Brad: So my wife is an early childhood educator. And she showed me this emotions wheel one day. It’s the greatest tool I’ve ever had. Where it’s, It just focuses on your core kind of emotions, happy, angry, sad. But then it breaks it down, so that you can get, “okay, my customer base isn’t angry, they’re frustrated that they can’t solve this problem. They’re not angry about it.”

And I think having, being really nuanced about the specific verbiage that you use particularly when you’re, when you’re trying to pick on people’s emotions is, is very important. 

[Musical Intro]

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

This is a special session recorded live at the UpSurge Baltimore offices following a presentation that I did to their Techstars accelerator. I hope you enjoy it. It’s with my next door neighbor and good friend, Brad Hennessy, who will introduce himself in a moment. 

I want to bring up Brad, who happens to be my next door neighbor, but is also a founder. I can talk a lot.

Brad: So can I.

Joel: I can tell you all this stuff all day long, right? But it would be really probably helpful to bring in another founder who’s been where you are, who has had some of these same challenges. And with some of this framing in mind I want to just give you a little bit of the floor first introduce yourself tell them what you’re working on. 

Brad: See how messaging goes. 

Joel: Yeah, we’re going to test his messaging. So Brad we moved in about the same, about the same time. And when I joined my startup, he founded his. So we would always be mowing the lawn and shouting and how are things going and then when I spun off onto my world always watching what he’s going on and I’m like, this is, this is really exciting and it’s been really a pleasure watching that grow and you’ve got some exciting things happening.

Brad: So, I’m Brad the company’s Next Step Robotics. We spun out of the University of Maryland to commercialize technology to restore function in stroke patients.

Effectively right now, patients are told by the clinicians six months after a stroke, functionally, “that’s as good as you’re going to get. Here’s your brace, here’s your compensatory movements and things like that. Live with it for the rest of your life.”

 What we know from science is that’s not necessarily true. Brain plasticity is real and through targeted training you can actually, not completely restore function, but in a meaningful way that enhances patients lives. So that’s what we’re working on now, is bringing multiple products through development and, and clinical testing for, for that.

Joel: We did a little bit of pre chatting. What were some of your earliest challenges? Or actually, maybe we’ll go back to the, the story about your background and how you got to that.

Because it’s carried through an awful lot into, into what you’re trying to do.

Brad: And I think that’s been the key to my successful messaging is identifying the story that resonates with people’s emotions on things and at the same time resonates with their own desire for a pathway to get them to where they want.

So I wanted to be a physical therapist I ended up getting an internship with who ended up being my two co founders at the University of Maryland doing clinical research in exercise and stroke patients, and I got to meet hundreds of stroke patients and sit down with them, and I got to feel their pain and understand the hope that we were being able to give them. So we got to touch on that emotion standpoint.

We were doing exercise research but basically what we learned that we were doing is we were making them limp faster. And so we weren’t really changing their lives. We were briefly giving them, getting them in better shape but they went home and they sat on the couch. At the same time, there was some stuff going on in the robotics development space at MIT that was showing neuroplasticity was real and it could actually help change with this targeted approach using robotics. So one of my co founders actually finished his MIT postdoc. at the University of Maryland to help us develop an ankle robot, because the first condition we were working to treat was called foot drop.

So foot drop is the inability to raise your toe while walking, so you can’t clear the toe, so they swing their leg out, they’re given this brace for their whole life and things like that. At the same time, going for grants, understanding what grant messaging was and things like that. 

We were successful, but eventually that kind of dried up as we couldn’t get the messaging straight in grants to show that what the next step that things needed to do wasn’t incremental.

We kept being, getting told that the next phase was going to be incremental. I didn’t think taking a $140,000 robot that cost, it cost us $140,000, making it something that was less than $10,000, taking the entire shoe department that we had in our lab and making it into a device that was universal fit and doing, there’s no means incremental, of incredible challenges we had to fit.

And then at the same time department chair was telling us, “okay, you’re not getting grant funding, put it aside, move on to the next thing. 

