Mike Feldstein Unveils Jaspr: Redefining Home Air Purifiers for Life-Changing Air Quality

my kid used to have four asthma attacks a week and now they have none or I used to have horrible seasonal allergies with a dog now I don't so I never expected we created it for wildfires we accidentally ended up being a medical product and now we're just a regular homeowner family allergies fires pollution in the cities number one people buy it is for sleep as a sleep product [Music] welcome to Super entrepreneurs podcast I'm your host Shahid danani today we have with us Mike felstein Mike is a CEO of Jasper he is a seasoned air quality expert and entrepreneur leveraging his experience in Wildlife restoration and air quality Consulting he founded Jasper to innovate in air Science and Technology Welcome to our show thanks thanks for having me my pleasure so is this something similar to HEPA hea is a standard that means that a filter captures uh up to a particle size of 99.97% uh at 0.3 Micron so hea is standard so there are um dozens of products that um hit that standard but yeah when you hear about a HEPA filter or HEPA purifier it's nothing more than a standard okay and so what have you done differently yeah so my background was in Wildfire flood and mold restoration and Remediation I was approaching this kind of from a industrial top down approach so before this when there would be fires floods like most of my entrepreneurial career was in responding to natural disasters so think California's on fire we set up Cali fire restoration when Houston had hurricane Harvey we set up Houston flood experts so we would my company then was called rapid group so we would quickly establish Brands to respond to natural disasters floods hurricanes earthquakes hail storms and I got to see firsthand how much Wildfire smoke was impacting people so when I saw it's quite staggering especially from California to British Columbia just how many days per year people have really toxic contaminated air so we when I got to we used like the air purifiers we used in mold and floods they look like photocopiers or subwoofers massive loud ugly machines and I before did you yeah we had a our hot tub flooded and it the whole house was just full of that water so they dried it out and then they they had to put those things in air scrubbers yeah these big boxes so you would you were happy to use that at post flood but you don't really want to leave that in your house for everyday life they're loud they're they're loud and they're ugly we after when we would clean up after wildfires and we would often get calls that like the baby would be back in the hospital somebody would be sick if we go back we would check the air quality and it's because after a big fight the air quality can stay poor for months it's just in the ambient environment so you clean the whole inside the outdoor air comes back inside the house and recontaminate everything we would leave these big air scrubbers at the customer homes for a couple months I'm like you know what it'd be a lot more affordable for me to just go to Best Buy or Home Depot and buy them four or five small air purifiers to keep the air quality clean and it wasn't doing the trick at all from a think about CFM horsepower so our big air scrubbers were like 700 800 CFM and a Dyson is like 87 so the analogy I like to use is most residential air purifiers are like trying to heat a bathtub with a kettle so like a kettle is awesome at heating water for tea not for a bath if you keep using your Kettle to heat the bath the water's going to cool down faster than you can heat it up when I got to see that I'm like okay this is a problem I I was shocked to find out how uneffective consumer air purifier is worth I wanted to create something that was large because it you need you need a certain amount of size to be effective so I wanted it to be pretty like a Dyson quiet like a Tesla and Powerful like an industrial air scrubber so it's hard to tell but these things aren't small it's a fairly good size I don't know if you use video or Audio Only but audio okay so yeah it's a pretty large size unit but it needs to be large if it's not large it's like you can't create uh you can't tow your boat with a golf cart no matter what battery and motor you put in there you need a truck we were using like the analogy I use is like in restoration flood fire work these were pickup trucks and the Dyson's like a golf cart and the market needed a luxury SUV that can take the kids hold the storage and look good doing it and that was that problem that we wanted to solve yeah and what about the noise because there's an obvious reason why I guess the noise is present with some of these big um fans so how did you take care of the noise so that's because that's in a post disaster situation you you want to optimize for air cleaning and noise pollution is not a big consideration for that short period of time if I don't know if you ever seen those big ass fans at an airport or a gym they're like these huge ceiling fans and they're silent it's because if if you think about a car on first gear it's very loud on fifth or sixth gear it's much quieter so by having large fan blades you can actually move more air quietly so by increasing the