EPISODE 5 - MARC BYERS

Welcome to the Impulse Spotlight where we meet with product development professionals and shine a light on the products they are most proud of.

In this episode, we talk with Marc Byers about a number of products he's had a hand in developing focused on helping people breathe cleaner air.

As founder and president of Byers Scientific, Marc began his product design journey developing a system that vaporizes plant based essential oils and disperses a dry vapor over landfills and industrial compost centers in order to mitigate odor emissions at their source.

Using his knowledge of air quality control and environmental monitoring systems Marc partnered with VFA Solutions to develop the ASPRA high efficiency air purification system.

During our conversation, Marc shares his insights into the many approaches to air purification. We hear why his next generation clean air technology is disrupting the North American market, why it’s important to take purposeful steps to keep the consumer connected and informed so they have the confidence to use your product effectively, and we get a little honest about the costs of bringing a new product to market.

Show Notes:

Click here to see more about Byers Scientific.

Podcast Transcript:

Hey, Marc, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Troy. Thanks for having me. This is exciting.

Yeah, so about 25 years ago I started impulse after working for another company and I tell people all the time that I got my master's degree working for that company. How did you get into product development?

I fell into it by accident. To be honest, it is an interesting story in so far as it is, you know, it is not 6 degrees, it is 2 degrees of separation. From Willie Nelson. I was in the banking industry and I sort of gotten away from that. I did not need to live that life any longer. Thankfully, not that it was that bad, but and I was I was giving a speech in Philadelphia for I was ended up being the vice president of a conservancy to save a ship called the S. S. United States to the US flagship, who was a cruiser in the 50 s that have been mothballed and we were trying to rescue it, etc. Anyway and. A guy came up to me after my speech and was very complementary and he said, Are you a musician, which I am? I play guitar and I compose well, he turns out to be a musician that had been in Willie Nelson's band and he toured with Willie for 4 or 5 years and his best friend was Willie's longtime 40 year bass player be Spears Beads had passed not too long before that, but he was invested in call it an industrial scale composting experiment in Washington. And my friend, whose name is Skip Dannenberg . Skip asked me to to help these guys to maybe do some business consulting for them because They are decent scientists, but not great businessmen . And I ended up taking a trip out there, did a road trip with my son. We drove from Philadelphia in the car all the way to to Washington, which was an amazing road trip to do with a 15 year old at that time and that got me some insight into the industry that I am in, and as I started to dig into it and helping these guys and starting to look at it through my lens, I realized that there was a lot of asymmetric information in terms of technology, the tools and things like that that the operators were bringing to bear and I saw a tremendous amount of opportunity to compete and so I ended up, you know, creating a device that I was issued a patent on. And and the rest goes from there but not the shortest answer, but yeah, that that is kind of how I fell into it, yeah.

Interesting. And like how long ago was that? So how long have you been developing products?

This really started in 2012 into 2013, and then I established the company here in Indiana in 2014.

Okay. And so what is your current role and what kinds of products are you developing now?

We have evolved quite a bit. I am proud of that. So I am the CEO the owner. We I have shareholders . We have evolved quite a bit. So the initial thing that I designed that I got the patent on is to take a liquid plant based essential oils plant based neutralizer that has surfactants. It is called a polysorbid surfactant, very safe and R water, but anyway. The design the patent is to be able to take a liquid any kind of liquid really with any sort of vapor pressure that basically will volatile and volatilize that get into its vapor state. And so in a very controlled and measured way. And so we use that in the landfill space, for instance. So we are putting out. A dry vapor, we call it into the atmosphere near the odor emission, so were creating the conditions so that odorous gases leaving the landfill, leaving the workplace are immediately mixing with our our neutralizer, and thereby that is active chemistry and and so that is that is that and so but we started to evolve that further to other markets, commercial agriculture, which is code for cannabis cultivation. That is a multi billion dollar market and we have evolved what we do to be actually the world leader and what we do. I have grown the company to include 2 Phd chemists, 1 is a globally recognized chemist teaching professor at you, C. Irvine, the other is at UNC Chapel Hill, and you know, Dr. Gunther has created models that the EPA uses. And there is a lot of history there why I ended up with those 2 guys, but suffice to say, we were the first entity in the world to isolate and identify the chemical compound that makes cannabis smell like skunk, so when everyone says it smells like skunk cannabis, well, we can explain that why and so. We evolved our production to include we call them molecular filtration devices. You would call them a carbon scrubber, but just like an air filter filters, air, a carbon scrubber does not carbon, right? So it is it is it is molecules is really the way to look at that. So anyway. Also our equipment, whether it is the scrubbers or the the other equipment of vapor phase equipment, it is all SCADA Iot based. So we have our own app and basically everything that we build that goes out the door if we want it to, has its own website and can be controlled via phone or any connected device. And then we have gone further then and licensed a technology with basically my partner in Holland for a what we would describe as an absolutely disruptive technology in the air purification space. Relying on electrostatic precipitation infiltration, which is distinctly different from the means that we all became a lot more aware of during during COVID, so HEPA, you V and things like this.

