Podcast Transcript: RefluxRaft: A New Option Beyond Conventional Therapy

[Dr. Ashley Agan]
I want to talk about the development of RefluxRaft. Go back to the beginning when you started kicking the idea around and how did this idea come to be and how did you get this catchy name?

[Dr. Spencer Payne]
Like a lot of people, I had a lot of time during COVID. Like I said, the functional medicine training I was using, they were all online courses because everything in person had been canceled. I was actually at the airport about to go to my first course, and then they canceled it. I was like, "Okay, all right, well." Over the course of that time, learning about all these other options and that thinking heavily about the, maybe we shouldn't just be saying symptom pill.

I really started thinking about it. I remember looking at all the information they were providing around treating reflux and problems with PPIs and the associated downstream side effects, which may just be very bad cross-sectional studies of people in nursing homes but take it for what it's worth. As we were coming back out of it, and I was trying to apply a lot of these options to taking care of patients. I remember talking to our laryngologist, Jim Daniero, and he was just like, "Oh, have you tried alginates for your patients? It's really gaining steam in the laryngology community."

I was like, "Oh, yes, they actually mentioned that at that course. It would be really great if we could have something." We talked about some other brands that were on the market. I started recommending a lot of those. A lot of patients were complaining about like, "Oh, there's a lot of sugar in this," or, "There's a lot of sodium in this," or, "This brand tastes horrible, and it's chalky, and it's hard to get," and da, da, da, da.

I was talking to Jim, and I was like, we complain about how PPIs, even when we take the side effects out of it, we're really only addressing one issue, the acid, but we're not addressing the reflux, but these alginates seem great. Again, we're not addressing the reflux, stoppy reflux, but we're not addressing causes with it. It's still a unit-dimensional product. I says, "Wouldn't it be great if we could integrate other holistic therapies into an alginate-based product and create the best option for patients."

Then, hindsight's 20/20, learn from what the others have done and try to tweak those things and build a better mousetrap, so to speak. He goes, "I love it. I love it." He's like, "Let's do it. I've been wanting to make my own alginate for a while now." I was like, "Awesome, let's go." Jim has been on the board of a couple of incubator startup-type things in Charlottesville. We've got a pretty good community for that.

He was talking to a couple of his colleagues with those, and they were like, "That sounds amazing." Two weeks later, we had a meeting, and they were just like, "All right, build us a prototype." Jim and I hit the kitchen lab. I was like, "We're just sitting there with all sorts of ingredients and putting stuff together and immersion blend drain in my mason jars in the kitchen and had all these things lined up, taped on all of them like, 'Here's this formula here's this one. Here's how we tweak this one,'" da, da, da and then came up with what we thought was the perfect one.

Then I don’t think Jim will mind me saying this, but he's got bad reflux. He's just like, "Well, if it helps me, I know this thing's going to work." He was like, "This is amazing. This is amazing." I was like, "All right, we're ready." He was patient one, right? Yes, co-founder and patient one. We took it back to these guys, and they were just like, "Yes," they're like, "Oh, the consistency is a little weird." We're like, "Yes, it's an alginate." I'm like, "But here are the alternatives." They're like, "Oh," so they're all gloppy. I'm like, "They're all gloppy." They're like, "All right, let's do it."

Then we had this brain trust of people who had run some other businesses, and they introduced us to a marketing company, and they had an intern. Then we just started researching companies that excelled at organic, healthy, that's called CGMP manufacturing standards for liquid processing. Then we found a third party manufacturer and interviewed several places and found one that seemed to be in line with our mission of providing this natural based organic healthy product to help with patients and then got moving. Then it was crazy because I had taken one business course during COVID, too, that was marketing.

At that time, I was like I had no idea marketing was not just advertising. To me, marketing equaled advertising. It was a mind-blowing situation to realize marketing is every step it takes to get your product to market including brand mission, product conceptualization, manufacturing, logistics, sales, all of this stuff. You're like, "Yes, let's make this product." Then all sounds like we've got to make it, we've got a bottle it, we've got a label it with FDA requirements so you've got to dig through all this FDA stuff about—

Luckily, our product is a food supplement, so we're not dealing with pharmacological types of restrictions, but then it's like, "What do you have to put on a label? How much fat? How much sugar? How much of these things is in this stuff? What does your label have to have? You have to have the office or where it's manufactured on the label, and the bottle has to either have a manufacture date or an expiration date on it."

