Wearables That Unlock Women’s Potential in Midlife

✍️ Show Notes

Loewen Cavill joins us this week to share her story as the founder and CEO of Amira, a health tech company helping women unlock their full potential. We touch on all things product development including prototyping, meeting manufacturers, and raising venture capital. It's an exciting time for Amira as they begin to ramp up manufacturing and start seeing their product improve lives around the world.

🔗 Check out Amira's first product, Terra

🔗 Learn more here: amira.care

🔑 Bytes:

• If you're a curious person, be disciplined about where your curiosity goes, and trust your team.
• Prioritize face to face conversations when building relationships, like initially reaching out to manufacturers.
• Don't get caught up in R&D before you prove your core business proposition, focus on building a sustainable business with revenue prioritized.

💬 Full Transcript

Vigs (00:00) All right, we're live. I've got Loewen here from Amira Health. Loewen, thank you so much for taking the time to join. I'm super excited to dive into your background, as well as how you're using hardware to solve a problem that basically half the world's population will face at some point. Loewen Cavill (00:16) Happy to be here. Vigs (00:18) So why don't we start there? Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about the problem that you and the team at Amira are set out to solve. Loewen Cavill (00:24) Totally. So, Amira is focused on unlocking women's potential, specifically in midlife. We have found that there's been a huge underinvestment under innovation in the women's health space once they hit 40 plus. So that's what we're focused on. We're starting with hot flashes. Hot flashes is something that about 80 % of women will experience. And they last on average seven and a half years. And we have found a way to predict and preemptively counteract sleep disruptions from those to keep women that work for us longer, keep them healthier and keep them themselves. Vigs (01:05) Yeah. And the hardware they're using to solve that, if I'm not mistaken, it's a wrist worn wearable that you wear at night. And does it connect to a heated mattress of sorts? How does that work? Loewen Cavill (01:15) It connects to a cooling mattress pad. Both of them were making in -house because neither of them existed in the way that we needed them to exist. So from the wearable standpoint, we are monitoring what's called skin conductance and forecasting an incoming hot flash earlier than you would through temperature alone, through monitoring the skin's electrodermal response, watching how the pore sizes change, how micro amounts of moisture change. And then from the cooling response side, we have a Peltier cooled water tank. And once we see a hot flash identified, within seven seconds, we cool the bed down through this cooling reservoir that shoots cold water into that path. Vigs (02:04) So it seems something that's kind of very unique to the problem you're trying to solve. And it makes sense that it doesn't exist already because it's such a focused problem that you're set out to solve compared to some of these more generic, like, you know, we're going to solve this big generic problem that maybe there's no specific way to do that. And so your background is in engineering. I think you did mechanical engineering at MIT. So how did that kind of... drive through into some of the decisions as you're building out this hardware. Was that technical background useful or kind of what are your thoughts on that? Loewen Cavill (02:35) Yeah, it's always hard to know how it would have been in another doing something from another seat or another background. I have been very lucky that my background has been really diverse from working in venture capital to building jet engines to nuclear fusion to now menopause and have been shocked in all the ways that different experiences connect. So I found a lot of connections through past jobs that I have had, learned a lot from those different experiences that I've applied to my current company. I do think it is really helpful being an engineer because you understand a lot of the failure points that can happen in hardware. You can learn these without being an engineer by training, but it does give you a little bit of a head start in saving you some of those learnings. by knowing some of the complexity, some of the common pitfalls that happen from bringing a one -time working prototype all the way up to design for manufacturing in the factory and a scale that is reliable. Vigs (03:48) Yeah, so I want to talk about that progression too. So that initial first time prototype, tell me about kind of the aha moment when you're like these sensors and these coolants, they exist in the wild. Why can't we just combine them and tell me how you went about making that first one of one. Loewen Cavill (04:02) Yeah, yeah, that first prototype. We were in an accelerator at the time. And what I loved about this accelerator in the early days is we had very tight timelines to report to our board. This accelerator had like every month a board meeting and then you would present the progress that you've made. So we were up