Listen to the podcast episode here, or read the transcript below for Exercise Bike Builds Strong Bodies, Strong Business, with guest Michele Mehl, co-founder of Excy, a company that creates, manufactures, and sells portable, 14-pound exercise bikes that can be used for cardio, strength training, and full-body workouts in any environment.
Kelly Scanlon
Welcome to Talking Business Now. I’m your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us.
We’re Talking Business Now with Michelle Mehl, the founder and CEO of Excy, a Seattle-based startup focused on eliminating barriers to exercise such as health conditions, injury, time and space, so people can conveniently connect exercise to their everyday lives. In this episode of Talking Business Now, Michele talks with us about how a broken leg led to the launch of her business and more tools and greater awareness for those with medical fitness needs. Welcome, Michele.
Michele Mehl
Thank you so much for having me.
Kelly Scanlon
Michele, like so many entrepreneurs, your inspiration for starting Excy was born out of personal experience. You had a medical situation that prevented you from exercising. Tell us about what Excy does and how your own medical condition made you reshape the focus of the company as you launched it.
Michele Mehl
So Excy, it’s a portable exercise bike that takes big giant equipment that you would find in a physical therapy clinic, so an upper body ergometer or recumbent exercise bike, and then lots of other things that you would do with weights, and puts it in a tiny little system that folds for storage and transport.
And so my goal was to, you know, take all of these things that are super expensive, right, and very difficult to get to when you have an injury, especially physical therapy, you know, your insurance might only cover it for so long. And then what are you going to do when that stops? So you can do all of that at home.
So, I had this idea for Excy when I was just about turning 40. I gained a bunch of weight. And I was sitting at the park actually with my son, he was at the skate park. And I had been running around like a crazy person, I work a lot, I’ve always worked a lot. And I was sitting on a bench and I was like what would happen if I could actually just turn this bench into an exercise bike? And I started stepping up on the bench because I was like I have to do something. I had 2,200 steps for the day. And then I just kind of sat on the idea for a little bit.
And then I broke my leg rollerblading with my son. And I did a number on myself—rod, screws, plates, blood clot. I was actually a disaster. And I started we had we had started prototyping. And I started using the prototype by pedaling my arms. And next thing you know, I’m getting my heart rate to 160 with completely being non-weightbearing, and, you know, trying to process this blood clot. And I was just blown away at how efficient upper body cardio is on a hand cycle.
And that’s when it was just like “That’s it. I’m obsessed with this.” Like so many people have these challenges, like what can we do? And that’s where it kind of became the shift of alright, you know, yes, busy moms need us, busy people need us, they don’t have time to get to the gym, but who actually needs us the most? Right? And it really came down to a lot of times where it’s home physical therapy, medical fitness applications, you know, and also prehab, right? In terms of preventing injury.
Kelly Scanlon
Yes.
Michele Mehl
Yeah, the broken leg at the time, I was like, “Yeah, I’ll take that healthy leg over kind of the “aha moment.” But looking back on it now, you know, I still live with pain and my leg is permanently crooked, and so it throws off my hip and all kinds of lovely things. But I use Excy for my own prehab rehab, like a life of rehab, if you will. I definitely drink my own Kool-Aid. I mean, I live and breathe, and with this device, I kind of I feel like it saved my life to be honest with you.
Kelly Scanlon
And it’s 14 pounds, right? It’s not very cumbersome to, it folds up, easy to move around and used in a variety of places.
Michele Mehl
It’s a super small—I mean, it’s small enough to fit in overhead on an airplane. You know, when I travel with it, I always get a lot of looks. I’ve been tempted from a business perspective to just kind of hang out at airports.
Kelly Scanlon
It’s not a bad idea.
Michele Mehl
Yeah. It’s been tempting. Isn’t it tempting? That’s for sure. Because anytime I travel, it’s like a walking, you know, advertisement for us. Everybody wants to know what it is. How does it work? Wait, I don’t understand it doesn’t have a wheel. No, it doesn’t have a wheel. We don’t need a wheel. Yeah, so it’s super small.
Kelly Scanlon
You launched on Kickstarter, not just to raise money, but also to test the market itself, you know, whether anyone would buy the product. Any tips for others who are looking at crowdfunding platforms as an option for fundraising or for doing market research?
