Powering Public Health with Data Management with TJ Muehleman of Standard Co

Giving global public health organizations the tools they need to succeed is more important now than ever. But efficiently collecting and managing data across teams, initiatives, and continents is no easy feat. Many public health organizations struggle with how to properly organize, format, and analyze their extensive data sets in a way that drives action and impact. 

In this episode of The Digital Footprint, we sit down with TJ Muehleman, Founder and CEO of Standard Co. With their Standard Data toolkit, TJ and his team have created a powerful platform that simplifies data management in public health, empowering organizations with technology so they can do more and help more people.  

We talk with TJ about Standard Co's transition from services to product and the ups and downs along the way. A tech and startup veteran, TJ shares advice on how to be in it for the long haul and define your own path to success.

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: TJ Muehleman

💡 What he does: TJ is the CEO and Founder at Standard Co, a company focused on helping public health organizations better utilize data to make better decisions and broaden their impact.

💡 Company: Standard Co

💡 Noteworthy: TJ and his team also built the COVID Mapping Project, a tool that curates and provides analysis of a broad range of state and local COVID data sources across the U.S.

💡 Where to find TJ: LinkedIn

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Connect with our cohosts Richard Simms & Carlos Gonzalez on Linkedin

Transcript

E661389B_12 - TT - Digital Footprint - TJ Muehleman - Transcript 

[00:00:00] Richard Simms: Hello and welcome to the Digital Footprint. I'm Richard Simms and this podcast is brought to you by Tyrannosaurus Tech, an award-winning technology partner dedicated to designing and developing high-impact software products. Very excited to be joined today by TJ Muehleman, Founder & CEO of Standard Co.

[00:00:20] Welcome, TJ. 

[00:00:22] TJ Muehleman: Hi, how's it going?

[00:00:23] Richard Simms: Good. Man, I'm glad to have you on. So at this point, TJ, I think I've known you about as long as I've known anyone in the Atlanta tech scene. Although of course, I know you are a West Coast space now, but we first met in 2013. I had just moved back to Atlanta and you were one of the first instructors that came in for my previous business Tech Talent South.

[00:00:49] And we were very much in our early days. So you were teaching Ruby on Rails to the young and hungry engineering upstarts in town and it, it was a lot of fun. You know, we've, we've kept in touch since then. [00:01:00] 

[00:01:00] TJ Muehleman: Well, and you know, what I love about that is we hired, I think eight, seven or eight people that came out of Tech Talent, Tech Talent South. It was the best breeding ground for new talent. You know, I spent three months with people, I was like, "You're the best in this class. Do you wanna come work for us?" And, and, and, you know, so several of them still work for us.

[00:01:18] Richard Simms: Yeah. That's awesome, man. Yeah. And I know who some of them are. And I'm sure that how far they've come on the development front is amazing by this point. Okay, cool. So yeah.

[00:01:28] You were a great instructor and you continue to be a great purveyor of all kinds of tech and startup advice, I would say. So I've, I've, I've checked in with you periodically to ask for feedback and advice and you're always a good, a good source for that.

[00:01:43] So I'm excited to get into it a little bit here on the show. So, to get started, can you just take a minute or two, introduce yourself and tell folks a bit about Standard Co? 

[00:01:53] TJ Muehleman: Yeah. So, my name is TJ Muehleman. Thank you. I, I was in Atlanta for 25 years. I moved there in high [00:02:00] school and then almost four years ago, my wife's from Seattle, we moved out here to Seattle, but, but my heart is still in Atlanta, I like to say. And thanks to social media, I mean, we all sort of be more on social media,

[00:02:09] I'm still connected to Atlanta in a, in a lot of ways. But Standard Co, I always like to start by telling the Standard Co story by telling the We&Co story, which is my company beforehand. And sort of similar to you, I have a background in entrepreneurship that kind of predates this company.

[00:02:24] So we started We&Co in 2010 as the LinkedIn for hospitality professionals. So I was a bartender in college and my dad was in the restaurant business for 50 years. So I had a real soft spot for hospitality. And when we did the traditional startup playbook. You know, we did a friends and family round. We did an angel round,

[00:02:43] we were trying to raise an A round. And, you know, it was a real struggle and right around 2013, 2012, 2013 we kept running out of money and our investors were amazing. And gave us bridge loans and, you know, kind of kept us afloat. But [00:03:00] after the third time, we kinda got tired of doing that and, and, and we've said, "You know, let's, let's take our, our skills or unique skillset," where I was sort of somewhere between technology and sales.

[00:03:09] We had a really good designer and a really good mobile developers. "So let's start an agency to fund this business." And we did that and it, it was really fun. We actually, our very first client was rebuilt Jason Carter, when he ran for governor, Jimmy Carter's grandson. We re, we built his website. And we were like, "Holy shit, this is, this is fun.

[00:03:28] Like, let's do this again." And it pays well and the client's really cool. So we we kind of evolved into an agency that built things for other people to fund We&Co. And that was the beginning, that was 2013.

[00:03:43] Richard Simms: Yeah.

[00:03:43] That's awesome. So, it does all tie together. So, for Standard Co, one of the things that, of course I admire about you all's journey is that as you just mentioned, you all started very much as agency kind of dev shop model, building out [00:04:00] websites, apps, products for other organizations, service provider, very much like Tyrannosaurus Tech.

[00:04:05] But you all have slowly transformed into really a product company with your Standard Data Toolkit and I think everyone can appreciate the accomplishment that is, but I especially recognize it. And I think anyone in tech services, because it's very hard to make that switch, of course, and it is kind of the dream for tech services firms,

[00:04:29] right? Like everyone is like, "Yeah. But we're going to be launching our own products and we're going to be a product company." And we have those aspirations too. And they're sincere, but I know how hard it is. It's kind of the MailChimp 37signals story that is very rare. So tell us more about that transition from services to product.

