Serial entrepreneur Miki Agrawal recently chatted with Elvis Duran and the rest of the crew from the famed “Morning Show”. Elvis Duran, a big Tushy fan, invited disrupt-her Miki Agrawal to share her stories of business development, breaking boundaries, and evolving industries that have seen little change in decades. In addition to founding TUSHY, Miki Agrawal is also the founder of Thinx and Wild, a gluten-free pizza concept. The best-selling author of “Do Cool Sh*t” and “Disrupt-her” is also a thought leader on various business-related and social topics, and is often invited to speak on industry panels, summits, and leadership conferences.
Read on for a few highlights from Miki Agrawal’s conversation with Elvis Duran:
Miki Agrawal On The Need for Tushy and a Bathroom Revolution
Elvis Duran: There are so many reasons we love Miki! Number one, hello Tushy. Hello?
Miki Agrawal: Hello?
Elvis Duran: How did you come to us with this hello Tushy concept? What were we thinking to say yes?
Miki Agrawal: Well, who doesn’t want a clean butt? It’s kind of time that we stop using toilet paper, and actually wash with water properly.
Elvis Duran: Right. Even Dr. Oz always told us, “you should use water, you shouldn’t use anything rubbing against your whatever.”
Miki Agrawal: The analogy I always give is: Imagine if you jumped in your shower, did not turn the water on, and just used dry toilet paper. People will be like, “What are you doing? Are you okay?” So, the fact that we’ve been deeply indoctrinated to believe that wiping with dry paper actually cleans is incorrect. It just smears poop around.
Danielle Monaro: Okay. When was the moment you said, “This is what we need?” Like, were you sitting there on the bowl? When did it happen?
Miki Agrawal: No. I’m half Japanese, half Indian. In Japan, bidets are literally ubiquitous. You find bidets at McDonald’s. In India, they use water too; they don’t use toilet paper, but they use buckets with a little squeeze thing that you just spray your butt with. It’s a little more low-fi version, but it’s still water.
In Italy, they don’t use any toilet paper either; they just literally use water, a bidet, and then towels to pat dry. So, we at Tushy offer an opportunity to actually eliminate toilet paper altogether by washing your butt with our Tushy bidet and then patting dry with our butt towels at the end of it.
You can also use 80% less toilet paper if you want, but you’re still saving 80% of your money and trees and resources every single time you go to the bathroom, and you’re properly cleaning yourself. It kind of feels like a no-brainer. Also, when you’re like pre-going out, about to have a sexy time, or you’re about to go on a date, you feel sexier, you feel cleaner, you feel better. You don’t feel gross.
Elvis Duran: You know what? The end game is always sexy time. You always remember that. Yes, Frog?
Scot Langley: I always use the analogy; If you got mud on your leg, you wouldn’t just wipe it off with a rag, you would get like something. You want water to clean that mud, of course.
Elvis Duran: Same thing. All right, by the way, we are getting somewhere with this incredible conversation with Miki Agrawal. Entrepreneurship is just an amazing headline of yours. I know that going back, almost ten years ago, not quite, your book called “Do Cool Sh*t: Quit Your Day Job” was released. I was always intrigued by that book.
I didn’t know until recently that was you that wrote that book! Of course, even though, in my opinion, it seems to be a great read for women who really want to find their center and get out there, it’s for all of us; it’s a fantastic book.
Miki Agrawal: Yes. “Do Cool Sh*t” was subtitled “Quit Your Day Job, Start Your Own Business and Live Happily Ever After”. It’s not written for women, it’s written for any aspiring entrepreneur who just wants to go from step zero to step one to five in their entrepreneurial journey.
I feel like back then, when I was deciding to become an entrepreneur, I was voraciously reading all of these books, Richard Branson’s “Losing My Virginity”, I then read Tony Shades’ “Delivering Happiness.” I read just all kinds of entrepreneurial books. I would read this super boring “how to start a business book”, and I would just be cross-eyed and bored after page three because it was so dense and terrible.
In Richard Branson’s book, which is amazing, he would be like, “Then I raised a million dollars, and then I made a billion-dollar company.” You’re like, “But how? How do you even get the first meeting when you have no contacts? How did you get press when you didn’t have money to hire a PR firm? How did you even get your friends together to even ideate your business without even having a clue where to begin?”
All of these basic beginning questions, but written in a story-driven format weren’t answered. I was like, “I want it to be a page-turner”, excited to start a business, not being like to go to business school or read this really dense book on how to start a business.
There was this need for a marriage of a fast-paced oh-my-god journey book, that you’re just like, “I want to see what happens next.” Then, it also gives you like, “What was the first email I wrote to get a potential investor to come and meet with me?”
I used to have fundraising dinner parties after I kept raising zero dollars because I was so awkward trying to go and talk to investors. I didn’t know what I was doing. So, I started organizing these fundraising dinner parties because I loved throwing dinner parties. I was very comfortable in that setting, and so I would start doing that.
So in my boo, I wrote, like what did I cook? What was the email I sent? How did I set up the loft that I borrowed from a friend to make it feel really enticing for investors to meet each other and feel like they’re part of a community? So then they all invested like that’s how I raised the money. So stuff like that, super granular.
Elvis Duran: I love the read, it’s fabulous from the very beginning when you crawl into that weird entrepreneur’s cruise ship, and all the way to the end, it’s really an amazing read.
For more musings from Miki Agrawal, follow her Medium page.