Uh, so what is is that the product you want to talk about today, is there another product you want to talk about today?

I want to talk about all my stuff, but but yes, the the air purification technology, it is it is fascinating, it is it is interesting. So our odor control equipment in the o control space. Unfortunately, you do not call by your scientific because you want to the reality is because you need to you have an odor problem and for compliance reasons or other, you do not have a choice but to deal with it. So think about a landfill that is out in the middle of nowhere. They can stink to hide heavens. They do not impact anyone, so they are not going to do anything right. They do not have any incentive to write. So that is always a compliance thing. And that is fine. We make a good living doing that and we really make our customers good neighbors because we also have a strategic partnership with the company that we do environmental monitoring with so we can actually do a reverse trajectory and tell. Where an odor mission, if someone is standing at grid X, Y, Z, and says, I smell this, we can take that geo and timestamp and do a reverse trajectory with our software and tell you where that odor came from.

That is cool.

It is a big deal, but anyway. We actually can we can help certain facilities use that cost to generate revenue, and that is by identifying potentially methane leaks that are beyond the scope of what they realize is happening. Which is a big topic right now, and so using this technology, we can identify dollars that are literally going up into the air, well, figuratively going up into the air because otherwise would be captured. But no, the the air pure and let me step back and say odors are in a gas state. And so that is 1 bit of technology, the Aspira, it is a P. R. That is an old Greek word for mountain air. That is our air purification technology and that deals with particulate matter and it is disruptive in the sense that we can achieve the removal efficiency these same technologies that we became more aware of, like I said, you V and Hapa and Merv filters and things like this, we can meet and exceed their removal efficiency, but while decreasing energy consumption at the same time.

Very interesting. So I do not know if you want to focus on just 1 specific product or talk about a few, but tell us a little bit more about a product or or a few products like some of the key features innovations .

