Is Your Tap Water Safe? Why Millions Are Now Testing Their Drinking Water at Home

Ravi Kurani

For decades, Americans have assumed that tap water, especially in major cities, is reliably safe. But growing public mistrust, aging infrastructure, and underregulated contaminants are changing the way we think about water at home. From lead pipes in historic neighborhoods to chemical runoff in rural wells, the question "Is my water safe to drink?" has become a household concern.

In this revealing episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani speaks with Johnny Pujol, a water quality engineer and CEO of SimpleLab. The two unpack what most people get wrong about water quality, and how new diagnostic technologies are transforming the conversation. It turns out, you can’t see, taste, or smell many of the most dangerous threats to your water—but with the right testing, you can take control.

What’s most striking is how Pujol frames the modern water challenge: not as a lack of treatment, but a lack of information. Utilities often provide outdated, generalized reports, while consumers are left in the dark about what’s coming out of their own taps. Enter Tap Score, a company that has reimagined water testing for the modern home by offering certified lab analysis through mail-in test kits—customized, accessible, and consumer-first.

What You'll Hear in This Episode

• The Tap vs. Bottled Water Myth: Why bottled isn’t always better—and why even famously "great" municipal water may be unsafe after it travels through your home’s pipes.
• Why Government Reports Don’t Cut It: A deep dive into Consumer Confidence Reports (CCRs), their limitations, and why they fail to reflect real-time, household-specific risks.
• The Rise of At-Home Water Diagnostics: How Tap Score makes it possible for anyone to test their water and get certified results, with no jargon and full support.
• Choosing the Right Filter: An explainer on three key technologies—granular activated carbon, reverse osmosis, and ion exchange—and how to match them to your actual water quality data.
• The True Value of Testing First: Pujol’s team doesn’t sell filters—they help you find out what you really need, based on evidence, not guesswork.

Listen On:

Spotify

📺 Watch the Interview

Meet Johnny Pujol

Johnny Pujol is not your average CEO. With a background in engineering and water remediation, he started his journey solving arsenic contamination in rural California. But it wasn’t the technology that changed lives—it was the data. Realizing that water diagnostics, not hardware, held the key to safer homes, Johnny founded Tap Score to give consumers what utilities and outdated labs could not: trusted, actionable information.

Under his leadership, Tap Score evolved from a scrappy hardware startup into a logistics-driven platform that ships thousands of testing kits across the country. Their support team, made up of scientists and communicators, ensures that even non-experts can understand and act on their results. The company’s guiding principle? Empower consumers with clarity, not fear.

More Like This:

• Decoding PFAS and the Innovations in Water Treatment
• Zero-Waste Construction and the Future of Water Recycling
• How Modular Systems Are Solving America’s Water Infrastructure Crisis
  

Transcript

00:00
Ravi Kurani
This episode of Liquid Assets is sponsored by hacc. The leader in water treatment solutions. Haasa delivers eco friendly, reliable and cost effective water care and has been keeping communities safe one drop at a time. They've been at it for more than 60 years and you can learn more about hacc by visiting hasa.com that's hasahassa.com what's up? 

00:25
Johnny Pujol
My name is Johnny. I am a water quality engineer and I am the CEO of tapscore, where you can get water quality testing for any purpose at home or at work. 

00:35
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets. I'm your host, Ravi Khurani. Liquid Assets is a podcast where we talk about the intersection of business, technology and management all as it looks at the world of water. Today we have an awesome guest for you. We have Johnny Pujol who's joining us from the west coast in Berkeley. Johnny, how are you doing today? 

00:55
Johnny Pujol
I'm doing just great. How are you doing in New York? 

01:00
Ravi Kurani
I'm doing good. It's been really good. It's starting to hit a little bit of springtime. So we got to see the cherry blossom. Central park is beautiful. It's gorgeous here in the city. 

01:10
Johnny Pujol
And this is your first spring in New York? 

01:12
Ravi Kurani
First spring in New York. Yeah, yeah, entirely. You know, I want to jump right into it. We were chatting before I hit record and I actually get this question asked a ton when people are like, hey, you have a water podcast. What's my tap water like? Like, is it better to drink bottled water? What's. Let's just jump into this debate of like, is my tap water safe? Do I need to go to, you know, Walgreens and buy bottled water? What, what? Just Kind of break that down for us. 