Michele Mehl
So, I think that crowdfunding is a great way to say okay, I have this wonderful idea, right? Will people buy it? The biggest obstacle you have to overcome is will people get their checkbook out, get their credit card out, and actually buy your product? And I think that Kickstarter, or crowdfunding, there’s so many ways to do it. It’s just a wonderful way to do that. Like for us, we set a really low goal. I can’t remember. I think it was like $17,000 or $19,000. I can’t remember.
Kelly Scanlon
This would have been what? 2016ish?
Michele Mehl
2016. I think that’s right. It feels like it was just yesterday, and then it feels like it’s been like 50 years. So, it’s all at the same time.
I had already been like I was all in on solving this problem with exercise and accessibility to exercise. So, when we did the Kickstarter, we had already been through manufacturing. I had, I think, 12 systems to ship immediately. And I wanted to see like, who would be the first people to kind of really dive in and want to get it right now. So wonderful market data, right? And then also to see who would then want it later. And then we shipped. We shipped immediately those 12 systems, and then we shipped everything else within three months, which is unheard of, right?
Kelly Scanlon
Yeah.
Michele Mehl
So, it was a very big expense for me upfront, but I was all in. Yeah, that’s about probably the best way is like just being all in. We had already figured out a lot of things prior to doing the Kickstarter. And then the data that you get in terms of who comes in, like who are these strangers who—they don’t know me, they don’t know Mike [Excy co-founder]. They’re completely trusting of what we’re building. And what we’re trying to do.
And what happened is a lot of medical fitness applications boiled to the top. We have a lot of women in particular, I think, who don’t love their tricep flab and really wanting to tone their arms. And so there’s a vanity play there as well, which I have learned over the years that vanity play goes up to 80 plus, 90 years old. It doesn’t stop. It’s been really interesting. It was a very fast way to get to product market fit.
Kelly Scanlon
So what you’re trying to say too, in terms of advice to our listeners is, don’t just focus on the money that’s coming in. You can glean so much market data from it, be sure to leverage, pay attention to that and leverage it as well.
Michele Mehl
Absolutely. I think it all depends on what your intentions are.
Like I worked with this one guy, he launched on Kickstarter. And he set a pretty high threshold. And for him, it was like, “I either get the money to do this, or I’m out,” right? And so he said, what was the real amount of money that he needed to bring his idea to market, and he missed it. And I think he missed it by about 15 grand. And so it didn’t get funded. But the goal was set pretty high, like $100,000-plus out of the gate. And he moved on, you know, so I think it really depends on your goal and how you are using Kickstarter. Are you trying to get data about customers? Or do you really need the money, you know, then it’s just a different … it really depends on what your goals are.
Kelly Scanlon
Talking about the financing, you made a decision very early on to bootstrap versus raising outside capital, even though your goal is to build a billion dollar company, or at least it was initially. So why? You are located in Seattle, where investors seem eager to support startups like yours, ideas like yours. Then you did go out for your first seed round in 2018. Why the shift in thinking, and what did you learn from the experience of going outside to raise capital?
Michele Mehl
So, when we first started, I mean, I just have this mentality of go big or go home. I mean, that’s just the way that I’ve always been. And so from the beginning, it’s been like, okay, we’re going to build this company, it’s going to be giant, and we need VC to do that. And as we started to get deeper and deeper into it, and seeing the medical fitness applications to it, there’s a kind of multiple ways to answer this question.
But I became obsessed with this kind of approach of radical fitness and medical fitness and physical therapy applications at home. And I think you can see from the last year of the pandemic, in terms of, there’s not a lot of care sometimes for those people. And so I want to be their champion, and I’m going to be their champion. And I think that a lot of investors kind of struggle with that market. You know, do they have money? Do they have disposable income? And they do. And obviously, it needs to be more about more than just that. So it was like, “Okay, I see the bigger picture here. I’ll be patient.”
And then I did decide that after I set some very specific milestones, and then we met those milestones, alright, let’s go raise some money. I went through all the due diligence. It’s extremely difficult, you know, creating your debt, creating your financial model, the story around how you’re going to get to a billion dollars. And I think if you don’t have a story to get to a billion dollars, no venture capitalist is going to invest in you, so you have to have a guide. How are you going to do that?