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so the aspa the air purification technology, it really is it is interesting. It is fun to talk about because I guess I did not really finish the point there. I was starting to make a minute ago that if you call us we are a cost center, right, we are solving a problem, but it is not necessarily revenue generating. The air purification is another story because we start to see examples data driven where you can start to quantify reduced downtime by employees even by increased indoor air quality. And so yeah. So I think it is fair to say that during COVID, we all got a bit of an education at least the nomenclature of air purification and there is snake oil salesmen out there like mad that is for sure, but the most common thing that we are used to is is a pleat filter like you would put in your furnace, right? And that would be capturing particulate matter or you V. And we all heard about the you V spectrum and and shining a light in our eyes or some craziness to kill viruses, and so for instance, both of those technologies , when we compare that to electrostatic precipitation , you start to see weaknesses in those others, for instance. If you use a Pleat filter, right, we are all familiar with and, you know, you buy them at Home Depot or whatever, you got your furnace 25 by 25 and it is an inch stick or whatever, well they rate those. They rate those by what is called Merv Merv. What is the minimum efficiency removal value. And so MERV is a scale that goes from 3 or 4, I think it is so low, you do not even really bother up to 16, mer 16 is like clean room and we can quantify that by effectively removing 99.98% of all particulate matter, 0.3 microns and larger, so that is literally microscopic. HEPA, you have heard Hapa hapa means high efficiency particulate and then the A is air filter, hapa is just another standard close to being the same thing, they are they are really more or less close, um. So if you are using a Pleat filter to try and filter air, then you can imagine that you have got a blower that is either sucking or pushing air through this this medium and this pleat filter when they are merve 16, that means it is a fiber glass weave that is so dense and thick as to capture microscopic materials. Then you can imagine the energy consumption it takes to push air through that has to be significant, right? So in that e.g., let us say we have duct work and we are blowing air through and there is all kinds of nasty things in there, and this filter is capturing them. Well, in this instance, it is capturing them, but it is not deactivating anything. The viruses are still alive and the they they actually do not capture gases. Gases will still make their way through that means odors would make their way through. But as we said, that is massive energy consumption as well as static pressure drop is significant, right? So let us say we we do not use the filter and instead we put in an array of UV lights. Well, the nice thing is, okay, we do not need the energy consumption from the fan, right, because now we are just using a you V spectrum, but the you V does not remove aerosols, it does not capture any virus or bacteria, it can not even remove particulate matter. And it has no effect on gases, it does, of course, deactivate viruses, but it still has a high energy consumption because you traded the fan for a bunch of light bulbs. Okay. So the combination of these 2 things maybe could be effective. What we have is just a much more elegant leveraging of science and electricity, which is called electrostatic precipitation , but it is closed a closed system and that is what is significant electrostatic has been around for a while or electrostatic precipitation , but the technology that my partner developed in in Holland and has patents on this essentially in the same environment . But now what we create in a duct, for instance, but what we create in there is an electrostatic field, so 20,000 v bolts and as opposite direction, you have a micro amp environment . The unique thing is the way it is you kind of call it tuned is it is only a positive charge, and so everything that is coming through, everything being all the particulate matter, particulate matter can be defined as smoke, pollen, virus, bacteria, dust, all these things are p m. When we think about air pollution and you see the Epa's guiding guidelines, they focus on 2.5 pm2 .5, you can kind of Google that 2.5 is what the EPA acknowledges as a particle size small enough to make it past our net that we can ingest and get past our natural defenses. So that is what we focus on that and smaller. So anyway, imagine all these there is a whole variety of these things that are in our in our e.g.. There is someone through a cigarette in the duct and there is smoke and there is pollen and there is virus and there is bacteria. All of that has an innate charge, an inherent charge. All those particles, some may be negative, some positive depends on the way they are, they are built so to speak, as they come through and exposed to this environment, they are being essentially blasted with exclusively a positive charge. So in the cylinder where we are doing this in the duct work. Anything that has a negative charge is repelled and is caught and deactivated on the cylinder wall and often sort of blown apart, anything with a positive charge is clearly electrocuted , and an e.g. of that would be bacteria, the membrane of a bacteria is often a positive charge, and so it is effectively electrocuted and Just blown to pieces. And also gets really trapped on the cylinder wall, right? Key is it is been deactivated completely. Subsequent particles that flow through that have been deactivated impacted are collected just a little bit downstream. And what looks like a p filter, it is similar, but it is made of a charged material. And so again, it is relying on static and so it gets caught and it is a consumable However, the static pressure drop is virtually nothing and that is where we are able to flow through all this, you know, polluted or tainted air. Deactivate and trap any of the particulate matter and and flow clean air out the other end. And again, I am saying at a merged 16 level, the White House is directive right now. The the the benchmark is MR 13. The ash ray standard is MERV 16. We have tested the MERV 16 by ISO we achieved over MRF 13 on ash ray and that was without a pre filter. Without a pre filter. And I will just tell you how efficient this is. So to achieve the ashtray standard to the device, you need to do an initial test and get your static pressure, then they load for this particular test carbon dust and has some bits of cotton in it, cotton fire or cotton dust. It is a it is a concoction that the ash ray determined was the appropriate way to test these kind of devices. You have to double your static pressure once you have doubled your static pressure, drop you from your initial, then whatever your minimum. Observed removal efficiency was that is what your score is, so we started out initially 0.12 ", 0.12 " of static pressure. It took a day and a half to get the **** device to double its static pressure drop to 0.32. During that time, for about a fraction, an oversized amount of carbon dust flowed through and we dropped to Merv 13 and then got back up to Merv 16, but we had to report mer 13 that was without a pre filter going straight into the like, so for want of a $10 throwaway merve 8 filter. We would have MR 16 all day long. It is amazing technology. So the key takeaway there is what are we not using to achieve this energy? A significant drop in energy, and that is why I always characterize this to me. It is eloquent. It is such a brilliant way of harnessing electricity. That billion, that is my partner and Holland, her mom died of a virus, and so very early on in her career, she sought to to take that she is leveraging what we Call the Corona, nothing to do with coronavirus , but the corona with with respect to electricity technology and incubated at Delft University in Holland, interestingly, they incubated it, she grew it, and they signed all of the IP. To her amazing. And she holds all the patents. And we are the North American distributor exclusively, yeah.