against all these other software companies for prototypes, versions of... the testing progression, which was like, in some ways really good for us because it encouraged us to be much faster than we would have in like a hardware alone environment. In the early days, we tried a ton of different things from infrared lasers through the ear to highest grade temperature sensors. Luckily I was in Shenzhen for some of this initial prototyping. And what's beautiful about Shenzhen is, everything you could possibly need in the electronics sensing world is there and readily accessible. So things that would take months to get here otherwise, or would be impossible to find, you can find there on like a train ride away. So that was really, really helpful for the early days of scoping through all the different types of ways that you could do it and landing on something that actually worked. Vigs (05:24) Nice. And so when you, first of all, I love that idea of kind of being up against a software group where you're forced to iterate on the same cycle of software, which happens super quickly. I have this really strong belief just with work with anything in my life that work like fills up the amount of time that you give it. And it's not my quote, but it's definitely a way to kind of reframe things. And it's like, if you only had, you know, in your case a month, what can we get done in that month to give those updates? Loewen Cavill (05:43) Yeah, exactly. Totally, yeah. I think it's a great mindset to have as frequently as you can. Like, Pomodoros are an even shorter timeframe for reducing time, where you only have 25 minutes to get something done. And just giving yourself increased senses of urgency and fitting as much as you can into a small box of time is always a great philosophy to bring into things. Vigs (05:54) And so. Yeah. And so it was cool that you guys got to do that. I guess in your case, it was a true accelerator in that sense that it forced you to move really fast. So then at the end of that accelerator, what did you have? Like what was the physical output of that that you were able to show to the board? Loewen Cavill (06:21) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so we had a prototype that we tested with women. And it wasn't necessarily a looks like prototype that we would scale up, but it was a proof of concept that, hey, through this sensing, you can actually predict a hot flash with medium levels of reliability. The reliability kind of comes with time as you scale things. What has really taken the chunk of time, I thought the chunk of time would be like inventing the thing. But no, the design for manufacturing the scale up there takes a ton of time. To make something work once is one thing, but to make it in a form factor that you can easily manufacture and you can figure out all the future reliability tweaking that you have to do is very much a long process. Vigs (07:21) Yeah. How did you get started learning that? Did you, were you working with firms in China? Loewen Cavill (07:26) Yeah. So we found, a design for manufacturing partner. Our network of hardware founders is quite complete. I would say we're really, really lucky that we have a lot of like hardware founders in our network. And we found that working with some of the product development firms is really helpful to repeat some of the, regular pruning processes that you need to do for. prototype design to scale up for manufacturing. And a lot of that can be helpful with experience. I think that there is always kind of a shifting between innovative, like doing things like they haven't been done before. And then also like tons of experience and applying the ways that they have been done before. And there's kind of like a toying between those two. And I think the real innovative hasn't been done before. comes in the beginning and then you have to kind of put on your, this is how you scale up for manufacturing, this is how you have to fit into the system. And that can be helpful to work with product development firms that do that every day. Vigs (08:35) Yeah. Yeah. I've had, I've had guests come on here, kind of sharing both sides of that spectrum. Some want to do everything in house and some are open to working with other firms. Just like anecdotally, one of the things that I think about is, you know, if I'm building a product, I want to focus all my knowledge and expertise on developing the product. I don't want to worry about solved problems like over the air updates or battery chargers, because other people have figured that out countless times over. I want to focus on what core proposition my product is solving. Loewen Cavill (09:04) Yeah, I think, yeah, I think this is a very, very good point and something that, curious people can get stuck in where oftentimes curious people is like learning is great. I want to learn everything, but that can really, hinder you if you are spending all your time learning the wrong things. there is only 24 hours in the day. It's really unfortunate. I'm really upset about it, but there's only 24 hours in the day. And, Vigs (09:05) And so I wonder if you thought about it that way too. Loewen Cavill (09:34) to reap the rewards as