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Learn how Devon Lodge, Vice President of Marketing at Wesper, is dedicated to improving sleep health with innovative technology. In conversation with host Tanya Perkins, COO of Tembo Health, Devon shares the inspiration behind Wesper, a sleep management solution designed to diagnose and treat sleep disorders such as sleep apnea and insomnia. He recounts how the founder, Amir Reuveny, was motivated by his father’s struggles with sleep apnea to create a clinically-validated, FDA-cleared device that provides lab-quality sleep tests at home. Devon discusses the challenges of joining Wesper, the importance of community and mentorship, and the challenges and rewards of working in a startup environment. He also reflects on his unique background as a professional ballet dancer and how it shaped his approach to business and marketing. Hear more about Devon’s journey and his advice for aspiring founders in this insightful episode.
Tanya Perkins, Host:
Welcome to AgeTech Talks, conversations about AgeTech powered by AgeTech Collaborative from AARP, leading a global mission to drive innovation at the nexus of longevity and technology. You are tuning in to a series of discussions recorded live at CES 2024 that highlight the dynamic startup founders who are making aging easier for everyone by pioneering innovative AgeTech solutions. In conversation with fellow startup founders, Kyle Rand and Tanya Perkins, each episode invites an AgeTech Collaborative startup founder to discuss their journey and share the invaluable lessons they’ve learned along the way. Today we’re thrilled to have Devon Lodge, vice president of marketing at Wesper to share their story.
Hey all of you out there in CES land, this is Tanya Perkins with the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP, and we are podcasting live from CES out here in Las Vegas. And with me today, I have Devon from Wesper. Hi, Devon.
Devon Lodge:
Hi, nice to be here.
Tanya Perkins:
Thank you for joining us. We are going to get into so many things today. What does Wesper do?
Devon Lodge:
So Wesper is a sleep management solution for hospitals and consumers to easily treat, diagnose, and provide ongoing care for sleep disorders such as sleep apnea, insomnia, and others.
Tanya Perkins:
I don’t have to use my phone app to see if I snore anymore. I can go ahead and use you guys.
Devon Lodge:
Absolutely. We find a lot of people start with a snoring app and see, “Hey, something doesn’t look right here.” And then because we’re clinically validated, we have three FDA clearances and we work with a team of doctors, it’s really easy just to order a Wesper kit, get an actual sleep test at home that’s lab quality, and then know what’s going on under the surface.
Tanya Perkins:
Ooh. Okay, I’m going to have so many questions for you. Let’s get into the quirky stuff. I’ve been asking everybody what makes them tick. What should we know about Devon? How does Devon operate in the world?
Devon Lodge:
My education was in arts. I grew up as a dancer. I was a professional ballet dancer for a lot of my early life and traveled around the world and had a very artistic upbringing in terms of my education. And I attended the Julliard School in New York City and that really kind of opened my eyes to how you can use creative thinking and artistic thinking in a little bit more of a structured business way. So I guess one of the unique things is just coming at this world from a very unique kind of lens that is very artistic and kind of non-traditional.
Tanya Perkins:
You just revealed that you were a professional dancer and you went to Julliard. Okay, let’s just start there. What was that experience like?
Devon Lodge:
I left home when I was very young to really pursue dance when I was 13, and so most of my teenage years were spent being more of a professional than a teenager. So traveling around the country a lot, performing a lot. It was this really incredible heightened experience to be around the top tier of people that are really looking to not only be professional dancers, but change the art form and really push that forward.
It was a really eye-opening experience because my upbringing had been in really classical ballet and technical stuff and I was used to working a lot of hours and being very perfectionistic and Julliard really opened my eyes to letting that go and finding other ways of expressing yourself and really digging into your unique personality and having that be what drives you.
Tanya Perkins:
As you were talking about being a dancer, your gestures and everything, I was like, “What was that?” It was like second position and third position. I can see it in your movements now. So what was that moment for you when you learned that you didn’t have to be perfect and how did you learn to embrace it?
