Changing The Lives of Babies Forever | Vee Langer (BBy)
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Podcast Notes
Wyndly lets you live life without allergies: https://www.wyndly.com
Vee Langer, Founder of BBy, joins Aakash to discuss how he is revolutionizing the way hospitals manage, store, and administer breast milk to our most vulnerable humans. Vee Langer started off this business being in debt after going to medical school. He saw how that there was an overwhelming amount of babies being formula fed and getting preventable diseases and wanted to develop a way to prevent this.
BBy: BBYmilk.com
My Website: https://www.aakash.io
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mraakashshah/
Twitter: @aakashdotio [https://twitter.com/aakashdotio]
Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@wyndlyteam?lang=en
Music: Syn Cole - Gizmo [NCS Release] provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Produced by Thomas Troy
Autogenerated Transcript
[00:00:00] Aakash Shah: Hi there I'm Aakash, founder of Wyndly, where we fix allergies for life. This is Founders and Builders, where I talk to people who are working hard to bring something new and meaningful into this world.
[00:00:13] Aakash Shah: Hello, everybody. Today, I'm speaking with Vee Langer. He is doing something that I didn't even know was possible, and he's literally changing the lives of babies. I'm so excited because when I talk to Vee I always leave more energized and more interested in whatever problem he's acting on that day. Vee, introduce yourself, please.
[00:00:42] Vee Langer: I'm Dr. Vee Langer I'm founder of BBy and we make machines that turn breast milk into powder at save countless hours a day in the hospital and hopefully one day will disrupt the entire baby formula industry.
[00:00:57] Aakash Shah: That's just like such an audacious claim and I love it because that's what we have to do as founders. Right? We want to change the world. Talk to me about how you discovered that the infant formula industry was broken and needed to be disrupted.
[00:01:12] Vee Langer: I got my start back in 2015, I had recently graduated medical school. I started my residency and everything, and I was in the hospital and I just kind of saw the overwhelming amount of sick infants that were all formula fed and getting infections that were completely preventable had they been breast fed and it wasn't really the fault of the mother. Sometimes obviously there are issues where moms can't produce for whatever reason whether they have access issues or what have you, or they're adopted.And that's a shame, but a lot of the times people were being told not to breastfeed because formula's available. We initially started to look at this as a way to help people get more breast milk, but it quickly changed when I actually met my partner, Dr. Blanco Gogo. By reading one of her papers she had published an exploratory paper way back when, and it was on theoretical ways of actually condensing breast milk into powder while maintaining all of its bioactivity. People ask me all the time, like, I see powdered milk. I see Powdered foods and stuff. What are you different? In foods, we want to make sure that we sterilize the product. That means that it's completely dead. There's no bacteria in it. There's no living organism in it. Makes perfect sense for food, but the whole point of breast milk is that it's active and it's alive. It's actually a part of our body so if we powder it and they just use traditional methods, we end up with a dead milk, which is no better than formula. So instead we started working on this method to work within the bio retentive zone, meaning that all of the bioactivity is retained in our powdering. We started doing that in 2016. I took a break from the hospital incorporated and we started bootstrapping and getting it all funded and six and a half years later, here we are.
[00:02:54] Aakash Shah: You were in the hospital, you saw that formula was being promoted without being as good as natural milk? Breast milk?
