Three Truly Shitty Startups

Meet the companies hell bent on getting you to poop differently

I’ve found infomercials fascinating since I was a young boy. For some reason, my brain has always experienced the format of long-form persuasive advertising to be both captivating and oddly soothing. Part of this, I think, is the formulaic structure. Infomercials always begin by presenting somewhat forced solutions to exaggerated or wholly made up problems. This trademark approach is perhaps best epitomized by the hilarious “Juice Loosener” infomercial from The Simpsons. In it, Simpsons legend Troy McClure shows an incredulous Homer that thanks to a new gimmicky gadget, there’s a better way to juice an orange than smashing it against your forehead. The pitch concludes with an offer that for each purchase they’ll throw in another product called: “Sun and Run, the suntan lotion that’s also a laxative.” Sheer satirical brilliance.

However, The Simpsons writers, as usual, were weirdly prophetic with this one. This fake infomercial debuted in 1993, a full three decades before our economy was visited by the real life version of the “Juice Loosener,” Juicero. For those that missed what some called “the Fyre Fest of appliances,” Juicero was a $400 WiFi enabled juicer. It was pitched as the “Keurig for cold-pressed juice.” After they squeezed investors for $120 million dollars, it turned out that the expensive, complicated machine was basically a heavy paperweight since the enclosed juice packets could be just as easily squeezed with your bare hands. The WiFi connection and QR codes added only complexity, not value. The fever dream of Juicero felt as if one of those late night infomercials grew to unnatural size, escaped its enclosure, and rampaged through our economy for a bit before someone scrambled some fighter jets to shoot the damn thing down.

What I could never have known watching late night infomercials as a youth is that I’d grow up in a world where the logic and language of the hard-driving pitches I saw on TV infomercials would one day metastasize, changing my career, my home of the Bay Area, and the US economy forever.

What are startups if not turbocharged infomercial pitches? We see this both in the slick slide decks trotted up and down Sandhill Road to get them funding, and then in the clever copy, explainer videos, and overjoyed testimonials written by verbose people like me splashed across their websites to persuade folks to fork over their credit card info and start using this subscription Pez Dispenser delivery service that also incorporates NFTs somehow.

As a lifelong fan of infomercials, what’s endlessly fascinating about VC-funded startups is their unique approaches to the timeless art of persuasion. Just like winning a real battle, central to winning a persuasive battle is the art of choosing your terrain. Startups today exist to address or “disrupt” a seemingly endless list of aspects of human existence, ranging from biological necessities like how we eat to utter self indulgence like having a C-list celebrity record a birthday greeting for your aunt.

Of our truly core needs, none is more essential yet seldom discussed as pooping. What we do in the shadows of the bathroom is one of the undeniable unifying needs of all humans. Everybody poops, as the book says. This makes the bathroom ripe for disruptive movement, which also sounds a lot like a Silicon Valley euphemism for a session of post Taco Bell diarrhea.

In the past decade, I’ve noticed an interesting wave of disruptions finally appearing in the “pooping space” for lack of a better word. Can we just go ahead and rebrand the shitting industry as “the poop deck?” Great, so if we scan the poop deck, I’d draw your attention to three of the hottest VC-funded darlings occupying it. Each has a fascinating story and quirky claim to the porcelain throne. What can we learn from their products, marketing, and plans to become #1 at changing how you #2? Let’s sit down and find out.

Squatty potty: We give a shit how you sit when you shit

The elevator pitch of squatty potty is that modern pooping posture is not working. For the minority of you not currently reading these words on a toilet, I can briefly elaborate. By sitting at ninety degrees instead of squatting as we used to pre-toilet, we add unnecessary kinks into our plumbing, creating the gastrointestinal equivalent of gridlock. Squatty Potty’s marketing points out that sitting at this angle can cause hemorrhoids, bloating, constipation, and an overall straining discomfort with one of our most basic biological needs. The simple addition of a little stool by the base of your toilet elevates your feet while you go, aligning everything into the angle it’s supposed to be at. It’s a remarkably simple product. Squatty Potty is a physical disruption in the age of mostly digital ones, targeted at an aspect of everyone’s daily routine that is seldom discussed, much less changed.

Yet despite getting some word-of-mouth buzz after appearing on SharkTank in 2014 (one whole year before Spikeball) Squatty Potty still needed to figure out how to market their quirky stool to the general pooping public. This is when they struck gold in a way that may go down in history as one of the greatest improvements to the culture of pooping along with the flushable toilet and the smartphone.

