On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Mike Feldstein from Jaspr. His background in cleaning up after a natural disaster, sparked the creation of an exceptional air purifier designed for high performance but with aesthetics that the D2C market demands. We talk about constantly improving the quality of a product, using more creative ways to grow your business, building real-life relationships with customers, and so much more!
Mike Feldstein is the founder of Jaspr, an exceptional air purifier designed for high performance but with aesthetics that the D2C market demands.
Working in the wildfire and flood restoration sector, Mike witnessed how polluted air can damage people’s health, and he discovered that standard air purifiers on the market cannot make substantial improvements in air quality.
He decided to create something to fix the problem. Jaspr air purifiers have all of the power and efficacy of an air scrubber while being quiet and stylish – something that people would actually use.
Mike Feldstein
If you believe in your business for the long term, then growing slowly is just the way to go.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today I'm welcoming the show, Mike Feldstein. He is the founder of Jasper, where his background in cleaning up after natural disasters sparked the creation of an exceptional air purifier designed for high performance but with the aesthetics that the D2C market demands.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Feldstein
Thanks for having me, man.
Chase Clymer
I'm excited to chat. So quickly, what are you guys selling at jaspr.co?
Mike Feldstein
At jaspr.co, we sell one product and one product only, or I guess kind of two. But the main product is a fancy air purifier.
The other product is a replacement filter that goes in the air purifier.
But long story short, my background was in wildfire, flood, mold, toxic environment cleanups. So when California was on fire or Houston would have a hurricane, I would go there, clean homes, build homes and restore things after natural disasters.
I got to see firsthand how bad air quality was after fire and in homes that have mold, which is almost every home.
And I got to see the Delta between the large commercial grade air purifiers we were using for toxic cleanup and the little stuff that you would find at Home Depot or Best Buy.
And the way I like to explain it is that the residential stuff is like golf carts, the commercial industrial stuff is like tractor trailers or pickup trucks, and the market needed an SUV. And that's where we came in.
Something that has some of the features and the storage and the size and the performance that you would want from a truck, but with the luxury and the conveniences of a more refined car.
And that's how we positioned ourselves as a premium residential air purifier.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Let's dive in there a bit more and talk about how you ideated on seeing this gap in the market with obviously your concept there of using the analogy of a golf cart versus like a truck and needing to get something in the middle.
Where did you realize that there's an opportunity here?
Mike Feldstein
2000 and... Well, two moments.
One was in 2014. Adjacent to my disaster cleanup, I was also doing air quality consulting. So this could be a company that has a bunch of sick employees and they're like, “What's going on? Why is everybody getting sick on the southwest corner of the building?”
So we would go in there as air quality detectives and figure out what was making people sick. And then we would also do the same thing for homeowners.
If somebody was getting chronically sick at home, they didn't know why, goes on a vacation, feels great, goes camping, goes hiking, feels awesome, comes home, gets sick again. They're like, “Wait a second, is my home making me sick?”
We would be like the family doctor for your home. So, we would find out what's lurking in the home that's making people sick. So, then we would create a plan to give people a strategy to improve their indoor environments.
And there was a lot of good stuff out there and a lot of lifestyle decisions they could make, but one of the big issues was there wasn't really a good effective air purifier for the modern needs of the consumer or the modern needs of a family really.
And then part two was the Fort McMurray wildfire, which is in Northern Alberta. And this was the biggest wildfire in Canadian history.
Almost 5,000 homes were burnt, thousands of cars, and a very toxic chemical fire. The city was evacuated for a month.
And I got to see firsthand the pediatricians, the pulmonologists, which are lung doctors, everybody was slammed, people were super sick.
Basically everyone with respiratory issues had their symptoms exacerbated: asthma, allergies, autoimmune, cancer. Everybody who was sick got more sick and everybody who felt fine felt a little bit sick.
And we were testing the air and all of these environments. So we got to actually see what people were breathing. And it really dawned on me how much air quality was impacting people's health and how blind or nose blind to it people were from the symptoms that they were dealing with.
And commercial air cleaners were like photocopiers or subwoofers: effective, but super loud. It's like, think about a Sonos or the HomePods. They are this new in between.
But giant subwoofers, giant commercial-grade audio equipment, very effective, but large and loud and ugly. You're not probably going to put those in your living room.
So the middle market emerged for premium consumer-grade products–being out there in Alberta, seeing how impacted people were from the smoke, and then learning about the West Coast.
So California all the way to British Columbia, like 60 days per year, there's air quality advisories from smoke and they tell people to stay inside because of the pollution or the smoke. And I got to see that when they're saying stay inside, inside air wasn't that much cleaner than the outside air.