01:42
Johnny Pujol
Yeah, it's a fun question because there are so many answers and so many situations to begin with. You have. Well, let me just say first, it's, it's not unusual for people to wonder if their tap water safe. Like we sell water testing. So we're familiar with the rural concerns. People living in the kind of middle of a small town, maybe they've got a small water system, maybe they have a private well that's whole bucket of concerns unique to that small town. In that well, you then have the big city concerns like yourself in New York City. New York has famously good water, and it does have famously good water. But people are still concerned. 

02:32
Johnny Pujol
Not one because of climate change and changing water supplies and maybe concerns about politics and public trust, but then also more realistically, in my Opinion concerned about the plumbing in the building, plumbing in the house, the appurtenances. And of course, with the new lead and copper rule, there is a lot more discussion now about replacing lead pipes. So even in the big cities, you have a bucket of concern around drinking water. And then you have the world of people who are trying to optimize their health, right? And these are the same folks who might be thinking about buying an alkalizer or worried about alkaline water in that they're consuming bottled water. People who swear by Evian or who swear by Smart Water. 

03:24
Johnny Pujol
And then you have the folks who own a home and have invested in a 10, 20, $30,000 water filtration system for the entire house or a $500 unit under the sink, and they're worried about their own special particular concern. And these five or six groups that I just mentioned, I'd say will constitute 95% of people coming in and having questions about their drinking water quality. And all of them have a similar question which is like, is this safe? It's a really hard question to ask, to answer without any information. And people try. There's like, okay, I'm gonna look at it. I'm gonna smell it. I'm gonna taste it. I'm gonna use that information. Sure. We, we, like, we know that's not a good idea. You can get some clues looking and smelling. And, you know, we. 

04:17
Johnny Pujol
We're highly evolved in certain regards, and so we can. If it smells like poop, it's probably bad for you. You know, we have some indications we can work with, but arsenic, unfortunately, and lead, unfortunately, in a myriad of other contaminants, have no taste, odor, or smell. Okay, so that's kind of not going to answer the question, is my tap water safe? The next thing people turn to is typically information from the government, information from the private utility that's serving you or the public utility that's serving you about your water quality. And this is, in my opinion, a very like, 20th century kind of answer to the question. It's like, oh, someone else is telling me, with a piece of paper. There are those days. It's like the newspaper, right? It's kind of. Those days are gone. We don't read the newspaper anymore. 

05:10
Johnny Pujol
We don't necessarily take our mail, open up every single envelope and trust it. So trying to convince people at home that your tap water is safe to drink with a piece of paper, I'm colloquializing what's called a consumer confidence report, which a water utility has to provide the customers every year trying to tell people their water is safe with that document. Just a little bit anachronistic, a little bit antiquated. Sorry. So again, you still don't have a lot of people happy knowing if their tap water is safe or unsafe. Then the next thing you can do is you can buy a 10 5, $20 test strip. And you've kind of seen these at Lowe's and people stick them in their pool. If you got up, if you're lucky enough to have a pool, you know, you see some basic information about water quality. 

06:05
Johnny Pujol
But test strips are the very surface level of diagnostics and testing. There's a reason a laboratory is filled with millions of dollars of equipment. You know, if they could do it with test strips, they would that the test strips don't see low enough concentrations, they don't test most things to begin with. And then you're usually left looking at some shade of orangey red, green and determining if you're either going to die or you're perfectly fine. And so they're not super satisfactory. What I'm leading towards is people testing their own tap water. And for a long time that option has been off the table because many water testing laboratories didn't build their businesses to sell to people at home. 

07:00
Johnny Pujol
They were built to work on, you know, government contracts, large public funded contracts, large airports being built, whole areas of town being constructed, compliance work, regulatory work. And so, you know, they built their businesses accordingly. Big contracts. And it really wasn't until recently when things like the Internet and E commerce and localized improved shipping started to converge and to make it possible for people at home to access professional certified environmental testing labs. And so we're in, we're probably in, you know, year five of a 50 year backlog of a revolution to make environmental testing, water testing, even food testing, all these health tests that are emerging across our economy. Water and environmental testing is behind all of them. Where we're late to the game. Testing your exposure, testing the things you have at home, it is new. 