So you talked about electrostatic precipitation, right? And of course, my brain, I am ignorant of your processes and all that. So I am thinking rain, the precipitation, is that the particulate that precipitates out of the system.

Yeah, it is. It is a great question. I have never really understood why they call it precipitation. It is it is sort of a term of art that said, you know, some experts hopefully will watch this and then they will contact me go, Hey, you do not ask, this is the part you do not understand. There is a distinct difference between between closed and opened ionization. You do see sort of competitor products out there. It is called open ionization, but they are showering ions out onto to the to the air, which, you know, it is not like ozone, but it gets close to being analogous to that, meaning what is your familiarity with ozone.

It is in the sky; we have got a hole in it.

Yeah, yeah, right. For people who would watch this is a quick bit of understanding ozone, of course, is oxygen with a 3rd, right, it is 3. Or maybe I should not say of course, maybe people do not know that that 3rd that 3rd 1. It is highly unstable, that is why we have a problem with our ozone layer, it is highly unstable in the sense that it wants to react with something meaning, right, you know, balanced equations and chemistry in general that that 3rd atom, it wants to react with some something it is less. It is less inclined to stay where it is and go react with something else and become 2, right, and the problem is it is indiscriminate with what it will react with, which in terms the chemical terms or biological terms means it will bond with lung tissue. Or rubber, anything ozone, that is why ozone is so powerful as a cleaner and things like this because it is scavenging everything but its weakness or its danger, I guess you would say is it is indiscriminate, right? So it has to be really controlled and so analogous to that to a certain degree is. Ionization, open open ionization, where you are showering out ions because if they have not reacted with something, they are going to find find something to react with, whereas our system is completely closed now there is AI would not call an opportunity cost there but. By virtue of that, the collector filter does need to be replaced, right, because eventually it is going to fill up with this particulate matter and the inside of the chamber, it almost looks like dust needs to be cleaned, but that is because everything's been captured and deactivated , and over time, it needs some small amount of maintenance .

Very interesting. So we have helped design literally thousands of products and every 1 of those journeys has been a little bit different. Walk us through kind of the the journey of you developing 1 of or several of your products like where did they start from and and what were the steps involved getting them on the shelf ?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I will go over a couple. The first 1 is just kind of funny what I got the patent on this device that like I said, to be able to take, I say a liquid, but a substance maybe is a more accurate term and transition it in a controlled manner from its liquid state to its vapor state. And so that analogy is if you took 2 glasses of water filled to the brim, separated a little bit, and over the top of 1 of them, you blew a fan, you had a fan sitting right behind it, and you would see a rippling, for instance. The fact is all else equal considering barometric pressure, etc. If you came back an hour, 2 h later, the 1 is going to be lower, it is just it right because you have induced the volatilization , so I took basically I took that principle and refined it to be controlled and etc. To do that. Well, certainly anyone that ever gets a patent or and you you know this as a design professional that you have to keep breaking it right and when it finally quits, breaking it breaking, then you have kind of solved it and so. Trying to I came at this so many different angles and and I literally broke tanks open and it was just frustrating and but you learn to embrace failure and then I finally I literally did have that light bulb, aha moment. Like my God and I think I probably jumped up and ran out to the shop and started, you know, I was like, this is it and then it just started unfolding and it came together. So that is kind of how that came together, but our scrubbers, which impulse designhelped us with was that was a really understanding kind of.

You know, I you know, if you are not will they say that if you are not cheating you are not trying or something like that, I just I had an idea. I mean, carbon scrubbing is we did not invent anything there by any stretch, but what we did do is take technology and apply it to our market and and that is when I did come to you and asked for help, like, you know, what is the best way to to kind of come at this? This is my idea and you guys were tremendous and coming back to me and saying this is the design and then there was a very iterative approach to design where the fan needed to be and how we integrate control panel into that and and things like that and.