[00:03:03] Vee Langer: It was kind of twofold. The formula was being promoted by doctors because of its ease no denying that of course it's easier. But also in the NICU, in places where breast milk is actually used in the hospital for very ill infants or extremely early or premature infants that need every kind of advantage they can get, we did use donor milk and when we figured out that we could possibly condense milk and make it powdered, we realized that we could kind of meld the two forms together, the ease and access of formula and all of the nutritional and immunological benefits of the breast milk. It then started becoming a situation where we can save the hospital hours and hours and hours of time a day. I saw it firsthand in a NICU of 35 nurses about three to four of them per day. Their whole job is to just defrost milk. Like literally just sit there and watch it defrost so that the other 30 nurses can do their job. And that's 24 to 36 skilled labor hours just completely wasted per day. We went to the hospitals later, as we kind of perfected our system and said, "Hey, if we could reclaim those hours, what would you do with them? Would you get rid of jobs? Would you increase patient care?" and overwhelmingly, I know people don't believe this, but hospitals do like saving lives, so they actually said, "Yeah, we would dedicate our nurses back to patient care versus having them sit there and watch milk defrost," and you know, as a young resident, I remember the milk shift it's called the milk shift because the nurses just sit there all day and if you're a resident and you don't wanna do any work, or if you're a med student don't wanna do work, you go over there and you go talk to the nurses and you hang out with them while they're on Instagram. They're literally sitting there watching the milk dry. It's completely unnecessary. Instead we started creating the powdered form that has a simple bag and bag and mixer model. You simply add the powder and add the water. 30 seconds later, you have the milk, no need for this eight hour wasted shift.
[00:04:50] Aakash Shah: Well, it's not necessarily wasted. The milk needs to be watched, but you're saving so much time. I love that idea of the milk shift and you literally have to watch milk defrost. You identified that the milk shift was incredibly ineffecient. You identified that we could bring the benefits of breast milk to a convenient form factor like formula and then you just emailed a professor?
[00:05:17] Vee Langer: No, so she published a paper on the theoretical aspect of it being possible and I am an extreme nerd and hugely technical with my hands and have hardware.I emailed her with, I said a read of paper. I have access to a spray dryer, conventional means of powdering things and I said, if you kind of gimme your parameters, I'm sure I can build you something that might work.We started working together on it and we created the first device that actually created our very first yield, so low yield, but promising results and that's when I decided, you know, "Hey, we should work on this together. I'm gonna incorporate a company take some time off, try and see if we can get off the ground." Very initially she looked at me like I had seven heads cuz she was like, what? She lives in Mexico. I was in Chicago at the time. It was a whole mess of things and obviously it requires a ton of capital to even get something like that off the ground and I had none. I had medical loans. So instead we applied for our first actual accelerator quake capital in 2017 and got a little bit of seed funding to do that. And really just bootstrapped our entire way and by the methodology we created was, "Wow, let's buy and sell breast milk." So we actually created a marketplace for parents to buy and sell breast milk within a few cities, New York, Chicago, and then LA for a little while and that's kind of how we kept the lights on. That's how we kept it going because we hadn't raised over a million dollars until like year six. It took forever to actually convince people that, "Hey, this is something worth funding. If you know anything about VCs, they all claim to really love interesting or weird tech and stuff like that but at the end of the day, they look at it and they go, "I don't know, breast milk. That's weird. I don't know. That's weird," and then they don't wanna fund it unless they've heard five or 600 nos before we finally started getting some traction on that side.
[00:07:08] Aakash Shah: That number makes sense. We got 300 nos before we got our first yes. The fact that you hit 600 is twice as many. That's commitment, man. You emailed the person that wrote the article, you were like, "Hey, I think we can do this!" Maybe it wasn't exactly that casual, but it reminds me of- so interesting how it can start from the smallest of ways. Brian Chesky, I believe, one of the Airbnb founders. stepped down earlier this year and another one of the founders posted on Twitter, the first email and it was just like, "Hey, I think we can make money selling air beds during, South by Southwest," and I'm like, it's the smallest thing. Sometimes it's just small step. So you guys prototyped and you did all the testing to make sure that the product worked and I assume that it was safe and healthy. It sounds like then you had to run a parallel process of the medical device, but also on funding on creating revenue and creating this marketplace.
