October 29, 2025

How Toilets Got Smarter Than Some Teams

Hold My Flush: Data Just Hit the Loo

Let’s be honest: a $380 device that analyses your pre-coffee pee sounds like a Silicon Valley prank. But Withings' U-Scan is real, wild, and possibly—dare I say—even profound.

Yes, it’s a urine analyser that clips into your toilet and uploads your nutritional and kidney health data to an app. Welcome to the age of quantified everything.

It’ll tell you if you're too acidic, low on vitamin C, drinking enough water, burning fat, or crystalising a kidney stone into something a geologist would name. And for $449.96, you too can upgrade from intuitive eating to lab-grade tracking—via your bladders' first tweet of the day.

Beyond the obvious punchlines (and don’t worry, I’ve got a few), this got me thinking about something a little spicier: what if your team's data hygiene was as rigorous as your AI toilet?

Most Start-ups Know Less Than Their Toilets

The average start-up founder has dashboards, KPIs, and a shiny product analytics suite. But ask them about their hiring funnel, attrition risk, or whether their Data Scientist was actually any good... and you get the vacant stare of someone truly free-styling life.

You're shipping features, raising rounds, burning runway—but have no objective signal on whether your core team is thriving or quietly breaking down in silence. But don’t worry, your toilet knows you're low on electrolytes.

See the irony?

Withings isn't just selling health gear. They're selling real-time data feedback powering behaviour change. That’s exactly what companies claim they want from BI and Data talent. But mostly? They settle for monthly dashboards and vibes-led decisions.

If Your Hiring Strategy Were a Urinalysis...

I had a founder last month ask why their last two data hires didn’t work out. On paper, both were solid—strong technical CVs, decent interviews. But both fizzled out within six months.

So we did a quick diagnosis (think of it as flushing out the issue):

• Hiring Need = unclear. They needed insight, but hired people who just built pipelines.
• Onboarding = nonexistent. First weeks were DIY scavenger hunts.
• Culture fit = misread. One was ex-corporate, allergic to chaos. The other thrived on ambiguity but couldn’t prioritise.
• Feedback loop = broken. No one clocked the mismatch early... until morale curdled and the exit chats kicked off.

If we’re being blunt, the system peed back a warning. No one noticed.

Stop Guessing. Start Scanning Your People Systems

You don’t need a toilet-mounted lab to know when something’s off. But you do need to tune in. Here's what founders and heads of teams can learn from the U-Scan’s nerdy brilliance:

• Tight Feedback Loops: Weekly pulse checks > annual performance reviews. Ask: are we learning fast enough from team dynamics?
• Change Indicators: Is data turnover telling you something deeper than “they got a better offer”?
• Custom Cartridges: Different roles need different success markers. Your Principal Data Scientist isn’t measured the same as your first DevSecOps hire.
• Analysable Inputs: You can’t optimise what you don’t track. Are you capturing context at exit? Are your interviews too unstructured to compare?

It’s not about surveillance. It’s about stewardship. Good data makes you a better leader—cleaner, faster calls without the guesswork.

When Smarts Get Personal

Honestly, smart toilets are weird. But also weirdly profound. They remind us that insight lives in the unglamorous bits.

The same goes for your team. Culture issues, engagement dips, bad-fit hires—they leak slowly until they overflow. Avoiding that? That’s data leadership. Just not the sexy, dashboard kind.

One founder I work with has a monthly review that’s half ops metrics, half ✨vibe checks✨ across key team members. Not just productivity scores—actual human pulse reads. She clocks issues early, clarifies roles faster, and rarely loses great talent. That’s her U-Scan. No toilet water required.

Final Splash

$380 for a toilet-based diagnostics tool sounds excessive—until you compare it to the cost of hiring a senior engineer who churns in 4 months. Or a data platform that no one uses. Or the culture rot that turns your dream scale-up into slow death-by-slack.

Good systems catch issues early. Smart leaders listen before the smell gets weird.

If you want help building teams that self-clean, self-correct, and actually scale—well, I may not analyse your urine, but I will analyse your hiring habits. And that’s probably more useful. Possibly less awkward.

– Gozie Ezulike
Founder, Xist4

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