I came up with that, and I was about seven meetings into it with some friendlies up front. And then my brother passed away unexpectedly. He was 48, which is actually I’m about to be 48 next month. I took some time off, and I went to the funeral and did the things that I felt like I needed to do. And it was right as summer was approaching, and I just had this kind of moment of like what will happen if I take the 200 hours, if you will, that it’s going to take me to go close money, and I just go all in on the customer and sales and put the gas pedal down on customer acquisition, and doing everything that we can, you know, as opposed to raising money. And that’s what I did, and it ended well.
And I think a lot of times, you know, going to raise money is a full-time job. It’s more than a full-time job. Instead of doing that, I spent my full-time job growing the company. And, as a result of that, we got Stanford Hospital using our system, helping people pedal, you know, while they’re going through chemotherapy and multiple applications. In a lot of hospitals, we sold systems. I got more feedback from customers.
And then the fall kind of rolled around. And I was like, maybe I don’t need to take on outside funding. And so we’ve built a profitable company. And I think sometimes it’s easy to, it’s not easy, all of this is extremely hard, but chasing the money as opposed to building a business. And I do think it depends on what you’re trying to do, right? And what kind of company you’re trying to build. So, that was the focus.
And then I was like, “Okay, we’re heads down.” And it’s just like, those things just come up in life. You know, I was like, “Okay, we’re like doing this again.” Like, we can raise money, and my son had an injury, that was very time intensive on physical therapy. And I just felt like, I needed to prioritize mom, being mom, wife, a friend and a sister, and all those kinds of things, keep growing the company as a huge priority, but without the distraction right now trying to raise money.
Kelly Scanlon
There are so many lessons in everything that you just said. I’m trying to remember all of them, as you presented them.
When you talk about the hours that it took to work with those investors, I think that’s an important statement for a lot of our listeners to hear, because the time that you’re that you’re spending with those investors, unless you’ve got a backup that replaces what you were doing in the company before and in your case, you were focused so much on sales, that you can actually set your company back.
Michele Mehl
Oh, yeah.
Kelly Scanlon
I believe that your sales fell during that period, didn’t they?
Michele Mehl
They did. Initially, they fell. Like for me doing a startup, I’ve been doing this for 25-plus years. I’ve worked with some very successful companies when they were itty bitty, right? Nobody knew their name, OfferUp, Zulily, helped them launch their companies. And I love, I love it, right?
When I stepped away to focus on funding and did not, just could not keep the pace. Like to me, if you’re going to do this, at this scale, it is a minimum, minimum of a 70-hour week, like minimum. And that doesn’t include traveling to go raise. That’s just being all in. I think it’s even more than that. And I did that for years and years and years and years. When you take the gas off the pedal of the marketing to focus on funding, it’s impossible to keep it all going unless you have a backup.
Kelly Scanlon
The other important thing that you said was—you didn’t say the word—but you talked about alignment. Different things happened in your life—your brother’s death, your son’s injury—that made you really stop and think, ah, billion-dollar company, that’d be great. But if I’m not happy, and if I’m not being able to be with my son, or be with my family, and do the other things that matter in my life as well, then what’s the billion dollars? So, alignment is another really important message: that is congruent. What you want out of life and what you have as a vision for your company support each other.
Michele Mehl
Absolutely. Absolutely. And just like it’s not, it’s not all possible. Doing everything is not always possible. Something is going to give. I have so many friends who have launched companies and gotten a divorce. Like, I was committed, but I’m not getting a divorce.
So yeah, I mean, so you can be all in on your good intentions of trying to do it all, but I think that something’s going to give. So, being in alignment in terms of what makes you happy. Getting a big check is not something—don’t get me wrong, I could use the money. Like we have a significant opportunity in front of us, and I’m all in on the company, but doing it in a way that I feel like is my pace of where I am in life. And I think it just comes with some, you know, I’m not too far away from 50—and prioritization is important.
Kelly Scanlon
Let’s go back to your product. You use a universal design for all your products. Tell us about that decision.
Michele Mehl
So, that’s a great question. If I give my device to a young child who has Down syndrome, or a woman who has cerebral palsy, and then I turn around and I give that same exact device to an Olympic athlete, a paralympic athlete who doesn’t have legs, and they are both getting tremendous value, right, from using the device. The Paralympic athlete is hammering it, drenched in sweat, resistance as high as he can take it. Whereas somebody who has, let’s say, cerebral palsy is working on range of motion, getting the arm extended so that they can reach and do functional things in their life, right? Not about competition, but just about lifestyle and healthy lifestyle and getting their heart rate up, let’s say, above 100, right? But that same device can do both.