[00:08:11] Vee Langer: The way our structure was for a long time is a Blanca's lab was in University of Guadalajara in Mexico and I was over here in New York. I worked out with the university, a lab share program where I paid for her lab time whenever she was working on baby stuff. Obviously she was tenured professor, so she taught classes and stuff like that too and in the meantime, we had a huge facility here in Brooklyn. That was a milk sorting plant. Essentially people would send their milk to us all the time. We'd pasteurize it in bulk and we'd package it and send it back out so we were running a consumer product that wasn't really our end goal to fund the fact that we were actually doing a heavily scientific process in another country. It was extremely frustrating and extremely anxiety inducing. Doing a two-sided marketplace is some of the worst ideas you could have when it comes to actually sending the product out. If you're just the middleman cording things, that's great but if the product's coming to you and then you're sending it back out especially with something as fragile as breast milk, I would say about 15 to 20% of the milk we got from moms in the mail just didn't use our box properly and I thought, " I created this really cool box that is reusable, that has an air to air cool and exchanger and it stays frozen for 72 hours and it's really great and I was like, "Oh, all you have to do is push a big red button on it and it stays working and half the time the mom would forget to push the button and we'd just get spoiled milk in the mail and we'd be like, "Well, okay. We can't sell this," and we're running this razor thin margin. We're not making any money because we have to give so much money to do clinical trials and get our device happy and ready. People always say " You've been around a long time. If you're gonna give something to an infant, you better damn well be ready to show everyone that it's.
[00:09:54] Aakash Shah: I mean, this is medicine, right? This isn't a Uber clone, which is just like routing cars, right? You're dealing with incredibly delicate product. You're doing something novel to it and then your end user is babies, which are already not feeling so hot because they're in the NICU, right?
[00:10:14] Vee Langer: Or they're at home and they're being fed if we were selling it. We used to get jokes all the time, calling our company boomer and I'm like, okay, easy, easy.
[00:10:21] Aakash Shah: That's kind of awesome though.
[00:10:23] Vee Langer: People used to call us boomer all the time and I used to be like, yeah, you know, the only difference is if your driver cancels a ride for you, no big deal you order another one. If your milk delivery doesn't arrive on time. Ah, your baby doesn't eat for a day. It's a really big difference.
[00:10:36] Aakash Shah: Yeah, it's massive.We couldn't trust any third party logistics after a while, we ended up doing all of it ourselves and then just handing it off directly to FedEx. I was so happy to leave supply side when we finally entered the hospital scene and we were just doing actual hospital based condensing and then as the masochist that I am, we decided our tech is very mature and if we really wanna make this thing impactful, let's, re-enter the consumer side and let's actually sell milk. I guess being a founder is also being a glutton for pain at some point, because that's the only way to do these type of things.
[00:11:07] Vee Langer: Yeah, we're, currently managing that three PL. The people you work with to get your product into the hands of your end users. It is impossible to trust anyone to deliver an experience that is worthy because they're used to shipping t-shirts and here you and I have literal medicine that goes into people's bodies.
[00:11:28] Vee Langer: Like on a biweekly basis, we use a cold trucking service to pick up milk from hospitals and then bring it back to our facility and then bring back powder. So on the one hand, it has to be time sensitive on the powder side. It could take as long as it wants in theory, because it's shelf stable now and you'd be surprised at how often I'm just yelling on the phone at this company, because like they do a good job to a point, and then there's always some issue and short of owning your own trucks and stuff, you know, like we're not Amazon, we can't own our own trucks and create our own logistic service. That's crazy. You are dependent on these type of things to some degree.
[00:12:00] Aakash Shah: How much of the hard work in, what you did was in doing something novel versus just operational complexity?
[00:12:08] Aakash Shah: Delivering things that need to stay cold is kind of a solved problem, but it's solved with a ton of labor involved, right?
[00:12:15] Vee Langer: We're perfectionist and you can't be a perfectionist when you run a startup because nothing's perfect, but you do iterate upon things and make more revisions and stuff until the point where you feel that somebody that doesn't know how to use your product could come in and use it and that's never the case of course but you try and we now have five locations around the United States where we process milk for different hospitals and we've trained just regular college grads and stuff that just want a job and within two days they know everything, how to use it. When it comes to the logistics of actually getting everything and keeping the world on time, there's a million variables that create all the problems we have. Like we're always on time because we only have one op, we have one logistical variable milk goes in, powder comes out. The entire overarching world around how milk gets back to location. That drives me insane. That's nothing we can do about.
[00:13:06] Aakash Shah: The new thing that you do, you're great at and then the value delivery chain, the moment it goes outside of your hands is where all the problems come in. I agree. A thousand percent.