08:09
Johnny Pujol
So drinking water testing is kind of that fourth stage of understanding is my water safe to drink? And getting your own hands on sampling equipment and sending it into the laboratory and getting results back, I mean that's just, that's the answer. That's what you need to do to really answer the question. And with that information, not only can you say, okay, I see a little bit of lead, a little bit of aluminum, a little bit of zinc, some high thms, these trihalomethanes that are from chlorination of drinking water by the utility. With that information, you can then buy the right solution at your home. Done more or less. You can check on it once every couple of years, make sure it's working, maintain the thing. And you'd think the whole country would have done this by now on some level, but they haven't. 

08:58
Johnny Pujol
Most homes still don't have professional in home water filtration, you have a water heater like 99% of homes have water heaters. But understanding your drinking water quality, buying home filtration adequate home filtration is very late to the game. And a lot of the reason it's so late to the game, in my opinion, is because the testing component, that first step, that diagnostic step, has been unavailable for so long. And we're seeing that change now. And a lot of people are testing their water, and we have been very successful in that market because of that tailwind. The question lingers, what's better? Drinking my tap water, buying bottled water, drinking some other beverage, or buying a filter and drinking my tap water through that filter. And we spend a lot of our time with people asking and answering that question. 

09:48
Johnny Pujol
And we find that they ask the questions and the answers are different all around the country. Whether you rent, whether you buy, whether you're rural, whether you're urban, whether you distrust the government or you love the government. You know, there's a whole spec, there's spectrums upon spectrums. And with water, you know, it's everyone, right? Like our, the tam, the total addressable market is everyone. And it's, that's kind of novel as well. 

10:13
Ravi Kurani
So I want to summarize that for a second for the audience. I definitely want to jump into water filters, which is where my summary is going to end at. But if I live in a home, whether it be in rural America or in New York City or Los Angeles, San Francisco, your recommendation generally is that you should test your water at kind of phase one, right? If you get that diagnostics element, you can then understand exactly what parameters in your water need to be fixed. And with that data, would you recommend combining it with a, with the CCR government, you know, like utility report? Or is that test enough for you to then kind of get to that next phase of. Well, now let me figure out what filter I need. 

11:04
Johnny Pujol
The test is generally it depends what test you order. You know, we. Let's just take ourselves out of the question, out of the equation. You know, there's not just One water test. There's, like, heavy metals, there's volatile organics, and there are esoteric compounds like pfas and microplastics. So depending on. Let's assume you buy the right water test, meaning to say one that's representative of the kind of issues you're facing, then you should have everything you need to choose the right filter. A lot of people either won't have the budget or won't have the interest to purchase the right kind of testing for their area, for their conditions. And so then you can kind of combine it with information in a ccr, a customer confidence report, and make the decision. If you. 

11:51
Johnny Pujol
If you're served by a public utility or a private utility, you can pretty much assume there's some trihalomethanes in your water. Is it a concerning amount? Is the dose a poison? Probably not. The only way to really find out if your levels are too high, in your own opinion, is to test it. So can you always fill in the blanks with, like, publicly available data? Yes, but it might be very tricky, and it might not actually be representative of your home. 

12:20
Ravi Kurani
Got it. And so how do I know what is representative of my home? Like, if I'm a. If I'm a person listening to this podcast right now, you'd mentioned there's a. There's a sweep of parameters, right? There's the. There's the heavy metals or the VOCs. There's your general parameters. There's the PFAs, the microplastics. There's like a, you know, let's just say there's a hundred things. If the problems in my home are things number 20 to 28, and I'm testing for things number 60 to 70, I'm testing the wrong end of the spectrum of the total number of problems that there are. 

12:50
Johnny Pujol
Right. 

12:50
Ravi Kurani
Or total number of parameters that I could test. And so how do I get to that initial starting point of I need to test for things number 20 to 28? 

12:58
Johnny Pujol
So there's a couple ways to do it, you know, easiest on, you know, boring way. It's just talk to our team. Like, that is specifically what we do. So we can tell people what are the conditions in their area and they can choose the tests accordingly. We also have publicly available data that summarizes the state and federal data on water quality available. So you can look at it there. It's citywater.mytabscore.com so you're not left wondering, what are the conditions of my general area? You can just see them and say, okay, look it looks like 10% of the homes in my area have some kind of lead detection and determine for yourself if you think you should do a lead test or hey, 2% of the homes in my area have elevated 14 dioxane. That's weird, but I'm not worried about 14 dioxane. 