So the analogy I like to use is if you go to a campfire, you don't notice that you stink like a campfire until you go inside or until you take a shower. You don't smell the smoke when you're in the smoke.
So with a wildfire, you don't realize how contaminated your house is because outside is worse. So I got to quantifiably learn this through firsthand experience and all of our gadgets.
And then I got to retest the Dyson's and the molecules and the Honeywell's and all the consumer grade products in people's homes. And it was kind of like using a kettle to heat a bathtub. So the kettle heats water, but not on the scale of a bathtub.
And Jaspr is designed to be able to handle the modern day needs, whether it's allergens, pollution, cooking particles, people who have pets.
So we originally launched at the $2,000 price point, May 2020. And we sold 99% to doctors and dentists in a COVID market.
And we were not D2C for our first two years. Only January of 2023 did we flip on the e-commerce machine and realize, “Oh, whoa, people actually buy this thing without talking to us? This is much better.”
And that's forced us to now get better at explaining why it is worth what it is. You know, getting people to do... It's been really fun and refreshing for me to solve a new problem because I knew the product was great.
We had a couple thousand in the world. We had only one or two returns. Nobody was returning them. They weren't breaking. I'm like, “This is awesome.”
But now, just jumping into the whole D2C world last year and getting into this whole new community and culture and trying to find ways to educate people and getting out of my own way and feeling like we had to talk to everybody and realizing that you could scale communication and education.
So it's been really fun now, bringing this commercial industrial-grade product, making it pretty. But now learning how to sell things online has been a super fun journey.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. I feel there was a little bit of a… have you ever seen that funny Reddit meme of how to draw an owl? It's like, do the eyes, and then the beak, and then now you have an owl. I feel like we skipped a few things in your journey there.
So let's go back to you guys. You have this idea. You're going to build this product.
How long does it take until you have your first prototype? What was that like?
Mike Feldstein
Okay. So that started early 2017 when I realized I love this disaster work. But it was very sad work.
It wasn't the kind of thing I imagined myself doing my whole life. You know, leaving your family for six months at a time was great before we had kids. So I wanted to still help out in these disaster situations and be in the disaster restoration space, but not have to physically go there every time and subject myself to the environment.
So I started actually trying to create a whole home air purifier, something that connects to the furnace. I dabbled at that for about a year till realizing that it wasn't as effective a solution.
So it was weird because I was trying to create a product and I'm like trying and trying and trying and eventually realized like, “This is just not the right solution. You actually do need something that's portable, that's separate from your furnace.”
So, but all things considered, to answer your question, it took from the middle of 2017 till early 2020 to not just have a working prototype, but have like 50 units. So we, you know, first you order, you design stuff, and you iterate, and then you get one, and then you have to do safety stuff and electrical standards.
And then you get 10, you get those 10 out to the world. You make some more improvements and you get 50.
So luckily the manufacturer was able to work with me, but it was about a three-year journey to go from I have a vision in my head of what we need to create to we have a thing.
And I was traveling for like 70% of that time. So it was one of those things where working a hundred miles an hour wouldn't get you there any faster. You would actually self-deprecate, actually having the time. Sometimes you're just waiting for stuff.
So it was a really nice thing to do at this stage of my life because I was able to–I'm not the one physically doing the tinkering–I was able to provide a strategic direction, organize lab testing and validate things almost as if I was the consumer.
And for a while there, I didn't even want to launch the company. I was still feeling stressed. I was enjoying my travels before having kids. I made some good money doing wildfire stuff before.
But I'm like, I really want this product just for myself and my family and my friends. So I got to the point where I'm like, “Let me just make 50.” And I don't even really care to make it a company.
And then COVID happened. A friend of mine sends me a Facebook message and he goes, his name is Jason Tam and he owns a bunch of orthodontic clinics in Ontario.
And he's like, “Dude, you have to launch today.” I'm like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “They just mandated that every dentist in Ontario needs an air purifier in every single room.”
I was like, “Whoa.” So we launched.
And I just put good Google ads for the word HEPA air purifier. And in like one minute, a sale came through for like $19.75.
That's how much we launched at our list price because the other medical grade products were like $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 plus and they were hideous. They were effective, but they were loud and ugly.
And the modern day dentist and doctor's office and school and gym, they wanted something that made their patients feel safe, looked pretty.
So because we created this product for the wildfire conscious and affected consumer, we over-engineered it residentially, which made us the perfect position for B2B during COVID.
So we ended up launching. We did about a million in sales in our first week, which sounds good. But the other part of that story is if we had 10 million of inventory, we would have sold 10.
