Dr James Fielding Podcast

In today’s episode managing partner Tim Whybourne catches up with the entrepreneur, founder, and CEO of Audeara. In the episode, they cover everything from how James came from a career path as a doctor to the CEO of a listed business that creates and sells headphones for the hearing impaired. We talk about the highs and lows of being a founder and what it is like to run an ASX-listed business.

Dr James Fielding is the Founder and CEO of Audeara, the Founder and Director of Robotics Engineering Research Laboratories, Founder and Director of Yumm! Confectionary and Founder and former Director of Field Orthopaedics. He worked in a range of fields before pursuing medicine, including at New York-based hedge fund Bay Harbour Capital and a prominent Hollywood production company. Dr Fielding was based at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital before leaving full-time clinical medicine to focus on the founding and development of his start-up, Audeara. Audeara headphones have the capability to test and re-test the hearing of the wearer over the span of a lifetime. They tailor the sound to the needs of the individual to ensure all people, regardless of their hearing health can enjoy a world-class sound experience. Through his lead, Audera has also taken an active role in promoting awareness of hearing loss and related issues in the community.

Please see a copy of the trsanscript below -

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[00:00:00] Ryan Loehr: Welcome to the exchange podcast by EWL. As advisors to some of the most successful families in the country, Craig Emanuel, Tim Whybourne, and I, Ryan Loehr, draw upon some of the best minds in the country. We believe that by exchanging ideas, we can deliver better advice and better outcomes for the families we worked for.

[00:00:32] Ryan Loehr: Now we're inviting you on this journey. In this podcast, we interview some of the country's best investment managers, business advisors, bankers, and founders to share their valuable insights. And our hope is that with better information comes better decisions, helping you to achieve more financially. 

[00:00:52] Tim Whybourne: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Exchange by Emmanuel Whybourne and Loehr.

[00:00:57] Tim Whybourne: In today's episode, I catch up with entrepreneur, [00:01:00] founder, and CEO of listed business, Audeara, with the ticket code AUA. ASX. We cover everything from how James came from a career path as a doctor to the CEO of a listed business that creates and sells headphones for the hearing impaired. We talk about the highs and lows of being a founder and what it is like to run an ASX listed business.

[00:01:18] Tim Whybourne: Dr. James Fielding has worked in a range of fields before pursuing medicine, including at a New York based hedge fund, Bay Harbor Capital and a prominent Hollywood production company. Dr. Fielding was based at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital before leaving full time clinical medicine to focus on the founding and development of his start up, Audeara.

[00:01:37] Tim Whybourne: Audeara headphones have the capability to test and retest the hearing of the wearer over the span of a lifetime. They tailor the sound to the needs of the individual to ensure all people, regardless of their hearing health, can enjoy a world class sound experience. Through his lead, Audeara has also taken an active role in promoting the awareness of hearing loss and related issues in the community.

[00:01:57] Tim Whybourne: So, without further ado, it gives me great pleasure to [00:02:00] introduce Dr. James Fielding, the CEO of Audeara. 

[00:02:04] Tim Whybourne: Welcome, James, to the Emmanuel Whybourne and Loehr podcast, The Exchange. It's a pleasure to have you here. 

[00:02:08] James Fielding: Yeah, no, I'm really looking forward to it. 

[00:02:10] Tim Whybourne: We first met, I think it was a couple of weeks ago now, I think it was this year.

[00:02:15] Tim Whybourne: The year's flying by already. Our original approach speaking into was, was different than Than the intent today, but they had a really interesting story, which I thought the, the audience would enjoy also. So thank you very much for coming in. 

[00:02:28] James Fielding: No, I appreciate that. 

[00:02:29] Tim Whybourne: Where did you start? Went to school?

[00:02:31] Tim Whybourne: Went to uni? 

[00:02:32] James Fielding: Yeah, it's a fairly long story that seems convoluted and roundabout to a lot of people, but to me it does all seem fairly straightforward and sequential. But I've been told that's what makes me a little bit different from most people. Essentially, when I left high school, I couldn't pick between business or medicine.

[00:02:51] James Fielding: So I ended up just doing both. So I did a business degree and a science degree. And over that time, met some very interesting people and got a chance [00:03:00] to work in a casino in Vegas, work in a hedge fund in New York. And then when I graduated, we relocated across and I took a paid job. In the hedge fund in New York, and then spend a bit of time in a movie production house, and that went really well.

[00:03:14] James Fielding: It was really exciting, but over that time, I put in my submission for medical school, so I took that offer, came back and started medical school and then was lucky enough to get a scholarship to do MBA studies during med school. So they wanted to get a group of us that would think outside of the pure clinical.