[00:04:49] Like what does that been like? How long did it take? Love to unpack that a little more. 

[00:04:54] TJ Muehleman: Well, I'll, I'll s I'll answer the last question first. It's ongoing. Takes a long time, [00:05:00] but I'm kind of rewinding back to 2013, 2014, 2015. So we, we kind of, you know, started the company as a dev shop to fund our other company. So we were always at heart a product company, I've always had aspirations to launch and run product. Service is is, it was sort of a means to an end

[00:05:18] and we always knew it was going to be. So with our first company I was a real big believer in founder market fit that you, that you had to have like a certain, you know, passion and a certain knowledge about an industry to really start a company in that industry. And, and again, for me, it was hospitality just because I grew up in it and did it a lot in college.

[00:05:37] And I realized that, at least for me, that that was wrong. I was wrong to believe that that was the only way to launch a product. And so with Standard Co what we figured out was that there are a million problems, a billion problems out there in a universe that require some sort of automation or some sort of intelligence or something that you don't necessarily need to have domain expertise over.

[00:05:58] You just needed to [00:06:00] develop that domain expertise over. So we decided to, to not come into launching a product in Standard Co with, with a certain bias or prejudice. We just said, "We want to find some problem." And so we literally started launching stupid goofball projects. We launched, I think, 10 or 11

[00:06:18] products over the course of three years looking for something that where there was a fit. So I'll give you kind of three examples. I always like to share these examples. So we started one called Dear Fe, that was for new mothers. It's like you, you have a new baby and you want to know, you had some questions about breastfeeding or you had some, you know, issue with whatever it might be.

[00:06:38] You could text SMS service and that got some traction and some paying customers, but it didn't really go anywhere. And then we had one called Idea Shaper for innovation groups that big organizations for shaping ideas and then we had one called Leo, which was an, a productivity, a Slack productivity tool.

[00:06:55] And we did that like 10 times. And each one of those either gained some traction or some [00:07:00] revenue, but they didn't quite lift off. And then the 11th or the 12th, I can't remember the exact number, and all the while we're doing services work to pay the bills. So we're building apps and websites and data systems and all kinds of shit.

[00:07:15] And around 2015 somebody at The Task Force for Global Health which is based in Decatur, reached out to us and said, "Hey, we we're, we're transitioning our data collection activities from paper to digital and we have a tool we're using in house, but we built it. We're not technologists. We don't really know what we're doing.

[00:07:34] We want to scale this thing and we want to dial it up a little bit." And we were like, "Well, that sounds cool, but we, we don't know anything about healthcare." And they're like, "Well, we're not healthcare. We are public health." At the time. I didn't know the difference really between sort of consumer health and public health.

[00:07:48] And I think now everybody through COVID, it's sort of learned that the, that there are definite differences. And we came in to The Task Force and built like a prototype tool [00:08:00] that was deployed somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. And it was like, "Holy cow, this is super neat." And there's a clear need here because, you know, there's, there's public health organizations all over the world, the WHO, CBC, Task Force, you know, non-governmental organizations who are trying to gather data and are, are using pen and paper or paper and pencil.

[00:08:23] And if you digitize it, you can get a whole lot of benefits out of it. So kind of long story short, we deployed that tool and it went really, really well. And so then we went and found somebody else in public health and said, "Hey, we actually know how to do this. Would you be interested in?" They're like, "Yeah, of course."

[00:08:39] And we also had an internal champion who sort of helped open a lot of doors for us, 'cause we made a really great relationship with this one person at Task Force. And that, you know, that was a really kind of big signal for us that that may be this 11th or 12th thing that we built, that we knew nothing about

[00:08:56] what is going to be the product. And that was in 2015 [00:09:00] and it, and it's from there, it slowly started to kind of build to that to now... we'll talk more about the in-between and I'm sure here, but here in 2021, 95% of our revenue is from a from Standard Data, our product. We still have a couple of legacy clients that are totally outside of public health that still pay us

[00:09:21] and, and they're, they're, they're good people and we have a wonderful relationship with them and we're not really ready to get rid of them, but... Through that journey, you know, one of the biggest, hardest decisions we made was quote-unquote firing customers that weren't, you know, didn't fit in the mold or were difficult to work with or whatever. We, you know, we wanted to be a product company,

[00:09:43] so that meant sacrifice. That meant losing revenue, so that way we could really dial on focus in, on, on building a product.

[00:09:51] Richard Simms: Yeah.

[00:09:51] That makes a lot of sense and I think that what you're describing about having a development firm or an agency [00:10:00] model, if you are deliberate about it, it gives you an incredible opportunity to experiment. Because you obviously have this talent on board that if you can carve out some of their time and, you know, still cover that cost with a lot of your services, you know, it's, it's a lot safer means to put some things out there, see what you learn.

[00:10:23] And I definitely appreciate how I think you all got into what ultimately became Standard Data. And it's a similar mindset we adopt, although, you know, we're much less far along than you all, but it's like, let's see what the market kind of leads us to as far as some consistency or just a thread that ties these problems we're solving across organizations together.

[00:10:48] So one, one question I had for you, which you've alluded to a little bit. In my opinion, the hardest part there is like, how do you balance those things. And that is the challenge, is you have to, at some point, if [00:11:00] your agency is doing well, you have to choose to forego revenue, pull people off of client work in some capacity knowing that at least for the short term this product is going to be nothing but a money pit.

[00:11:14] So like how, how did you all kind of balance that over the years and then how did it evolve to where you basically were like, "We are essentially there where we're making the switch," you know? 