It was like a fire and a flood. There was unlimited demand for a finite period of time.
And then the number one feedback we got was, “Can you give us more signage for our lobby, for our waiting room to educate our patients on why we're the cleanest, healthiest, safest dentists in town?”
And then in doing that, patients started to inquire about the product, and we split tested it.
We tried a $1,000 price point and a $2,000 price point, and we couldn't sell anything at $1,000. Nothing. Crickets.
At $2,000, we were selling great. And I learned there that the medical audience expected a medical price to substantiate the quality. And when we were not charging enough, we had no respect from our consumers.
So that was a really powerful lesson for us in pricing.
Chase Clymer
Oh yeah. I remember you telling me that when we did the pre-interview and I was like, I'm definitely going to ask about that again during this. Obviously, it came up organically.
Now, obviously, the pandemic and the sales bump that came along with it, and obviously you working on this product and having this thing ready to go is potentially a once in a lifetime lightning strike, an act of God moment. There's no way anyone can plan for that.
So let's talk about how you had to almost shift, and pivot now to direct to consumers. Demand isn't necessarily still there that originally built a business.
Mike Feldstein
Totally true. So thankfully, we didn't plant our flag like many other brands and call ourselves the COVID virus infection brand. I didn't go there because that wasn't why we created the company.
We created it for wildfire smoke, and homeowners and families and consumers. So the vision is we always knew the problem we wanted to solve, so it was almost like that was just an unexpected profitable detour.
And the nice thing that happened was that they gave us thousands of testimonials from doctors and dentists who are the most difficult people to convert. And they started buying it for their homes.
So them talking to their patients about it, then the patient who has the kid with asthma or bad allergies or cancer, like really sick people, or people who just really wanted to clean air, they're like, “Hey, do these guys sell these for the home?” The dentist is like, “I don't see why not. Give them a show.”
So we started to get inbound from people who are like, “I want this for my baby's room,” “I want this because we cook a lot,” “I want this for our fire,” “We have mold.”
The trickle started in what I call it, like, I guess it is called B2B2C. B2B2C has been a huge thing for us.
So it's like, we don't want businesses for the sake of having the business clients, but when the consumers see them in the businesses.
So even to this day, over 10% of all of our customers coming, we get that no commerce surveys are from dentists. Dentists are actively a fantastic source of business for us, and all those other COVID businesses, it's like, instead of running Facebook ads, we have real physical units in the wild.
And because the units have the green light and the air quality score right on the top, people are able to see it, ask what that means, and it is designed as an educational tool as much as an air cleaning product.
So to this day, we've tested a very few Facebook ads. Most of our businesses come from people who bought them and then happened to be affiliates and influencers or doctors.
And they're like, “Hey, how can I share this with my audience? Can I get a code?” And then they did.
I think every one of our affiliates to date was a customer first. And then either I saw them tag us on a post and like, “Whoa, you make really great videos. I could not have said that better myself. Do you want to collaborate? You bought the thing. You obviously like it enough to share it.”
So the shift was like this really slow organic thing, but it was very painful, especially for the team at the time.
Because I'm like B2B, B2C, build this website, scratch it. The grass was greener on the other side.
Finding our market and finding our audience was a two-year journey. Now it's been like a year and a bit of just... What makes it obvious is when you get the emails from a business– first of all, you don't.
When you get the review, it's like, “My patients and staff felt safer because Jaspr was there and my customers loved it,” And in the home it's like, “My daughter used to sniffle through the night when the dog was in a room. She didn't sniffle anymore. The asthma attacks aren't happening anymore.”
So it was like, forget lab data. These are like visceral, life-changing results. Someone with an Oura ring whose sleep score was 61, now it was a 91, because now they weren't breathing mold and pollen at night.
So it was very slow and organic, but I would say most of the growth has come from podcasts.
And not podcasts I've done, but other health and wellness people being on podcasts, talking about it. Which is why I'm more excited about doing podcasts now because it provides enough airtime to actually thoughtfully discuss a concept as opposed to a cute little ad.
I just really didn't want to jump onto the Facebook, Google ads thing. I think that's a really good tool. I love retargeting. But I think that there's just a lot more creative ways to build a business if you formulate true relationships with people online and offline in your community.
So I live in Austin, Texas now. And the main market I focus on is one mile radius of my house.
And then the 10-mile radius. I'm like, get strong in Austin. Then we'll get strong in Texas and then we'll branch out.
So even though we sell online, I think about selling online as... I don't consider us an Ecommerce D2C brand. I consider us a company that leverages the technology and tools that are Shopify and Ecommerce and third-party fulfillment.