[00:13:16] Vee Langer: We're constantly apologizing to hospitals. and they're like, well, the tech's here now, I can't make a rider do something better. I can't make FedEx be on time. I know that's their slogan, but like, I can't do that.I totally agree. You know, sidebar, this is why I know my next round is gonna be software, man.
[00:13:33] If I was a better coder, I would just figured what's where ends for for me.
[00:13:36] Well, that's the great part, right? You just pre-sell to a heart to sell to market, and then you can hire the coders.
[00:13:42] We'll do it together.
[00:13:43] Aakash Shah: You've already sold into a very difficult to sell to market. How was that first hospital partnership? How did that conversation even start?
[00:13:51] Vee Langer: So that was our craftiness getting that one. I think, you know, everyone says I didn't have sales people until this year and by this year, I mean, July. So about five weeks now. We were buying milk from moms and selling milk to parents and I knew we were making this device for the hospital. We were probably two, three years out from really being able to really do anything with it, so just decided, you know, well, first of all, we have to make sure our milk is safe. The moms have to be tested to make sure that the milk is not disease. There's nothing in it. Even though we do all of our testing on the back end, it helps if you know that the source
[00:14:26] Aakash Shah: Test the source.
[00:14:27] Vee Langer: The FDA, along with the milk bank associations have decreed every 12 months you have to get tested and in my opinion, that's not long enough. That's too long because you could get tested in January. You get sick in, in may, and then suddenly the rest of the year, you are giving some babies, some potentially life threatening milk. We decided it was gonna be every 30 days that that ended up becoming 45 days. But what we did was forced all the parents to do it, whether for the buying parents, we just forced them to sign off from their doctor saying they're healthy enough to do it, even though they don't need that at all and for the moms, we had them get a blood test every 45 days. We're in certain markets New York, Chicago, LA you know, Dallas we're in some markets. There's bound to be some overlap between the doctors that all these parents see and we had probably 10,000 members at this point. So we're like they have to have some overlap and they're gonna keep seeing the same forum they have to sign every month and then hopefully they sign a couple hundred of them. And one of them gets really confused and goes, "What the heck is this?" and gives us a call. And that's exactly what happened cuz in my very rational brain, which is not rational at all, I just couldn't see a world where I walked into a hospital and this is Pre-COVID mind you. I could just come to a hospital and be like, "Hey, have breast milk powder. I wanna sell it to you guys." I just never saw a world where the, hospital's gonna look at that and be like, " Yeah, that's legit," and then come COVID like, you can't even walk into a hospital without an appointment or without some actual-
[00:15:51] Aakash Shah: No one in the hospital has time to talk to you.
[00:15:53] Vee Langer: Yeah, but that, and some general reason to be there. One doctor's gonna call us. His name's Dr. Reddy. He called and was like, "Whoa, what is this? Like, what are you doing?" and then I was like, "Hey this is how we are operating. This is our tech. If you're a hospital, your community can come. We'll do some lactation consulting. We'll talk about breastfeeding and, you know, we'll have all different doctors and nurses and lactation consultants come. We'll make a night of it while I'm there. I'd love to show you our research and what we're working on." They became our first test, which then became our first pilot and then we just said "Can you recommend us to another hospital?" and then from there now we're at our 635K a month doing that kind of process.
[00:16:27] Aakash Shah: That right there is incredible. You recognize that selling into hospital systems is effectively impossible unless you already have the connections, you already know somebody and at that point you're effectively saying like, let me hire a salesperson that already is friends with everyone.
[00:16:44] Vee Langer: Exactly.
[00:16:45] Aakash Shah: You know that you're saying, Hey, let me take on a huge cost without knowing.
[00:16:49] Vee Langer: They're surprisingly expensive. They do good jobs but they had demands and they could back it up.
[00:16:53] Aakash Shah: Yeah. They know they're worth. You effectively went viral for these pediatric baby doctors.
[00:17:00] Vee Langer: There's only so many in any given area, you know?