[00:03:36] James Fielding: And while we were doing our med school studies, we were also doing the MBA studies and on the back of that, we set about to solve some problems in the public health space and me and a couple of my crazy mates ended up starting five companies in our junior years as doctors. But music has always been my primary passion.

[00:03:59] James Fielding: So [00:04:00] now the heart and soul of it is driving Audeara. 

[00:04:02] Tim Whybourne: Were those companies in Australia or are you still in the U S at the time? 

[00:04:05] James Fielding: They were here. So it was all out of UQ where there's a big push on innovation and thinking outside the box. I think especially the medical school has a great reputation and we were very fortunate that they ran these additional programs to try and find Find people that would be willing to take a crack at things.

[00:04:25] James Fielding: And the underlying principle was instead of sitting around and complaining and thinking, I wish someone would build a. Whatever we just thought, yeah, let's build one of these and we didn't stop. We just kept going. 

[00:04:40] Tim Whybourne: Was that part of the medical side or the business side? 

[00:04:44] James Fielding: I think we always had the underpinnings from the medical side.

[00:04:49] James Fielding: So they were medical problems or Dira, for example. Was based on the idea that it's a bit too tricky for people to get hearing tests. And then even if they have a hearing test, [00:05:00] they don't really care. So they're not doing anything about their hearing. And so we use entertainment as a hook to get people to pay attention.

[00:05:08] James Fielding: To their hearing somewhat of a gateway drug into hearing aids. We sold them through clinics. So very much using the medical hat. The second one was field orthopedics and my very clever mate, Dr. Chris Jeffrey, who now has a thing called convergence medical. He was sitting at an orthopedic surgeon convention and was looking at why.

[00:05:29] James Fielding: Joint replacements fail and thought that they're looking at the world a bit too simply. And so we set aside a bit of time to come up with a way to build a three part magnetic total wrist replacement and got that up and running, which is really exciting. Then we did a mental wellness chocolate company.

[00:05:47] James Fielding: Then we did a robotic vision company for gamification of live sports. It was a lot of stuff. Going on and underpinning it all was this thing that we called Robotics Engineering Research [00:06:00] Laboratories, which was just the most R and D sounding name I could think of at the time, and we put ourselves out to tender to try and solve problems.

[00:06:08] James Fielding: So we built interesting elbow splits for physios, or we'd have a look at software packages for junior doctors. We were just constantly on the lookout for innovation and exciting ideas. 

[00:06:21] Tim Whybourne: Yeah, wow, we were always good at design or how did you come into this field? 

[00:06:27] James Fielding: I've always liked design, but I'm much more interested in progress and action and getting on with things.

[00:06:36] James Fielding: Something I've been thinking about a lot. As we do different podcasts and we think about the journey is the catch cry of actually do it because lots of people talk about, Oh, I'm going to be able to do this one day and we just went, no, we're going to actually do it. I think just do it underplays the importance of it sometimes, and you need to take it back.

[00:06:58] James Fielding: Next level, but I've always liked [00:07:00] entrepreneurialism. And I was selling burnt copies of the OC soundtrack at school and doing all those sorts of fun things and always looked at the world a bit bigger. And once I'd met some interesting people. That owned casinos or owned shopping center networks, or we're working in TV and doing these global scale behavioral change type businesses, it meant that I always had an ear to the ground and.

[00:07:29] James Fielding: And in the future, I think both my parents are doctors, grandparents are doctors, aunts and uncles are doctors. It was very much the path and I still do surgical assisting once a month. So I still get to do it. I still get to be a doctor and help people and do that that I really, really enjoy. But the thought of.

[00:07:48] James Fielding: Helping more people than I can with my own two hands has always led me to be thinking outside of a traditional clinical seeing patients and going home at the end of the day [00:08:00] approach. 

[00:08:01] Tim Whybourne: And so someone comes with a problem or you or you see that risk replacements, as the example you used could be done more efficiently.

[00:08:08] Tim Whybourne: Do you need to go and outsource? Yes. The design, I guess, what I'm trying to get at is how do you go from an idea on paper neither of you have a, Design background or any experience in CAD or whatever program you used to. 

[00:08:20] James Fielding: Yeah, Chris happened to be a Robo mechatronics engineer for the military before starting med school.

[00:08:26] James Fielding: And so he was bunking with the trauma surgeon while on deployment and said, what you do is more fun than what I do and came back and was in that MBA course with me. And then we had a signal analyst from Boeing who's now a cardiologist. We had a firmware engineer who was working at Cochlear down the road from here at the time.