[00:11:26] TJ Muehleman: I think for us, I'll say one of the key ingredients to this is sort of a real, a dining passion to build, you know, a real, a real product that can change, change, change the world. You know, that sounds kinda like a cliche. Like for me, one of the things that I've really been passionate about my whole career is sort of this intersection of technology and impact

[00:11:47] and how do we leverage technology to actually make the difference in people's lives to improve the human condition, right? And so we think of what we're doing is aiding public health [00:12:00] organizations to do that. And so, in 2017 we were, you know, we had the product and I think it represented about 35% of our revenue in 2017.

[00:12:08] And we were at this sort of pivot point where we could continue to be an agency and continue to push hard on growing our, our, our agency revenue. And by then we were doing over a million in revenue and in services work. And I think we were on a pretty safe trajectory to doing by now probably 5 to 10 million in revenue as a services company,

[00:12:29] I think that was an easy thing for us to do. But we were passionate about it. We were focused on that. So, so we, we made a very deliberate decision to say, "Okay, we've got,..." at the time I think we had around 10 developers, 10 engineers. Our team, the biggest we ever got was 15 people. And so I think right around then we took two or three of our developers, our more senior developers and said, "Okay, you're only working on

[00:12:52] the product." The remaining team was services. And as a partner we had, there were three partners at the time. One partner was dedicated to the [00:13:00] services side of the company, one partner was dedicated to the product side of the company. I was on the product side. And so we, we made these deliberate decisions to start holding, separating the company really into two.

[00:13:10] And, and people kind of went back and forth at time. Some of the times the product teams flopped over to the services business to help out and vice versa. And even the services team was afforded about 20% of their time to work on product. And 'cause at that point we were still pretty, we were like, I would say mostly certain that Standard Data was going to be the product, but we were still kind of goofing around with other things.

[00:13:34] And so w w I think it was, I think it was making deliberate decisions to, to bifurcate the company a little bit and making deliberate decisions to say, "You know, in 2018 we pulled another developer over, and by 2019 another one." And then at the same time, you know, our revenue, our revenue did kind of was, was doing this whole spike thing.

[00:13:55] And then it flatlined, because we that's when we started saying, "Okay, this customer [00:14:00] is really needy and really hard, and they're not public health and they're not contributing to the vision of the company. So when their contract is over, they're out. And then this client is out and this client is out." And so we were able to kind of, we were able to our revenue kind of flatline there for a couple of years and then started to pick back up 2020 at the end of 2020.

[00:14:21] But our team shrunk, because you know, one of the benefits to having us a product company is you can do a lot more with a lot fewer people. And in fact, most of our work now, I mean, we're always innovating and always adding new things to our platform. But you know, when we have a new client we're not coding anything for them. We're, we're configuring things for them and standing up, so that doesn't require as quite as much engineering talent.

[00:14:41] So it just meant like sort of taking, we were engineering, heavy company, and now we're sort of more of a customer success, heavy, more marketing heavy, and, and sort of consultative, like here's how you can use Standard Data to solve your problem.

[00:14:56] Richard Simms: Yeah. Awesome. That, that makes total sense and yeah, [00:15:00] I love that it was a very gradual transition just kind of, you know, quarter by quarter, year by year making the move. So, let's talk a little bit more about Standard Data. I know the Toolkit is made up of essentially three products, right? There's what you all call collect, manage, analyze.

[00:15:19] Can you tell us just high level about the Toolkit as a whole and, and those products and kind of how they work together?

[00:15:25] TJ Muehleman: Yeah. So, so, you know, the, the problem we're trying to solve is, is how to get information from the field to analysis as quickly as possible. So 10 years ago, COVID happened, Ebola when Ebola happened until in 2008, 2009 and it's still kind of flares up. But when the main outbreak happened, what they would traditionally do is they'd send people into the field to understand who might have Ebola, who might've been in contact with somebody with Ebola, what have you...

[00:15:54] And then we collect all this data on pen and paper. And so they'd get all this information and then maybe [00:16:00] halfway through the survey, they're like, "Oh shit, we, we, this question is kind of wrong. We need a new question. We need to change it." Write new surveys, deploy new pen and paper, paper and pencil and then collect all that data, aggregate it, get it into a data system

[00:16:13] and in that whole sequence might take, you know, months, right? Well, our platform digitizes that whole thing. And so from the moment that somebody comes to us and says, "I want to collect data in the field and understand what's happening with COVID," for example. We digitize, we have a survey tool that runs on Android and iPhone that from the moment they come to us with the questions they want to ask to, to them actually interviewing people in the field is, can be as short as 48 hours. And a real world example of that I'll tell you is COVID.

[00:16:45] So when COVID first broke out in March of 2020, Merck, the Merck foundation, so Merck, the German pharmaceutical company was sponsoring a survey in Nairobi around COVID. So they wanted to interview 10,000 [00:17:00] households. And so they came to us 'cause we're, we, we worked with Merck and a bunch of different things. And we created a survey in 48 hours that allowed them to go to 10,000 households, interview people about did they understand the difference between COVID and Malaria.

[00:17:13] So in North America we confused or we talk about COVID and flu and pneumonia as sort of a package goods. In Subsaharan Africa they talk about it with malaria. And so they wanted to collect all this data so that data gets collected on our, on our apps, immediately gets sent to the cloud, but the cool thing is it works with or without internet.