Sure. On that product that we helped you with. Was it literally, hey, this is what we need, we help you figure out a design and then we throw it back to you and you went and made it or did you have some iteration and that went on after we finished? Yeah, no. Yeah, there was now there is a lot of back and forth, a very I mean, you would call that like the perfect scenario, right, a lot of collaborative back and forth because Ryan, I think his name was Ryan that was helping us, you know, he he could not fully understand what we know, and so of course, he presented the case and we looked at and tweaked a little bit and sent it back, say, can you do this? It is amazing actually, something that does not look much different than a refrigerator and a lot of ways there is, you know, the Devils in the details and especially with the production style that we initially started with. A lot of nuance to getting that right and you because of the material selection is you are aware of, for instance, 8020, you have to think a numerous steps ahead when working with that and and materials compatibility. That was a lesson learned as well.

Tell us a little bit about your team, how many people are involved and you know, what are their different roles and.

Yeah, we have I have really in the last year, really a year and a half, I have actually contracted a lot that is the right word trying to really outsource more and almost start to lean away from being a quote manufacturing company to almost more of a sales and marketing company. That is selling and marketing the products that we design and build, but I am having someone else build them, I you know. This is not the kind of a mean thing to say on 1 hand, but the worst possible thing an employer can have is employees just.

They are expensive.

They are expensive, man, you know, everyone who has employees knows. And so where I was a lot more aggressive early on and really bringing in people now that we have refined a lot of things. Now I am trying to get lean, get get rid of people and we just run more efficiency efficient, so. That said, you know, I have my VP of sales who is kind of my right hand man and but we wear a lot of hats. I have my Chief Operating Officer is also our we have our own in house counsel, which makes me spoiled to have my own attorney, but. He wears a lot of hats and he is been with me from really from before day 1 and then I have a couple of guys out in the shop and I have got remote guys like out in California where we have a significant market, but yeah, we we literally everyone does a lot of work beyond the scope of what their sort of job description is.

So I guess with all the products impulses help design, there is always, you know, some kind of challenge that comes up looking back like what is 1 of the biggest challenges you and your team have faced during the development of a product and how did you solve it?

Oh, yeah, interesting. That is more of a technical 1 are so scada if someone who is not familiar with that term, it is S C d scala, so SCADA is just whenever you are. Locally, capturing it is supervisory control and data acquisition, that is what it stands for, and basically anytime you have an interface, let us say on your computer to operate or just observe something remote, so. When I said earlier, as I started looking at the solid waste industry, I just thought that providers into that industry were so simple and there is so much opportunity to bring technology to bear for the customers. So, you know, for instance, I remember early on my guys similar to my industry. Like you do not want the client to know anything about the machine and I thought, no, just the opposite, I want them to be empowered to run the machine. And me as well, like remotely and so I realize that, you know, we need to have sensors and level sensors and flow sensors and measure this and measure that and that needs to be in a control panel and then I need to be able to. Not have to stand there at the machine, but I need to be my computer a thousand miles away and do this. And so I set out to create that with a with a team, electrical engineering team and you know, that was our first attempt and it was successful, but just seeing so many wrecks. And then, you know, then the next iteration was and that was kind of a closed architecture, meaning it was not Iot Internet of things, right, where where cloud based and all that kind of comes in. It just resided on our own server, you know, sort of down the hall. And so after a few years, I understood well, the way this really needs to work is that customers need to be empowered, they need to have it on their phone. You know, we need to have an app. And so we went down that road and that is an expensive proposition and, you know, you do not do that yourself. That is like doing your own dental work. You just you got to work with the right shop. So that that that is been I mean, we have evolved it. It is highly effective now. It is a massive selling point for us. It is a differentiator for us. It is a massive value added, however, because it is a comfort level for our customers. But yeah, getting there again, that is 1 of those things that, you know, be careful of not knowing what you do not know. Because when you get into that realm it gets expensive in a hurry and all of a sudden people are speaking a language that you do not even come I mean, virtual gates and things like this, you know, and it is all cloud based and all the stuff, which is not somewhere that I am fluent, so anyway.

Yeah, I can not imagine developing something like that. That would be like you said, it is totally different language, but interesting that you are talking about that and letting the customer have all, you know, the the app and the sensors and all that and we are talking a totally different scale, but we recently bought A3D printer and 1 of the the guys that works for us works remotely in Colorado and the simple fact that he can. From Colorado print to the printer here in Indianapolis , he can get on look at the app, see that it is printing correctly. See when it is done, see when it is cleared. So you can start another I mean, stuff like that is, you know, like you said, empowering the customer because it is pretty amazing.

