Healthcare Startup Anatomy (Part 1)
Startups are like med school: from outside everybody wants to get in and from inside everybody wants to get out.
This is a transcript of a lecture given by me at Collegium Medicum, Jagiellonian University in Cracow. This talk started a series of workshops focused on building healthcare products and could be treated as a manual for medical students on the first steps of going from an idea to the product.
Two years ago I had a phone call in the mid of summer from Caroline (friend from my med school). She told me that there was this great idea that came into her head and she needed to share it with me to discuss possible development… She’s come over with her boyfriend (they treated the whole thing quite serious, as he was wearing a suit…) and after a short introduction she said: “so we want to build a smart sleeping mask that would just help to sleep better”. As hardware is hard, my response was that it’s gonna take years to make it happen. One month passed and she called again, this time to announce that she gave up on the project as it would take too much of her spare time. Caroline was right. Startups are like med school: from outside everybody wants to get in and from inside everybody wants to get out. I kept thinking about what would I tell Caroline if she had decided to follow her project. Here are my top ten hints I would like to give all medical students, including myself from four years ago — before my startup life had started.
1. You as a Founder
People often disregard the fact that even corporations are built by people and that behind each product there is an actual human being. For the first couple of months or even years you are going to be your project. People tend to think “oh if I’m gonna have a startup, what name should I pick…”. But the truth is that nobody will ever really care about its name, what they will care about is you as a person and your set of skills.
Next important thing is self-awareness. There is no other way of succeeding in anything, than spending time working on it, so you need to like it. Think about what gives you fun, find your talent and pursue it.
Thirdly, everything is predicated on your actions. So if you are a medical student, join student organisations and societies or other startups that are already more advanced than you are at the moment.
There is a set of common questions asked by medical students, like: “When should I start as a medical student?”. I would say that definitely after third year when you have already started your clinical rotations. The other is: “Which segment of medicine should I go into?”. Well, it all depends on the approach you are willing to take; building products and features for patients would be best suited with chronic diseases or pediatrics, however creating pure tech could be pursued in portable diagnostics. So let’s get back to our example.
Say you’re like Caroline; you are a medical student and have your interest — you want to fight with chronic sleep disorders and build a great, magnificent, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending, smart sleeping mask… and you are on the stage where you’ve gone through whole pubmed, trials.gov, researchgate and all other article-filled bases.
2. Idea
So now it’s time to develop your idea, because saying “well I want to develop a smart sleeping mask” is simply not enough. The best way is to start with “why”. WHY drives everything else. For instance, you can start with WHY will it be helpful for anyone? Secondly, WHY you want to do this? Is it because you want to change current status quo, build a company in which you plan to work… Whatever your goals are, plan it early and write it down.
Most people building new stuff want to help everyone and find a panaceum for all world problems. But it’s simply not possible. In most cases, trying to help everyone ends up with helping no one, so focus on identifying main problem and thinking about how to tackle it. This problem is surely connected with a certain group of people. So try to define your potential users. Are they male/female? What about their age? Their profession?
It should all give you a picture of who you want to help.
To recap, it’s easy to memorize:
WHAT (e.g. a smart sleeping mask)
WHY (e.g. people have insomnia)
HOW (e.g. by measuring vital signs and changing users habits)
One of the students asked a very interesting question that you may be thinking about → “How to prepare to have an IDEA?”
3. Pitching
It’s good to have a clear idea of what you are planning to do, because the next step is pitching. Probably you’ve been pitching a lot of times in your life but didn’t even know about it! Since pitching is a medium for presenting your ideas the most important rule is to be brief and concise. Imagine that you have a chance to speak with a perfect stranger for around 3 minutes… And the word stranger seems to be really important for all medical professionals. As we tend to generalize and think when speaking about medical cases, that everybody else is a doctor as well. But it’s the other way round. I remember presenting CardioCube in front of American jury in Tel Aviv (Israel) this year and most of them confused heart failure with heart attack. The solution is to use basic terms and tell your story simply enough, so that non-medical people know what it is all about.
