

Forrest Smith:
I am good to go.

Roy Morejon:
Let’s do this. So, what inspired you to be an entrepreneur?

Forrest Smith:
Originally, necessity. I, I moved to China when I was 20. I moved out of an interest in the Chinese language, and I spent some time working there as a, as a teacher to just support myself. But I found very quickly that I’m not cut out to be a teacher. And I, I, I built my first company when I was 20 to 21, based around the necessity for me getting out of that situation of just kind of being hand to mouth as a, as an English teacher in China. And it, it grew and I ended up exiting that company and doing well with it and continuing on with the entrepreneur life.

Roy Morejon:
Beautiful. So if you could meet with any entrepreneur throughout history, who would it be?

Forrest Smith:
I think Thomas Edison, they, they, he built a structure for innovation, and I know he’s not as well-regarded as say Tesla these days, but he built a structure for innovation and the, the number of patents, and the number of, of people that he inspired. And, and the, the scale of what he did is, is happened very rarely in history and Silicon Valley and kind of the startup of Silicon valley as a, a, a callback to it these days, but I think going back to understand what his views were and his views, his motivation, and his, his methodology for building that at that time, when it wasn’t really kind of a part of a cultural foundation at the time, it would be extremely interesting to talk to him about that.

Roy Morejon:
So what would have been your first question for him?

Forrest Smith:
What do you use for motivation? He’s a, he was an extremely hardworking man and did long hours for years and years and years on end. And it drove a ton of his, his, his, his success. And again, the scale of that really spoke well to his, the choices he made in, in building it. But how, how do you get yourself to work those massively long hours for, for years on end? Is, there’s a inherent motivation in that, and it’d be [inaudible 00:24:45] to be able to tap into it.

Roy Morejon:
Nice. What book would you recommend to our entrepreneurial listeners?

Forrest Smith:
It’s mildly entrepreneurially connected, but the, the Wealth and Poverty of Nations is there’s, there was the old book, the Wealth of Nations. There’s a, a, probably, I’d say roughly 10 year old book now called the Wealth and Poverty of Nations, which kind of goes into the externalities of what’s developed the, the world as it exists economically. And yeah, it’s, it’s informed a lot of my, my structural view to how, how the world sits, how the world stands now, and extremely useful book.

Roy Morejon:
Nice. What do you think would be the top three skills that every entrepreneur needs to be successful?

Forrest Smith:
I think the, the main one is perseverance. I think it’s hard to, it’s hard to get through any product launch is hard to get through any company launch, if you don’t have patience and perseverance and how to execute on that. But following up with that, the habits, the ability to build a strong habits when you can make something once it’s great, but the, the repeatability and the processization of, of what inspires you or what helps you bring, bring that scale to, to market for any product is super valuable. And so, yeah, perseverance and, and habits, and I think an ability to take a top-down look as well. One, one other thing that would be extremely useful for everyone is, is actually one of my advisors or mentors told me when I was younger is the rising tide floats all the boats. So if you can, if you can select the right market segment, that you can select the right product segments and, and float your boat by way of, by way of the, the larger trend that’s going, then it’s going to make life easier for you as well.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. So what’s one invention that’s made your life easier during this pandemic?

Forrest Smith:
Headphones that block out sounds so, so the, and actually just that, that was even pre-pandemic, but, but more so with the pandemic, because you will find yourself working in a number of different places outside of the office and being able to kind of block out the outside world and focus in on what you’re doing is super useful.

Roy Morejon:
All right. Last question Forrest, and I know the campaign hasn’t launched yet, but still very interested to hear your insights, and what does the future of crowdfunding look like?

Forrest Smith:
To be honest, we’re going to be asking you the same question, but I think my personal view for it is that it’s going to be interesting to see what happens with the equity crowdfunding space in how, how capital, one space that’s always seemed underserved to me as an entrepreneur is the raising capital. Anytime that you’re getting started is a big gap. You typically lean on friends and family, and that’s a really inefficient systemic way of addressing that need and having a way to pull funds in early into campaigns or into, into small businesses is super value system, super-valuable systemically, and we don’t really see that right now. And I think crowdfunding is an excellent solution for it. So being that, that kind of equity and, and even debt crowdfunding, being able to fund smaller businesses in a more systemic systemically impactful way, I think is a huge step forward. So it’d be interesting to see what happens with that space.

Roy Morejon:
Absolutely. Well, gentlemen, this has been amazing, Tom, this is your chance to give our, give the pitch, tell people what you’re all about, where people should go and why they should check you out.

Tom Sanderson:
Well, just first of all, thank you, Roy. This has been a great chance to just catch up and speak with yourself and just want to say a big shout out to you and all your team that do fantastic work for all these campaigns you launch. I don’t know how many a month, but I know your team’s extremely busy. So thank you for all the hard work that you’ve put in for the company [inaudible 00:28:36]. Listen guys, this is Reviiv Knee Plus, we are here to help you get back into action, get back to doing what you love, get back out running on the beaches with your children, with your grandchildren, get back on the ski slopes, get back in that sailing boat, or just even down to, down to the shops taking a walk without the knee pain, without that pain in your body that you’ve lived with for years, maybe even decades. So come and join us, support us, come and get part of the community coming back as sharing this amazing opportunity and start using this new technology and this great product.

Roy Morejon:
Amazing. Well, thank you gentlemen, for being on the show and all that you do. Audience, thanks again for tuning in, make sure to visit artofthekickstart.com for the notes, the transcript, links to the campaign over on Indiegogo, and everything else we talked about today.

Roy Morejon:
And of course I got to thank our crowdfunding podcast, sponsors at gadget flow and product type.

Roy Morejon:
Forrest, Tom, thank you so much for joining us today on Art of the Kickstart.

Forrest Smith:
Absolutely fantastic to be here. Thank you, Roy.

Roy Morejon:
Thanks for tuning into another amazing episode of Art of the Kickstart, the show about building a better business world and life with crowdfunding. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, show us some love by giving us a great rating on your favorite listening station. And of course, make sure to visit art of the kickstart.com for all the previous episodes. And if you need some help, that’s what we’re here for. Make sure to send me an email to info@artofthekickstart.com. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll see you on the next episode.