[00:17:32] So you could be out in the middle of nowhere and you're collecting all this data and as soon as you get to a wifi hotspot, zip it up and shoot it over to us, to our servers. So then the managed component kicks in and the managed component actually cleans the data and looks for outliers and puts it on a map and does all kinds of stuff to basically do some of the more,

[00:17:52] you know, onerous tasks that people do with managing data. And, and then that's the middle component, so some [00:18:00] people might think of it as data engineering. And then the last piece, which is sort of the newest component to our platform is the analytical side. So what used to happen is people would do all the first two steps, collect all this data,

[00:18:11] we do all this data cleaning, make it easy for them and then they export the data and they go put it in SaaS or they go put it in R, or they do something with it to create a report like, "Okay, COVID or Ebola or whatever is, here's a map of where it's happening." So what we realized was people kept asking us to do the analysis and we're like, "We're not qualified."

[00:18:32] We had this imposter syndrome where we were like, "We're not data scientists, we're data engineers." And then we realized that what they were asking for was actually pretty basic stuff like, "Show me a pie chart of how many males and females I've interviewed. Show me a bar chart of how many, you know, villages I've reached in the last 30 days. Show me a trend of how many what's, what it's going to take to get to 10,000 households."

[00:18:54] And we were like, "Oh, we can do that." And so, the analytical side came in when [00:19:00] we adopted an open source platform called Metabase. And, and now we're a holistic tool, so, so we were running a whole bunch of COVID studies right now in South America and Africa where the client's using us, that's like a turnkey solution.

[00:19:13] Like they don't have any data analysts on their team, they don't have any data managers on their team. They don't have any programmers on their team. We're doing all of it, so that way they can kind of focus all of their attention on understanding the disease, understanding or the virus understanding where it might be happening and understanding where it might be going.

[00:19:29] So that's, that's kinda what we're doing is, is it is a turnkey solution for these global health organizations.

[00:19:35] Richard Simms: Yeah.

[00:19:35] That's a great overview and what I, well, one of the things I really appreciate about it is that it is very broadly applicable. You know, like I think you all have correctly focused on public health and I'm sure there's a lot of aspects of the product that are specific to public health. And I know that that's where you all want to work and have a big impact, but

[00:19:58] these are very common [00:20:00] problems that there's a lot of sophistication in what you built, but it's not rocket science. Like, "Hey, people are doing this and in very manual way. We can build something that make their lives easier, help them, you know, save money on all these efforts and have a bigger impact."

[00:20:12] So I think that's really cool. One thing I was going to ask, you've mentioned this to me at some point, but what, what percentage of your clients are, you know, outside of the US as far as based, and 

[00:20:24] then the product itself, if I remember correctly, I mean, is overwhelmingly used outside of the US and Africa.

[00:20:32] You know, I I'd love to just understand how folks are using it a little bit more. 

[00:20:36] TJ Muehleman: Yeah. So I would say we have, probably 10% of our clients are US-based. So we actually have non-public health clients, to your point. Like we have developed as a company a domain expertise on public health data systems and humanitarian logistics. Those are two kind of areas that we spend all of our time.

[00:20:57] But the product itself is not really designed [00:21:00] specifically for public health. So we have an ice cream company using it, we have a dev shop using it. We have a bunch of NGOs who do some humanitarian public health and some don't and some mission based organizations using it to kind of measure their progress and their impact.

[00:21:15] And, and in fact, that's where we see our growth areas going, is we're actually kind of expanding that side of the business and then in terms of usage, 98 - 99% based outside the US. So it's really funny. You know, when COVID hit, everybody was like, "Oh, TJ, are you gonna, you know, go work with, you know, domestic organizations, public health departments?"

[00:21:35] And, and, and for a couple of months we wanted to. We were like, "What you're trying to do in terms of coalesce all this data, in terms of make sense of what's happening with COVID is exactly what we do for about 10 different diseases around the world and over 164 countries." And when we talked to public health groups here, they were just sort of like, they didn't know what to do.

[00:21:55] They had no idea how to deploy a tool like this, because they're kind of stuck in [00:22:00] 1999. And, and I've been very publicly, very public about this, about the, the, the, the problems we have with our, our digital infrastructure and the public health system here in the US. I'm much, so that's a long way of saying like, I'm much more comfortable,

[00:22:13] I know a lot more, I know more people in the Ministry of Health in Kenya and Tanzania and Cameroon and Ghana than I know about here in the US. Our tools are not, our just our tools, tools in general are much more likely to be adopted and utilize and I think in more meaningful manner in Africa than they are here.

[00:22:32] And I've said, you know, several times that I think if we wanted to understand how do we better deploy technology to combat disease here in the US, we should look at how we're doing some of the technology in Africa, because I think it's a little more forward-looking and, and, and meaningful, but it, it does pose challenges.

[00:22:51] I mean, we've talked a little about this. Some of it's practical, like, you know... Before COVID, I would travel to Africa two to three times a year and I'd traveled to Europe [00:23:00] five to six times a year. I was, I was traveling internationally almost every month. And that's hard, especially when you have kids. And then when I'm not traveling, I'm, I'm up at 4:00 AM for calls because my, my, my good friends in, in East Africa time zones are about nine hours from here.

[00:23:15] So, you know, it does make things challenging, but it's rewarding because you see how they're using these tools to actually make an impact. And it's, I, I hate, I I'm hesitant to say this sort of, it's always hard to say, but I prefer working with our friends internationally than I do domestically, because I feel like here we're just sort of so caught up in bureaucracy and politics than we are in actually solving problems.

[00:23:40] Richard Simms: Yeah.

[00:23:40] No, I hear ya. And that's a good segue of sorts because as much as we are all sick of talking about it, no pun intended, COVID is very top of mind. And I remember a few months ago, I texted you out of the blue because I was just driving around, listening, listening to NPR, [00:24:00] legitimately, I was like, "That sounds like TJ."

