Concept to Creation, Chapter 3: Everyone Said Yes. That Was the Problem.

After AccelerateRU, we had a cleaner picture of what we were building. The pitch was tighter, the concept was more defined, and we had real feedback from people who had seen a lot of early-stage companies. But the question of who we were building it for was still wide open.

So we joined NSF I-Corps at Rowan.

If you haven't heard of I-Corps, it is a National Science Foundation program built around one core methodology: get out of the building and talk to people. Not about your product. About their problem. The whole point is to pressure-test your assumptions before you invest too much in them. Our program director, Michael T. Dominik, Ph.D. , was relentless about this (and rightfully so). Every week we were pushed to go deeper, ask harder questions, and resist the urge to pitch when we should have been listening. Our assigned mentor, Erik Brewer from Rowan's biomedical engineering department, was equally valuable on the tactical side, helping us sharpen our interview questions and think critically about the different types of people we actually needed in the room.

So we got to work.

Over the course of the program, we connected with marathon runners, endurance athletes of all kinds, military dieticians, clinical dieticians, and professional sports dieticians. We also spent meaningful time with members of the POTS patient community and the physicians working with them. Across all of those conversations, we were asking the same fundamental questions: what does this problem actually cost you in your daily life, how are you solving it right now, and what is missing from everything currently available.

The good news: nearly every single person we spoke with articulated the exact pain points we had been building toward. Unprompted. The problem was real, it was felt across very different populations, and the existing solutions were not cutting it for any of them.

The bad news: we still could not narrow the market. If anything, every conversation opened our eyes to another application we hadn't fully considered.

That is a strange place to be. You have put in the time. People are nodding. The data is pointing in your direction. And somehow you are walking away more uncertain about focus than when you started.

We sat with that for a while.

Eventually two markets kept rising to the top. Endurance athletes who needed a lightweight, portable electrolyte solution that would actually hold up mid-effort, and people who spent real mental energy managing their sodium intake and needed something they could trust and carry with them every day. We could have committed to just one. The business case existed either way.

But the hybrid felt true to who we are.

Braeden's connection to the POTS community is personal. Zac's entire background is exercise science and competitive sport. Ryan built the operational foundation around both of them. People say a company is a reflection of its founders, and for the first time, we really understood what that meant for us. We didn't land on our mission because a customer discovery spreadsheet told us to. We landed on it because it was already written into the people building this thing.

That kind of clarity takes time to earn. But once you have it, everything downstream gets easier.

Next: Chapter 4.