[00:08:46] James Fielding: And then the real tipping point for us was I managed to convince a bloke called Alex Affleck, who was a software guy that one of our buddies knew, guy named Ross Pryor, came in. And [00:09:00] he has the design, implementation, ruthless CTO. Mind with that perfectionist drive and with all of our different combination of skills, all underpinned by a kind of relentless forward momentum.

[00:09:16] James Fielding: We managed to pull this stuff off. So a collection of engineers and then. I bring the public speaking business, of course, we can hyper optimistic part to the team because especially when you're around a collection of engineers, they might spend far too much time down in the basement trying to get it right.

[00:09:37] James Fielding: And so someone needs to bring it up into the light and actually get on with it. And that's where I see my role in amongst all these incredibly intelligent people that bring the ideas to life. I'm sort of there facilitating, encouraging, sometimes forcing if needed to actually get some results. 

[00:09:56] Tim Whybourne: We missed the part where you're in a band as [00:10:00] well, a wedding band, wasn't it?

[00:10:00] James Fielding: Yeah. I I've always loved drums in particular was my weapon of choice, but of course I did piano as you're supposed to, and did that all the way through grade 12. I got my letters and did all of that, but drumming was always the passion. So I ended up in a few nice loud rock bands and then a fun acoustic pop band called the Dash Hounds.

[00:10:22] James Fielding: And we released a couple of VPs and had some albums with both bands at Bangkok Deadstock Circus and called Stratton. And then with the Dash Hounds, we were hosting festivals and playing cats and seafood and being support act for all these fun people. And then we translated that across to making a bit of cash in hand.

[00:10:40] James Fielding: Working at weddings and doing other bits and bobs for what started off as our mates. And then you play one and they say, Hey, you guys are great. Can you come play in my daughter's wedding? And it just sort of bounce around. So, two or three weekends a month for quite a long time. I was just loading up my kit in the back of the car [00:11:00] and racing off and having an incredible time.

[00:11:02] James Fielding: And then someone hands you an envelope of cash at the end of the day and you drive home at two in the morning from wherever you were. And that's awesome. Yeah, it was incredible. It was so much fun. And I miss those guys a lot. One of them is now an emergency physician in Canada. One of them joined the army and he runs around on deployment bits and pieces.

[00:11:18] James Fielding: And then Bass, our front man, moved back to UK because he married a British girl. Every now and again, they cycle their way back through and we find a chance to have a hit out. That'd be great fun. Oh, it is. It's incredible. Relive what life was like when we were 18 and then 19 and then 20. But doing the wedding band stuff was still in my mid twenties.

[00:11:37] James Fielding: It was an awful lot of fun. 

[00:11:38] Tim Whybourne: And so you've clearly got a bit of a passion for music, was that somewhat responsible for the inspiration behind Audeara? 

[00:11:44] James Fielding: Yeah, huge. Realising that people were missing out on something I loved so much drove me. A huge part of the passion for it. And when we think about hearing loss, we [00:12:00] think about elderly people whose hearing aids don't work or elderly people who aren't being communicated with at the dinner table, whatever it may be, that's quite sad and obviously need a huge change where we got really excited, was trying to find a way to bring back the joyful part of an experience.

[00:12:22] James Fielding: And at last. Nine or so years that I've been playing this game, the amount of tears I've seen rolling down cheeks of people who just given up on music in their life. And it's something that I love so much. I top out the Spotify listening lists and all that kind of stuff. I just, I love music. I run to music.

[00:12:41] James Fielding: I listen to music. I make music. And if we can find a way to give that back to people, then we've done something really worthwhile and that then actually through the clinics and listening to our customers ended up becoming about watching TV, which wasn't, you don't [00:13:00] finish med school and think I'm going to make TV easier for people, but.

[00:13:04] James Fielding: What we found when we were learning about hearing loss was 80 percent of people who go in are just saying, I won't be able to hear the TV without captions. I don't want it so loud that my wife has to yell at me. And so we started making TV headphones that sound incredible when you're sitting down. And just trying to relax and it unlocked this huge potential, not in the least that it's fully government subsidized as well.

[00:13:33] James Fielding: So we found ourselves creating something really cool to do hearing tests and then taking the hearing test and flipping it into entertainment. So now these headphones sound amazing. And they're making music sound incredible for people. And then we add this TV transmitter concept so that they're TV headphones.

[00:13:52] James Fielding: And now the government will pay for them for anyone who's on the pension, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander veterans, which is something we're [00:14:00] really proud of. We're NDIS registered now. So we found a way to take something that we built, which is really cool and translate it into something that's now market accessible, which I think is really cool.