quickly as possible, you have to be hyper focused on learning the right things for that right moment in time. And certain things you know you'll have to learn in the future, but you have to have the discipline to put that on pause until the time is right. So I think I'm someone that definitely leans a lot more curious innately. And one thing that's been really difficult, in building a company is actually pausing some of those curiosities and knowing, hey, the time isn't right. I need to focus on this one thing right now. And then in the future, I can learn these other side things. Or maybe that someone else is getting to focus on this other battery charger or something else. But you have to stay on the most timely, critical part of your business at any given time. Vigs (10:28) And how did you figure out what that was for yourself? Like how do you draw that line between later and right now? Loewen Cavill (10:35) Great question. This is the million dollar question or trillion dollar question. I think that there is never, there's never a perfect on this prioritization piece. One thing that helps me is dedicating some time to meditate, journal, and also reality check myself with others where maybe, I think that this is what I should do. And then I would talk to someone on my team and like, Hey, can I steal five minutes of your time to just like talk through this with you? other people might just want to stay in the journaling space, but for me, it's really helpful to talk with someone who has a little bit of context on what we're doing. Vigs (11:18) Yeah, that makes sense. And then that accountability also helps. And so many founders sometimes get stuck working individually by themselves and you kind of lose that sense of external feedback. So I'm curious as you were kind of growing Amira, who were the people that you surrounded yourself with? And as you formed the company, started hiring your first employees, how did you think about, hey, who's the right person that I want to keep around me for the long haul? Loewen Cavill (11:28) Yeah. Yeah, I have seen people take the strategy of, Hey, I want to keep the team just me. I think that that is really hard for hardware because for hardware, there are so many pieces that have to be put in place and then fit together and to be a master of backend software systems, low level firmware, designed for manufacturing electronics, PCB. marketing brand, that's really difficult to do that all. So you have to have a collection of minds, a collection of different folks working on their silos. How I have done it is definitely hired, we hire fast and then like fire early. We've been really, really lucky with some of the people that we've brought on. like world -class engineers, marketers, and then additionally keeping a really strong network of people that are like six months ahead of you, or are able to stay in the bird's eye view territory, where they see a huge aggregate of different companies, of different types of products like yours, and they're able to see what's going to pop up on more of like a large scale data perspective. or other folks that are like very in the weeds and then have just gone through the weeds that you're about to go through. So I think venture capitalists often fit into like the aggregators of the data and then founders that are semi relevant to you that are six months ahead are also extremely useful. Vigs (13:24) Yeah, that's a super interesting model. In your case, how did you find those founders that were six months ahead of you? Because a couple of the other people, other guests I've had on here, they have a hard time finding that community of other hardware builders because a lot of engineers, they tend to kind of be tinkerers, kind of building prototypes in their garage. That's the stereotype. How did you go find those founders six months ahead of you? And I remember earlier, you also said that you have a network of hardware founders. So how did you kind of build that around you to be surrounded by that? Loewen Cavill (13:54) Yeah, it is a good question. I think that this is where some of the Midwestern tendencies come into play and are pretty useful. I think that I am very extroverted, friendly, outgoing. And whenever I come across one of those individuals, we usually like stay in contact because you know what a needle in the haystack that person is that also does consumer hardware startups. And then you do need to do kind of like a lot more networking to find that needle in the haystack. It is not enterprise SaaS, which is very common. Consumer hardware is less frequent these days. So when you do find those individuals, know how special and rare it is to come across those. Vigs (14:44) which is you and every single other guest that I've had on here. That's great. So let's go back to the product for a second now. So what's the current state of the product? Are you selling to women? Are you manufacturing already? Where are you at? Loewen Cavill (14:46) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we've gotten 10 units back from the factory. So we're still pretty early stage when it comes to the manufacturing process. And then right now the factory is shipping us the