Our Founder's Story: How Toxic Black Mold Changed Everything

The problem started where I could not see it

I want to tell you how Spoores really began, because it did not begin with a product idea or a pitch deck. It began with water in a place no one ever looks, doing damage for weeks before I had any clue.

There was no dramatic flood. No burst pipe, no water pooling on the floor. My neighbor had raised the soil on their property, just enough to change the way rainwater moved, and now it drained toward my house instead of away from it. Cracks in the foundation did the rest, letting that water seep in. Once inside, it got trapped between the slab and a carpet padding barrier, the kind of layer that is meant to keep spills from soaking down into the padding. Here it did the opposite of its job. Instead of keeping water out, it held water in, and everything underneath stayed damp with nowhere to dry.

I was living alone at the time, so there was no one else to compare notes with, no second person to say “do you smell that too.” It was just me and a house that felt, slowly and then not so slowly, like it was working against me.

What I noticed first was not water. It was me.

Before I found the source, I found the symptoms. A tiredness that sleep did not fix. Lesions on my face I could not explain. Then I started bleeding, from my nose, my mouth, and other places, in a way that no reasonable story about allergies or a busy season could cover.

I want to be honest that black mold does not present the same way for everyone. During that long exposure I had the fatigue and the lesions, but I never got the brain fog that a lot of people describe. Every body writes its own version of the reaction.

I even went to a doctor about it. He looked me over, told me I had an infection, and sent me home with antibiotics. I asked him directly whether it could be something in the environment of my home. He said no, confidently, without hesitation. He was wrong.

The cause was mold. That trapped moisture had let a colony take hold, and it spread up the walls and eventually worked its way into the A/C. From there the system did me the worst possible favor, pushing spores through every room I breathed in. I finally figured it out the day I put my nose up to the A/C return vent and caught the foul smell coming off it.

Finding it was the start, not the end

Once I understood what I was dealing with, I brought in the people who do this for a living: a mold remediation company and a water leak detective. Yes, water leak detectives exist, and I was grateful they do.

The remediation was not a mop and a fan. They moved everything I owned into pods. They sealed off rooms with plastic sheeting, ran big industrial fans to dry the house out, and repaired every room the mold had reached. They cleaned the air ducts. Before a single piece of furniture came back inside, they cleaned each one individually. By the end, on paper, the house was fixed.

Then I moved back in

I moved back in, and in a single weekend I was coughing up blood again.

So I moved out. The house stayed in the family, but I did not set foot in it for years. It was not until the place was completely gutted in a remodel, down to the walls, that I could finally return. Everything short of tearing it back to the studs had not been enough.

I became the canary

Here is the part people find hard to believe. Every exposure since that house has hit me faster than the one before. What used to take days to affect me started taking hours, then minutes. Today I can feel black mold in my lungs in about a minute: a sharp pain, and then the coughing starts.

I have become a canary in the coal mine. People around me find it unbelievable, because they do not notice anything at all. I find it just as unbelievable that they cannot feel what is so loud to me. We can stand in the same room and have two completely different experiences of the air.

Why I built Spoores

I did not want anyone else to go through what I went through. That is the honest reason Spoores exists. Once I was on the other side of it, I set out to solve the problem I had just lived, so the next person would get a warning while there was still time to act.

So I studied how to catch it early. The danger starts with moisture that has nowhere to dry, so you measure humidity and watch for it climbing where it should not. A leak is often the source, so you catch it the moment a sensor gets wet, not weeks later when the wall is already ruined. That thinking became spooresLEAK, a wireless sensor that watches for water and tracks conditions like temperature and humidity. My own trouble came from the outside, rainwater working its way in, which no valve could have stopped. But plenty of water damage starts on the supply side instead: a burst pipe, an appliance that overflows, a fitting that finally lets go. In those cases, cutting the water off fast is the difference between a mess and a flood. That became spooresVALVE, an automatic shutoff that closes the water supply before a drip turns into a demolition project.

What I want you to take from this

If you take one thing from what I went through, let it be this: your health is the most valuable thing you have, and once it is damaged you cannot always buy it back. Long exposure to black mold is not just a rough few weeks. For some people it leaves lasting harm: chronic coughing and trouble breathing, sinus problems that never fully clear, fatigue and headaches that will not lift, brain fog and trouble concentrating, and a heightened sensitivity that turns every future exposure into a faster, harder reaction. I am living proof of that last one.

No repair bill, no remediation invoice, no insurance fight comes close to the real cost. You can put a price on a wall, a floor, or an air handler. You cannot put a price on your lungs.

So do not wait to take it seriously. Pay attention to the hidden places, trust your body when something at home feels off, and give the quiet spots a way to speak up before the damage is done. That is the company I wanted to build: one that clears the air, honestly, and helps you catch the small thing before it becomes the big one, so you can breathe a little easier.

Want to be first in line as we roll these devices out? Join the waitlist, and if this resonates with something you have been through, tell me about it. I read every message.