Just throw the IP up on the shelf and move on.” I didn’t like that because I had the emotional connection with our participants that we saw, that we actually were improving their lives and things like that.

At the same time, we developed IP that was very broad. And, the robot that we developed, we saw that not only were we able to make people not just limp faster, but we were changing their entire gait dynamic and really restoring their ability to access their community. And, and we had really meaningful, often anecdotal, but meaningful responses from patients.

So going forward we filed for the IP of how we did that, and we got a patent for the use of our control strategy over any impaired joint. Because we knew if it worked for the ankle, it would work for any impaired joint. So we had this idea, we went after it. They were doing lots of upper extremity robotics that were being successful but it was very different than walking.

And we recognized the pattern component in walking and how important that was to gain repetition. But there’s no, as long as you can create that pattern in any joint, you can create that. Synergy to create neuroplasticity.

Coming through, we got introduced to the Office of Technology Transfer, learned about the ecosystem.

I didn’t want to see the IP sit on the shelf. I’m a little bit of a crazy person and decided, okay, I’m going to figure out this technology transfer component on my own, because no one could really tell me how to do it. 

Got a year’s worth of basically salary, took a salary cut from my co founders and said, “I’m going to see, I’m going to take a year. We’re going to make this happen. And if not, I’ll go sell insurance.” That was, that was my actual plan.

So we did that. 

We were able to build in four months time out of a startup studio, MDC, the Maryland Development Center. In four months, we built a, device that was powered by a DeWalt battery, put it on 10 stroke patients and got data to show that we could do this for $5,000.

Build a device for $5,000 that wasn’t research grade. So now we had a real actual business opportunity. Went out, pitched to the Maryland Momentum Fund, got first check. Before that , we received funding. In order to build that device with MDC, we got TEDCO funding from MII to actually build it and take it forward.

So, but then we got the funding from Maryland Momentum Fund. Follow on MII Phase 3 and then I raised $900,000 from angel Investors. Local as well as West Coast. But that’s where messaging went in a direction. Local ecosystem. Told me my idea was too big, too big, too hard to understand with what we were going after as really a robotic rehabilitation platform.

And we got pigeonholed. We are now the foot- drop company. I would go and I would introduce myself to people and they go, “oh, you’re the foot drop company.” And internally I would roll my eyes and go, “yup, that’s us.” 

Because that was what the messaging that I was told that we needed, needed to go after.

But it wasn’t what I was passionate for. And it definitely hit my drive a little bit.

 Foot drop is a thing, it resonates with people that have foot drop. Who’s, who’s got foot drop? Who knows someone that has foot drop? No hands. 

You know a lot of stroke patients. There’s a lot of stroke patients that have foot drop.

It’s a big problem, but it is relatively niche in the medical space. It’s not kidney disease or anything like that. 

But essentially, I realized at that point we had to change our messaging and go after the larger components and larger investors and things like that and try to bring in their attention.

And that’s, investors don’t want to fund small cap companies. You’ve got to be at least mid cap or larger in order to get their attention to even talk to you. And that’s a struggle that we’re still going through now is trying to expand that market opportunity in a meaningful 

way. But yeah, we had lots of different, I don’t know,

What direction into messaging you want me to go to?

Joel: You had a vision early on about what your Big Idea was. Which was the neuroplasticity across any joint, any affected joint. And then you were told, “show me the case study.” who was, who was driving you in that direction? What was the advice you were hearing to limit or niche down?

Brad: Many players in the ecosystem, one being a first time founder a lot of the ecosystem players that are writing those first checks and things like that are a little, a little leery of going for big ideas from first time founders. You have to prove yourself a little bit, and I understood that, 

Joel: Promise what you can actually prove? 

Brad: That’s what you can actually prove.

Exactly. And at the same time, we were going for grants. And that’s where the bulk of our funding has come from. Which is extremely targeted. 

That’s our bread and butter, was always grant funding. We came from an academic center, very well funded things like that. And we, we did end up honing that message for a grant that we got from, we got a 5 million dollar grant from NIH to do our development and things.