[00:17:04] We're both Indian. Every person we know is a doctor in New York. Every one of them is, but even within that and even in the pediatric space. In the neonatology space where the doctor's gonna be signing off on infants, there's like two per hospital. So it comes down to the fact that if there's two per hospital and there are 116 hospitals in New York city, there's 240 or 250 of these people total in the entire five boroughs. So at some point you're gonna find overlap and you just have to.
[00:17:33] Aakash Shah: You launched a two-sided marketplace to enable your product so that you could get onto the map for these large partnerships. That is a lot of hard work but also it makes sense because I think one thing that I've seen a lot in consumer healthcare right now is if the end user is asking for it, the more traditional healthcare system, inevitably adapts.
[00:17:57] Vee Langer: Exactly.
[00:17:57] Aakash Shah: So you're creating a ground swell that had to be reacted to.
[00:18:01] We talk about Tell Digital Health and everything. As long as there's demand at the end of the day, the hospitals work for the patients, even though the overall goal is to save lives, it's still capitalism here. You know, like they still have to do the things that people want and even though it's kind of modified themselves, they don't have to ultimate make money beyond all reproach. They have to save lives, they still have to do it and it's especially prudent when it comes to private practices because those people exist purely for the will of their patients.
[00:18:29] Aakash Shah: It's almost like in this probably positive way. You can skirt around the traditional gatekeepers of insurance and folks like that.Let's go one step down. How did you bootstrap a breast milk powderizing service? Like how did you find the first mom that was like, yeah, I'll do this or you were buying breast milk it sounds like, so sure. You could buy breast milk. I'm sure there is someone out there that is selling breast milk.
[00:19:00] To this very day, I remember her name and everything. Her name was Crystal and she was in White Leaf, Michigan or Sugar Leaf, Michigan. It was just north of South Bend, Indiana. That was the first person to ever contact us. What we did was we wrote an app and the app was basically, in its first iteration.
[00:19:19] Vee Langer: It was designed to be like an Uber and Tinder hybrid, where you are matched to a mother. You input the amount of ounces you need to buy, and you are matched to a mother within your local area that has the amount of ounces to buy. You prepay for the milk and we hold it in escrow, like on our Stripe account, and then you guys have a chat like a Tinder chat. You arrange a time to meet and we give you a location and we used the local post office. You meet cuz it's a public place and it's safe and then once the transaction's done you push complete and then the money minus our fee was then transferred to the mom that sold it to you. So that was our original. Massive failure. Massive.
[00:19:58] Aakash Shah: How much time did you spend building that app?
[00:19:59] Vee Langer: I I wrote that app along with the third party partners that we did probably three and a half months. Like just straight up. 10, 12 hours a day.
[00:20:08] Aakash Shah: If you, were to do it again, would you have started with an app? Like knowing what you know now, is that how you would've de-risked this idea?
[00:20:14] Vee Langer: No. First of all the thing that everyone forgets about apps are that when it's live on the app store or live on the Google play store, it goes everywhere. Like even there's no restriction to download it. Sometimes there's device restrictions, but it's everywhere. I just mentioned our very first mom that wanted to sell us milk, her name was Crystal in Michigan.
[00:20:31] Aakash Shah: You guys weren't in Michigan.
[00:20:32] Vee Langer: Like middle of nowhere, Michigan. Like where the lower peninsula starts to go up to the upper peninsula and I was like, "I'm so sorry. We don't have anyone that could buy your milk over there because population density, like why would I have that?" but then I started thinking about it and I was like, you know what, though? I will come to you and I will buy her milk. And she said, "What do you mean?" I was like, "Well, we always need milk here and on top of that, we always needed research milk anyway." So I was like we will either figure out a way to sell this, or we'll figure out a way to utilize this. To create the device and I flew to south in Indiana. I rented a car. I drove up, got the milk, literally in travel coolers and she had a lot. She had like 2000 ounces at the time. You know, the grand scheme of things, not a lot, but like to travel with, that's like, 150 pounds of milk.