And so often we think about the big burly fitness person, right? When it comes to this market, you know, what do they need? And when it comes down to it, the body, the human body, the human body is incredibly simple and also complex at the same time, right? But if you design for kind of every use case, and that’s difficult to do, but you kind of just design for the human body, right? Then the applications become applicable to everybody.
I take offense when somebody will say, “Oh, that’s for like big, strong people know.” No, right? A barbell can be used by somebody who’s bedridden, for example, right? It’s just being creative and thinking of solutions and outside-the-box approaches, when you address any use case. Like people who are able bodied will benefit from it as well. And so I’m just a fan of designing products that can be used and accessed by everyone, so that there’s kind of not these siloed approaches that end up in landfills more than they end up in helping people with their life.
Kelly Scanlon
I suspect that some of your customers have figured out ways to use your product that you hadn’t thought about before.
Michele Mehl
Oh, absolutely.
Kelly Scanlon
Has that happened?
Michele Mehl
Oh, it happens all the time. I had this one guy, he’s paralyzed from the chest down. And he bought our solution. And then when he got it, he sent me a video of how he was using it. And I never in a million years … he lies down in bed, and he puts our device on his chest, and he pedals while lying down. He pedals his arms while lying down.
You know, there’s these wonderful stats, right? These Fear Factor stats, and they’re legitimate stats that 80% of Americans do not get the bare minimum amount of exercise at cardio and strength training to fight preventable disease. Eighty percent.
I am convinced—well, one, that 20% who actually does do it? It’s not all fitness gurus by any means. Because the people that we work with, who are sometimes disabled, have health conditions, the things that they will go through, and the creative approaches and ideas and openness, and just commitment that they have to exercise, if that 80% of the US population get could just be the tiniest bit inspired by them, we would dramatically change the health of the world. Because you know, and I believe it to my core, exercise as medicine. And yes, we want some of the vanity benefits that come from doing it. My approach of exercise is do the bare minimum to fight preventable disease. That’s all I’m asking you to do.
Kelly Scanlon
Often, when a brand-new concept is launched, it requires a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money to educate your target market. And sometimes you can get out ahead of the curve as a new business and exhaust your money and time and resources before that education takes place. You have obviously been able to get through that phase, people have embraced it, Kickstarter was a help. But what other tools have you used to market and to get the word out? You’ve got a background in PR, so I’m sure that was helpful. But what other things? I believe videos have been a huge part of it.
Michele Mehl
Yeah, my approach has been very focused on content marketing. And here’s my suggestion for people who want to do this in a content marketing approach. It’s a long tail. It is a long-tail investment. It is not a short-term win by any means. But starting with: What are the problems that your customer has, right? And if we are looking at it from solving their problems and their challenges, then content marketing can be a wonderful tool.
And content marketing means lots of things to lots of people. To me, it is a heavy focus on SEO. If somebody has a problem, they’re going to come to their search engine, likely Google, and look for a solution based on that problem. And so we created a content marketing strategy around solving people’s challenges. So they, by the time they get to us, they have done so much research. They have been looking for a solution for so long.
Like recently we’ve sold quite a bit of bed bikes, and so that is to help people exercise in bed. And some of those are rentals, month-to-month rentals. Some of them are long-term rentals. Some of them are purchases depending on what the person is going through. So content marketing, that is a combination of video, YouTube, blog content, landing pages, customer testimonials, and the like. And in the beginning, I thought that social media would be a good way to do this as well, or like people would share themselves doing it and peddling Excy in fun places. And that didn’t pan out.
Kelly Scanlon
Maybe a little too intimate for some people.
Michele Mehl
I think we have this over expectation of showing our perfect lives and things being perfect. And so, so when somebody is peddling, and they’re watching TV, you know, maybe their living room furniture isn’t what they want everybody to know. Or they haven’t had a pedicure, and they don’t want to show their feet on the pedal. So …
Kelly Scanlon
No, you’re absolutely right. Yeah, because I think a lot of people do think these days, oh, social media, social media, social media, and your experience as a marketer is no, not always.
Michele Mehl
I use it to show people quick ideas. And sometimes I, you know, I’ll do live challenges, for example. And I think people are like, here she goes again. You know, okay, I need to pedal, or I need to move.