[00:24:03] And then after a while it just became very evident it was you. And you were on there talking about COVID, but specifically the COVID mapping project, which I know is something you and Standard Co have invested a lot of energy into. So, I'd love to know more about that and, and kind of how that came to be.

[00:24:19] And, you know, to what extent is that something where you're largely leveraging like technology you already had in place with Standard Data or is a totally separate? Love to hear more about that. 

[00:24:31] TJ Muehleman: So, the story, I think it's kind of interesting, 'cause I was actually in Geneva, Switzerland at the end of February, 2020. So, so there were a handful of cases here are diagnosed confirmed cases in the US when I left. In fact, they were doing temperature checks when we kinda left and I was like, "What the hell is going on?"

[00:24:47] I don't, you know, I know that COVID is a thing, but I didn't realize it was a big deal. And so I go to Switzerland and in fact, I'm sitting at WHO, World Health Organization headquarters in a meeting with about 60 other people about a [00:25:00] completely unrelated thing. And everybody starts looking at their phone, people are getting alerts. And it was the first confirmed case of COVID in Switzerland.

[00:25:07] And we were all like, "Ooh," you know, "what's going to happen?" And so when I got home, my phone was, had been blowing up while I was gone. People asking me like, "Hey, TJ, w what's going on?" 'Cause they knew they knew me as a public health person or data person. "What's going on with COVID in Texas where my family lives? What's going on with COVID in Georgia, where I'm from

[00:25:26] and all my, most of my friends are? And what's going on with COVID in Washington?" And at the time you had to go to the state department public health websites and download PDFs and like, "Okay, well there's 65 cases in Washington. And in Texas has 200 cases." And it was just this kind of mess. And I was like, "Well, this is exactly what we do."

[00:25:44] We, we, we either have people collect data with our tools or we collect secondary source data, you know, through PDFs and Excel spreadsheets and all this stuff, we standardized data. So we take data from all these places and bring it into one place. [00:26:00] So it was like March 12th, I bought the domain name COVID Mapping Project

[00:26:03] and I was like, "Well, this is, we can take Standard Data. And we can point Standard Data instead of an African data and South American data and South Asian data we'll point it out American data. It'll work." And in fact it did. So we built a website called COVID Mapping Project where you could go, and this is right around the same time that COVID Tracking came about.

[00:26:21] And COVID Tracking was the big one with, you know, the Atlantic was backing at New York Times and Johns Hopkins. And we weren't really competitive with them because they were just doing data and we wanted to do very straightforward visualizations. And so we wanted, you know, I always call it 'the mom test'.

[00:26:37] My mom is 75, 77 and really bright woman, but she's, she's not a technologist. I wanted to be able to show her a map and a trend line and for her to be like, "Got it. I understand that COVID is going up or it's going down or it's bad or it's good." That's it. And so we built the tool to be a layperson's guide to what, what was happening with COVID.

[00:26:59] [00:27:00] And so that was in 20, that was in March and we've now had four big evolutions of COVID Mapping Project. In fact, it's still running, it's all automated. So every night we update 50 states 3000 counties and, you know, that's common indicators like mortality, hospitalization, testing and cases. And, and we've on purpose made it very simple again, because at the time what we also found was if you went to Twitter, it was one epidemiologist sharing with another epidemiologist, you know, a chart that, you know, if he showed it to my mom, she'd be like, "What the hell am I looking at?"

[00:27:34] And so we thought that the public health communications around COVID was lacking. It was not speaking to the commenter or the common person or the layperson. It was speaking to other scientists. And that's one problem you still see in public health is they have a difficult time, a lot of in communicating with, with the moms and dads of the world.

[00:27:53] They're, they're so used to communicating with other scientists. So we wanted to streamline it and make it simple. That was our goal.[00:28:00] 

[00:28:00] Richard Simms: Awesome. Yeah.

[00:28:02] I've explored that a good bit throughout the pandemic and it found it very helpful. And you know, one thing I very much appreciate about your perspective on technology is, you know, I think you are not into tech just for tech's sake, right? I've always perceived you to be someone that views it as a tool.

[00:28:24] You know, you're not necessarily over the moon for this particular programming language or framework. It's all about, "What are we going to do with this, you know, to make an impact to help people to solve the problem." And I love that. I mean, and we experienced a lot of that here at Tyrannosaurus Tech too. We do some stuff that is much more sophisticated, but honestly, most of the stuff, yeah,

[00:28:45] it's not some AI blockchain enabled.

[00:28:48] It's taking things that are just, you know, decentralized, like you said, and kind of bringing them together so that they can be analyzed or more actionable or, you know... Especially in the public health space so [00:29:00] much of it is just getting information into people's hands that, you know, previously had been inaccessible or unapproachable.

[00:29:08] So, I love the stuff you're saying there about just trying to make it, you know, really easy for everyday folks to use and get value out of. So taking a step back from your point of view, like how has COVID reshaped the public health landscape? Because I feel like, and from, from folks I've talked to, you know, one positive, at least in terms of kind of public awareness as it's, it's drive more awareness of epidemiology, how connected our societies are, the threat of things like pandemics

[00:29:41] hopefully we'll be better prepared in the future. On the other hand, I've also had the impression from folks in public health that, you know, in a lot of instances COVID has kind of sucked all the air out of the room for other very important public health initiatives that were, you know, put on the back burner.

[00:29:58] So I'm just [00:30:00] curious, from your perspective, what that's, that's been like over the last couple of years? 

[00:30:04] TJ Muehleman: Yeah. I'll tell like sorta two anecdotes that sort of, that kind of speaks to that last point about how it's sucked the air out of the room. You know, one KPI we look at in terms of like how uses our platform is how many surveys are done once every week. So that's how many people have been interviewed on our platform out in the field. And in February it was like 120,000 surveys we processed in a week.