[00:21:15] Aakash Shah: That PSA doesn't necessarily allow that much to be
[00:21:20] Vee Langer: The TSA in the Southbend Indiana airport. Very friendly people. They have maybe six people going out of that airport. I had a duffle bag of milk and I had a cooler that I checked in full of milk. I put the duffle bag through the TSA and they're like, "So what's in this?" and I go, "Oh, you won't believe it. It's breast milk." and they open it and they see all the Landino packets, like little frozen bags of milk and they go. "Why?" So do I sit here and explain why I'm doing this or do I just go, "I have a baby," and like,' Well, you know, my kid needed milk and I got it from my mom and they're like, "Oh, okay!" I just kept going and then we get it back and we put it in the freezer and now we're like, "What do we do with all his milk? We gotta use it somehow," and a mom in New York contacted us and was like, "Hi, I'm trying to get milk, but no one's matching with me." and I go, "Well, you're in luck. We got some milk." and we decided very quickly that matching two people to try and make milk sales happen is impossible but we can buy the milk from anybody if we want, if we're willing to go pick it up or ship it to us and then we can sell it and that's how version two very quickly happened in 2017. It happened about six weeks after version one.
[00:22:36] Aakash Shah: Three and a half weeks of building the app, six weeks to turn into the reality.
[00:22:41] Vee Langer: It was like 14 weeks of building an app and then six weeks of being like scrap all of it. Let's change everything and turn it into what it should be and then we went on a crazy hiring spree, which is like this dumbest than you can do. When you've raised $150,000 total, you really can't hire anybody, but you do it.
[00:23:00] Aakash Shah: Very nice.
[00:23:00] Vee Langer: I haven't thought about these memories, Aakash in like probably five or six years.
[00:23:05] The sheer hustle that you have to do, but this is what I love, cuz like that is the heart. Right? What we're discovering here is like this is how you change the world by doing things that are absolutely bonkers by telling the TSA that, Hey, I just need to take this 2000 ounces of breast milk. I gotta fly to New York with it guys.
[00:23:26] Vee Langer: You know what we ended up doing? Until like every time we didn't wanna pay for check bag fees because they add up. The weight limit is 50 pound but we would sometimes have a hundred, 200 pounds of milk to bring home. This is another little life hack. We got those human organ stickers, like for the people that bring hearts
[00:23:46] Aakash Shah: Yeah. Like the,
[00:23:46] Vee Langer: and we slap those on all of our coolers and then we would use obviously the bonded tape to close our thing up and we would check the bag in and be like, oh, "It's human organs." Technically it is right, like by like a very thin definition of what a human organ is. If the definition of blood is a, blood's a human organ. So I said, "Well, milk came out of this woman too. So it's human organ." and Delta would have to check our bag in with like extra fragile care every single time and put it in there and that's how we save check bag fees too. I'm just laughing now because I, ended up hiring 10 fresh outta NYU students and I said, "Look, I can pay you guys commission based. Like you get to fly, you pick up and you make some money every time and they would fly once a week to a new mom to pick up all this milk and bringing it back and that's how I built up our store and then thankfully by some random miraclesome accelerator, I don't think they exist anymore, but they asked if I would give a talk about it because they needed a speaker that day and someone from NYU happened to be watching and was like, "Oh, you wanna teach this class at NYU?" and I was like, "Well, I'm not a professor, but sure. I'll do a visiting adjunct ship or whatever." and I got an NYU email for like half a semester and I realized that NYU pays for internships, if you're a professor offering internship. So I was like, "Oh yeah, we're offering 50 internships." So all these kids came and they were getting paid by NYU and we were just flying 'em out every day for like six months and getting 'em back to the facility. So that's how we ended up getting our first employees without actually paying them. That was a really great way. Thanks NYU for that and finally they caught on, they're like, oh, you're not actually offering an internship. You're just making milk traffickers.
[00:25:26] Aakash Shah: Student internship, they're learning.
[00:25:28] Vee Langer: In their own way. Those are fun times, but those were the early days.
[00:25:32] Aakash Shah: There must have been such a high demand for buying breast milk or saving breast milk from new moms that they went through and they like discovered your app and then right cuz that's also relatively difficult to identify like they would've had to found your app, downloaded the app, tried matching, failed, and then emailed you like that is something someone really, really wanted it.