13:50
Johnny Pujol
I'm not going to spend additional money on 14 dioxane testing. So you can look at the publicly available data, I think to judge a little bit of where you want to spend your money on testing. You can also just talk to our team. Certain things are always inherent risks. I say always, but normally inherent risk and that those are things related to premise plumbing. Even if you have plastic pipes, there are concerns. I mean, we have a lot of people with PEX plumbing who have concerns about their drinking water taste and smells, even because of the pecs, just as we have issues and concerns around people with old copper and the concerns around lead plumbing. So that's something the utility doesn't test for. 

14:40
Johnny Pujol
Unless they've come in your house, knocked on your door and collected from your sink, there's just no way they're going to have that information for you. You know, they are doing a lot of testing and indeed a lot of hard work to make sure the water quality that's getting into the distribution system meets standards. First and foremost. Almost every water utility is in compliance with the key standards. There are things downstream that are maybe more nuanced that the water system itself cannot fully represent on its consumer confidence report, like the lead levels, for example. If there's lead in your home, the water utility can't do anything about that really. Of course, there are now rules where there are changes to the lcr, the lead and copper rule that are changing the way utilities not only discover these lead issues but fix them. 

15:33
Johnny Pujol
So help is on the way. Then there's concerns with hey water utility delivers drinking water properly to distribution system. Does it change on the way from distribution system to my house? It certainly does. There's distribution systems out there where the water can take several days to get to your house and it transforms its chemistry. It's a natural system that water and its interaction with the plumbing and the pipes, so chlorine in particular has been known to transform and create disinfection byproducts. Now, things like PFAs, which are very topical right now, are not likely to enter your drinking water system. In fact, it's almost impossible for PFAS to enter your drinking water system if they are tested at the utility and demonstrated at the utility to be undetected. It is extremely unlikely. 

16:28
Johnny Pujol
I can't think of a way how that PFAS are thus ending up in your tap. Because it's a closed system, at least it should be. It usually is. And you know, this is, you know, I, I'm presenting like three or four examples here, but it's really confusing stuff if you have no background in any of this. And so what we've done principally is build a place for people to ask these questions, get testing done, explore their options where there wasn't one before. So all the way up until tapscore, it was extremely difficult to get professional water testing at home or even to talk to a professional about your water that feels unbiased, that feels like they're not your utility or they're not the epa. And then the final, I think source of concern for people are the things that are not regulated. 

17:21
Johnny Pujol
So just like PFAS was not regulated until recently, there are other things that are potentially under regulated. The big ones are like pharmaceutical concerns and microplastics, which frankly I don't, you know, I'm not particularly concerned about in our tap water. But there are people out there who either have reason to be very concerned about these things or at least suspicious. And you know, they need to have recourse, they need to have some way of figuring out if this is a concern for them. And so providing consumer testing is really the only way to get to that answer because most utilities are not going to test for things, let alone report the information about them if they're not being regulated. 

18:06
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, totally makes sense. And so picking off kind of where I left off, for all those of you out there listening it starting, you should probably just go to citywater.mytopscore.com right? Go ahead and generally see in your particular area if there is a prevalence of a problem that you see, whether that be with lead or whatever those problems could be. If you start over there, then you guys have basically a series of water testing kits that would be most prevalent to, for somebody to basically pick up that comes back and then there's obviously a slew of filters or sort of fixes that you can then do to buy, to basically correct your water. 

18:54
Ravi Kurani
Do you guys see a, a Pareto, you know, what's, what's like the 80, 20 of generally people should buy, I guess a lot like should I go buy a Brita filter, right? Or should I buy a zero filter? Like obviously we need to do the testing the diagnostics. But out there, once they've got that done, are you seeing particular fixes in water chemistry around filters or products that people are buying and maybe even geographically like in New York, we're notic that everybody should buy a, an X filter or versus in plexus they should buy a Y filter or an RO system. 

19:26
Johnny Pujol
I think depending on, to your point, depending on what's in your water and depending on what you're concerned about. Right, Like a, a if you're a, a mother or a father with a newborn, there's reason to be more anxious. And so the level of filtration will be more sophisticated. If it's you and your partner and you're both in your 30s or 40s and there's nobody else you know, and you're not immunocompromised in any particular way and you're not sick in any particular way, you probably don't need anything at all. And if you do get something, you are purchasing a basic granular activated carbon filter or off over the counter kind of RO system. If you have a house in an area where there's water hardness issues. Okay, well a water softener is typical. So I'd say three technologies. 

