Healthcare Startup Anatomy (Part 2)
Buying a black turtleneck and white new-balances won’t make you an innovator, but your project will…
This is a second part of a lecture given by me at Collegium Medicum in Cracow.
Part 1 -> click here
6. Talking to users
You have a team now, so you can start taking your first operations. Unless you have a problem with people like doctor House, you should start speaking with the outside world and think about potential users evaluation. Who should you start with? Many times you will not be allowed to speak with real patients. Then I would start speaking with your friends having this type of disease. As a medical student, you can move on to the patients during your clinical rotations. Finally, you want to get an answer for a simple question: “Do they want it?”. Because if nobody wants it, why should you ever build it.
Beware! People often don’t know what they want, so you can’t ask them straightforward questions like “hey, do you have insomnia and do you want a smart sleeping mask?”. You rather need to go from general questions to more specific ones, dig deeper and make your own observations on the direction of the path you should take.
answer one question: Will my solution match people’s needs?
But in the world of medicine most of the time we have more problems than usual people, so the process of customer development is no difference. The first problem is that we have so many different groups of stakeholders. We have patient, doctor, hospital, healthcare system… And they all often want different things, so you can’t speak with all of them at the same time. Otherwise you would feel like my sister entering a shoe shop looking all around in search of a pair of dreamed heels.
I would advise you to define one crucial group as key element for the initial process and focus only on speaking with them. How to make this decision? Well, in many cases it’s the group of customers that will touch your product as the first. If you are making a product like smart sleeping mask, then it would be great to start with patients. Why? Because if patients don’t like your mask, then they won’t use it, so doctor won’t have any data and healthcare system will have nothing to refund… So start with patients, then go to doctors and loop this process as many times as you need.
7. “It already exists”
While speaking to people there are many phrases and answers that may discourage you. One of them is a phrase that you are going to hear literally thousands of times, when somebody replies “it already exists…” And you sure know that there are so many famous examples of huge companies that weren’t first at what they do, like Google wasn’t the first search engine and Facebook wasn’t the first social network. So rule number one is: focus on being the best, not first. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about market analysis (when you are creating a sleeping mask and all projects you see on kick-starter are sleeping masks, then it would be dumb to just do exactly the same…). Bearing in mind that you need to have a great range of knowledge on how you are better than existing solutions, let us analyze the three major groups of people who keep saying “it already exists”.
The first one are bozos who just want to annoy you, the second are ignoramuses who just don’t know anything about your field, but the worst case is the third group: the so-called experts. They are often wearing good suits, having expensive cars and are going to repeat “it’s not gonna work, there is no point in doing it”. So here I have one power tip for you: focus on doing one thing extremely well and solving a problem by your product, like it hasn’t ever been solved before.
8. Early success syndrome
The previous problem was coming from outside world, but the next comes from inside. It’s the moment when you think you are like Elon Musk, that you are nearly flying to another galactic and becoming a creator of self-driving cars… It often happens after couple of first interviews for press or speaking at public events. It’s the time when you are about to start, but people stop developing their products because they think they are already good enough.
What is more, people often miss correlation with causation. Buying a black turtleneck and white new-balances won’t make you an innovator, but your project will.
At these moments my way of getting out this delusion is a mantra:
“Remember what brought you to this point and that nobody else will do your work while are attending a networking event”.
9. Numbers
Now it’s time to go back to your desk and apply some maths!
You need to know if you are moving forward or not. In order to get a sense of that, you should track your progress by a set of parameters, so specify what will you measure and how. To put it into real numbers during early stage of development:
During next 2 months I want to speak with 100 insomniacs. If half of them tells me they finally want some device I will follow this project.
Or later you may say:
I want to have 30 testers of my mask in the 6 months… after making first prototype.
Stay practical and pragmatic, test if your idea has the potential to take off by gathering statistics.
10. Time
If there would be just one thing that I can tell you and is the most important one, that would be it — TIME. I didn’t understand what it means four years ago. But after meeting one of my co-founders who is nearly 40 years old and having family and kids I can see that even though I’m a medical student I have plenty of time. Guys, you have no baggage at the moment. No family, no mortgages whatsoever. It’s the greatest time to do risky things. So either you want do something or you don’t, and there is nothing in between. And be patient, since as I told Caroline during my first discussion with her. Startup is not an all-nighter, it’s a marathon, so be prepared it’s going to take months and years. I recommend you to draw a timeline, set your milestones with dates and track progress!
We’ve gone through those 10 points, accomplished so much in developing our idea and still didn’t spend a cent on it. None of the points require any other kind of investment than your time; this brings me to an assumption that
we live in the greatest era to innovate and take our ideas to reality.