[00:25:59] Vee Langer: And that was shocking almost at first, but the only reason I knew that there was a huge demand for, it was another podcast back at the time.
[00:26:09] Aakash Shah: The power of podcasts.
[00:26:11] Vee Langer: It was a Gimlet media one and I'm forgetting the name of it. It was about the internet. I think it was called React?
[00:26:15] Aakash Shah: Reply all?
[00:26:16] Vee Langer: Yeah, that's the one. They contacted me cause they were doing an episode on Craigslist, milk sales. They didn't really cite me properly. We'll let that go but they asked a bunch of questions and that was like validating on the whole fact that this is the thing that needs to be done and that's when I learned about the back channels of how people got breast milk and I was like, "Oh, you know, we went this legit, but, this is horrifying that people like barter for milk with moms on Craigslist. Like, like there's no safety here. This is crazy," and so it kind of galvanized us to be like we have to keep doing what we're doing, but really the bigger thing that I think people always forget new moms weren't really the ones that really, really desperately needed our product, but adoptive parents really wanted it. Obviously, you know, as an adoptive parent, you don't have the ability to produce milk and especially in LGQBT families, there's clearly no way to do that and they were kind of our number one customer for a very long time because all of them wanted milk because we will recognize that it's the best way to, you know, raise your child and I think they had the money cuz clearly, you know, LGBQT families tend to be a little older, more settled if an adoption agency, you know, and this is just kind of a knock on the fact that this has kind the way the world works, they want more established families if they want adopt and they like that. So they had the money to spend on it and they became kind of our big customer, but the biggest problem that ended up happening is that our customer base rapidly outgrew our supply base and that was the ultimate downfall of why we stopped selling milk. We ended up having like a six or seven month wait list to get our product which we would end up telling people, Hey, please sign up early, please, please, please sign up early because if you sign up the day, your baby's born or the sign up the day, you get your baby. Your baby's gonna no longer need our product by the time we can offer the product. You have to sign up early and being myself, I'm a doctor, I took an oath and I said, "I'm never going to accept more people into our product than we have supplied for, because you're relying on me to feed your child." So that's a stance I don't take lightly like you're going to get all of your milk before anybody else gets added on. It became very stressful. There was just never enough supply and we're looking at it and we're looking at kind of how we're doing in the United States and we're mainly buying from surrogates at this point. We have a welled oiled machine. We work with the surrogate networks to kind of get the milk and we're thinking, we should be getting 15 to 25% of all available surrogate milk in the United States by this point and we're getting five to 10%. Why is that? It's not to say that we didn't really consider it, but like, you can't know these things until you actually do it. You think in your brain, I'm offering a thousand to $2,000 a month to these moms of free income for something that they're gonna throw away. Why wouldn't they accept it? Why wouldn't they want to do it? You know, free will's a thing and people just were like, yeah, we don't wanna do it. You know, or people would do it for six to 12 months and be like, "It sucks. I don't wanna do this." and obviously I can't breastfeed. I would never be able to be like, "No, you have to do it." Of course, I get how taxing that is, you know? And at some point the money doesn't matter or you can't pay someone enough to do something and that was really ultimately when we were like, okay, we have to get our product in the hospitals ASAP because we're not gonna survive at this rate or we're going to survive and just be a very wonderful small business that never really grows beyond this. And luckily 2020 rolled around and, you know, a big pandemic happened and suddenly no one wanted to buy milk from us for a month because they all thought I had COVID in it. And then, you know, suddenly they realized, well, actually babies have to eat. They're pandemic proof. They can't just not have it. We show a lot of patient education that our process denatured everything from HIV to Corona, to like Corona style, viral infections, et cetera and people came back, but that was enough of a six week panic gap that like, we're gonna go under that I absolutely drove doctors insane by trying to get into the hospital. A few established contacts I had made up to that point with our growth hack was pestering them like, "Hey, we'll do it for free. However, just get your nurses to recognize how awesome our product is so that they start demanding it," and we did it for free for like six months for a handful of them and finally that was enough to be like, okay, like we can't do it for free anymore. The hospital's like, no, no, no, you gotta do it. Well, this is the money. Like, this is how much it costs.
