456: The product journey of a disruptive innovation – with Eli Packouz

How one serial inventor brought a revolutionary approach to flossing from idea to launch Today we are talking about the journey from initial insight to launched product. The featured product is Instafloss, a revolutionary approach to flossing your teeth.  With us is the creator of Instafloss, serial inventor, and two-time founder, Eli Packouz. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:03] Tell us about Instafloss. I found myself in a position that many people may find themselves in—you’re in a rush and trying to clean your teeth and flossing is just taking too long. I thought there had to be a way to make this go quicker. At the time I had already founded a company, and we had come out with seven products. I was thinking about how we could solve this problem, and within a week about five other people told me they hated flossing and asked if we could make a product to do something about that. I started reading periodontal textbooks and finding out more about the problem. I found there are two problems: In the U.S. 70% of people regularly skip flossing, and of the people who do floss almost all of them are flossing incorrectly. If we break down the first problem, there are three reasons people don’t floss: It takes too much time. It hurts. And it’s difficult to do correctly. I looked at existing solutions. Water flossers have been on the market since the 60s, and research shows they are more effective than string floss if done correctly. However, there are a few issues: Nobody does it correctly; in order to do it correctly, you have to hold the jet at a 90 degree angle, trace the gum line, and do it on the inside. It’s messy, and it takes even longer. We had to create a floss that people will love and that will be quick and automatic. After five years, it’s been quite a journey, but I believe we’ve accomplished that. [6:10] What is the form of the product? The insight was that in order to floss correctly you need the water jets at a 90 degree angle to the gum line and they need to cover 100% of the gum line. The first iteration was a mouth guard with jets pointing at various areas. There were two issues with this: The mouth guard is stagnant, so the jets mostly point only between the teeth, and we would need to create a customer mouth guard for every individual, so the product would have to be $900. That didn’t seem like a path we wanted to go down. The breakthrough was taking a cross section of the mouth guard and moving it across the mouth. We have an H-shaped manifold. The top of the H goes over the top of the teeth, and the bottom of the H goes over the both teeth. It spins around in the middle, which is attached to the handle. It flosses the top, front, back, and bottom simultaneously. It has 12 jets aimed at the correct 90 degree angle. We can ensure 100% coverage at the right angle, and we can do it in just 10 seconds. The water pressure is adjustable, and it is painless. [9:20] Were there other paths you went down before you got to a water jet? Yes, I did a deep dive into all the possibilities. My initial sketches were trying to figure out ways to automate flossing with string, but that requires an insane amount of dexterity and intelligence. You don’t want to cut your gums and cause problems in your mouth. I looked into air as a medium, but that is incredibly ineffective. Overflossing might be the only thing worse than not flossing. That was a problem we ran into in the development. We had giant reservoirs of water because we don’t want people to have to refill the reservoir often. We noticed that people were enjoying it so much, but they were used to flossing for two to three minutes. Ten seconds with Instafloss is the equivalent of two minutes with an alternative flossing method, so two minutes of Instafloss is equivalent to 36 minutes of flossing.