[00:14:11] James Fielding: The team deserves a big pat on the back for because we help a lot of people just simply get the best out of their life, which is pretty cool. I think. 

[00:14:20] Tim Whybourne: You've probably thought about this a lot more than I have. What is it like to have a hearing loss? Is it like different frequencies people are missing or is it they just need to turn things up really loud?

[00:14:31] Tim Whybourne: Or is it...? 

[00:14:32] James Fielding: It's really precise a lot of the time where different frequencies will have gotten hit first. And what's really interesting as human beings is the rustling of the grass or the animal over there, breaking twigs and things. Those are the frequencies that are most sensitive on the outside of the part of your ear that's called the cochlea has all these hair cells on it.

[00:14:57] James Fielding: And they're essentially like the keys on a [00:15:00] piano. And if you think. The really nice ones up the top end of the panel that make things sound beautiful and make them sound melody, those are the ones that go first. And the best example I've found of that is that when you talk and then all of a sudden you've got a hearing loss, it just starts to sound like this.

[00:15:18] James Fielding: So you can still hear it, but it sounds horrible. Yeah. And so when you bring that clarity back and you take the wet rag, Off, everything sounds beautiful again. And so your hearing loss is most often determined by different parts of the piano dropping out, which means when I showed them to my dad for the first time on seven or eight years ago, once I'd actually figured it out, I brought the Rolling Stones back to his left ear because most often when things are in stereo as well, if you've got one ear worse than the other, frequencies worse than others.

[00:15:53] James Fielding: You're still hearing things. It's still there. It's just, imagine [00:16:00] listening to your favorite song and having no lead guitar or no female vocal. There are just parts of it that you can't get. And so to get them and try and get a full sense, you crank everything out. So you take all of the frequencies and crank them up as high as you can to try and hear that voice or hear that guitar, which means you're then damaging everything else and making the overall worse.

[00:16:26] James Fielding: And so when we look at it, we think better, not louder. It's almost like when you're driving in a car and you've got the radio on and people are chatting and your favorite song comes on and you go. Hey, everyone shut up and you turn it up because then you get to hear all the rest of it. And then if you turn the air conditioning down, you can make it sound better.

[00:16:46] James Fielding: If you put the windows up, you can make it sound better. So you don't always need to crank everything. There are other tools to get that clarity and get that precision back. And that's what we do. That's our secret sauce is instead of saying, [00:17:00] we think this will sound good for you. We say, What can you actually hear?

[00:17:05] James Fielding: Can you hear what these headphones are trying to play for you? If not, we'll take care of it for you. And that's what unlocks the whole thing. 

[00:17:15] Tim Whybourne: So every single client of yours has a different, bespoke...? 

[00:17:20] James Fielding: Every single human being has a different bespoke hearing profile. Yeah. You'll never find two people with the same one.

[00:17:27] James Fielding: They're like fingerprints. Yeah. And so, when you said, oh, obviously I don't have a hearing loss. You never know, I might have two fully in canal hearing aids on. That cost me 15 grand a piece. You just never know, hearing loss sneaks up in different ways. And a mate that we first gave the product to, he was big rugby playing guy, and he had a tumor in his ear as a kid, so they cut half his cochlear out.

[00:17:48] James Fielding: And so you look at people and go, Oh yeah, they're bulletproof. He can't hear anything out of his left ear. They're useless to him. And so that side of it as well has unlocked this huge idea, and it's actually World [00:18:00] Hearing Day today, of all days, which is a really great coincidence. And the theme for this year is changing mindsets around hearing.

[00:18:09] James Fielding: Because we think elderly, frail hearing aids, but when I went back to my high school and ran around and tested all the kids there, it's 20 percent of 10 year olds and you look at that and go, Oh, that's not great because you do the newborn hearing screening and you go, my baby can hear or not. And everyone gets a tremendous sense of relief when you get those ticks and go cool.

[00:18:32] James Fielding: And then they're weighing up should we, shouldn't we screen at school entry to which I obviously think the answer is yes. And that's it. People won't get a hearing test again until maybe they decide to go to a mining site and they get taught how to fake it so they don't get kicked off site and lose a shift.

[00:18:48] James Fielding: Or they join the military and they get taught how to fake it so they don't get kicked out and miss their pay packet for going on deployment, all those sorts of things. So people learn how to fake the hearing test, but then when they're [00:19:00] 50, 60, 70 and they can't fake it anymore, they then get dragged by the ear into somewhere and told to get a hearing aid.

