Meet John Wells of JAWKU in Scottsdale

Today we’d like to introduce you to John Wells.

John, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I have been inventing ever since I could remember. I’ve always enjoyed looking at products and figuring out a way to improve or make them more unique. As a freshman in high school, I applied and was actually granted my first patent. It was an invention that had to do with wireless Bluetooth speakers in shoes which later got licensed by a large shoe distributor. I first began college as a pre-med major, as a majority of my family were in the medical field and I had always wanted to help people. But, within the first two years at Cornell, I won several innovation awards in multiple classes and my professors thought business and entrepreneurship was my calling. I have always been passionate about inventing so with their guidance I decided to take the leap and change majors.  I started with a 1 credit independent study under my entrepreneurship professor. The project was to create a business around one of my ideas. I wanted to come up with something in the athletic industry as I have always been into sports. I played football throughout school. I was the kicker at Brophy for the 2007 state championship team. My junior year, I moved to San Diego where I continued to play for Cathedral Catholic and went on to play at Cornell University as their kicker.

During our practices and training for football at Cornell, it always surprised me that when testing our speeds we only used the very accurate, laser gate timing systems twice per year and all the other times we would use very inaccurate stopwatches. I asked our strength coaches about this, the main reasons were that they would take an hour to set up and take down, they required the use of a lot of equipment and they were not very easy to use. Another challenge I faced along with every other athlete, was training myself to get faster but knowing my actual time. The issue, you can’t run with a stopwatch and get an accurate time and the majority of athletes don’t have thousands of dollars lying around to buy laser gates let alone the time to set them up. This is where I established the need for something else in the market and that is how Jawku was started. Working from my dorm room I put together a team capable of creating a wearable technology that was as easy to use as a stopwatch, could track anything a stopwatch could, but was just as accurate as of the multi-thousand dollar laser gates. From that point, it took over four years of R&D to get the product to just right accuracy, getting the app all dialed in and sourcing the production of the product for manufacturing. It was the best learning experience. Since launch, we have now been on the market selling the Jawku Speed units for two years and it has been growing ever since. Not only do we want to be a company that can track an athlete’s speed, agility and reaction time, but we want to also provide products that surround an athlete’s workout and training. This is how we got into distributing a massage gun device, the Jawku Muscle Blaster. Over a year ago we launched our first massage gun the Muscle Blaster V1 and since then have come out with our Muscle Blaster V2 which is ranked as one of the top massage guns on the market. It won’t end there, as we are always innovating. We are looking forward to expanding the massage gun line come 2020. We will also be launching several speed training products along with some very neat updates to the Jawku Speed device that will allow athletes to track more than just their accurate times and reaction times.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
There’s going to be challenges for any entrepreneur starting their first business, especially when it comes to innovation. Things are constantly evolving and there is always more to learn. They say the best way to learn is by trial and error, and that we had. We were burned by several web/app development companies that could not deliver on connecting the app with our wearable technology. There is nothing like this that had been done before. Using the technology in conjunction with a smartphone required a very complex algorithm. This was a big set back. It took figuring out how to get our engineers and the app team to collaborate effectively. I figured laying out everything we needed was enough, but I had never built an app before, I was naive. As an entrepreneur, it’s important to be involved and educate yourself to understand every aspect of the business. No one is going to promote or care for the business and your idea like you do. After putting these mindsets into place and getting our engineers involved with the new app team, we were able to get everything done to lunch the Jawku app.

At first, there were many challenges when it came to accuracy. We knew we would get there but there were times during the first years of R&D we would take three steps forward and two steps back. It was a long road that requires patience and perseverance knowing that we would get there without giving up. After each new development made, we usually encountered a new problem in the code, and like a puzzle, we had to figure out how to solve it to move forward. After over 10,000 tests of the speed unit and app, we finally got the accuracy to the point it was needed, and everything was dialed in perfectly for launch.

Another big learning experience was production. Manufacturing a product with all the schematics to mass produce, you have to go through many test rounds. It took about a year of multiple back and forth iterations to dial in the hardware and get the sensors to test as perfect as how the engineers developed them to be. This created delays in the initial proposed launch. The trials and tribulations are really what make you stronger, they help us learn from our mistakes and know what to look for when going forward.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I wear many hats, as any entrepreneur has to do when getting started. I have overseen product development and innovation, everything from ordering boxes to fulfilling shipments. Much of what was done right out of my parent’s garage. I currently specialize in our product innovation, retail and distribution accounts, as well as traveling to many teams and events to promote the business.

JAWKU is a company that always will and always has strived to create the highest quality innovative products at more affordable prices for athletes. We never want to exclude anyone from the market as we want all athletes to be able to improve their performance.

Jawku is proud to be known and used by top sports performance centers such as the Fisher Institute here in Phoenix, by Olympians worldwide, and by professional sports teams. We are proud to have been able to develop an innovative technology that hadn’t been done before and assist athletes in getting better.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I had the honor of being asked to be a guest judge for my high school Cathedral Catholic’s “shark tank” along with other esteemed inventors. Then delivering a speech at the Senior Luncheon this year before their graduation to all of the seniors and their families.

The proudest moment of my career so far had to be the day we launched and made our first sale. Getting to see how much we evolved over the past four years and the Jawku’s teamwork finally come together was a huge milestone I will never forget.

Pricing:

• Jawku Muscle Blaster V2: $299.99
• Jawku Speed: $199.99
• Jawku Power Shaker Bottle: $29.99

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jawku.com
• Email: support@jawku.com
• Instagram: @jawkuspeed
• Facebook: @jawkuspeed

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