next 50 units. So very exciting time in the hardware land. Vigs (15:10) OK, nice. Definitely. Do you have users lined up for those 55 units? Loewen Cavill (15:17) We do. Yeah. Yeah. We just started selling like very, very recently and kind of like quietly. So it's not like an official launch. It's more of like a, Hey, we have a landing page right now that you can come across. So we've sold our first 30 units and are now thinking about, okay, what is a true go -to -market notion look like? And it is totally different than what it takes to bring up a hardware. Vigs (15:24) -huh. Loewen Cavill (15:46) invention. I feel like I am a tennis player that is now having to learn water polo when it comes to like, okay, this is what it takes to get consumer electronics to work. And now this is what it takes to sell it. It's very, very different. And that's one thing that I find so fascinating about kind of like, I want to say the hero's journey of founding something, or maybe the game of founding something is you have to go through these different levels of the game. And none of the skills that were useful to the last level, apply to the next one. So it's constantly having to learn new things and ramp up a new skills in a way that can be very daunting and frustrating, but can also be extremely exciting and rewarding. Vigs (16:29) What kind of a CEO are you? So you said you have kind of world -class marketers and I'm sure they're going to do a bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to the growth. How involved are you going to be? Are you going to be like that curious person who's wanting to learn everything on their own as well? Loewen Cavill (16:44) Yeah, I think that this has been a little bit of a journey because I have a lot of opinions and I do not have as much time as some of the people that are able to spend full time on it. So I am very trusting. I've learned to become more trusting and knowing that, Hey, this person that's full time role is to this part of the company machine and this part of the company machine. It's like, I trust in them to. Have all the information that is needed and then I can provide questions I can like nudge the way that they're thinking about it or challenge them on certain areas, but at the end of the day you have to delegate yourself and Trust in them to be able to move that part of the ship forward Vigs (17:30) Yeah. And I think that's what makes being a founder so, like it requires so much teamwork is like you said, you can't do anything, everything by yourself. And so letting go and having that trust is, it's a hard skill to learn. Like I, I'm a manager right now and going from an engineer to being a manager, I had to learn that because I was burning out, just trying to like check every little minute detail. And I'm like, hang on, like, I don't need to do this. I need to be trusting the people that I've hired. Loewen Cavill (17:36) Yeah. Yeah. Totally, yeah, you need to enforce guardrails almost for yourself to be like, okay, this is their territory and this is mine and this is in certain areas the way that I can provide feedback or my thoughts, but knowing at the end of the day that it's their call on the areas that you give them that autonomy. Vigs (18:15) Mm -hmm. Yeah. I want to talk about your first 30 customers, as well as the initial women that you were using for testing the prototype earlier. How did you go about getting these people lined up to help you test, to get their feedback? And what tips do you have for others that maybe have an idea and want to go get customer feedback? Loewen Cavill (18:33) Totally. So I very highly, highly recommend getting as much feedback throughout the process as possible. Staying very close to your customer is one of the most critical parts of starting any type of business. And hardware, it's so much more cost intensive to make any changes after the fact. So I think a lot of people are like, you have to make the thing first. And I'm only going to share it when it's like perfect. But there's so much that's going to pop up in interim that you could get earlier on solving through testing. We had about 60 testers of our product before we sent it to manufacturing. How we came across those 60 was mostly in network, in Facebook, menopause communities. through hearing about us through events, we are kind of, we're not very public facing, but we do go to a lot of the menopause events. So that's been a good source of relevant consumers for us. But luckily menopause, despite in a popular conversation is very much not niche So every woman between 45 and 60 at some point experiences it. So it's pretty easy to find testers for our hot flash system. And then how we acquired some of those like first 30 users. A lot of those actually came from press that we stumbled across from the Consumer Electronics Show. We were posted as Wall Street Journal's like best of CES, which is great for us as like a very early, fresh consumer electronics company. So some came from that. And then some have stumbled across our website. Some have heard about us through some of those events that we've been at. I would say that's mostly how it's come in. We haven't done any like paid customer