It is efficient. We actually funny. You mentioned that we 3D, 3D print a number of parts for our some of our equipment.

Yeah, for production.

It is amazing. You can yeah, you can now actually we we do not do enough. I mean, obviously it is some scale that would never work, but that our our throughput or our scale is enough that yeah, we can threed print for production, the materials have evolved enough. You know, we are well, you know, we work in solid works like like you do. And so of course we do not have to so much now because we have kind of built everything and now we are just kind of flowing along and I have been too busy for to really spend time on. Product design, new stuff, which is not good, but you know, the upside, you you prototype something, you go into solid works, you draw it, get this idea, throw it on the 3D printer. Try it, it breaks, does not fit print another 1. It is super empowering . And my guy, my new guy who is a machinist, runs the water jet. We have a water jet, for instance, which my God, this is so cool. We literally, you know, cutting cutting metal that thick if we want with of water is fascinating, it is not really water. There is garnet in there. It is like liquid sandpaper almost. But anyway, he has a he has a scanner. So we can take we could take this part and scan it. And then take that scan and manipulate it and then print it, you know, a completely a derivation of this item, for instance, which is just.

Yeah, it is. It 3D. The 3D printing has become do not know how to explain. I mean, it is just so much more than it used to be like more and more and more. I am hearing clients and yeah, we are doing production with it. You know, up to thousands a year, obviously, like you said, you know, you get up to a certain extent and you need to go to an injection mold or some other process. But yeah, that the lower volume,

We are at that crossroads right now. We are at that exact crossroads right now. We 1 of the part of our business model, not part of a significant aspect of our business model, whether it is the odor neutralizer or the scrubber, that machine that I said, you know, T or takes the liquid to the vapor state, well, that liquid is a that is consumable, that is a residual income for us, same with the carbon, we do not just throw away the carbon cylinders, we open them, dump the carbon, refill them and put them back in. So that is another residual income model to do that, the cap of that cylinder sometimes gets broken, and we are 3D printing a model cap. That we can, you know, basically replace and we are right at that that crossroads, like how many of these can we print or do we just get 10,000 of them injected mold, and so we are right there literally dealing with that question.

Yeah, it is interesting. It is kind of a fun little challenge when you bump your head up against that. So as we start to wrap things up, I want to change gears just a little bit. See if I can get your thoughts on this in your perspective. I think I will be a little bit different than a lot of people I talked to. But what are some of the trends you kind of see emerging in product development in general?

Wow. Interesting. I do not, I am. Deep enough in it, but I would say 1 thing that I observe by my inbox is how many companies reach out to me because I am on various mailing databases wanting to outsource our stuff or or sort of. I get a lot of inquiries wanting to optimize what we do or take a part that we do, you know, a particular part, but potentially and mass produce it like I guess almost I think I see obviously computing and cloud based technology and and and all that is. Sort of a cottage industry, fragmenting little parts of production and say like we can take this this little bit for you and multiply it by a 100 thousand and do it for a fraction of what you are doing it for. That I feel like I do not know, maybe that is something that is been around for a long time, but I just gauging what I what my inbox looks like. I see a lot of people coming after me to do bits and pieces.

Interesting. Yeah. If you could go back in time and this can be in regards to any of the products you developed. But if you could go back in time and change 1 thing about that process, what would it be?

Well, it is not fair to to you because it is a computer constraint that I had, but it is actually when when you and I designed the scrubbers. So we initially did those in 8020 or extruded aluminum and we have changed that to an much less expensive proposition. I would have gone a different route from day 1. However, that is not necessarily fair the reason why we went, you know why. You know, you did come to me with a couple of thoughts. You can do cheap metal and bend it and cut it. Or we could do 8020. Well, 1 of those. Anyone who knows 8020 or extrude aluminum knows that a monkey can do it in his garage. You do not need equipment to do it. The other option requires a break, press and cutting ability and bending ability and all this, which we did not have. And so, you know, it is not fair to say we went down the wrong path, we went down the right path for the for the constraints that we had. Then then we evolved it to basically send it down the road and have someone else do for much less, but I do not I do not know if I would have gotten to that point without first having gone through the, you know, right, because quite frankly. If we had had all that in house capability, you know what, we probably still would have come to you to help with design, but I do not know, I just think that would be 2020 hindsight. It is not like lost money. I mean, we have we have been profitable with those and and and we have established , you know, market share and we probably learned a lot along the way that has informed the new process, so.