[00:30:24] So we did, you know, half a million surveys a month. July of 2020, kind of in the middle of this second wave or the beginning of the second wave, it was down below a thousand. So you went from 120,000 a week to below a thousand. So that is a reduction of 119,000 fewer people are being asked about what disease they might have unrelated to COVID.

[00:30:44] And in fact, those, those 900 and, or those thousand people that we're interviewing on our platform where we're sort of COVID test projects that we're doing. So global health came to a screeching halt. And, and, and it was really eye opening and it's sort of like, "Oh my God, you know, what [00:31:00] about these other programs to your point?

[00:31:01] What about measles? What about, what about neglected tropical diseases?" And the other piece that we saw was that the other side of our business that we haven't really talked much about is humanitarian logistics, so one thing we do is we help, you know, supply chains all the buzz right now. And whereas, you know, "Where's my, where are my air pods?"

[00:31:16] You know, where, that kind of stuff why is it running late? Well, similarly drug donation programs one very big component to what we do is we help the pharma companies, so GSK and Pfizer and Merck and Johnson & Johnson. We help them coordinate where they should send their drugs to treat a variety of diseases.

[00:31:33] So they use data to do that. And so, those drug donation programs for a good five or six months just basically stopped. And so you're talking about millions of people who weren't getting medicine to prevent them from getting diseases that, and, and let me be very, very, very clear, like COVID is, is dramatic.

[00:31:51] And we did the right thing, but it did, it has sort of a cascade effect of, of bringing these other programs to a halt. And I think we're [00:32:00] going to be unwinding the effects of COVID for years to come. Societaly we can talk about that as another conversation, but from a purely global health perspective, it did bring real change.

[00:32:14] In in fact, I was talking with a client today who was getting ready before COVID to do a really neat case study, I'm sorry, a test in Cameroon on doing interviewing people in the field, but actually diagnosing them in the field, you know, without a lab. So it was a mobile lab all on iPhones really neat high-end stuff.

[00:32:32] They were going to do that before COVID and they had, they basically put a stop to it for a full year, because of COVID. So these there's all kinds of cool innovations that we're getting ready to launch. So I think that those are the things that we have to figure out, but on the flip side, on the positive side, and now I'm speaking here in the US and I'm speaking kind of maybe as a, as a, as a parent,

[00:32:50] is that, you know, before COVID, you know, we would send our kids to school with a sniffle and we're like, "Oh, did they have a temperature? No, you're going to school." Now, I think with masking, I think we're going to [00:33:00] be much more proactive. And this is, I think the next evolution of COVID Mapping project is going to be about proactively telling people like, "Hey, there's an out

[00:33:08] flu in your neighborhood. There is an outbreak of COVID in your neighborhood. You should probably wear a mask today, you should probably keep your kid home." You know, whatever. And I think we'll see a lot more intelligence around illness in proactive illness arbitration. And I think that's something I'm excited about again, as a public health technologist, but also as a dad. Because I mean, it sucks for my kid to be sick

[00:33:30] and if we can reduce that, then that's a bonus for everybody.

[00:33:34] Richard Simms: I'm right there with you and I've, I've talked with folks about this, like our daughter's three and she'll be three in December. And of course her school was shut down for a couple months early on. And we put her back in fairly quickly when they opened up, because we love the school and we felt comfortable, but knock on wood

[00:33:54] I don't want to jinx it, she has not been sick once. 

[00:33:57] Which is insane because of [00:34:00] course, before that, you know, standard like daycare stuff, she would come home, we would all get sick. It would go through the house. So, yeah.

[00:34:06] Man, it's like the masking and just some of the best practices and like cleaning for surface transmission.

[00:34:13] I mean, obviously it affects a lot beyond COVID. So I'm, I'm very grateful for that. Yeah,

[00:34:20] right there. So changing gears a little bit, you know, we started this podcast primarily so it could be a resource for folks who are either in the process of or thinking about launching new products, you know, generally in healthcare, public health obviously, education. Startups are very hard.

[00:34:37] I feel like you are the last person I need to tell 

[00:34:41] that too 

[00:34:42] TJ Muehleman: don't need, I don't 

[00:34:42] need that. No, no. 

[00:34:44] Richard Simms: I... 

[00:34:44] You know. You, you definitely like are very real when it comes to, I think perspectives on the startup world, challenges of startup life and that's one thing I think I and others in the community appreciate is like, you, you don't pull your punches [00:35:00] on this stuff, you know?

[00:35:01] Which is healthy, like we try to be the same way. I mean, startups are hard, you need to know that going into it. You need to know that there's a lot of things you can do to mitigate risk or improve your chances of success. But, you know, we always tell people, it's like, "If we could pick the winners, I wouldn't be sitting here.

[00:35:16] I'd be, you know, on a beach somewhere retired." Right? Like, so for, for Standard Co you know, one of the biggest challenges you all have faced over the last couple of years, you know, specifically as it relates to jumping into product? And kind of how have you overcome those, what, what comes to mind? 

[00:35:32] TJ Muehleman: I I think the biggest challenge is that because we've very deliberately decided to bootstrap this business, we haven't raised outside capital. I think that has made us be, we have had to be really focused and really intentional with our decisions. Again, going back to, you know, taking the company and sort of splitting in two and, you know, separating, you know, taking the employees and de dedicating the product and, and non-revenue producing employees was really hard. And doing it on our own capital and doing it, you know, I like to [00:36:00] call it customer finance

[00:36:01] or customer investment. So we would get customers who, you know, we would make sure that they would pay for things, and we would incorporate that into the product. So those decisions I think, were really hard. And, and I think that's the trickiest part about going from services to product is you also have to be a patient.