One of the biggest challenges of being a company disrupting defecation is simply our squeamishness. Descendants of Puritans notoriously suck at acknowledging much less embracing how our bodies actually work. We see this in everything from generally poor dance moves to most bodily functions from menstruation to sexual intercourse being taboo topics for decades or centuries, depending on who you ask. So for companies parked on the poop deck, even if your product offers genuine utility, you have to sell it to a public that doesn’t really know how to talk about their bathroom habits openly. This makes it hard to discuss your value props in any depth, regardless of if they’re truly shitty or in fact a DaVinci-caliber bathroom invention.

Squatty potty decided to tackle this oppressive silence headlong by kicking in the bathroom door with the conviction of a SWAT team via a surreal ad campaign starring “Dookie” the Unicorn. This insane video is truly too weird and wonderful to fully sum up here, so you should watch it if you haven’t already. Two of my favorite parts of it were the tagline: “the stool for better stools” and the inclusion of an Amazon users review via haiku:

Oh Squatty Potty

You fill me with endless joy

Yet leave me empty

Shitty poetry,

Effective as laxatives,

Bravo, potty mouths.

This ad, conceived by the Harmon Brothers agency, wasn’t just a flash in the pan, er splash in the bowl. It ended up winning the Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Copywriting in Advertising in 2015. By making it fun to talk about how we poop, Squatty Potty not only made it easier to sell the little stool that could, they empowered a sea change that made it possible for other people and other startups to talk more openly about previously taboo topics beyond pooping like sexual health, mental health, and more. In my opinion, Squatty Potty’s biggest victory hasn’t been in the tragically overlooked realm of pooping posture, but in moving our culture’s Overton window when it comes to discussing “off limits” aspects of life like going to the bathroom. They took a shitty situation for marketers and turned it into a positive paradigm shift with ripple effects that transcend the toilet entirely.

Who gives a crap: Wiping away your guilt about wiping

Caring about trees is so hot right now. It’s trendy to write lengthy novels, explanatory nonfiction, and Lord of the Rings-length, Lord of the Rings-themed Substack articles about the precarious state of trees in the modern world. Trees, it shouldn’t need to be pointed out, are not having a very cash money time these days. They’re getting clearcut to make our furniture, houses, paper towels, and yes, toilet paper. The average US pooper goes through 141 rolls of toilet paper in a year. As a country we consume over 31 million trees annually in the name of wiping our collect asses. The dismissively named Australian company Who Gives a Crap was founded to address this, sort of.

Their two flagship products are a 100% recycled toilet paper and another that’s 100% bamboo. Since both products use less virgin wood (what juvenile a turn of phrase!) than traditional TP, by buying or ideally subscribing to WGAC, your bowel movements relocate fewer trees in the process. At $68 for 48 rolls (or $1.40 per roll), it’s not exactly a great deal, but it does boast carbon neutral shipping and zero plastic packaging.

Yet, according to their website, the real goal of the company isn’t just to make toilet paper sustainable, but also to make toilets more attainable. Their founders started this company as a crowd-funding campaign via IndieGoGo in 2014 after learning that over 2 billion people worldwide don’t have access to a toilet, leading to water contamination and preventable deaths via diarrhea and disease. So WGAC set out to address both the environmental problems of toilet paper and the public health problems of poor sanitation practices in one hip, direct-to-consumer startup. How are they doing this, exactly?

I’m honestly not sure. What is undeniable is that they’re positioning themselves as the Tom’s Shoes of the bathroom. On their website, large and eye-catching copy pledges that “We donate 50% of our profits to ensure everyone has access to clean water and a toilet within our lifetime.” While their ambitions are crystal clear, I’m left wondering how a company like this possibly makes money if they’re donating a whopping 50% of their profits to charity. Unless I’m missing something, the profit margins of toilet paper simply can’t be that big. More importantly, while I’m no Paul Krugman, I do know that any company that gives away 50% of its profits is breaking the #1 rule of capitalism.

For some context, Toilet paper colossus (incidentally a great indie band name!) Kimberly Clark shared in a recent public earnings report that their operating profit margins are about 15%. So how a trendy upstart can give away 50% of their profits speaks either to some accounting chicanery, a business secret no one else knows about, or conveniently fuzzy math for them to share with the public, investors or both.