What beautiful ways to have an employee-light scalable business, but by no means are we limited to not having real-life relationships and real units in the wild.
So it's been slow and steady. We're not steady.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
You mentioned your trajectory now… how your funnel breaks down is you don't do any paid advertising at the top of the funnel.
You're doing a lot of affiliate deals with influencers to drive more qualified organic traffic in. And then you're remarketing through the paid stuff and obviously, email and SMS.
Mike Feldstein
No SMS right now. I just wanted to get really good at email first. So what’s actually working good is we have a little simple quiz on our website.
We've tested calling it the Air Quality Quiz, the Air Quality Report. How many do I need?
And then basically, they raise their hand and say if their biggest problem is allergies, sleep, pets, mold, cooking. We have a bunch of questions.
And then based on those things, I'm able to hit them with an email series that educates them about their specific problem. Because once I understand their biggest problem, I can explain to them why it's a no-brainer and explain what our guarantee is and make them an offer and all that.
So we don't do a lot of things like discounting and educating. We do a little bit on the website, but the backend is all… every email I write myself and they're all personal emails. I found that personal emails massively out convert all these fancy designed emails.
So the way I write them is I literally would not go on Klaviyo. I'd be on my Gmail and I would write one person an email. I'd be like, “That felt like a good email. Let's put that in Klaviyo now and use that for everybody.”
That was a situation that applies often. So it's literally my words to one customer.
And I love to use automation to scale your truth. You get this weird brain when you're like, let me write this email campaign. All of a sudden, you have a weird voice and a weird style.
So that's been very big. The email has been very steady.
We're not a... Unless there's wildfire smoke, and then we're in impulse purchase, we're a very considered purchase.
They research it, they look at lots of competitors, we ask lots of questions. And believe it or not, I did all of our customer service for the... I'm just getting off of it now because the product works so good, it doesn't really break.
And if it does ever break, we just send people a new one. We ship a new one, they take the new one out, they put the old one in, we prepay to ship it back.
And by having a ridiculously good policy that's fair, we don't need a big customer service department to say no politely, we just give people the unit.
So I love having a subscription-based model because it's not just a transactional relationship. These are gonna be our customers for decades. So we treat them as such and we're able to have incredible service and policies because we intend to have this long-term journey.
So it really allows us to do stuff that if we were in a transactional business, we wouldn't be able to do.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah. And we definitely didn't highlight that. One of the powers of your business is obviously that subscription tail and obviously, there's the upfront cost of the unit, but then you've got the subscription on the filters.Which from a clearly capitalistic point of view is an awesome way to build a business.
Mike Feldstein
It's the best. And I love... Most of your audience is Ecom founders, is that correct?
Chase Clymer
Yes.
Mike Feldstein
So this was awesome because I'm sure a good percentage of them have a subscription model.
So for the longest time, we had ChargeBee for subscriptions, and that's because Recharge used to not do multi-currency until Recharge 2 came out.
So it was horrible because we used ChargeBee for multi-currency, but we couldn't have that as a part of our Shopify checkout.
So we were literally not even focusing on getting new subscribers for the first couple of years. I was just innovating the product to get the product really, really, really good.
So people think we're on our second version, but we're actually on our fifth version because whenever a unit would break, I would take it apart, figure out why it didn't work, make the manufacturer change their process so it never happens again, and make our third party inspectors inspect the goods to look for this issue.
Our money has to be where our mouth is to make great products or it's going to cost us a lot, not our customer.
And I think if you make a product and you sell it, your warranty should match your life expectancy. So if I said the product should last 10, 20 years, the warranty should be at least as long as the life expectancy of the product.
I hate when you get a product with a one-year warranty. It's like, does the company think this is only going to last one year? So I think warranties are one of the... Like honest, legit warranties are one of the biggest differentiators in business.
But going back to the subscription stuff, we use Loop for subscriptions, which I love the company and I love the team. And they've been so helpful.
And we put the subscription button on the website like five months ago. Instantly, when people would check out to buy the purifier, 30% to 35% of the people were subscribing.
Ran that for about a month. Then, we changed it so the default radio button was in the subscription option instead of the one-time purchase option. And that instantly jumped. We jumped from 30% to 35% to 60% to 65%.
And my whole projection on the business was I always had a dream of 70% filter club subscription rate.
Here's the craziest thing. Six months is the appropriate cadence, but some businesses and medical offices do three and four months. Some snowbirds who would only use the unit seasonally would do 12 months.
I got rid of every option and I just put it to six months. That's the right cadence for 99% of people.
When we went to six months only and we removed the options, we've been sitting at a 95% subscription rate. So that was what I needed to be true.