Sure, yeah. I mean, you cost reduced.

Big time.

We do it all. We do it all the time you existing products and hey, can you help us cost reduce this and we go in and look at, you know, hey, what is your volume and okay, yeah,it does not make sense to do 820 because you can go get these bent for a fraction of the cost so. So reflecting on all the challenges and successes and you know everything you have gone through developing products, what words of wisdom would you share with somebody looking to make a significant impact in the product development ?

Wow. I guess. 1 thing would I mean, this might be no kidding, but but maybe easier overlooked than it seems just to be able to sleep at night going into something just be wellcapitalized. I know it sounds like a no brainer on 1 hand and and it is a maybe a luxury that some people can not afford. But I just I am certain that, you know, nothing nothing motivates like a deadline and so and and you could argue if you are I do not want to call it over capitalized but if you are not sweating, then you may not get things developed and moving along as quickly as maybe you should because you do not have a gun to your head. But at the same time, being well capitalized gives you a posture and just for me at least to be able to breathe throughout the day that I know I am going to be able to design the best thing and get it fleshed out without having to race to market because what what I I think is a very fair statement is if you do not have time to do to develop properly, then you risk beta testing with your customer and and that is at a minimum unethical and because I have seen it, I have watched it and it is a sore spot for me because. I watched someone do it and and potentially initially initially taking market share from me because he is just went to market but his stuff failed but it failed on the client's dime. Meanwhile, I am spending, you know, $150,000 of my own money just burning through it, not going to market, ensuring that we got it done right and then going to market so.

No, I I think those are wise words. You actually you probably would not be surprised, but you might be surprised with the number of people that come to us and say, hey, I want to develop this product. And 1 of the first things, if I am going just brutally honest, 1 of the first things I try to do is scare them away, you know, if they are an individual and they do not understand the product development process, I have just start throwing big numbers out. Because I have told people, like, if you can not afford us, you can not afford to develop product because we are in the overall scheme of things, our cost is nothing. So, you know, if you are scared of, you know, whatever number I use $510,000, then just stop you are wasting money and wasting your time.

Yeah. Yeah, I think you are you are kind of saying the same thing. I am in the sense that you just have to have I know it sounds like business 101, but you just have to have a really fleshed out plan and forecast and capitalize that and know your numbers. Ultimately, then you are going to develop the best product you can, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that is all right. Yeah, this has been great before we wrap up. Is there anything else you want to mention in regards to any of your products or just product development in general?

Now, I mean, I would obviously invite anyone to visit buyer scientific on the web and, you know, like I said, the general consumer is never going to come to our website. However, the air purification technology it is worth looking at. It is fascinating, we are so proud of it and I would encourage everyone to to at a minimum, go go learn a lot, a little bit about the air that you breathe. We have a tag line. Clean air is a basic human right we learned through COVID, the amount of misinformation that is out There is signing. It is just it is not fair because it is misleading information on odor control. Big whoop, right meaning no 1 ever died from an odor, right, it is just a nuisance, this is another animal, right, and you can potentially put yourself in a harmful position by by employing the wrong thing or the right thing incorrectly.

I just think right?

And so I you know, we invested a lot in this in this website. We always wanted our website to be almost a tool. When we do video calls with customers or prospects. We often just do a Zoom phone call and use the website as a tool to be able to show things. And so I would invite everyone to learn a little bit more about IQ or indoor air quality than they might actually realize.

And what is the actual website? Is it by scientific or is there or?

It is byers-scientific, but if you just type buyer scientific at the moment, we will, uh, we should come up number 1.

Well, I will make sure I will put that in the show notes, so if anybody's watching, you can scroll down there and just click on your website.

Uh, thank you. That is great. Thank you.

So awesome. Marc, I really appreciate you doing this and I wish you the best of luck.

Thank you, Troy. I appreciate you reaching out. And again, you have been a part of our growth. So it is cool. So like a great story. Thank you.