Devon Lodge:
It started at Julliard and it started with a lot of teachers that by that point my training was where it needed to be, but that really challenged me to find where my identity lied to let go of some things. It wasn’t really until I started working in the business world that I started to understand the difference between perfection and quality, and that really was one of the big shifts in my thinking was rather than things being perfect, being the highest quality they can be and not limiting yourself. So one of my mentors early on said this quote that’s very well known about perfection being the enemy of good. That really changed my thinking about if it’s good, get it out the door, see how people react. As long as it’s not bad, you’re probably going to get some reaction out of it and the very least you’re going to learn something and that learning then will transform the next thing you do.
Tanya Perkins:
We live in a world in which we’re constantly talking about what we can and cannot afford to teach the next generation, whether that be in sports or in the arts. What would you tell someone who’s thinking about whether or not they should enroll their kids in a program or someone who loves something that maybe isn’t a traditional path or a popular path and is wondering should I go down it? What should they be thinking about?
Devon Lodge:
I think the first thing that people should think about are that kids are kids and they need space to be children. And we have a culture that tries to professionalize children in a lot of different areas, especially with the rise of social media and these different things. That’s my first thought. The second is really instilling education as a priority, not school. Learning and challenging the way you think.
While I was dancing, I was interested in a lot of things that weren’t dance related, and I think that it’s really important that parents don’t get their kids… If they find their kids love something and they push it so that that’s their whole life, it actually limits a lot of their development and their understanding of the world. Education is so important and just getting that education, continuing that not saying like, “Okay, I’m going to do this professionally. I don’t need to go to college. I don’t need to get classes. There’s so many easy ways to continue educating.” And that’s one of the things that I’ve seen so many artists that I’ve grown up with. They reach a period in their life and they don’t have another direction to go and it’s really limiting. And so I think the more you can keep that education, keep that curiosity, you end up finding different ways to use the skills you’ve developed.
Tanya Perkins:
From your experience being a professional dancer and then moving into the marketing world, it sounds like you’ve gotten so much out of that experience. Everything ranging from learning how to take on a discipline, learn how to do the technical, and then be able to be a little bit creative with it, being willing to not have everything be perfect and that being something great in terms of being in a startup because again, as we mentioned before, you can’t be perfect. First of all, that’s just not going to happen in a startup. Trust me guys, you’re just going to get a lot of things wrong, so you might as well ship it, get your MVP out there. What’s your version of how Wesper started and moreover, how did they convince you to join?
Devon Lodge:
Wesper started out of a need to have better sleep management tools. Our founder, Amir Reuveny, was in Cornell Tech as postdoctoral fellowship and created this concept and was really curious how he could use micro engineering to build a better system for people. It all started because his father had sleep apnea and the snoring, the sleep issues, they never really went away and saw how much it deteriorated his life and how many issues it caused.
In terms of me joining, I had previously been in a finance company leading their marketing, and over the course of my career I had started to drift away from a mission and really was focused on building the businesses and revenue being the leading metric and really just working on getting these businesses to a better place, launching them, doing whatever was needed in that framework. And I started to realize that that mission piece connecting me to it was super important. I needed something that I could believe in and that I could really, really get behind.
The more I started to dive in, the more I realized that sleep medicine is so fragmented. I think if you asked people around CES today where to go get a sleep test or how to know if you have a sleep disorder, they wouldn’t really know. A lot of people reference other trackers that exist, but there’s not a really great understanding of how to get a clinically validated assessment, meet with a physician and get into treatment. I realized that for me having a community working on something was really important and being able to know that people felt the same way and being able to piggyback ideas, get feedback on things was really huge. So those things were ultimately what led me to Wesper.
Tanya Perkins:
Let’s talk about that oh goodness moment, that moment where you realized I am totally in a startup. When was that for you?