[00:19:06] James Fielding: And by that stage, it's offered a huge adjustment in people's lives and they don't like it very much. And so, we think if you can be proactive, get on the front foot, make it a positive experience. Going to the day as being ridiculed for wearing your glasses. If I had any glasses and I wasn't wearing them, you'd just think I was an idiot.

[00:19:24] James Fielding: And if I'm driving my car and I'm not wearing my glasses, I'm unsafe and I'm a threat. And the whole point next to four eyes stuff. That was 30 years ago, and now people wear glasses who don't even need them just because they see them as a fashion accessory and hearing is just kind of 20 years behind vision, especially when you look at the practical applications of it.

[00:19:48] James Fielding: For example, TVs. Black and white, to color, to analog, to digital, to high definition, to 4k to 8k. Somebody needs an 8k TV. But then [00:20:00] you've got the crappy little bit at the bottom of the TV that's often making the sound. And some people get sound bars, some people do other things. So sound lags so far behind the progression.

[00:20:13] James Fielding: And as a consequence, hearing does too. And so what we're trying to create. Hearing aid is a world where people get celebrated for using devices that make them better able to interact with the world around them. You shouldn't be, oh look at that old guy, he must be really weak for using his hearing aid.

[00:20:30] James Fielding: You should be, oh awesome, he actually cares enough. To listen when people are trying to speak.

[00:20:37] Tim Whybourne: So what, where is the line between what you, your headphones do and what a hearing aid does? 

[00:20:42] James Fielding: Well, we're blurring it tremendously at the moment with a new product that'll be coming out in a few months called a personal sound amplifier.

[00:20:51] James Fielding: So it's essentially offering people specific environment enhancement. 

[00:20:55] Tim Whybourne: Yeah, the earbud type things we're talking about. 

[00:20:59] James Fielding: Yeah, [00:21:00] sort of AirPod Pro on steroids that have a hearing enhancement capability to them, which is really cool. And our current headphones are designed for media consumption. So if you're making phone calls, FaceTime, the grandkids watching TV, doing zoom meets, whatever it is, That's where we come to the party.

[00:21:21] James Fielding: So we are taking media that has come in and we're optimizing it for your hearing. The newer products we're bringing out and now starting to incorporate the outside world and optimize that for your particular environment that you want to be in. But we consider ourselves as on the way to, or as well as a hearing aid, never instead of a hearing aid.

[00:21:46] James Fielding: A person who needs a hearing aid does not need. A set of headphones, they need a hearing aid. Should they have a set of headphones as well to round out their full experience? Absolutely. Can hearing aids do what our headphones do? [00:22:00] No way. Not even close. But our headphones can't do what hearing aids do. Not even close.

[00:22:06] James Fielding: And so it should be seen as a sweet bonus. of enhancements for whatever you might need. You're not going to find one thing that does everything. 

[00:22:14] Tim Whybourne: So someone with a hearing aid could still benefit from the headphones to watch TV or listen to music? 

[00:22:20] James Fielding: Yeah, big time. And you can also just pop them over the top of the hearing aids as well, because hearing aids also suffer from a lack of connectivity.

[00:22:27] James Fielding: A lot of the time they're designed to do something Really specific, really well, which is here spoken word in particular circumstances. So if you're thinking I'm going to be making zoom calls and my phone's going to ring, and then I'm going to get up and go and join that meeting. Someone with a hearing aid, that's a fairly convoluted process.

[00:22:44] James Fielding: If you're trying to get all of it to stream through your hearing at all at once. So you can just pop headphones over the top of your hearing aids and you're tailoring the sound for that. So a lot of it is also breaking down barriers for people using. The devices and using the tech [00:23:00] that's going to give them the best outcome.

[00:23:01] Tim Whybourne: Back on the business side of things. So what, what drove the decision to list on the ASX and how's the journey being from being a creator and um scientist to a CEO and sales man. 

[00:23:14] James Fielding: Oh, it's been great. Thanks. It has been wonderful. Essentially we listed because there was a market comp that we felt we strongly aligned with Who had an 85 mil valve at the time, and we were asking for a 20.

[00:23:31] James Fielding: So we thought financially, this would be a great return for our long term holders. At that point, we'd had investment on board for six or seven years. And so there was some people looking to get some liquidity out of that. And we had this big comp and we had the mechanism and the market. Was bubbling. And so the IPO process for us was incredibly straightforward and we took that opportunity.

