Johnny Pujol

Johnny Pujol did not set out to sell water tests. He came to water from finance, as a senior analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York, then went back to school for a master's in civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. His graduate work was on using electrochemistry to pull arsenic and other heavy metals out of water, and when a Berkeley advisor offered him a grant to commercialise a technology called ECAR (electrochemical arsenic remediation, a low-cost method that had worked in South Asia), he said yes before the question was even finished. The plan was to bring it to the rural Central Valley of California, where small water systems sit in violation of arsenic limits with no money to fix it.

Johnny Pujol built his own pilot near Edwards Air Force Base, decided he was becoming an engineer, and then ran the numbers. They did not work. As he put it, he could not make two cents of the business, and he started wondering how anyone makes money doing this at all. To pay the bills he was selling vacuum cleaners on QVC, the American TV shopping channel, when a dinner conversation with his father changed everything. His dad asked him a simple question, what's working?, and the honest answer was that the one thing people in those Central Valley towns loved was being told what was actually in their drinking water. They wanted to know about the arsenic, the uranium, the heavy metals, and suddenly the quiet room came alive. His father said it plainly: you should just sell water tests.

Johnny Pujol did what every son does and told the old man he had no idea what he was talking about, and then he did exactly that. With his co-founder Julio Rodriguez, he built a basic Shopify store, ran cheap Google ads, and started selling home water-test kits under the brand Tap Score. It worked, and because the margins were positive he could recycle the revenue into more product rather than chasing venture money, which is why he says SimpleLab has never had to do much fundraising. For three or four years the obsession was the individual at home who knew nothing about water quality and was scared of what might be in their tap, and building a report that held their hand through it.

Johnny Pujol then noticed that the businesses, utilities and engineering firms doing compliance testing had the very same problem, only bigger, so he turned the consumer obsession into SimpleLab, the company's larger business today. SimpleLab is a lab-logistics network: it had called and indexed around a hundred laboratories, mapping which instruments and certifications each one held, so that an order dropped into the network instantly finds the lab that can run that exact test fastest and cheapest. If a lab in Southern California is already running a regulatory test that day, the marginal cost of one more sample is a fraction of the headline price, and SimpleLab routes the sample there and passes some of the saving on. The real competitor, in his words, is not another startup but the conventional habit of phoning your usual lab and waiting.

Johnny Pujol holds an opinion that makes him worth listening to, which is that a testing company has to choose its side. Filtration companies ask every week to buy SimpleLab's customer list, and the answer is always a flat no, because the moment you sell that data you lose the trust the whole thing runs on. He drinks tap water, evangelises it, and argues that the only way to get people to trust their tap is to give them the tools to check it, since most of the time the results come back clean. You can read more about how I source and audit facts like these on my Leviathan database, which sits behind every profile on this site.

“When we tell them what's in their drinking water, because we've run a test, everyone is listening. It's like suddenly the quiet classroom has come alive. And he said it right, at dinner: you should just sell water tests.”

Johnny Pujol is, in short, the finance-analyst-turned-engineer who learned that the product was never the arsenic reactor, it was the answer, and who built a business on the simple idea of just telling people the truth about their water.