20:21
Johnny Pujol
There's a decision between the whole home and the point of use. So of those three technologies, let's consider those most the most prevalent, the water softening ion exchange technology, reverse osmosis solution, which is maybe the like the kind of nuclear option in a way. And then the granular activated carbon which is the most familiar. You mentioned Brita and Zero Water and there's plenty of other brands out there. I'll take this opportunity to say we do not sell any filtration or treatment. We're on the side of the person purchasing the unbiased diagnostic test so that you can go find the right filter you want. And we're not involved in that equation at all beyond giving you advice. So we'll tell you what technologies will work, but we're not going to sell you a filter. 

21:12
Johnny Pujol
We're not going to even give you an affiliate link to a filter, but we will help you pick it out. So with that said, you got these three maybe biggest technologies. Granular activated carbon softening, slash ion exchange and reverse osmosis. The next decision is do I treat all the water in my home, have a point of entry solution or do I just go for one sink or two sinks? Obviously a budget plays a big role here as well. Do you own the home or rent? The home plays another factor. The actual contaminants you're concerned about plays another factor. Like, if you're concerned about lead and you don't know if that lead is in your home at the street level, there's no sense in treating your water as it walks in, as it flows into your home, if the lead is in your plumbing. 

22:07
Johnny Pujol
So knowing some of this information is important before you buy a filter. That's a long way of saying no, there's no silver bullet yet. It really, you're, everyone is a special snowflake and so is the water. And so the filter you choose may likely be one of those three technologies, but there's another like 20 distillation systems, aeration systems, you've got cation and anion exchange systems. The list goes on. And I'm not going to bore people or you with the list, but you're right, there is a way to simplify it all with saying like, hey, like these core technologies probably can be adapted to 90 to 95% of people's homes needs. 

22:55
Ravi Kurani
Cool. That makes a ton of sense. And I think that'll be super useful for the audience out there. We'll throw those on the show notes. I would love to kind of get into the, a little bit of the background of why did Johnny build this? What's the founding story behind creating tapscore and simple lab? Like, did you have a water problem? Did you just kind of realize that there's a problem, big disconnect between people understanding what's in their tap water? Was it, was it Flynn, Michigan? Like, what's that starting story look like? 

23:27
Johnny Pujol
Yeah, there was obviously Flint, Michigan was a huge tragedy that provoked the idea on some level, but it wasn't like tit for tat. The. After graduate school here at Berkeley, I had gotten involved in a kind of grant to use technology called electrochemical arsenic remediation ecar in the California central coast to remediate arsenic from wells. And the idea was that this technology would be viable in public water systems and in private water systems across the country. Because arsenic is a major issue in the United States, affects tens of millions of connections. After about a year or so of testing that technology, we found that the most attractive thing about what were doing wasn't our arsenic remediation solution. Like the business model just wasn't really making sense. It was kind of the case that you can think of it this way. 

24:40
Johnny Pujol
The solution that were delivering, it's called Ecar, was maybe like 30 or 40% cheaper than what was out there already. But in water filtration and treatment, that's not enough because all the other costs of building and selling and marketing and maintaining technology in a water industry are huge. So just because the technology portion is a little bit cheaper, you're still going to get hit by all these other costs. And we have to, you know, get a new technology certified in the state of California and then in every other state. So seeing that, we realized we had to change the business model. And it was actually a conversation I'd had with my father at one point where I said like, hey, it's not really working. I don't think. I'm like, I don't see how this really is ready to become a business. 

25:30
Johnny Pujol
At least I don't know how to run this business without needing tons of money and Runway. So he asked me, then it was over at dinner in Berkeley and he's like, well, what is working? And I said, well, you know, honestly, one thing all of our customers really appreciate is talking about their water quality. And at that point in time, we've been doing these water tests for free and more or less giving them out in order to help people understand that they had an arsenic issue and to understand the nature of their arsenic issue. Was there arsenic and high ph? Was there arsenic and uranium? Was there arsenic and a lot of hardness? What were the conditions of these pilot locations? And the conversation about those test results was always a like fascinating discussion where people were showing real interest. 