Before now it's time to scale, and actively promote and build relationships and build out our affiliate program because we offer no discounts for people who subscribe, but you get the lifetime warranty if you're part of the filter club and you save $100 per filter.
So if you just buy your filters one at a time, it's $2.99. If you buy them one at a time, sorry, if you subscribe, it's $1.99. But making the default option subscribed with no options, changed the business by 10-fold in terms of the value and the LTV of the customer, because customers that don't subscribe don't have much value.
And if they don't subscribe on day one, or by month six when it's time to change the filter, like, you did something wrong and that's a travesty. Someone invested like $1,300, $1,400 and they're not even going to continue to use that product.
They'd be like buying a car and never doing an oil change or changing your brakes. That would be horrible.
So I just thought, I don't have enough broad experience, but I can share my experience here. And removing the options has just been massive.
So I would really encourage people that have the traffic and are doing subscriptions to experiment with removing options to see how much that helps increase conversions.
Chase Clymer
No, that's a fantastic piece of advice. I was talking about this yesterday with a prospect and it was just this concept that choice leads to analysis paralysis. And the easiest option is to not make a choice and just to walk away and not make the purchase.
Especially with subscriptions, I know that you can get really down a rabbit hole with your options with the cadence of 3, 6, or 12. Or 1 at a time, 2 at a time, 3 at a time.
Now you've got these exponential amounts of options. And your first hurdle is selling your customer the product. The hurdle shouldn't be them understanding what option they should pick.
Mike Feldstein
I totally agree. Because they could either not purchase at all. Or they're like, “You know what? There's no discount. I'm just gonna buy it one time and I'll wait and see.” And then good luck.
Sometimes you could get them at 6 months because that reminds them it's time to change your filter. You can get them in a year, “Hey, your warranty is about to expire,” but it's not the way that the experience should go down.
When you go to Best Buy and you buy a TV, they sell you a warranty now.
Now those warranties aren't usually that nice to deal with. They make you sit on hold. They make you ship your product in, take photos. We removed all that stuff.
But by not having the option like… I also think there's some businesses that have subscriptions that it's worth it to test like a supplement.
If you give a discount, a heavy discount, for someone to subscribe to a supplement, they might not buy it all because they feel shitty that they have to pay a higher price to buy it one time, or they're going to subscribe and then cancel.
Whereas if you could just get them to buy it once, if they like it, anyone who gives you a five-star review, for example, get them to subscribe at like day 25, day 26 if it's a monthly product
But just getting as many customers in the door on day one and then rolling out the subscription offer on the back end…I think like, I think being so intentional, any business that has a subscription model, I wouldn't even waste my time trying to scale unless I had my benchmark numbers that would equal success for your subscription stuff.
And if you dial that in, now you just got this like… Like our churn rate is less than 1%. Our refund rate is under 0.5%. Our warranty defect rate is under 3%. And now the filter subscription rate is over 95%.
You're like, “Whoa, it's time to scale, guys. We did the hard work for three years, and now it's time to go.”
If we scaled at 30% for the filters, like we'd go broke, we'd have to be raising money. Instead of raising our money, we can grow slowly or organically. I would rather double and triple for my first several years than have like a nine or 10x year and try to maintain that velocity.
And then you're making horrible decisions. And nowadays you see everybody for two, three years, 25 million, 50 million. Sometimes that founder only has 10% equity and they're losing money.
And now they're trying to maintain this pace. And now the bad decisions you're making, it's like if you drive a golf cart and you make a bad decision, you bump up the golf cart. And if you're driving a Ferrari and you make a bad decision or a motorcycle, you turn into dust.
So I think, you know, learning how to drive a golf cart and then a reasonable sedan, you, you know, you want to move up and get a faster and faster car organically. If your first car is a Lambo or a Ferrari, you're likely to make a fatal mistake.
So I actually think getting the best first thousand clients you can with the deepest relationship, intimately understand them, don't outsource your customer service so fast until you know what's going on.
When somebody asks you the same thing twice, put it in your FAQ.
But I'm a huge proponent of if you believe in your business for the long term, then growing slowly is just the way to go.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Mike, I think that is the perfect note to end it on.
Mike Feldstein
Perfect.
Chase Clymer
28:28 You talk so much about your passion for this product. If I'm interested in checking out your unit, where should I go?
Mike Feldstein
jaspr.co. J-A-S-P-R.
And I'm not sure if you record intros or outros later, but I'll create a special code for your audience after the podcast for anybody who may be interested.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. We'll make sure to link that promo code down in the show notes.
Mike Feldstein
There you go.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on today.
Mike Feldstein
Alright. Take care, man.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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