Introduction
On Episode 1 of Bits and Atoms, Grishin Robotics host Elias Can sits down with Nancy Scotford, Co-Founder and CEO of GET RUDE, a company building intelligent wearables designed to enhance sexual arousal and performance in real time. Nancy’s story matters because it connects two worlds that rarely meet: deep tech and sexual wellness. From navigating homelessness during university to running user research for a major sex-toy brand, she’s seen both the human reality of the problem and the technical opportunity hiding in plain sight. In this conversation, Nancy breaks down what she believes the industry gets wrong today, why user research in this category is uniquely difficult, what it takes to build hardware in a niche space, and the insight she thinks will define the next generation of sexual wellness products.
Attendees
Elias Can, Nancy Scotford
Interview
Elias Can: Hello and welcome to Bits and Atoms, the Grishin Robotics founder series. I'm your host, Elias Can, and today I've got Nancy Scotford, co-founder and CEO of GET RUDE, joining me. To get started, Nancy, would you mind sharing a quick intro about you and your company?
Nancy Scotford: I'm the founder of GET RUDE, and we're building intelligent wearables to enhance sexual arousal. Think WHOOP for sex, but if your WHOOP band enhanced your performance in real-time, that's what we're building for sex.
Elias Can: Amazing, let's jump into some questions here.
Elias Can: How has your personal journey shaped and motivated you as a founder?
Nancy Scotford: my personal journey is I guess quite an extreme one in some ways and it's definitely shaped me as a founder. I don't think I'd be here without it. So, it's twofold really. My family were made homeless whilst I was at university which set me on a weird and wonderful path of survival but also to survive actually work with a deep tech consultancy initially on commission only and then obviously later work for them as a consultant. So, that thrust me into the world of tech and deep tech. And then, through another weird and wonderful opportunity, I then took on running the user research for a big sex toy company as a bit of a side hustle just out of interest and saw behind the curtain of these companies and saw that there's a huge gap in terms of what users want from these products and what they're able to actually deliver. And having then worked in deep tech, I knew that it was technically possible to basically do something completely different. Probably on a slightly deeper level, it maybe makes me a little bit mad the family story in that I probably wouldn't have dusted myself off and picked myself up again so many times if I hadn't have maybe been through that when I was younger because it's sort of was resilience training which I think all startup founders need. There's always a fire to fight. and there's always a need to stand up and get up the next morning when something may not be going quite right. So, yeah, I think it set me on this path today.
Elias Can: Absolutely. Resiliency, I think, on our side as well, is usually one of the key founder traits that we look for, and so hearing that personal story and what you had to go through, I'm sure overcoming all of that is just an extreme testament to you and your willpower as well.
Elias Can: You mentioned spending some time in the industry already and maybe just for folks in the audience as well to better understand, what is the status quo in sexual wellness and sexual pleasure? What did you see that they were kind of missing that inspired you to start a company in this space?
Nancy Scotford: So to kind of put it quite simply hopefully anyway rather than get really sciency on it. If you think of normal sexual experiences like a general path for somebody it’s that they enter kind of a buildup phase. They get slightly aroused and then they maintain and sustain a level of arousal and that is where the pleasure area is that time that you're in that sustained period of time with somebody or on your own and then ultimately that then leads to climax. A lot of people don't actually understand how to get into an aroused state and then also sustain arousal and essentially there are a number of things you can do and a number of techniques to be able to do that and that's motion and pressures and rhythms and things like that. But that complexity when it comes to these products is completely missed. So they get you from point A to B, and rather than actually taking you on a natural arousal pathway which is that build and sustain to then enhance the experience, they are driving you to B in the quickest possible time. So if you look from a kind of just I guess a bit what's in these devices they’re very heavy-weighted motors that spin at high powers at high intensities and ultimately blast out a climax within anything from 30 to 60 seconds which is the absolute opposite of a very good experience and a normal enhanced arousal path. We are in the arousal path enhancement space versus here let's blast you in 30 to 60 seconds, which again then starts to reinforce things in terms of, particularly for women who don't understand themselves using these products, there's then no connection between actually these products and reality leaving this sort of again a space of what's wrong with me. I've heard that consistently, you'd be surprised how often I've heard that from users in testing.
Elias Can: Interesting, it sounds like the industry has revolved around this sense of instant gratification, but it's missing the actual pleasurable experience of the full journey for the end user rather than like you said getting them immediately to point B from point A.
Elias Can: You brought up early user feedback, I'm curious too from some of your original assumptions, what early user feedback kind of challenged or sparked different ideas for you from what you had originally envisioned? How has your sense of what you're building evolved as you've been testing with some of these early users?