acquisition yet, but that will come. Vigs (20:34) Wow, that's super impressive then. Just free press and kind of getting your name out there. That's awesome. so jumping back to the product again, what's kind of in the roadmap? Are you, you know, the company Amira Health are you thinking of that as a family of products? Are you gonna kind of focus on the night flashes problem? Tell me some of your thoughts and what the roadmap looks like. Loewen Cavill (20:54) Yeah, so we are just hitting the tip of the iceberg when it comes to wearable sensing. I would say, on our day, wearable sensing has been very much in the camp of, we have these sensors. We will send you data. And then you can interpret that data as you will. I think that the next generation of that will be removing the work from your end of things. It's removing the... diving into knowledge and figuring out how to interpret these data sets. But instead you will have kind of the intelligent AI that interprets it for you and then acts for you as well. So it'd be automated action that is enabled through the wearable sensors that you have in there. So we're starting with thermal regulation. There's so many different other ways that you can do this kind of same type of sensing. There's a lot that you can do with sweat. We're focused on sweat right now. And I think there's a lot of stuff that you can find inside this one as well. So we have a lot of things cooking for the 2 .0 of it. Too early to say which direction we will double down on and do first. Vigs (22:05) Okay, interesting. And so I'm assuming you have kind of a separate R &D team and maybe a separate kind of production team that's dealing with the current product. Being an early startup like you are, how do you find that balance and avoid kind of burning too much in R &D, but also not giving enough attention to manufacturing and production? Loewen Cavill (22:21) Yeah. Yeah, this is a really good question. We do not spend too much time on R &D because to do the R &D, you have to do the first thing right. So you have to like earn your ability to do some of these more like moonshot ideas. And I think this is where a lot of technically inspired people fall into a trap where they're like, look at this cool science. How fun would it be if we could do this shiny thing? But You have to do the practical thing first and get that done. And then you kind of earn your right to go deeper into the R and D and creating the future of different areas of science. but it's checking one thing off the box at a time. So back to that, like disciplined prioritization. Vigs (22:59) Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's what you're describing is ideal where you don't necessarily burn a bunch of cash in R &D. Instead, you have something that works. You have essentially your business is a prototype at that point and you're kind of iterating on it. And then that money is just feeding back into R &D, which I think that's so great because you're establishing an audience, you're testing out your initial ideas and validating right away. Loewen Cavill (23:18) Yeah. And revenue is king these days. I think that we are seeing the landscape of venture change pretty dramatically. Hardware, I think, will become more exciting as some of the moats in software kind of decrease due to the ease in AI -generated software. But at the end of the day, they're not throwing as much free money at things. We are now going to have to withstand the test of revenue multiples. which has kind of been ignored for the last couple of years. So getting your pathway to revenue as quickly as possible and then being able to lean on that, I think will differentiate a lot of the great companies from the less disciplined ones. Vigs (24:13) Yeah. On that topic of venture, have you taken any outside capital? And if so, what was the, your thinking behind saying yes or saying no. Loewen Cavill (24:20) Yeah, we have taken in about three million in venture capital funding. Our thinking was, yeah, you kind of need actually a lot of capital. There's not a lot of ways to ramp up hardware manufacturing lines without upfront capital. If you find any other ways, let me know. I think that grants are really promising, but grants are really hard to come by. It's a very like insider game on how to write those grants. I think there's some interesting new like AI grant generating companies that can kind of help you acquire that with less of the insider experience. But bootstrapping is a lot easier in the software only land. Bootstrapping and hardware is really difficult. But also to get venture funding in the first place. Vigs (25:08) Mm -hmm. Loewen Cavill (25:14) you kind of need a working prototype to show, hey, this is a path worth going down. In the early days, I did put a lot of my own capital into the company. Luckily, I didn't have a family to take care of at the time. Google X was very financially supportive. So we were able to invest my salary into the company and then get some early prototyping traction to then go raise funding through. Vigs (25:43) Nice. The only other thing that I've seen at the hardware scale is pre -orders. So there's a specific category of products that need to have kind of social media virality, need to have broad appeal, and they need to show very easily through video what they actually do. And so I know a few companies that have used that method to get a few million pre -orders and then use that obviously towards production. Loewen Cavill (25:49) Yes. Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that is a really good route. I think one thing that people don't pay as much attention to upfront is they're optimistically thinking, these pre -orders will come for free. But you do have to do a lot to get people to that web page in the first place. Like you could have an amazing product, but if no one knows about it, then no one's going to buy it. So money is still required, even if you are doing one of those like Kickstarter campaigns, different pre -order campaigns. Vigs (26:27) Hmm. Mm -hmm. Loewen Cavill (26:35) to get the word out there, or maybe you have some competitive edge around already being super close to your consumer and having some sort of virality through TikTok or online social media. Vigs (26:47) Yeah. Yeah. The Kickstarter thing, that's the whole nother kind of topic that lately I've been hearing. It's no longer the thing that you go to as a bootstrap founder to like gain capital. It's something that you have to invest capital to like have a good campaign. Like you have to hire firms and there's like dedicated firms for having a successful crowdfunding campaign. It's crazy how that evolved. Loewen Cavill (27:04) Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like four years ago, that was not the case at all. But now it's very much a tried process where it's, I think when things first appear, there's a huge arbitrage opportunity because it's fresh. Like TikTok in the early days, people got such fast virality and excitement through that. Kickstarter, I'm sure was probably the same when it's like fresh, new. Vigs (27:13) Mm -hmm. Yeah. Loewen Cavill (27:38) But then when it's been around a while, some of that arbitrage opportunity diminishes. Vigs (27:45) Yeah, I wonder if there's room in the market now for a new player, right? Because Kickstarter nowadays and Indiegogo, they're so polished. And I remember like the old days of Kickstarter where people were taking pictures of prototypes with their phones and that was it. Yeah. Last question before I let you go here. So if you could do this all over again, you know, starting from when you first had the idea to today where... Loewen Cavill (27:58) Yeah. Yeah. Wow, how different it is. Vigs (28:11) in our manufacturing 50 units and getting ready to test them out, what would you do differently? Loewen Cavill (28:18) That's such a good question. I would have gone to China earlier would be the answer. I think that China, they have everything there right now. I mean, who knows what will happen with tariffs, but when we went to the factory in China, so much of that design for manufacturing was sped up. So much of the early prototyping, not early prototyping, but the early manufacturing was sped up. So. Vigs (28:24) earlier. Loewen Cavill (28:50) If I were to start this all over again, I would, when I had the idea, go get an apartment in Shenzhen and prototype, speak with manufacturers, do some of the design for manufacturing with them. And I think that would speed up the process tremendously and also reduce some of the costs that actually go into it. Vigs (29:10) What is it about actually going there that kind of helps propel things? Is it the face -to -face meetings? Because I've never been to China for this purpose, so I'm curious. Loewen Cavill (29:18) Yeah. Yeah. Face to face actually, you know, we have not found a new technological replacement of that. Face to face meetings, still really important for fast tracking trust and finding partners that really want to invest in you and help you. Because when you are in early days and you do not have a hundred thousand unit orders, manufacturers don't necessarily want to spend a lot of time on you. They want to spend time on those bigger players that have larger volumes. However, if you're there in person, you do have their attention in a way that you don't have over email. And then also some of the language challenges is easier when you are there yourself and you're able to be so much scrappier, get parts that you wouldn't be able to get for months otherwise. You're able to like see how they're putting the things together and then. brainstorm ways that that can be done easier. So definitely recommend going to China early, going to factories, figuring out parts, figuring out design for manufacturing techniques earlier that way. Vigs (30:32) Yeah, I can definitely resonate because I'm sure even if you don't have the 100K MOQs, you being in person is an investment that you're showing that you're serious and they can't ignore you if you're standing in front of them. So that's awesome. Well, all the best for you and your entire team at Amira. You guys are doing really important work. So I wish you all the best and yeah, thanks for coming on. Loewen Cavill (30:41) Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Appreciate it.

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