26:21
Johnny Pujol
And so we kind of just flipped the business in a way and said, hey, instead of selling arsenic remediation technology and building a new electrochemical product for the United States, let's just sell the testing. And lo and behold, we hustled, we got lucky. And it just started to work that way in the very beginning. We had a shopify store, a very meager adwords budget, and we started building a customer friendly way of purchasing and understanding water quality lab results. And then it took off. 

27:02
Ravi Kurani
Really cool. And what was the time between doing the arsenic testing? And was the arsenic testing for the consumer market in the central Valley or were those for farmers or kind of B2B? 

27:15
Johnny Pujol
It was a little more B2B. But when you're dealing with small communities and a more agricultural and rural setting, the lines get blurred easily. Right. Like everyone in town is interested in. When there's 50 people in town. Sure. And so it was consumer enough. Like the interest was. The interest felt more like people are interested rather than businesses are interested. They may very well have actually been businesses, but it was more about people having these questions. And so we built a product that was more ready to serve people's questions. The time from probably spent maybe a maximum of two years trying to understand this market for arsenic, volt or ecar. And at the end of those, I'd say about two years, we started to realize it wasn't feasible, at least not as a private company, from my point of view. 

28:18
Johnny Pujol
And then it took about three to say were. I didn't have a lot of money. So like building the next version of the business had to be done quickly and cheaply and it had to work on the first go. And that's kind of why it felt like it was lucky. We made this huge transition from a kind of hardware technology company to a effectively a new business model altogether to a company that's now. We're now I consider as a logistics company. Yeah. 

28:50
Ravi Kurani
And what was if you were a lot of our audience are kind of people thinking about getting into the water entrepreneurship game or just entrepreneurs in general? Do you have a lesson that, you know, over the course of making this pivot, moving from the arsenic piece to kind of doing water testing in home B2C, do you kind of have like a life learning or like a business. A business learning lesson that, you know, people probably wouldn't. Wouldn't know if. If they didn't talk to you? 

29:25
Johnny Pujol
There's so many lessons. I mean, every day is full of lessons, right? I don't mean to get poetic here, but there's so many lessons. Right. And I think a lot of them, I don't think I have any that are necessarily new to the. The. What's it called? The Atlas of. Of human mistakes and learning thinking right now. I will say one thing that's always been very interesting and I haven't made up my mind on yet is the working with friends 1. It's kind of a. It's a controversial one. It can go both ways. You know, there are people who I work with today that I. 

30:08
Ravi Kurani
I was. 

30:08
Johnny Pujol
Friends with well before tapscore. And then there's people I met through hiring and purely a relationship forged in business. And I've had the friends we've had to let go and that sucks. And I've had the friends who have done marvelously and it worked out really well within tab score. And that's awesome. I even work with my dad. Right. Like my father is the CFO of the company. So sometimes that's awesome. Sometimes that's painful. I'll say. The. The jury is out in my opinion. On that one. So as a lesson, it's not exactly a life lesson because I haven't gotten the end of it yet. But I will say I wouldn't judge the book from its cover. 

31:01
Johnny Pujol
And so if you're somebody starting a business and you're, like, not sure if you should do it with your girlfriend or boyfriend or partner or with a family member, I'd say there's no hard and fast rules here. You can totally do it with your best friends and you can totally do it with strangers and with family and without family. You just have to know which. What you're buying into when you do that. So if you're going to have tough conversations with people who are emotionally important to you already, like, just be ready for that. 

31:35
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, Real sound advice. I've heard that a few times, actually, but, yeah, that's. That's really good advice. 

31:45
Johnny Pujol
I think it's real. I mean, it's realistic. Right? Like, if you're starting a bit, it's not everyone, especially not in 2024, is going to have a ton of money in their war chest on day one. Right. So the easiest people to, like, kick an idea around with are the people you're already kind of close with or friends with. Family members give you good advice, maybe give you a little bit of money, and so they start working with you for you. So I think it's. I think today 2024, it might be in next couple years, because obviously the conversation in Silicon Valley is a little. VC is slower than it used to be. And I don't know if it is or isn't, to be honest. Something has changed for sure since 2021. 

32:25
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. 

32:27
Johnny Pujol
You're going to see more and more people getting creative with who they're working with in those early days. 