[00:23:59] James Fielding: It [00:24:00] really secured our flow on capital as well, which people, there's PR, there's credibility and there's ease of future capital. And we've gotten all of those 3 things, which I really like the fact that the share price got absolutely torn to shreds. Along with all my other micro cap buddies over the last couple of years, it has been a very tough market, but, we also went up 120 percent last week and we can swing and round about on a few thousand bucks worth of trades.

[00:24:35] James Fielding: It's a. Proper merry go round of emotion. Apparently I need to stop buying shares on Friday to make my weekend feel better, that kind of stuff, because we really can move the needle. But I think there is a genuine amount of credibility, especially with our Asian market. Counterparts if you're publicly listed, they don't care what your share price is.

[00:24:58] James Fielding: The fact that you got [00:25:00] onto a public exchange to them is a sense of commitment, a sense of maturity, a sense of financial prudence. They can see your results. They know that you're a strong counterparty, and that's gotten us in a room with a few. Really big players, which I think has helped out a lot.

[00:25:16] Tim Whybourne: There's a lot of a lot of hoops to jump through the list. So it's not a decision you take lightly. 

[00:25:21] James Fielding: No, that's right. And obviously once we run up to 30 or 40 cents and everyone looks back and goes, you stuck with it. Like my wife always says, nobody wants a memoir of a person whose life was great.

[00:25:31] James Fielding: Then they died. There are supposed to be some bumps. There's supposed to be some interesting parts where you had to stick with it and overcome. And this is part of that. Yeah. For us where we are 10 times better as a company than we were when we listed and we're 80%. Less on our vowel and that will ride itself shortly and at that time I will feel great about it But for right now, we just keep fighting the good fight and I've learned an awful lot over the last few years [00:26:00] That's for sure.

[00:26:01] Tim Whybourne: As CEO, are you still able to spend a bit of time on R& D? And are you doing presumably what you love? 

[00:26:08] James Fielding: We're an R& D entity. I spend an enormous amount of time I'm out of my time on R& D. I'm in the meetings. I'm in the engineering meetings. I'm doing a lot of the product assessment elements. I'm going up and visiting our R& D partners in Taiwan and China.

[00:26:22] James Fielding: We spend a lot of time thinking about how our R& D is going to impact because I do the BD side of it. I go out and I get the deals, but the deals are being driven By the further application of the tech, so that research and product development is a huge part of what we do. And I absolutely love it. I get the 1st cab off the rank when it comes to new prototypes.

[00:26:50] James Fielding: I get to break them. I get to travel with them. I get to see what I can do. I ran 30 K through the forest with a 1 of 2 prototype of those airpods, at [00:27:00] which point my CTO refuses to let me leave the office with them now, in case I end up tripping and breaking them. But. I still get to do that, come back with feedback, sit with our engineers.

[00:27:11] James Fielding: When I went up to China a few months ago to get ready for an enormous presentation that we've got up there, I was setting the parameters in the fields and still actually on the tools enough to be knowing. No, it doesn't quite sound right. It's supposed to look like this is supposed to look like that.

[00:27:30] James Fielding: And I felt really proud of that because it then gives a tremendous amount of confidence. When you go into the room, if you do the pitch and you really know what it is you're talking about, it makes it a lot easier. 

[00:27:43] Tim Whybourne: Spent much time thinking about battery technology in the, in the pods and their headphones is and do you have a preferred type of battery?

[00:27:49] James Fielding: We do my preference would be nuclear so that it will just last forever, but apparently that's reckless. So I can't be putting little nuclear [00:28:00] reactors in everyone's ears, but where we've made a progression at the moment is always a balance between performance and battery life. And as the performance increases, it lets us do so much more.

[00:28:14] James Fielding: So we then do so much more and you end up roughly the same place battery wise. So thinking about the buds that are coming up, for example, if you can be getting 10 hours out of a set of buds, you're doing great. But if you were trying to get the same performance out of those buds two or three years ago, you'd get an hour.

[00:28:34] James Fielding: So we're able to work on both the battery side of it. Really, we're driven by our manufacturing partners. And some of our sourcing partners, those two, Hey, you should try this. You should try that. We don't, well, we try very hard to focus on the bits that give us a competitive advantage and give us an edge, and then we'll use best in class on the rest of them, but I think there's [00:29:00] huge room to move on the battery front. 

[00:29:03] Tim Whybourne: Just with the products that you currently offer.

[00:29:06] Tim Whybourne: We had, we did touch on it, but can we just quickly. Go through exactly what it is that you sell. 

[00:29:10] James Fielding: The primary bread and butter, reasonably listed, underpinning of our revenue Bluetooth, noise cancelling, over the ear headphones. So they work the same way as all market leading Bluetooth noise canceling headphones do.