But what was really interesting at the same time, we were one of the first, we were the second of this kind of grant that came out. NIH and even VA funding now, has equal weighting on your commercialization strategy. And I’m on a standing committee to review these kinds of NIH grants now.

And it is, it is equally weighted, your technical approach and your commercialization strategy. And what they’re looking for is you to be able to explain that messaging in a way, and you can put personality in it. 

And I see the grants that get better scored are the ones that have personality and play on people’s emotions a little bit in what is this typically ultra dry grant application.

But really to explain that you have a brand and things like that. And I think the reason why that’s the case is because a lot of SBIRs have been submitted to really just kind of prop up research academic directions. But they want to see that you actually have a plan to commercialize this thing. It’s not something that you’re just going to prop up your, your research approach.

Joel: So talk about the difference between writing for grants, now knowing that they’re humanizing a little bit and they’re a little bit more open to maybe opening up with the story and the use case as story and then going after the angel investments.

Brad: Yeah. So, grants are very technical. You have to do that.

It’s very, there’s pretty much a flow chart that you can almost follow to get that. How I developed my pitch is I didn’t have, I had a good team that we could pitch to. We did pitch ideas off each other, but we were pure academics, and I realized that wasn’t going to cut the mustard right away with actually pitching, so I pitched to absolutely everyone I could find that would let me pitch to them who I knew was going to say no. And that was because they were going to ask me questions, so that when I had a potential yes asking me that question, I knew how to answer it.

That was probably the most valuable exercise. That I did early on was just, and I even did, everyone told me, stay away from pay to pitch. Don’t go to any pay to pitch events. I put $800 out of my pocket and I went to a pay to pitch event in, in Manhattan. And I was pitching to a team that had 800 billion dollars in their portfolios. And I got the best questions I could have ever gotten that I was able to answer because they actually asked questions about revenue generation, reoccurring revenue, the things that actually matter to investors, the money component. And that made me realize, okay, this money component of a business is actually pretty important.

And you need to figure out that, that messaging early on, because the angels care about it too.

Joel: So as you’re getting all these this feedback and you’re seeing where their eyes light up or where they start dropping off of the questions that they’re asking what techniques or what tools did you use to make sense of all that to, to avoid chasing that messaging?

” They asked about this, so this is the only thing I can talk about now,” 

Doing that ambulance chasing kind of.

Brad: Yeah, it’s, it’s hard, and it’s a, it’s a balance, and trying to Focus on having a time frame, you know, it’s everyone’s like you’re at your elevator pitch. It, it doesn’t sound like it’s as important as it is, but it’s probably one of the most important things you can work on, because if you can explain what your business does, and not just what your business does, but how your business makes money in 30 seconds to anyone you meet in an elevator, not just the ideal person you end up in the elevator with, so anyone you meet in an elevator can understand what you do. Then you can have those conversations and those deeper conversations pretty, pretty quickly. The other component that I, the other tool that I used was actually my, as Joel talks about talking to children. 

And having children understand things. So my wife is an early childhood educator. And I, you know, wasn’t always the best communicator, you know, as the husband, right? And she showed me this emotions wheel one day. Like I was a an eight year old. But it’s the greatest tool I’ve ever had. Where it’s, you know, It just focuses on your core kind of emotions, happy, angry, sad, but then it breaks it down into further syllables, or synonyms for those emotions so that you can get, “okay, my customer base isn’t angry, follow that trail to they’re frustrated. They’re frustrated that they can’t solve this problem. They’re not angry about it.”

And I think having, being really nuanced about the specific verbiage that you use particularly when you’re, when you’re trying to pick on people’s emotions is, is very important.

Joel: And that is storytelling. That is being very specific and articulating the problem that they’re feeling they may not even have the word for and they go, “that’s it. That’s how I feel. I’m frustrated. You get me.”

And that’s an instant credibility builder.

Brad: Exactly. So you’re always, you should always be adjusting your message based on the audience. So it’s really important to do as much research as possible on the audience that you’re going to be presenting on because they all have very specific wants and needs and emotions that they might be feeling, right?