32:33
Ravi Kurani
For sure. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. Let's walk through the kind of customer experience on tapscore. Like what? I think it's really interesting also for the audience because we get this question asked so much. What does that look like? Do I just go to tapscore.com and I hit, you know, I talk to one of your customer service reps and then I order one of these things. 

32:56
Johnny Pujol
Do it. 

32:56
Ravi Kurani
Does something get shipped to my house and I put underneath my tap? How does it, how does it work? 

33:01
Johnny Pujol
So for the standard journey, somebody arrives at the website, mytabscore.com, chooses a water source. Private well, rainwater water utility, obviously, that's the most popular one. Spring water. You then see the most Common, most, what we call core test kits for that water source. And you're invited to then customize it a little bit based upon the age of your home. Any particular concerns you have? Of course, budget is a consideration. So we put everything in such a fashion where you can see the pricing very easily. And then sooner or later, you've either made up your mind and made a decision, you checked out. Like you buy anything else on the Internet through a cart, or you reach out to the customer service team and you say, hey, I'm almost done, but I got some questions. And we have an outstanding support team. 

34:01
Johnny Pujol
I mean, it's a mixture of scientists and just outstanding communicators and very helpful people. And we've really tried to foster that combination and. Which is weird, right? Because right now the discussion around AI and customer service is raging, and there seems to be like everywhere you throw a rock, you hit an AI customer service product or a company, you know, and we've dabbled in them, but man, there's nothing better than a real person still. So maybe it's more expensive, but in my experience, it makes your customers happier. That's probably most important. It keeps your team more engaged on the actual business. Like if you're, if, if, if an AI is like listening to your customers problems and trying to answer them. Feel like you kind of, you're missing out on something. No, I also think it should be your problem. 

35:08
Johnny Pujol
In my personal opinion is if you got problems and the customers are pointing them out like, all right, man, just. That's your, that's your responsibility in a sense. Like be there to at least talk to the person. It's. How annoying is it when you like call up the airline or the Internet company and you're talking to a robot for 15 minutes until you finally push the right button or express enough rage that they give you a human. 

35:33
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, you're like rage clicking 0 to get to an operator. 

35:41
Johnny Pujol
Dude, I can get so upset sometimes at these robot situations. It's like, it's just. I would, I wouldn't do that to my own customers. Yeah. And so, but yeah, maybe it's a little more expensive to take some graduate engineering students and chemistry students and tell them that they have to do some customer support, which probably they weren't thinking they were going to do. But we bring almost everyone in our team into customer support. It is like the unifying medium of our business because we got people who come in with very sophisticated questions and Also very unsophisticated questions and you need to have all hands on deck sometimes. So I don't know if that was answer to a question. How do we get talking about AI and ice in customer support you had mentioned. 

36:35
Ravi Kurani
So you then get to the end. You can talk to a customer support rep if you have any questions. And then once you hit the checkout button, do you get something mailed to you? Do you mail, do you get just a bottle, an empty bottle? And you send it back in. Like, how does the process work? And then is there an app? Do you get to see your readings? Like, what does that look like? 

36:54
Johnny Pujol
So when you place your order, we in our warehouse prepare the kit accordingly based on what you ordered for testing. And there's a lot of different sampling materials out there. Bottles, glasses, transparent, opaque brown glass. Preservatives inside. No preservatives inside. Temperature controlled, not temperature controlled. So we, we manage a massive inventory of professional sampling equipment. Bottles, vials, preservatives. And when orders come through, say it again. 

37:31
Ravi Kurani
I see why you say you're a logistics company, by the way. 

37:33
Johnny Pujol
Yeah, this is kind of where that begins. So once the order is placed, we've got our own proprietary software that effectively tells us how to package the order. And you know, there's thousands of different items in our inventory to make sure that this works properly, because different labs use different materials, different states use different materials, different levels of compliance require different materials. So that algorithm to match up customers orders with the requisite materials and paperwork is sophisticated. And we then ship out materials that include instructions which again have to correspond to all the bottles. We don't have a simple one page instruction that works for everything. Every kit needs its own instructions. You receive that in the mail and you can just honestly follow the playbook at this point, we've dialed it in to be something anyone can do at home. 