size of the product it can operate silently so like right now it's running we can't hear anything it's completely silent if though we start cooking or if there's Wildfire smoke or something causes it to spike it'll go up to a a reasonable noise get the air cleaned and then automatically come back to a quiet setting but basically the key to making it quiet is to make it large if you have a small fan in your bedroom you need it to be on full speed in order for it to do anything but yeah the bigger it is the quieter it can run good so the early sorry go ahead no go ahead no all you so the early stages of Jasper can you share some key challenges that you face creating this purifier so I was always in service companies I had done yeah Marketing in my early 20s and then I had spent several years in Disaster Response restoration a random turn and I I call the restoration money sad money because it was unfortunate that we would clean these homes and then it would be recontaminated the next week so you're getting money but you weren't solving a real problem and I wanted to be able to what I loved about that business in my 20s the rapid group was I spent most of my 20s in Thailand Costa Rica Switzerland I was traveling constantly and then a big catastrophic event would happen I would fly in set up the landing page set up the website and I had a really good process to hire local contractors get the jobs manage the jobs this was great for my 20s when I could leave for three four five months at a time got kids now so I wanted the original vision for josper was to to run the same Playbook but only operate during Wildfire season so I figured let me use the cash that I had piled up from disaster ERS stock a lot of inventory so I created Jasper specifically for Wildfire smoke so I thought it would be a West Coast product you'd keep it in your house when there's that toxic smoke 30 40 50 days a year it would step in I was planning on launching summer 20120 and I had spent a few years developing it I mostly toured Asia and because Asia has way worse air and way more air awareness so in in in Asia they have air purifier stores in the mall for example like when I go to meet the a banker in Asia and I say Asia broadly because I saw this in Thailand Malaysia China like they had an air purifier in every single room most a lot of restaurants had them offices had them they they are further along just like in North America most offices most homes we filter our water but we don't filter our Air Asia is ahead in that space so I wanted to go find the best air purifiers in the world and I tested about 25 different machines from different factories and I the the effective ones were either loud or ugly so I was I had to find the best of both worlds so the the process of figuring it out was just finding factories ordering them testing them rigorously and they had to be good build quality Factory to have good communication silent aesthetic and I would run them full blast for a few months sometimes things don't crap out for a month or two you don't really know what you got until you have it running for a certain period of time and so the challenges were finding something that was effective and looked good and was quiet so that wasn't readily avilable out of the box so we had to get creative and I I found industrial designers and Engineers off of upwork so I was able to be me plus use freelance designers and then vet out find existing factories test their Flagship models and then I worked with the best Factory I could find to then make something a lot more beautiful a lot quiet a lot smarter but the funny thing is I was prepared to launch this is crazy we were prepared to launch at the price point of about $7.99 the costs are a little over $400 to make these things so I figured we'll be like printer and printer Inc you'll get the subscribers and it'll be as affordable as possible and then Co happened and a friend of mine named Jason Tam in Ontario goes we were it was may we are going to launch for Wildfire season and he's dude you have to launch today I'm like what do you mean he goes they just mandated every dentist in Ontario needs an air purifier in every single room to to reopen their doors so I just threw up the site quick times one pager didn't have I didn't have e-commerce functionality or anything all live chat and we did $500,000 in our first week closer to a million so and we launched at the price point of 1975 because our closest competitor was $2,100 for a ve a machine that we are actually Superior to and he goes dude if you launch at a thousand or less no dentist is going to buy your machine so I launched at the at with the domain Jasper medical.com because honestly we had no reviews we had no customers so I like to joke if you put Medical on the end of your name it's like putting a lab coat on your domain so I did no fake reviews I did none of that stuff just the but the high price point and the word medical is all we needed and I just had a comparison chart on US versus the $2100 model which we were a lot prettier then we were much more effective they were priced in that market because they were medical and it was amazing to see the medical industry is used to paying a medical price and if you don't