Devon Lodge:
Yeah, so I have been in startups for most of my career and I love the chaotic environment. I’m a huge fan of pivoting when things are not working and failing fast and I’m probably the one on our team that’s causing more headaches than other people because if something’s not working, then let’s change it. Let’s do what we need to do to fix it. And I love that environment.
I think there are so many times, I mean today, yesterday where you’re like, “Oh crap, I am in a startup and I am at a conference all day and then I’m meeting with people and then I’m getting back to my room and I’m doing the work that needed to be done that day in the office.” Those are kind of the times where you’re like, “It would be really great to be a part of this large corporation where a lot of that is handled for you,” but you also lose that ability to have your finger on the pulse and know when to change, and also again, going back to that community, I think there’s so much value in hearing other people’s thoughts and just bouncing things off of people and making sure people are heard.
That is so much harder I found in larger companies, especially like post-acquisition and you’re growing, you’re scaling, things become more siloed, leadership becomes more heavy-handed with metrics and really with a driving growth and you lose a lot of that ability to really say, “Okay guys, we’re on a team, we’re on the ship, whatever. Where do we go from here? We just tried this and we didn’t get the result we wanted. Let’s change.”
Sometimes those changes happen over the weekend and sometimes those changes happen overnight. Sometimes you’re talking to people in the Philippines and you cannot stop the meeting until 1:00 a.m. And that’s to me the downside of a startup, but I think there’s also a pill you have to swallow and just get over the stuff that is unfriendly and also accept fear and anxiety as a way of life is really I think a huge, huge thing I learned is like it’s never going away. You’re never not going to be afraid of what you’re doing. You’re never not going to be anxious about what’s happening, and so how do you just learn to navigate within that and try and be okay with that.
Tanya Perkins:
Elise, I don’t know about you, but it really sounds like Devon is that person that’s constantly at the front of the line to go on the free fall.
Devon Lodge:
Fast pass every time. I love roller coasters. That’s the main thing that I want to do when I’m here in Vegas is go to all the different roller coasters and so that is kind of my energy. I also grew up a lot on the water, on the ocean, on boats and living periods of time on them, and that really taught me a lot about fear and security, things happening at the drop of a hat and you just being like, “Okay, whatever. We’ve got to take care of it.” You can’t negotiate with Mother Nature or with different situations.
Tanya Perkins:
Can you tell me what type of boats? Were you on mini little Sunfish sailboats, what type of boats?
Devon Lodge:
Both. So I grew up on an island and boats were just part of our life. So sailing was a huge athletic thing within my community. It was the same as sports. So small sailboats. But my family would just live on a small wooden motorboat for about three months each year and just taught so much about living in that way and really being at the mercy of a lot of different elements.
Tanya Perkins:
You grew up on sailboats and were that person zigzagging through the bay.
Devon Lodge:
So I honestly don’t think of myself that way a lot of the time. Most of the men in my family are captains of boats and it’s kind of what they love to do with their life and they’re in very extreme situations a lot of the time that are much more intense. But I really like to use being on a ship as a metaphor for business a lot of the time. There are just so many things. My favorite is when you’re going through a really tough period and you need to make decisions that kind of pull back spending or resources or readjust.
When you’re sailing, you have a centerboard and a lot of times you’ll get into a shallow area that you didn’t plan and you have to pull up that centerboard. You can’t really go forward fast. You’re kind of drifting. You have to drift out of that area. You push that centerboard down and you just get sailing again. So when you’re in a race or something, it’s a lot of figuring out how to manage those pieces and being okay with like, “Hey, this is going to be slow for a little bit. We just have to wait it out and get to that area of the water. We can throw the centerboard back down and we can start going fast again.”
Tanya Perkins:
Can you tell us one of your favorite moments of being in a startup? When was something you were like, “Yes, this is exactly what I’m living for, this is why I’m in a startup”?