[00:29:27] James Fielding: They've got a built in microphone for calls. They do all that kind of stuff. We bundle it with a Bluetooth TV transmitter, which you plug into the back of the tv, and that becomes the Aira TV bundle. That's about 80% of our revenue is sold as a TV bundle, and that's the second generation of the ovary headphone.

[00:29:48] James Fielding: Second generation of the TV transmitter. So theoretically we've got a one. BTO1s, AO2s and BTO2s, but realistically the AO2 TV bundle is the heart and soul of what we do. [00:30:00] We just announced last week that we're making some product for a group called Avidus Zildjian, who are one of the coolest companies in the world.

[00:30:10] James Fielding: And we're incredibly proud of that. And that's utilizing our AUA tech. Side of that business, that's the licensing and contract manufacturing piece. So it's their product and we're making it a reality and bringing it to market. And the other one we have are our airport pro on steroids and little personal sound amplifiers that we're building for the leading audiology partner.

[00:30:33] James Fielding: Who's our lead investor out of Taiwan, and that'll be an in uniform factor of Aldira. So it does all of the personalization. It has everything, an incredible set. Of true wireless buds will do, and then it has a secret source. 

[00:30:48] Tim Whybourne: So I prefer earbuds to the big headphones that sit over yours ears, are they the same experience?

[00:30:53] Tim Whybourne: So you choose, if you have a hearing impairment, you choose what, what your preference is or would you want both? 

[00:30:58] James Fielding: Yeah, that's right. So we'll find out your [00:31:00] hearing profile and then we'll make sure you're getting the best possible experience. They are not a medical device. They are not intended for people who suffer from a hearing loss as a compensation for said hearing loss.

[00:31:11] Tim Whybourne: What sets Audeara apart from other companies in the audio tech sector? 

[00:31:15] James Fielding: I think the true differentiator from our point of view is we focus on the person at the end of the listening experience, the actual human being. Everyone else wants to know how much nickel's in the wiring, what's the stand light, what are the interface cables, all this kind of stuff.

[00:31:36] James Fielding: We focus on the bit right at the end. Which is the person's ears and their brain and how they're going to actually experience the sound and do everything we can to optimize that piece of the puzzle. And that personalization technology algorithm, all the rest of it gives us our secret sauce. It's earned us the right as the number one Hearing aid [00:32:00] product in Australia.

[00:32:00] James Fielding: It's given us a global tender to be the only over ear headphone in the biggest audiology retailer on the planet. And it's giving us licensing and contracting plays with, in my opinion, the coolest brands in the world. And that's our differentiator is that focus on each person is an individual. So each person deserves an individual experience.

[00:32:22] Tim Whybourne: And do you need an audiologist or medical practitioner to tune the headphones or do they self tune? 

[00:32:29] James Fielding: Good question. Self directed hearing check and tuning by our consumer apps. You can download the apps, do it yourself in the comfort of your own living room. That's great. That's what we do a lot for NDIS or anybody who buys them online.

[00:32:42] James Fielding: Retail. What we learned was that the primary demographic of audiology clinics are people who don't like apps, don't like Bluetooth and don't like having to do anything outside of go in and get serviced by a professional. And so we've built platforms [00:33:00] that the audiologist can tune and tailor up the headphone with an existing hearing test on file, which is something that we're pretty proud of as well, because we're the only product that does that.

[00:33:10] James Fielding: And that really gives us the edge over the competition and it will cement our position as number one. 

[00:33:18] Tim Whybourne: And as as we mentioned, it's been quite a journey for you, highs and lows, high highs and low lows, I imagine. Are there any key milestones that come to, to mind? I'm sure listing on the ASX would have been pretty cool.

[00:33:29] James Fielding: It was pretty cool. It seems like, most of our world revolves around March, which is really quite interesting considering it links to World Hearing Day. But it was March that I stopped working full time clinical medicine and stepped across for Audeara. It was March 1st, the year after we did our Kickstarter campaign.

[00:33:50] James Fielding: It was March 1st, the year after that we shipped to 60 countries around the world. It was March 1st, the year after that I fired everybody and secured the contract to be hearing Australian. [00:34:00] Fully shifted gears and retail into clinical. It was a March after that we got our first international deal.

[00:34:08] James Fielding: March after that, we got the funds from the IPO March after that. We've got our first big U S player, which was cool. Much after that, my wife got breast cancer and I returned back from the U S to Australia and sort of batten down the hatches for a bit. March after that. We've got the global tender for Amplifon, which is pretty cool.