38:31
Johnny Pujol
And that means following some instructions, collecting a sample. You've got a couple of choices, usually for a given test, how you want to collect the sample. When you want to collect the sample, you then activate the test kit, saying, hey, I'm about to send it in. We assign it to a laboratory at that point in time, effectively turning your return shipping label, which we provide you with, active and ready to be used. It gets sent to the closest lab that's adequately certified and up and running and capable of testing what you need tested. Once it arrives at that laboratory, testing begins. Most test kits are done in three to five business days. You get results back when they're finished. And that report, there's like three or four reports. 

39:20
Johnny Pujol
You get one, you get a standard laboratory PDF, difficult to parse, but technically rigorous and available. Two, you get an HTML report that is much more colorful and on the other end of the spectrum, it's clickable, it's animated, it has guidance and translation. And then you have your quality control information and additional materials provided by tapscore to kind of help you make sense of this report, this lab report. You can also have a CSV file. So at that point in time you have everything you need to understand and interpret your results. You can pass those results to a filtration expert, you can come back to tabscore and ask us further questions. Most people look at the report and say, okay, good, we're good. Nothing required, no filtration required, no treatment, nothing sophisticated required. 

40:16
Johnny Pujol
But if you're in that 25 to 35% of people who look at that report and say, huh, I don't like the way that looks, you can reach out and talk to us, you can share the report with a local water filtration company or a national filtration company, but you now have what you need to improve your own drinking water. And that's the critical step that we've, I think, solved and provided. Whereas in the past you never had that information. And as a result, like water filtration market in my opinion has been massively hindered in the last 10, 20 years. The product quality, just like you compare your iPhone to a water filter and they're like two different planets, I mean obviously, right, but like there has not been the same amount of, I'd say like consumer focus and innovation on these products. 

41:12
Johnny Pujol
I think because the consumer hasn't had the right information at their fingertips for the filtration companies to then get obsessed with making them happy. 

41:21
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, yeah, entirely. That is, that is impressive, Johnny. I love, I love the customer experience as well as the kind of logistics under layer that you built. That's, that's just really impressive that you guys have, you know, over a thousand skus of lab equipment, package those up in a box, test it. But then even on top of that you guys activate the return label to then send it to the closest lab after to then actually get that test done. Plus the data right, you get, you can double click all the way into that really complex data stream or you can kind of see this really colorful, you know, data stream that tells you exactly what it is. That's really impressive, Johnny. I have one last question. 

42:03
Ravi Kurani
I ask everybody on the podcast and it is, what is your favorite book, movie or show that has kind of either given you like an overview effect of. Of your life or changed the way that you look at the world of water? 

42:20
Johnny Pujol
Oh, man, I'm so glad you're asking this question because I do have a favorite book and it is so awesome and people need to know about it. 

42:29
Ravi Kurani
What is it? 

42:29
Johnny Pujol
It's called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. 

42:33
Ravi Kurani
Harry Potter, rationality. Okay. 

42:36
Johnny Pujol
It's ex. It's weird. I'm going to just go out and say that. It's extremely weird. It's a th. It's. Oh, it's maybe thousands of pages long. 

42:48
Ravi Kurani
Okay. 

42:51
Johnny Pujol
It's written, it's fanfiction, and it's a. It's the story of Harry Potter loosely told from the point of view of a rationalist Harry Potter, very brilliant scientist, Harry Potter, who had brilliant scientist parents. And he goes to Hogwarts and he's pretty much there to figure out what the heck is magic? How does it work? There must be an explanation. It can't. I refuse to believe there's actual magic. And if there is, it must abide some laws and I'm gonna figure them out. Yeah. And it's. It's weird, it's funny, it's. I. It's a page turner. And to this day, I'm amazed how I actually think it. This is sacrilege. I think it is better than the canon. I think it is better than the real Harry Potter. I would pay 10 times as much to see the movie. It's brilliant. 

43:55
Johnny Pujol
And it has woken me up, I think, to so many different ideas. I'm not a rationalist, and I know that is a kind of an ideology some people embrace. And I don't embrace necessarily the rationalist ideology. That doesn't mean this is an extraordinarily awesome story and you can learn a ton from it. So, yeah, if you're looking for a weird, eccentric book, I would go. You go on. It's free. And actually there's an audiobook now too. A guy named Jack Feraces does a really wonderful job of reading it out loud. And I would say that is my favorite work literature. Okay, cool. 

44:38
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, we'll definitely throw those in the show notes. Johnny, thank you so, so much for coming on the episode today. 

44:45
Johnny Pujol
Hey, my privilege. Thank you, Robbie.