charge them a high price they don't even give you the time of day and this was weird and unfortunate and backwards to what I was thinking but because our first thousand customers during covid we had we we over engineered this for the residential market and the dentist wanted something that looked good was quiet was effective and if the dentist didn't have an air purifier they had to wait two hours between patients and if they had like a Dyson or like a honey well or something from Walmart they would be like 45 minutes between patients with a Jasper it was eight to 10 minutes between patients it was all based on the air flow so from the dentist standpoint like this pays for itself in two days so yeah we weren't in the air cleaning business we were actually in the sales business business as far as the dentist was concerned so they didn't buy this thing because they care about the air they it was completely a a business purchase for them but the nice thing was our first thousand customers were dentists and doctors gyms and and wellness businesses mostly doctors and then after a few months they they would Rave about it to their patients and then the patients would ask the dentist hey do they sell my kid has asthma my kid has allergies is is this thing better than the portable air purifier avue at home and the dentist was very promotional of it because promoting Jasper was promoting the safety of their clinic but you have a thousand dentists that each see five 4,000 patients a year all of a sudden we start get lots of leads from homeowners we still had no e-commerce and I'm like you know what your family let's get we'd give the families like 40% off because I'm like we priced this thing for medical I didn't want to charge homeowners out amount I don't think they would have paid that amount it's amazing because now now we we got the price down to 13.99 I'm actually working on lowering it more because the whole point was to make it affordable and then we got ourselves into this very premium category because it is a premium product so yeah the challenges was early on it was developing a great product and we have a lifetime warranty as long as people change the filter twice a year that we put our money where our mouth is so if these things break it's gonna it would it could it could crush the whole company so we needed something that was super reliable effective quiet and then the next challenge was Keeping Up with the demand and covid shipping rates to put these things on an airplane during covid was $500 a unit so we actually had to charge more because our prices were so high in order to import them swiftly but the all these challenges was in covid keeping up with the demand and managing the cash flow and now so we went from 99% being B2B doctors dentist and now I'm happy to say we're 99% homeowners families allergies sleep uh and it's a way better if you read the reviews on our website when it was doctors it was like it makes my patients and Staff feel safe and now when you read the families it's my kid used to have four asthma attacks a week and now they have none or I used to have horrible seasonal allergies with a dog now I don't so I never expected we created it for wildfires we accidentally ended up being a medical product and now we're just a regular homeowner family allergies fires pollution in the cities number one people buy it is for sleep as a sleep product so yeah it's so Mike for the subscription that is definitely the part of your company that is the most profitable right the ongoing changing of filters So currently our churn rate and I consider churn has canceled ever is under 1% nobody's cancelling they buy the filter every 6 months so early on because our price has been high there was a large profit on the units but the if we were selling the company which I have no desire to do we'd probably get like one to three times earnings on unit sales but maybe 30 to 60x on subscriptions so all the value in the company absolutely comes from the subscription yes yes and honestly it's it's amazing I've never had a business model with I used to have the marketing and it was still churn and burn but because it's way better than SAS because they have the actual hardware and the lifetime the biggest thing is the lifetime warranty and the filters so nobody churns and it's amazing like when I would make a bunch of money after a disaster it felt like a big hit like a big rush and then you were like depressed the next day because you need to lay on that high keep selling the analogy I use for the subscription is it's like putting on muscle like it makes me it's a yeah continues on you get stronger you get more predictable you don't need debt you don't need investors cool it's a it's a healthy way to build a company are you franchising in different countries or or agency models nothing right now it's all US and Canada and almost so still a huge percent of our most of our business now either comes from the doctor's office still the patients have been seeing it repeatedly other people talking about it on podcasts I only started getting on podcast in the last month or two but it would be like doctors or Health and Wellness people like all speak about it they speak about it when they're like hey