[00:34:31] James Fielding: And then the March after that is this. And last week we announced Zildjian and who knows what's coming up in the next couple of weeks. But March has always been an incredibly exciting time for us, that's for sure. And yeah, this year hasn't disappointed. 

[00:34:48] Tim Whybourne: It's only the only the fourth of March, so it might go ahead.

[00:34:51] James Fielding: Yeah, that's right. But no, there's, there's been a lot of really big pinch yourself moments, and it's something that we have [00:35:00] to really try and do. And there's a bloke on our team, Rob, who's really good at that because he came in when we were just starting to get going with Amplifon and he always reminds me of the fact that Amplifon's first order was 10 pieces.

[00:35:15] James Fielding: And I went door by door down in Melbourne and went to the 10 clinics that were going to stock. And then they didn't talk to us for six months while they were thinking about what they wanted to do. And he got involved at that point. And from that point, they gave us a hundred clinics that worked. And then they said, all right, every clinic has to hold five pieces and that was just whole man.

[00:35:40] James Fielding: So this is, our first, what, 1500 piece order, okay. The thing is starting to get pretty serious. And then the year after that, they were 5, 000 and just sort of, okay, now we're rocking and rolling. And he remembers when we had to call people and say, Hi, I'm James from Audeara, the headphone company that your company is about [00:36:00] to start stocking.

[00:36:01] James Fielding: Just wanted to introduce myself and let you know that we're here. But, and I was on the phones and I was talking to every clinic and doing that kind of stuff. And now people come to us with ideas and they want adjustments or changes. Or, when we walk around, they go, Hey, we're trying to conferences.

[00:36:15] James Fielding: We know everybody. And it's this really cool thing. And we're stocked. By three of the big five audiology players on three continents about to be four and you sort of look at it and go, oh, we have done some stuff. It has been an interesting journey. And especially when we look at the share price and it's gone in the opposite direction.

[00:36:36] James Fielding: And I think. All we've done since listing are three global contracts, a new soon to be highly profitable business unit, captured every clinic in the Australian market, tripled our revenue and approached break even. And we've been torn to shreds by it, but you look at it and go, it's actually not a bad rap sheet.

[00:36:58] James Fielding: So, we'll keep [00:37:00] marching onwards. 

[00:37:00] Tim Whybourne: I look back fondly of when we started this and nothing but a serviced office, a couple of laptops and a couple of phones. Yeah, you don't really look back, do you? Everyone just assumes you've always been here and you've always been doing it. 

[00:37:12] James Fielding: Yeah, my plan is to be a 10 year overnight success, which means by March next year, we've got to have just sailed off into the sunset and everyone goes, whoa, they've just come from nowhere.

[00:37:23] James Fielding: And, we were down the road from here with six of us and we had to make this really big decision. Big call about whether or not we'd hire a salesperson, because I'm a horse before car. What are we doing? And now we're deciding which country gets the next salesperson. 

[00:37:41] Tim Whybourne: It's probably a good segue for what advice would you give to any aspiring entrepreneur or a individual like yourself 10 years ago that thinking about not going to work for someone and starting their own thing and solving the world's big problems.

[00:37:53] Tim Whybourne: What advice would you give them? 

[00:37:55] James Fielding: Actually do it and find people to play with. I think the [00:38:00] solo founder thing is an incredibly tough journey. And even the tight knit founder bonds that we had when push comes to shove, not all relationships are going to work out. So do your best to find some people that you think you're going to stand the test of time.

[00:38:17] James Fielding: But just actually do it, just get on with it. Worst case scenario, if you're clever enough and hardworking enough that you're contemplating whether or not you should start your own thing and get after it, you will be that clever and hardworking if it fails. So you may as well crack on and you'll be able to deal with it afterwards.

[00:38:35] Tim Whybourne: I completely agree. That's great advice. In our business, we meet a lot of successful entrepreneurs like yourself, and the big difference between them and someone that's living a more ordinary life is just having a The guts to go and do it. A lot of people talk about what they are going to do, but to actually go and do it's another level.

[00:38:52] Tim Whybourne: So no, congratulations. 

[00:38:53] James Fielding: No, thank you. I appreciate that. It's very good to hear. 

[00:38:55] Tim Whybourne: Yeah, well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here today and learning more about your business and your [00:39:00] journey so far. I look forward to watching it with interest. I'll definitely check in next March to see how you go.

[00:39:05] Tim Whybourne: It's been a pleasure and thank you for coming in. I'm sure the audience will get a lot out of it. 

[00:39:10] James Fielding: Absolute, absolute honor and I look forward to talking to anyone who wants to reach out because I love hearing from people, so come say hello.