Nancy Scotford: Yeah, I was thinking about this. It's probably not as direct as they gave us this specific feedback that made us pivot, it's more about the challenge of this whole space in itself. So what has surprised me the most, and maybe it shouldn't have, but when we are trying to find out what people like and then validating that at enough scale so that our devices are able to replicate and enhance that. So we're trying to get to a point of truth but actually the hardest thing about finding that point of truth and the biggest challenge has been that people don't even have a language in the first place for what they like. I can't say to somebody of all these three things which do you like the best really simply because they don't even know what those three things are. So we had to develop this awful test trap to start with, which you would be embarrassed to show anybody, but it's got some very clear pictures of the female anatomy and really badly drawn diagrams. I had to eventually put them into digital format, but arrows to things to explain what the anatomy was called. So start at that point next being touch it in this way with this specific motion and that being so specific and having to almost handhold to a level that I just did not expect. That has probably been the biggest shock and the biggest challenge and so complex and so tiring at times because it's just such a level of detail that I didn't necessarily anticipate. But I think there's no way you can develop a solution without going down to that level because that's the whole core of what we're doing.
Elias Can: It’s interesting you bring up the idea that people just don't even know how to express it because I would think as well some people are uncomfortable giving a certain answer or it's an intimate thing to share with someone else what is pleasurable for them. But even this idea that they don't even know how to answer or what's enjoyable is interesting and I hadn't really even thought of that myself.
Nancy Scotford: It's also you have to tell them in such a specific way so that you're not leading an answer because if I were to ask have you tried this? Do you like it? Most people would be like yeah yeah I like that. But do you though? You have to be able to ask in such a way that you're not leading an answer.
Elias Can: That definitely makes sense. Additionally on the product side, what would you say so far has been an unexpected challenge of building in hardware?
Nancy Scotford: I think it's probably the same as the business to an extent, which is people. Being in the UK, I think it is harder to find hardware people. There aren't loads of mechanical engineers who have developed specifically for a product like ours. There's some intricacies in terms of over molding and form factor that we have to take into account. It's a very specific surface model that we have to create to be able to get something that is manufacturable. Also I'm not a technical founder, so I think finding hardware people is difficult. But once you do pick up who the people are in these circles, it's a small network, you can then get the specific skill sets that you need relatively quickly. It's just having somebody that you trust to support you in knowing what you don't know. For example, I didn't know that if we were to develop this product there was going to be some complex surfacing model that would require somebody who'd done that before, but I thankfully had people tell me that and guide me along the way.
Elias Can: How did you originally meet your co-founder and does he come from a bit more of that technical hardware side?
Nancy Scotford: Our technical co-founder, Pete, I've known since I was 21 or 22. I used to try and chase him to become one of my clients, so I was that annoying person for him. When I came across this problem, I knew he was the person to go to. One because I trusted him, and two he's definitely bordering on a genius. His background is software originally but he's built massive infrastructure projects, like smart factory projects, large scale infrastructure, and IoT in the northwest of the UK. Funnily enough, a lot of the data that we were initially using for vibration data we were able to use some stuff from a lot of the factories he was working with at the time. Like the sensors were quite similar for us to test the data throughput and things because it was the amount that we would need.
Elias Can: Finally one question looking a bit into the future. Once you're successful here with GET RUDE, what do you think competitors would say that they underestimated about you?
Nancy Scotford: Probably the insight around the arousal pathway. When I was running user research I gave that feedback to a manufacturer and it was just ignored. I think this insight is ultimately fundamental to anyone who develops a real solution in this space. I've also been told many times that what we've now developed wasn't technically possible and that it had been tried before…but to be fair there's also been advances in the components now compared to when people would have tried this even just two or three years ago. Things have moved on, but I think it's taken a level of resilience as well. You can't see them behind me but there's a box of lots and lots of broken prototypes. It comes back to that kind of thinking like “ok this isn’t working, there has to be a way and we’re not stopping until we find something that is going to work”.
Elias Can: I'm sure there's been a few different iterations, some missteps and some things that change here or there. It’s the path of being a founder and learning quickly as you go along.
Elias Can: Thank you so much, Nancy, for joining me on Bits and Atoms!
GET RUDE is a sexual wellness company building arousal intelligence - technology that adapts in real time to the body. Through responsive hardware and live feedback loops, GET RUDE learns how each user responds and actively improves stimulation to extend and heighten arousal over time, making pleasure more consistent, confident and personal.
Grishin Robotics is a Silicon Valley-based VC firm focused on investing in early-stage companies in broader consumer categories. Grishin Robotics has invested in category-defining companies such as Ring (acquired by Amazon), Spin (acquired by Ford), Zipline, Starship, and many others.