[00:36:18] I think when you're, you know, when you live in the startup bubble, what you're used to seeing is speed and overnight success, because that's the story that sells, right? We need to talk to any tech reporter and they're like, "Look, I would love to tell the bootstrap story, but nobody wants to talk about the fact that it took you 10 years to figure out how to tie your shoes,

[00:36:38] right?" They want to know that you did it in 30 minutes and then you sold the company for $10 billion. And so those stories sell and then it kind of just, it gets in your head and you start thinking like, "I'm doing things wrong." And in reality those, instances of the big success and the overnight success and the blitz scaling are, are, are [00:37:00] edge cases.

[00:37:00] They happen, but they're as much luck as they are anything else. The founders will tell you that they are the, they made deliberate choices for that to happen and I'm going to tell you that's full of shit. And so, they got lucky in a lot of cases. And that's having a front row seat at some really smart people who just kind of plugged their way into a tidal wave and just rode it all the way in.

[00:37:22] And so I think learning to kind of ignore that, that hype and just stay focused and stay true to your mission and true to what you want to do is really hard. And, and, you know, a couple of years ago, like we were, we had been very deliberate about not raising capital. And then I kind of, I just, I will be the first to tell you, I got sucked into, like, we had sort of had a really big year.

[00:37:43] Everything that we'd grown really fast and things had gone really well and like, "What if we just raised a couple million bucks? What would we do?" And we tried to raise money for about four weeks. And I realized how much I did not enjoy it and how much it wasn't for me. And I, I had sort of lost [00:38:00] myself a little bit in the ecosystem.

[00:38:01] And so I always tell them, the founders, I'm like, "If raising money is your thing, if blitz scaling is your thing, go do it. Like that's, that's awesome." It's not for me. And it's not for a lot of the people in my cohort or the people that I sort of look up to. I'm very about deliberate authenticity, about not deliberate authenticity, but being deliberate about my choices and being authentic to me.

[00:38:21] That's the thing that makes me tick. And every morning I wake up and I'm like, "You know, could we be a bigger company? Could we be doing more? Probably, but would I be happier? No. Would my team be happier? No." We get to make, we get to do a lot of things otherwise we wouldn't be able to do. And I'm very, very happy that we've chosen the path we're on.

[00:38:41] Richard Simms: Yeah.

[00:38:42] Yeah. That's a great answer and I am right there with you. I think that we all struggle with some of the noise in the industry and what's glamorized and reported on. And of course, yeah, the folks that, especially here in Atlanta [00:39:00] is of course what I monitor the people that are having big wins. I mean, I'm so happy for them. And it's good for all of us because you know, it brings more attention and talent and potential for investment to the area.

[00:39:10] But it's very hard to not get sucked into feeling like you should be doing something bigger. And, you know, we also know that as much as raising money is an accomplishment in itself to a degree, it's like, that is just the beginning of where, wherever that rollercoaster is heading. That is not defined success,

[00:39:33] right? And the unfortunate reality is a lot of folks raise money and it's not like it's, you know, a fairy tale after that. So you kind of have to take it all with a grain of salt, I 

[00:39:46] think 

[00:39:46] TJ Muehleman: Yeah, I always tell, I always tell people that, you know, these numbers are just sort of pulled out of thin air, but when we raise money for We&Co we probably spent thousands of hours getting pitch decks ready, go into pitch competitions, dealing with investors and we probably spent [00:40:00] hundreds of hours on the product.

[00:40:01] I mean, th the, the calibration was out of whack. And, and I think at an early stage it's hard to get that calibration right, unless you're just really good at raising money. Whereas with Standard Co we've spent dozens of hours talking to investors and thousands of hours on customer and product.

[00:40:15] And that, again, that calibration for me feels right. And, and, you know, the flip side is we own a hundred percent of our company. I don't get to tell anybody what the hell I'm doing. My family and I did a four month road trip from March to July. And we were, I worked from the road and if I had a board of directors and a investment, investors they would have lost their minds

[00:40:33] if I told them the CEOs are doing And in fact, you know, the interesting thing about that is that quarter I was gone for almost an entire quarter, it was the most productive, the best quarter from BizDev and revenue we've had in years. And so this whole idea that you got to like, you know, throw 80 hours a week into, you know, everything now, early in your career is a different story, but I'm 44 years old.

[00:40:55] You know, I want to do things the way I want to do. And if it means it takes me, I might be in my [00:41:00] sixties before we hit massive success, might, I'm okay with that. I'm happy with what we're doing, I love our customers.

[00:41:05] Richard Simms: Yeah, I totally respect that. And I think, the value of that lifestyle and I think striking a balance between being able to do your own thing and, and find success and do something really interesting, but yeah, not feel like you have to burn yourself to the ground...

[00:41:20] TJ Muehleman: Yeah.

[00:41:20] Richard Simms: ..is great. So for, for Standard Data, you know, what does, what does success look like in your mind,

[00:41:27] let's say five years from now? What, what impact do you hope you all can have with, with the product? 

[00:41:33] TJ Muehleman: So I think there's a quick little story, I'll tell you. And it's sort of where I hope we go with the whole platform. I, and from a public health perspective, one thing we want to do is increase the speed to get meaningful and impactful data, so that decisions can happen more automatically and health efficiently. And a good use case of this is on the humanitarian logistics side.