So early on pitching to TEDCO and the angels and like that. You want to be very specific even to the point where you’re targeting just one thing, even though you don’t want to because you have to be able to articulate a finite story that’s clearly executable, and that you can manage as you go along as a solo team often at, at that stage and you know, you can’t say you’re going to do these things that you don’t have any expertise in or anything. 

Okay, you’re going to talk to consultants, like make sure, fill in your, identify your weaknesses and, and say how you’re going to fill in on those things.

So early on with, with angels, like I said, go pitch to as many people as possible who will say no, so that you know the questions that the angels are going to give you. 

And then grants when you’re going for that, it’s a very much, a much more technical approach. Even the commercialization plan is, is 12 pages often.

As a, that ends up being a very, very technical commercialization plan, just to fill out the 12 pages and give the kind of detail. 

But then you’re, you’re always changing your messaging and so we had to talk to the FDA, about quality control, safety, and the messaging around that and the importance for it.

We filed for a breakthrough device application. We didn’t get it. I think the FDA was wrong by not giving it to us. But, We had to tell that story of why it’s important what we’re going for compared to what’s out there already and you have to change that messaging and now we’re going through where we are now, we are FDA registered, we’ve got a 510K application we’re working on, now we’re pivoting and I had a board member in the office for the last two days working with us on messaging, For, okay, now, now we’re going to be customer facing.

This is completely different. And it’s almost like you’re, you have to keep zooming in and out of what you do. 

You have to zoom, you have to show, figure out who it is, who wants the big picture, simple language, and who wants the technical stuff. Because there are, there are specific audiences where the, the technical approach is the important component.

But you always, you have to figure out that zoomed out view because even the ones that are interested in the technical, you got to get their attention and that, that happens from that, that more top level messaging.

Joel: So now you get to go back to that founding story; “I saw so many patients who didn’t have hope, and they were being told this is the best we can do.” Do you think that is that going to become a lot more of that message as you’re going into these clinics, or you’re going into… 

Brad: Yep, exactly, and that’s where that, ” I bet you’re frustrated that you can’t do this with your, your patients. I bet your patients are frustrated.” You know, figuring out what those, what those emotions are, that, that get them actually considering your technology for adoption.

 We place an extremely heavy emphasis on customer discovery. And also recognizing who your customers are is important.

 I’m helping stroke patients, but that’s not my customer. 

My customer are physical therapy clinics that are going to buy this device to use on their patients. So, we knew how stroke patients felt about their condition and things like that. We dealt with hundreds of them at that point. Luckily, University of Maryland has a great rehab hospital and we spent a lot of time in our early development making sure that this was a problem that they, they had and there was no solution.

But then we had to go and basically validate all of our assumptions that we had built around just one entity. And I ended up interviewing over 200, not just PTs, but largely clinic owners and decision makers, because that’s, again, defining the customer further. It’s not the, not even the PTs, it’s the, the ones that are actually going to write the check to give it to their PTs in the clinic to use.

So, identifying your actual customer is, is extremely important to your, your messaging as well.

Joel: Did you find having that direct patient hands on helped you advocate to the customer that second level order of benefit, say “look we know what you’re dealing with. Do you know what your patients are dealing with?”

Do you find that being valuable is taking that that step back? Did that come in handy?

Brad: Yeah, because what it does is it kind of immediately, it builds credibility with them. So you’re able to immediately say, ” this is a problem your patients are having,” and they go, “that is a problem my patients are having. You’re right.” 

And it’s, and to be able to just immediately pivot it right back to them is, “would you like a solution to help your patients with that?” 

What’s cool about the iCorp program is they teach you how to do that process without talking about your solution. And it gives you a lot of information about what your solution should be.

And that’s when they came to us and they’re they would say, “I bet you would, you would like a device that actually, you know, helps your patients get better.”

” Yeah, that’d be great as long as it doesn’t take too long to set up.”

” What is too long to set up?”

“Anything over three minutes.” 

Okay, that’s my design input. It’s got to be less than three minutes to set up and get a patient going on it. And that’s, those kind of open ended questions allow you to figure out. Really feel out what the solution should be for your actual customer. So it’s identifying who your actual customer is first, and then trying to be as vague as possible in figuring out what your solution should be during customer discovery.