You can try mastering your technique with a good exercise of putting your idea into one sentence. For example: “We want to build smart sleeping mask to show people how to change their habits to have a better quality of sleep”.
Problems with forming your idea into one sentence might be a sign of muddled-thinking and wrong approach to the problem. And it nearly always means that you need to rethink your idea and perhaps tackle it from a different angle.
4. Get outside
So now that we have an idea, we are able to speak about it
— it is time for us to get outside.
It’s good to start speaking with young people as they have a good intuition about technology and where the world might be going in the next couple of years. As med students you are in this comfortable situation of being able to see so many peers everyday. It would be a great thing to start sharing your ideas with them during classes, lunches or while having beer.
Next good step is to reach out to your tutors. Many corporations and later-stage startups pay thousands of dollars to consult their projects with doctors and you see them so often during clinical rotations that there is nothing easier than just presenting them what you already have in your head.
Another vital part is to find a mentor. Building medical startup might get over your head faster than you will notice, so reaching out to an experienced, open-minded doctor willing to spend an hour or two a week on consulting the development of your project might prove priceless.
And here most of us fail.
Why? Because of three major communication problems.
Problem 1: Generation and technology gap — so many students are having a hard time finding a mentor, mainly because of the lack of some sort of common ground in terms of language. Chances are that the 75-year-old professor of cardiology you would like to speak with might still be using an ancient fax machine to send a ‘quick’ message to his friends… You cannot really compare this to you sending a snap to your friends which will disappear in couple of seconds, can you? But there is something, that might save the day… pitching! If you make your story about the solution you want to build clear and compelling, then 9 out of 10 potential mentors will agree to help you.
Problem 2: European culture thing — I guess it’s typical for central Europe, especially in the academic field, that you may have a group of scientists, sitting inside the same room, not knowing what the other person is doing only because they are too afraid of someone stealing their idea… There is no bigger nonsense than that. First of all, you will not develop anything without others’ feedback, so you just have to do it! Secondly, people who would be capable of stealing your idea, developing it and making it successful are already busy — and those who have time for that have already lost.
Problem 3: Fear of rejection — many guys are afraid of speaking with beautiful girls… We just don’t like when somebody says no and we look wired. But as an inventor it is sometimes good to get comfortable with others’ rejection or (especially!) their critique. While every opinion is priceless, you shouldn’t care about people laughing out of what you’re up to. Not only will it happen a lot of times, but it won’t even benefit you in any way. And most importantly, lose your feeling of superiority and thinking “now it’s me the creator speaking to people”. Exaggerated pride among young people is one of the most stupid harms you can do to yourself.
5. Co-founders
At this point you will feel comfortable speaking to people about your project and have a great contact with your mentor. As I mentioned before, your mentor is someone already having thousands of other commitments and will meet you once a week, but you still need some people to spent with you 5-hours everyday in your garage. By the way, a solo-inventor, entrepreneur or sportsman is a myth. I love to watch Roger Federer on court, but his gorgeous backhand is a final product of a team work. And so is any project, product or a whole company. So think what set of skills will be needed at the start and how should you be supplemented. As a doctor building tech solutions you will probably look for coding or hardware people. Again, you sure have lot of friends going to universities other than med schools, so take advantage of your friendships.
Having co-founders is like being in a marriage, if your idea takes off, you will spent plenty of time together and most of your days you will be fighting with problems therefore friendship is a great basement for getting through hard times.
But even if you were friends before, I recommend you to set clear rules first. Right down who is responsible for what etc.
And one of the key points, equity. When product turns into company, it’s a common example, that people you asked for help say after couple of years: “well you know, it was mostly my idea, so now I should have 80% of this company…” Such conversations become only harder with time, so solve it as early as possible.
As Part 1 ending, I attach a scheme of our path of analysis during the course.
Go to Part 2 -> click here