And so sometimes, yes, I want people to use Excy, but I also just want people to move and get exercise. And so if they see me, you know, sitting down watching TV or doing whatever I’m doing—I get a Chuckit sometimes with my dogs and go to the park because I can’t run, you know, like they run. So I pedal at the park while throwing the ball for them. Some of it is just like oh, here she goes again. Okay, okay, fine, I’m going to get up from my desk. Okay, I’m going to stand during the Zoom call. Oh, you know. So I kind of want to, like, frustrate people into exercise sometimes.
Kelly Scanlon
I’ve read a lot of the comments. Before I before I started talking with you, I read a lot of the comments. And from what I can see your customers find those videos very, very inspirational. So you are doing something right there. And I like your larger point, though, that this is the long tail. We live in a society where we want immediate reaction, immediate response. And you have to have the patience. This is an investment of your marketing dollars of your marketing time, and you’re not going to necessarily see a result in a week or a month. You might start seeing incremental response, but to get the big picture, you’re going to have to wait it out, you’re going to have to be all in, as you’ve been saying, all in on that as well. Yeah,
Michele Mehl
I think one of the best pieces of advice that I have gotten during this journey from the beginning is going to cost more money. And it’s going to take longer than you could ever plan for. And so throw the ideas of the immediate wins out the door. Getting a hit in the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, or you know, an influencer might give you a bump, right? But it’s not going to sustain the business. So, you’ve got to keep looking for the big bumps, right? Sustainable bumps in your marketing strategy that kind of keep things going.
Kelly Scanlon
Excy is still a young company. I think what it’s five years old this year, you’ve had a strong positive response to your product, we’ve talked about that. What do you think, has been the key to that success at this point?
Michele Mehl
I will say radical inclusion and authenticity. And both of them together. There was no way that anybody was going to give me money in the beginning, knowing like, I wanted to throw the marketing playbook out from the very beginning of this entire journey. And doing that on somebody else’s dollar? I take accepting money from people very seriously. And so I felt like I needed to prove that to myself, that people were ready for this, right? Like, a lot of times when you get into doing any marketing, you’re showing perfection and models and it works for lots of brands.
But it’s not … this is so hard to do. Like building a company, manufacturing a product, maintaining software, it is so hard to do, that there’s no way I could wake up every single day fully inspired and engaged by not focusing on inclusion and radical inclusion. Our content is never perfect. Our videos are never perfect. They cut off. And I think that people appreciate that we’re not trying to be perfect, by any means. And so I think that’s what’s driving the success.
Kelly Scanlon
Yeah, it’s the authenticity. They’re not perfect. You’re not perfect. They see themselves in you, but your product works for them. So it’s perfect. Yeah, it’s not but it really is.
What’s the most important thing business owners should be talking about in 2021? What should we be Talking Business Now about?
Michele Mehl
The pandemic I think has really shed some light on the need for people to have deeper connections in extremely authentic ways, where like the posting of the picture-perfect things on Instagram. or on Facebook or whatever, nobody cares anymore, right? It’s like, “No, I want to connect with you. And I want to have a relationship with you. And I want to have a relationship with other people.”
And so I think it’s throwing out the playbook of social media perfection, in favor of connection that we just, we need, like in our life, our kids need it. We need it. college kids need it. I mean, every generation needs it. There’s something missing in so many people’s lives that I think if as entrepreneurs, we help minimize that, then we have like a huge win on our hands. So, that’s my hope. And I feel it’s happening. I really do.
Kelly Scanlon
I agree with you. I think the pandemic has forced a lot of introspection and has really reminded us of how dependent we are on people and to just really make sure that we keep those relationships, keep them alive, even when it’s been hard this last year and we need to continue that as we move into a post pandemic world.
What is your website in case anybody wants to learn more about Excy?
Michele Mehl
Sure, you can find us at www.Excy.com, and that’s XC, like short for exercise cycling. That’s where the name comes from, Excy.com. And then we’re on social media and YouTube and pretty much everywhere. You’ll get tired of seeing my face. Excy.com is a good way to find us.
Kelly Scanlon
Excy.com. E-X-C-Y.com Michele, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Talking Business Now, and much success as you build the company into the future.
Michele Mehl
Thank you.
Kelly Scanlon
And I’m your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thanks for joining us today.