Devon Lodge:
Absolutely. So thinking of Wesper, 2023 was our go-to- market year, and so we really focused on how are we getting this product commercialized. We had already gotten our FDA clearance and gone through insurance and all those processes. And one of the most interesting things is we started the year with our ideal customer profile being a specific group of people. We immediately went out to market and we used a lot of marketing, digital marketing and different tools to start to gauge who was most interested and really understand how we can book demos, get people onboarded faster and faster and in the right ICP that has the right contract value for us.
During that process, we definitely tried a lot of different areas that weren’t working. But once we started to find small signals that said this is the right ICP, this is the right area to invest in, it’s so exciting to then build on top of that and be like, “Okay, great. Let’s do a pricing analysis. Let’s see what are all the competitors for this ICP? How are we stacking up? How can we change that, make it good for us, but also make it really great for them?”
And that whole process are just hundreds of little decisions that are being made over months that then after six months, you realize you’ve onboarded 50 customers in this ideal customer profile within six months and you have a business that has been based on you and your team making small decisions along the way and being like, “Hey, I think our pricing isn’t perfect for this.” And then the rest of the team being like, “Okay, great. Run an analysis, show what that’s like. Show the difference. Show where their attitude is. Let’s do a trial, put that into market for a week, see those demos. Did they convert at a higher rate? Great, okay, we learned something there. Let’s now use that to go into a different area.”
And so iterative changes in startups are really exciting to me because you don’t see the progress until you step back after six months, after a year and you’re like, “Wow, this company had zero customers or really didn’t have commercialization and now it’s being used to really solve a problem out there in the market.” I don’t think there’s anything really more exciting than that, knowing that you found that fit and people are using it for good out there in the world.
Tanya Perkins:
That the we did it sort of thing.
Devon Lodge:
Yeah, absolutely, the team. I don’t know, just it really feels like the work you put in meant something. And I think it’s really easy in our culture to feel like the work you do doesn’t necessarily result in anything meaningful for you in particular besides maybe how you’re getting paid and other benefits. But a lot of people just go into their job and work and I think without that team, without that viewpoint, it starts to feel a little degrading instead of empowering. And so I feel like that’s a really big thing.
Tanya Perkins:
What would you say to someone who’s out there thinking about joining a startup and what would you tell them about how to go find the right place to work or choose the right team or role?
Devon Lodge:
It’s really difficult. The first thing is really understand that it’s a startup and the rose-colored glasses, no matter how awesome the technology is, how much you connect to the mission, at the end of the day it is going to be a lot of grunt work and it might not always feel like you’re getting appreciated for that because that’s the energy of the startup. There might not be a very clear value to you in the short term, and yet you have to do it anyway and you have to really meet what’s needed in the business. That would probably be the biggest thing.
Elise Downes, ATC:
You mentioned that you’ve had a lot of experience working at startups and you’ve worked at several startups. How does working at an AgeTech startup and specifically in the AgeTech industry compare and how is your time working in the AgeTech industry and what can you say to people about that?
Devon Lodge:
For me, working in AgeTech is amazing because of the accessibility that you have to think about whenever you’re doing anything from the instruction manual, how can you have it be printed in the box, how can you have it be a PDF on the website, and how can you have there be videos all at the same time to meet people where they are? And then also how can you make it so people can schedule an appointment with a customer service rep? Those types of things are really fun to me.
But then it’s also on a design level, you really have to lean on the accessibility design that’s out there that people know about, about contrast, about how you use images and text, about how those words sound. To me, that’s all really, really exciting because it’s putting a lot more care into the process than just get this product out there, let’s see how it performs. But you’re really having that patient in mind every step of the way is different than other companies I’ve worked at.
Tanya Perkins:
Again, this is Tanya Perkins with the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. We are podcasting live, doing startup stories, and we were just speaking with Devon of Wesper. Devon, thank you so much.
Devon Lodge:
Thank you for having me.
Tanya Perkins:
Thanks for listening to AgeTech Talks from AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. You can learn more about today’s guests and all of the innovative startups in the AgeTech Collaborative by visiting the startup directory on agetechcollaborative.org.
