00:30:47 · Matt
[00:30:47] S0: I I think that the most precious thing we're building right now is trust. It takes a long time to build trust with your customer base, in our case, our patient base, trust is very quickly lost and very slowly earned, and so with respect to our expansion, I wanna make sure that any time you see Fortell Audiology on the outside of a door, I want you to know that when you walk through that door, you're getting an unbelievable combination of the best clinical care and the best hearing aid technology that money can buy, such that it is just a screaming no brainer to come and to send your friends who need hearing aids. My nightmare is going too fast and then blowing the trust, and so I would rather go too slow, being very protective of the quality of the experience we deliver, the quality of the hardware, the quality of the care, the quality of the post purchase support. I would much rather accidentally go a little too slow while being very precious about quality then go too fast and blow that trust. We're here... Our intention is to work on this problem until, you know, we're old and gray. This is a, this is, this is what we wanna be when we grow up. We're not doing this to do something else, right? This is the most interesting and fulfilling thing we can imagine doing, and so we're very long term oriented, we're very careful, and we're growing at the pace we think we can grow without ever compromising on quality.
00:32:42 · Sachin
[00:32:42] S1: Is there a part of your heart that it wishes that you could get this technology to people quick more quickly, right? Because as you said, it's one of the biggest problems. How do you rectify that? Because, you know, maybe playing devil's devil's advocate here that an incrementally worse experience when you step into an audiology clinic versus millions of people around the world whose hearing aid frankly right now doesn't serve them much at all. How kind do of balance those things in your mind?
00:33:12 · Matt
[00:33:12] S0: The way I think about it is there's five major hearing aid companies. It's something like $50,000,000,000 of market cap, and these five companies have been at it since like the seventies. And then you got your consumer electronics companies who make headphones and are adding kind of amplification features. So you have a pretty healthy, or I should say, somewhat crowded ecosystem of people trying to build products to help people hear better. The role that I want Fortell to play is advancing the state of the art, bringing and realizing more ambition for what a hearing aid can and should do for its wearer. So I care deeply about access and scale and touching as many people's lives as possible, but the role that I want our company to play in this ecosystem is taking the best in the world and making it better, so year after year after year, we will be advancing the state of the art, and so massive increases in access, massive increases in affordability, these are important goals. We need to pick our zone, and our zone is building the best possible medicine, the best possible solution, the best possible technology for people who have a hearing loss, and that I think is the only way we can be successful. If we try to do too much, we won't be able to do any of it well. What we want to be is an ultra small company focusing obsessively on one thing and just taking it all the way to the limits of what science and technology can achieve. Right now what that means is we have a premium product that's available in New York City, but very soon will be available in other cities and other parts of the world, and we're very excited about that expansion.
00:35:24 · Adam Miller
[00:35:24] S2: Yeah. I wish everybody could have the experience that I had standing out the front, us in the rain, trying the product and comparing it to the other one, But for those that can't have that experience, they'll care about the results and the data. So I'm keen to hear from you what have been the results you've seen from tests of this and then also the results you're getting from actual customers.
00:35:46 · Matt
[00:35:46] S0: -: Yep. So what I will say is we have filmed some videos that are on our website where the microphones we used for the video were our hearing aids. So even though we can't host everybody at our clinic in New York City and take them outside and put hearing aids in their ear, anybody on the internet actually can experience what we've built. Go to our website and you watch the videos. I assume people probably don't even believe it, but the demos are available and we actually... We did it in noisy places around New York City, Grand Central Station, Times Square, construction sites, restaurants. And so that authentic demonstration is available and I encourage your viewers to check it out if they're curious. But yeah, data validating the results of what we've built is a crucial part of the picture. We wanted to do something a little bit unusual within the hearing aid and hearing loss industry. We found these two professors at NYU. One is Doctor. Bill Shapiro, and he's in charge of the Cochlear Implant Center at NYU. And the other one is Doctor. Mario Svirsky, who's a professor of otolaryngology. These are kind of giants in the field of audiology. We ask them to help us devise a study comparing our hearing aid against the state of the art top of the line competitor in an environment that reflects the real world conditions in which people struggle today with hearing aids. And the goal is, let's do the first hearing aid study that is really at the level of academic rigor and quality that it would be embraced by the peer reviewed community. And so we've published the results of that study where we did a double blind randomized control trial against the top of the line hearing aid. And yeah, the data was, it's almost like too good to be true. My favorite statistic is that the odds of hearing words correctly in the most challenging environment were 19 times higher with our hearing aid than with the state of the art competitor.
00:38:22 · Sachin, Matt
[00:38:22] S1: That's crazy. [00:38:23] S0: And if we get more technical, we were able to meaningfully improve the listening ability that all of the participants had. So we were able to move for the first time in the industry something called SNR 50, which is a measure of what is the signal to noise ratio at which you hear 50% of the words correctly. We were able to take people with the control device from like an average SNR 50 of around three dB. So basically that means that the speech was, or the important speech was three dB louder than the distracting background speech. We were able to give them that same level of listening performance at a negative six dB approximately, so it's about a nine dB improvement in SNR 50. This... Like, we we've literally given people their listening ability in quiet, in noise, and, that's, I think, the job of a hearing aid. That's what it... That's why you go to the audiologist. Yeah? But no hearing aid had ever been able to meaningfully improve listening accuracy and comprehension in background noise. [00:39:35] S1: Matt, so tomorrow we're going Upstate to New York to see how the hearing aids are made, which I'm really excited about. But when you outline those crazy results, my mind immediately goes to what was the innovation that you guys had to create for the world to make this happen? If you could quickly tell us about the components that lead to these kinds of crazy results.