what do you what are five products you recommend for sleep and then they talk about Jasper and then the other thing now is a lot of these Wellness influencers doctors bioh Hawkers they bought one for full price for their home they're like this is great can you set me up with a code so I can share it with my community so that now makes up for 70% of the business it's just people who bought it so there's no we don't ship out tons of free Jaspers and try to get people to push it to their audience and is 2024 is we haven't done any marketing yet so we we've sold guess this is an entrepreneur podcast so we've done about 3 million in sales so far about a 60% profit margin almost no that's over a few years no but no ads we've spent like five grand in ads ever and now I you have affiliate system right we have Affiliates but the only Affiliates were customers who said Give me a code and okay now we're like okay our our return rate is under 1% our defective unit rate is is under 2.5% and our turn rate is under 1% we're like now it's time to put fuel on the fire I've seen way too many companies they do huge sales in their first year but let's say 14% of the machines break or they some it it puts them out of business so the way I like to view it is I'd rather crash a golf cart into a wall than crash a Ferrari so because I intend to do this business for many decades High sales in my first two years was never part of the goal I wanted to have a a robust great product great Systems Great customer service now we have this really strong foundation so now it's going to be I'll go on podcasts I'll sponsor podcasts and we'll actually create relationships with health and wellness individuals to try to now spread the word but I didn't want to spread the word until we were ready to spread the word and now we're ready oh man this is wonderful mic I love this story I love what you guys are doing it's the businesses that're actually making a change in someone's life comes with heart to just feel good doing business in that realm so I can just imagine what you guys are feeling with each sale that you make because asthma is a problem there's people that suffer from air quality and they don't even know it for example and it's just just like a invisible thing I'm grateful that you took the time to come on our show today man what water is to fish air is to humans it's crazy the first thing we do when we're born we take a breath the last thing we do before we die we take a breath we need food Water and Air to stay alive but at night it's crazy you could be in a coma and you're you'll still breathe like your body literally breathes without any conscious efforts if you don't if you're hungry you eat if you're thirsty you drink but I think we take our air for granted because it's autonomous we don't even have to think about it so my whole mission here like if I find out someone's hey I listen to the podcast with Mike and if someone cracks their window to get fresh air in it like it's not all just about air purifiers with water we're trained if it smells funky we it's like a smell is just a safety feature that the human body if it smells gas or it sells Smoky we get out of there and it's all to me about increasing air awareness when people realize that it feels stuffy if it feels smelly if it's if the if the air like just start to think about it cuz you muggy yeah muggy humid damp like you want your air matters the same way that you're um getting your nutrients from food and water it's the same thing with air but because it's autonomous we don't even think about it yeah my whole mission here is to just increase air awareness make people realize it's not just you are what you eat but it's also you are what you breathe what you breathe good one like I might put that on a shirt you sh yeah you sell them no but maybe I would I should should make a you are what you shirt yeah you should man you should keep it give him away with each each sale of each un yeah it's a good you gonna say you have a final question or something I was gonna yeah I was gonna yeah I was gonna ask you what you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in life yeah when there's a fire and other people are running from it I run towards it I have I've had no common chaos and I understand that great things require risk and effort and I've never been afraid of putting myself In Harm's Way to help or for opportunity and just be being able to be mindful and calm when disaster is going all around so many people go to these flood and fire zones and go out a business in a few weeks because they're just chaotic you need to find the time to you need to find time for calm even in chaos so just taking that moment having good friends asking for help yeah and and become aware of your breathing it's important man yeah great Mike thank you so much for coming on our show appreciate your time today keep in touch and thank you for agreeing to help us promote your episode on your network and looking forward to seeing your equipment everywhere all right man you'll know we've done our job when the product is half the price of what it is now until then we got a long way to go but that's where I'm trying to get this thing all right [Music] [Music] super super super