Whatever they’re doing is working well enough so far. Driven in part by the “great year for toilet paper, bad year for everything else” that was 2020, in 2021, WGAC successfully raised $41 million in funding. They now have a marketing war chest big enough to run viral PR stunts. This past Valentine’s Day they ran a campaign called “Flush your Ex” where users could send in love letters from their ex to be upcycled into their toilet paper. The campaign, like their larger business model seems stranger than fiction to me. Nothing about this quite makes sense or adds up, but who gives a crap about logic if you’re laughing your way to the bank?

Tushy: Use us regularly, but Google us very carefully

One of Tushy’s biggest challenges as a brand is the perilous road to its website. If you’re not careful, would be buyers of this product can end up on an anal porn site. This is not a hypothetical danger. One of my best friends from college accidentally sent his mother to this disastrously wrong url in an earnest attempt to refer her to Tushy. So I don’t envy whoever is on their SEO team, to say the least.

Now that we’ve gotten that landmine out of the way, I should clarify that Tushy is a direct-to-consumer bidet. Their core product is a $99 attachment that turns most, but not all, toilets into something that can also wash your butt after you finish doing your business. Tushy co-founder Miki Agrawal had experience disrupting bodily functions from founding period underwear company Thinx. After noticing how common bidets were in other parts of the world, Agrawal set out to build a company that made the bidet accessible in the US. I should also add that Tushy is the first of these three companies I have personally purchased something from.

Without diving into an unsolicited review that’s TMI for literally everyone (especially my beloved paid subscribers, never leave me!), I’ll share that in my opinion, this is the biggest game changer of all three products. Once you figure out how to install it, which took me longer than I expected, and get used to operating it, this nifty accessory will change how you use the bathroom in a very positive way. I wish I had Squatty Potty’s marketing team to help me paint a charming picture of exactly how, but alas. I’ll just say that the difference between cleaning something with water and cleaning it with dry paper is now astoundingly, viscerally clear to me. This is the type of product that honestly makes you wonder how you used to do things for so long. So while Squatty Potty has made bigger waves with their marketing, I’d argue Tushy is making much bigger waves with their product.

Gunning for Squatty Potty’s share of the poopdeck, Tushy also sells stylish Ottomans that look like Squatty Potty’s if they were sold at the SFMOMA gift shop. I couldn’t resist adding one to my order. Now I understand the precise angles that add up to a proper poo with the clarity of Pythagoras. I suppose this is also an implicit endorsement of the Squatty Potty, so take that for what it’s worth.

Conclusions: Who is holding the royal flush?

Of the three companies, I still can’t fully wrap my head around Who Gives a Crap, which makes me least optimistic about them. The fact that they’re asking their consumers to change next to nothing about how they go means it’s easy to market what they’re doing, but their opaque business model and iffy value props don’t fill me with endless joy. Squatty Potty on the other hand has perhaps the highest delta between the ease of using their product and the impact on your bathroom routine. While explaining the utility of this lil’ stool took a bit of marketing hand waving, its “installation” if you can even call it that is an absolute breeze compared to Tushy, which asked me to think critically about the hoses connected to my toilet as well as how the seat was attached. That said, I do wonder how much demand there is for “stools for better stools.” Will Squatty Potty keep having to market themselves as hard as they did in the “Dookie the unicorn” days or will the implicit value of their product one day turn them into a mini Ottoman empire of the bathroom, the first true unicorn of the 21st century pooping revolution?

If I had to bet, I’d put money on Tushy. While their product does not work on all configurations of toilets (I had to put ours in the guest bathroom since installing it in the master bath was a non-starter short of a trip to the hardware store based on the existing plumbing), for those it does work on, it’s a simple addition that makes a large and noticeable improvement in a basic aspect of your every day life. If they can get enough market share, I think they may legitimately change the American bathroom landscape. This could have huge ripple effects for the toilet paper industry, our overall downstairs cleanliness, and even the health of our forests (though I’m less optimistic about this last one).

In the VC-funded race to re-think the final destination of all of our meals, we see virtually all of the delightful and frustrating tropes of startups as a whole: opportunism, empathy for real pain points, unit economics that don’t quite add up, clever designs, grand ambitions, surreal viral ads, and earnest yet bizarrely-bolted-on philanthropic components. I’m just glad that unlike their brief infatuation with “The Juice Loosener,” Silicon Valley has yet to trot out a bathroom product as comically useless as “Sun and Run” (the sun tan lotion that’s also a laxative!) from The Simpsons. That would certainly make for some attention-grabbing stools in the nascent “potty-verse,” but for all the wrong reasons!

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