[00:41:53] So we monitor all these indicators about the delivery of medicines and we publish that data to the [00:42:00] public. And we've started doing that in 2018 And, a bunch of smart people at The Task Force did a case study on the platform that we built from 2018 to 2019. And what they figured out, what they saw was that are the tools that we've built in,

[00:42:13] they actually tied it to the tools, helped reduce how long it took to get medicines to these hundred and five countries. It reduced the amount of time by a month, okay? So it was nine months and because of the tool we rolled out, it went down to about eight. Now, this is almost 2 billion tablets of medicine to a hundred some countries that we're now monitoring all of this and shooting out alerts say, "This thing is running late. You should go talk to this person."

[00:42:38] And, "Oh, this is missing this customs dock, blah, blah, blah." All this stuff is now automated. And if you think about that a month, reducing things by a month means millions more kids are getting treated for these, these, these diseases than they were before. They're getting treated on time, they're getting treated with these medicines that aren't languishing or expiring in warehouses or aren't, you [00:43:00] know, going getting stolen or whatever.

[00:43:02] And so when I think about where do I, where do I want to go, I want to take that, that use case, so that's particular little example and expand that. So, I want people that use Standard Data to understand where disease is happening, where it's going to happen and how do we mitigate that, how do we prevent it. How do we get medicine and treatments and vaccines out to places before they realize they even need them?

[00:43:25] And, and really, again, take this idea of all these really goofy data sets that exist in the world and bring them into one place, so that way we can actually understand what's happening. And, and provide that data to, to whether it's public health organizations like ours, we have clients in Africa and WHO and CDC or small NGOs or, or whomever.

[00:43:47] I really want to see that data bring more, shed more light on what's happening and how can we make the world a little bit of a better place.

[00:43:55] Richard Simms: Very cool 

[00:43:55] cool And that No, I mean, I know it's sincere and that's a really [00:44:00] great example that you've shared, you know. And I think all of us in tech, there are so many great products out there and there's great opportunities and, you know, I don't even want to imply some are better than others, but it is great to work on something that you can really see a tangible impact.

[00:44:20] It's not just, you know, another Tinder like dating app or something like that. It's something you can really find fulfillment in and, you know, tell your kids about, I think that's awesome. And again, it goes back to kind of viewing technology as just a very open-ended tool that can do a lot of amazing things if pointed in the right direction.

[00:44:40] So my last question for you, which is a, a big one. You might have to, you know, do a quick inventory in your head and distill the list. But for someone listening who's in the early stages of pursuing a new product or thinking about taking the leap and pursuing a startup, you know, what [00:45:00] advice would you give to them that, that are kind of some of your biggest takeaways from

[00:45:04] the journey you've been on? 

[00:45:05] TJ Muehleman: I think there's a couple. I think, one is, patience is key. The, the best founders, I think, the best founders that I know have stuck with it, right? It's really hard to start something and see success in the first year. And a lot of people are like, "Oh my God, that sounds terrible." And it kinda is.

[00:45:25] So you have to enjoy the journey, you have to enjoy the process of building something from scratch, you know? I talked to a founder in Atlanta that I really love and really respect and he made a really interesting point to me that, he was like, "I think I'm a founder. I don't think I'm a CEO." And I think we conflate the two a lot, you know? When I said, "You know, unpack that a little bit."

[00:45:46] He explains like, "I love starting things. I love getting things to a point where like, we're inventing the employee handbook and we're inventing the onboarding guide and the product and all these things. Like, but once we get to a certain point, then all we're doing is [00:46:00] scaling that..." He's like, "I don't, I don't do that very well."

[00:46:02] And I sometimes wonder if that describes me, you know, I love starting things and I love building things. So you have to kind of enjoy that journey and those that heartburn. So I think patience is, is key, you know, or you can distill it down to a simple, you know, axiom, like, "Don't die."

[00:46:20] Like that's all it matters, "Don't And if you can do that, then, then, you know, building a startup is the most rewarding thing professionally I've ever done. And, and I just absolutely love it. And then the second piece is, I do think I'm now a big believer in, in, in sort of authenticity and, and sort of trusting your gut.

[00:46:40] Like, what do you, what, what do you want do, TJ Muehleman or Richard Simms or whomever? There's 1,000,001 people out there who will tell you that you got to follow these steps and you got to do these things to kind of build a impactful startup. But if you do that, you know... great, go for it. But if that doesn't really resonate with you and it didn't resonate with me and it sounds like it doesn't necessarily resonate with you, like [00:47:00] trust your gut and follow what you think is the right way.

[00:47:03] And, and in a lot of cases that will lead to a more rewarding outcome, maybe not the most financially beneficial outcome, but a rewarding one that where you feel good about the work you do, you're comfortable in the work you do, you get to do cool shit. And if, if at the end of the day, like it becomes a financial reward for me,

[00:47:24] awesome. But right now that's not my goal.

[00:47:27] Richard Simms: Yeah, that's all good advice. And certainly in startups, there is no playbook or roadmap that has really any proven success either. You know, it's startup game is just always a gamble and people, you know, find great success coming at it from totally unconventional direction. So I'm right there with you.

[00:47:48] You might as well, you know, read up about on success stories, know what's out there, but don't feel like you got to kind of follow these particular parameters if they don't feel right for you. I think that's that's great [00:48:00] advice. All right. So I think we are about out of time. Thank you so much, TJ, for doing this.

[00:48:04] It was a lot of fun having you on the show, I knew it would be. Before we sign off, where can listeners go to connect with you and learn more about Standard Co?

[00:48:13] TJ Muehleman: You can Google Standard Co or go to standardco.de, that's our website. You can follow me on Twitter. I tweet a lot about my dumb kids and nachos, but also data @tjmule.

[00:48:27] Richard Simms: Awesome. All right. Well, thanks again. Appreciate you coming on the Digital Footprint and we'll see you later, later, TJ. Thanks. 

[00:48:33] TJ Muehleman: Thanks so much.