All of these things that you've got to actually think about that you'd never thought about. It was a real crazy thing. Then it's, "Okay, well, how do you sell your product?" Then like, all right, well, you've got to do Amazon. You can't not do Amazon these days. There's a reason why there's a lot of people mad at Amazon. You try to figure that type of stuff out, and you've got to develop a website. Then how do people buy things on your website? Should you do subscriptions? Then who saves the credit card information and all these kinds of things that we've been moving along.

In the end, we had one company that got us started with the marketing and advertising in the website. Then we picked up another company to move us forward to the next thing. We launched officially, I think product was available October 2022 when we finally flicked the switch on the website and entered Amazon. We lost one of our original colleagues in the process. Now, there's just three of us running the company, all co-founders and then not president.

I'm customer service. Jim's in charge of inventory. We've got the marketing company, our other partner, Bill Porter, is our president, really chief operations officer in charge of contract negotiation and managing that type of stuff. It's a whole new world of stuff that I hadn't thought of. I was even thinking it the other day. It's like, I show up to the OR, and I expect things to be how I want them.

You forget all the time we had put into having it be perfect. Now I want things the way I want them, but wait, I've got to do all this now. It's in my spare time. People are always like, "Oh, you've got your side hustle." I'm like, "Yes, it's definitely a hustle because we're hustling trying to do this stuff and also stay within the confines of not letting it interfere with my day job and then inspiring the ire of either my chair or my school and that type of thing.

[Dr. Ashley Agan]
Yes. It took about two years. You started in 2020 and then launched in '22?

[Dr. Spencer Payne]
Yes, 2020 we started talking. I think 2021 is when we really started. We met with the corporate folks, so to speak, and then launched the product. Then took another year to get the product actually to market. Our first product was Lemon Ginger, which has the ginger in it, which I wanted as the anti-inflammatory pro-kinetic agent. It's got deglycyrrhizinated licorice, which I still can't spell. I always have to tell Siri, deglycyrrhizinated, and hope that she comes up with it.

[Dr. Ashley Agan]
What does that mean?

[Dr. Spencer Payne]
Yes, so licorice root is used for a lot of reasons, but it's an anti-inflammatory. It's also a thickening agent. It's used as a demulcent or a gel type of a coating, but if you look into it, it's got a lot of potential contraindications, especially with patients on either blood thinners or a loop diuretics, or they've got heart issues. There is a, for lack of a better word, but probably too technical, a moiety on the licorice root substance that is called glycyrrhizin. You de-glycyrrhizinate the licorice by taking it off. Once you do that, you get rid of the anti-inflammatory component, but then you also get rid of the issue that interacts with all the other problems or creates all those other issues.

Then you're basically just left with the demulcent capacity of the soothing coating. In that case, it's almost like the licorice is acting like the sucral fate type of scenario. People ask like, "Oh, this has got licorice in it, and I can't take this." I'm like, "No, no, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine." Then we've got natural lemon flavoring extract. Then people always say like, "Oh, but no, you're not supposed to have lemon if you've got a reflux diet." I'm like, "Yes, it's the citric acid that you don't need. These are the natural oils and flavoring."

Up with that product, that's a pretty good soup-to-nuts thing. Then literally it was just maybe less than a month ago we finally dropped our second product, because I really wanted to do a RefluxRaft PM, and the rest of the world PM means we've added diphenhydramine aka Benadryl, but melatonin which a lot of people use naturally for as a sleep aid is also good for lower esophageal sphincter tone, so we created a product with melatonin in it for bedtime use, our Midnight Berry, which then has blueberry and acai berry for polyphenolic and anti-inflammatory antioxidant parstices. That one's starting to pick up speed, too.