Really before you, as early in development, if not before development.

Joel: I’ll throw you one more curveball. We’ll take any other questions afterwards. How do you, how do you keep your creative spark alive? Outside of the technology. Is there anything that you do outside, cause I know a lot of founders get very focused in on the thing. Is there anything that helps you do that discovery outside of… 

Brad: …Just kind of like letting my, letting my creative mind like wonder in things? 

Joel: Hobbies interests, things like that. 

Brad: I’m a huge sci-fi nerd. And by that I mean, I like sci fi books. I do a lot of gardening too. I’m, I’m like a little old lady in my garden. 

Joel: Jealous of his garden, by the way. 

Brad: Like you probably see me walking around the yard and a little old lady in my garden. I walk around and I’ve got headphones on. I’m always listening to either a sci fi book or really old school philosophy. Like Plato, Marcus Aurelius, of stuff., And I think it’s There’s some kind of tie there, because there’s a lot of philosophy in the sci fi, but that just often gets my brain going.

And, um, I’ll have a question, I’ll put on some Marcus Aurelius meditations, and I’ll go for a three mile walk, and I’ll come back and I have a solution, pretty much planned out. 

 I’ll Word Vomit into ChatGPT, and then say make this make sense, and it spits it out, and I can edit that into a clear, concise message. 

Joel: So you’re not just muttering to yourself as you’re walking around? I’m a little worried about you. man. 

Brad: I’m a little bit of a crazy person.I told you that.

Joel: At this point, we took a question and it was about feedback, but unfortunately we didn’t have them on microphone, but here’s, Brad’s answer.

Brad: The important thing about feedback is you’ve got to understand what defines your product and what’s features, right? So, there’s a very clear, you have to understand what will actually make a minimal viable product for this. What can I actually go to market for? First you have to define the pain point that the customer has. 

Joel: That’s a card in there, by the way. 

Brad: Yeah, once you can define the pain point, then you can actually define the solution for that pain point. And you have to draw the line and you gotta be kind of brave about when you draw the line, to say, okay, this is good enough, ’cause you could just develop features forever. This is where design freeze is going to happen. And then, whenever you get feedback on how to make your product better, take notes and that’s for the next generation. But you really have to make sure you get that, early on it’s the feedback to define the minimal viable product.

Once you define it, stick with your definition, stick with your gut. Because often what you’re getting is the gut of the clinician. Stick with that and, and, and make something that works for them.

Joel: Yeah. Quite often I’ll be working with a client and I’ll say “well, what are we gonna put on this features page”? And they’ll give me a list of 14 bullets. And I’m like, we talked about the, the overwhelming, the, the caveman brain. You do not want to ever put 14 different choices in front of somebody.

You want to figure out a way to create supergroups or to cluster together and say here are the solution areas and they’re solved by these things, right? The, the human brain just cannot sort through that. You just can’t give everything and say you pick what’s important to you because it’s lazy. It’s just really lazy.

Brad: Yeah, the last thing I’ll say is don’t ever make assumptions and ask the stupid 

questions. Because the stupid questions often give you the answer that you’re looking for. And kind of that, that, they give you that gut, that of what’s actually bothering your, your potential customer. 

We’ll find out if what I’ve been working on is we’re going to market now. So we’ll see if, if, you know, the pathway that I’ve gone through is, is going to be, is going to work. But we’ve been, we’ve been trade showing for, for two years to kind of make sure we had an MVP that we felt good with.

Luckily we had NIH funding so we could afford to go to those trade shows and things like that. And I think we, we’re getting, we’re getting a really, really good result. Response from our customers and I’m, I’m excited for, for the rest of this year.

Joel: Awesome.

Brad: Onboarded my sales director two weeks ago.

Joel: We need to build him a messaging playbook. 

Brad: Yeah.

Joel: Thank you so much, Brad, for for joining us. I think that was, you, you told them everything that they needed to hear. So, I think that was super duper helpful.

Thank you guys for coming.

Brad: Thanks, Joel.

[Musical Outtro]

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.