Shit is getting real.
The emergence of the Toilet Tech industry here in Los Angeles.
I’ve always been jealous of businesses like Dollar Shave Club that do something seemingly SOOOO simple and yet are SOOOO successful. Reminder, or for those not familiar, Dollar Shave Club is a monthly subscription service of razor blades that was acquired by Unilever in 2016 for a staggering $1B.
For a long time I’ve joked about starting the “Dollar Toilet Paper Club” because after all, what could be more simple than shipping monthly supplies of toilet paper to people?! Well guess what……it already exists. Toilet Paper Valet, Grove, and my personal favorite, Who Gives a Crap are all monthly subscription services for….you got it….good old TP. And you have to give a creative nod to their cheeky marketing humor with tag lines like: “Good for your bum! Great for the world.” and “Everything but the wipe.”
While these e-commerce companies certainly deserve credit for creating the Toilet Paper 2.0 industry, I’d hesitate to call them true “tech” companies. It seemed it was only a matter of time before some brilliant engineering minds would bring some true tech innovation to the toilet world. Lucky enough for me, a few of those people happen to work with me here at Event Farm.
To clarify, we are an Event and Experiential Marketing platform so toilets are not our primary focus but we do like to tinker and innovate on side projects when we have time. Our LA office is a two story building and we have a bathroom on each floor. With 25 of us in this office most days, there are times that we inevitably have to wait in line to “go”. No biggie, and certainly expected in a startup office. But with bathrooms on 2 floors, when one is occupied, you end up walking up or downstairs to see if the other one is free and a lot of times it’s unavailable. Ugh. What a pain!
Over the last 6 months, Jamie Isaacs and Jason Raimondi led the Event Farm team to build a real-time monitoring system for us to see if our bathrooms are occupied before committing to that walk across the office. It came to life with a few arduinos, rasberry pi’s, and some duct tape. It has taken on a life of it’s own and has affectionately been branded as CanIPoop (largely b/c of domain name availability). They built a web application canipoop.com and now we even have a native mobile IOS app. Most employees have a browser window open on their screens at all times. The interface is purposely simple. The top and bottom of the screen represent upstairs and downstairs bathrooms. Green = available. Purple = occupied. For any of you engineers out there, This is now an open source project available on Github. The feature requests we’ve already received are incredibly fun and pilling up. Come up help us build! And great work so far from Jamie, Jason and the Event Farm team!
But yesterday this whole conversation took an even bigger step forward when Tooshlights (a smart restroom technology company) announced they have secured a $3M Series A funding round. According to CEO Allen Clevens, “Tooshlights is addressing one of the biggest pain points in the public restroom experience: long lines and the awkward experience of having to peek under stalls to see if they are free.”. They seem to be targeting venues, malls, and anywhere that may have long bathroom lines. To my knowledge this is the first material investment in a “Toilet Tech” company. Congrats to Tooshlights. Is this the tipping point for lots of ideas, innovation, and businesses surrounding the toilet?
I’m not a superstitious guy but I do find it interesting that Dollar Shave Club, Event Farm and Tooshlights are all based in Los Angeles. Something is going on here. Is Toilet Tech the next breakout industry? I certainly don’t have the market prediction skills to call that one, but I do know that Shit is getting real!
Having fun innovating here at Event Farm,
RC