[00:30:41] Aakash Shah: Like come on guys.
[00:30:43] Vee Langer: That was simultaneously anxiety inducing, but also very exciting point because we were able to successfully transition between the two and ultimately phase out our marketplace kind of market our model.
[00:30:55] Aakash Shah: Right. Wow. That must have been quite a transformation. I suppose we've covered a lot. What would you tell the, I guess it was been six years ago now. Before you went on this journey, what would you tell that person? If you could go back and just have two minutes to speak with yourself?
[00:31:13] Don't get discouraged. But if I'm being completely honest with 'em, you know, maybe pick a different market. This is gonna be one that, it's your life's work and you're really fulfilled by it, but it's not gonna be easy and I think there is this kind of overarching mentality in kind of tech, startups and whatnot in general, that it's gonna be easy because oh yeah, yeah, this will happen. That'll happen. And you know, you'll just hit your milestones every time and there's always that one asshole entrepreneur that, you know, that everything works out easy for them, you know and you're just like, okay, fine. They got that and they close that round and they hit these milestones. Those KPIs are great, but they're the ones that crumble at the moment. Anything goes wrong and I've been around long enough now to see companies that have gotten to like B rounds. That were just completely drama free the entire way, the moment they hit any sort of adversary, they just fall apart and then I've seen companies that struggled for every single dollar up to their seed and are now a unicorn status. I have a couple of unicorn friends that have made it since then. So I would just say like, resiliency is key. When I went into it, I wasn't a hundred percent sure that this is what I really wanted to do. I mean, I just became a doctor and I was like, that's kind of what I'm gonna do, but I fell in love with the mission more than the product itself and then ultimately wanted to actually make this reality for people and if that's what ends up happening and I think that's absolutely what needs to happen if you're gonna actually make this jump into this world, then resiliency is the ultimate kind of trait that you need as an entrepreneur.
[00:32:45] Aakash Shah: I have nothing to add. That's exactly what I would tell myself if I went back two and a half years ago. Just heads down hustle like V and just make it happen, because if you're willing to work hard enough to make it happen, then it will inevitably happen.
[00:32:59] Vee Langer: I think that's a very great lesson to learn for anybody when it comes to resilience. We got down to our final $15 in our checking account one month. It's like, oh, okay. All our bills are paid for next month. Right? Okay. So we have 30 days to turn this around. That's what you got, you know, and that's how you can make it work. So when you think about it like that now I look at the problems we have and they're like, "Oh, I gotta yell at a vendor. Oh, I gotta like yell. I gotta like, figure this out. I gotta keep everyone line." It's like, these are small potatoes now. That was genuinely like, okay, our company's gonna lose its rent if we don't do this, like, we won't have a facility. Let's problem solve. Let's make it work and so those are two hugely different scenarios but you have to have those growing pains to really appreciate the fact that even though the problems are bigger on a grander scale, they're never as dire as they once were.
[00:33:44] Aakash Shah: I think that's a great way of putting it. That was beautiful. Where can people find you? What's your ask of the listener?
[00:33:51] Vee Langer: Our website is BBYmilk.com. We're on all your social media platforms that BBY cares. We'll be getting viewed by milk soon. We did our trademark match. So be on the lookout. It'll change and honestly, the only ask I have from everyone is continue to be advocates for breast milk over formula. I know that there's a reason why formula exists and I don't begrudge anyone for having to use it. But truly if you have the means to do it, if you can breastfeed or if you know someone that can that's on the fence, please, please, please remember that it's the ultimate nutrition for your child and there's no reason to even subject them to any sort of preventable injuries when our evolutionary goals have created a way for us to prevent that.
[00:34:33] Aakash Shah: I think that's a message that everyone can take home. Take care of your babies.
[00:34:37] Vee Langer: If you're a hospital CEO and listening to this, call us. We'll work it out.
[00:34:40] Aakash Shah: You never know. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next time. Vee.
[00:34:44] Vee Langer: Thank you so much, Aakash
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