Interview with Sifter Health CEO and Founder, Andrew Lyle
Andrew Lyle, CEO & Founder of Sifter Health, has spent over a decade in the healthcare industry and is focused on optimizing the patient experience.
What is your start-up?
I run a company called Sifter Health. Put simply, we are the Expedia of telemedicine. We are helping patients, providers, and pretty much anybody connect to telemedicine that fits their needs without having to scramble through hundreds of google pages or cheesy social media ads. We are focused on matching patients exactly to their needs, both in terms of diagnosis or state of health as well as in terms of insurance, cost allocations, and shipping concerns. Even minor details can change the patient experience, so we want to make sure patients find exactly what they want for their healthcare.
What inspired your interest in telemedicine and healthcare?
I used to work for a specialty pharmacy. For a little bit of background, the independent specialty pharmacy industry is kind of dying. We needed to find a way to create new business and revenue opportunities. Me and another guy at our company realized that telemedicine was becoming pretty big, so we thought about partnering with telemedicine companies to distribute their products. We had a giant compounding lab and a giant warehouse that could be better utilized. The pharmacy I worked for ended up turning into a telemedicine distribution facility. We were on the grind, literally reaching out through phone calls, emails, anything just to get a hold of these companies. We ended up shipping tens of thousands of prescriptions a day just for telemedicine orders. That is how I really got placed into the telemedicine world, working with many prominent telemedicine companies with lots of VC backing.
After I left the specialty pharmacy I continued my interest in telemedicine, checking in often to see what was new in the industry. Especially after the pandemic hit, but even leading up to it, there was an inundation of new telemedicine providers. It was new company, after new company, after new company. I think there were around 40 telemedicine companies that were all dermatology providers. I thought to myself, “Man, this is really hard to keep track of, how do I even know which ones are who?” That’s when everything really clicked. If someone like myself, who is following the industry and who is really tied in with the entrepreneurial community around telemedicine, can’t even keep up with the telemedicine providers, how can a regular patient? A patient is going to go to google and search “get ED meds online” and will find the telemedicine provider paying top dollar for ad words. In reality, the best healthcare option may never even show up. I wanted to create an easier way for everyone to find all available telemedicine companies, not just companies paying for advertising placement. I wanted to create a centralized database where people could see all of their options.
When you left the pharmacy, did you leave in order to start your company?
No, I actually went to big pharma. There was a mutual agreement that I didn’t really need to stay there. I wanted to find something more stable. This start-up idea still stayed on my mind. I was running this on the side, at weekends and at night, but at that point it was still just an idea. Hopkins really jumped up. The Carey business school sent an email [I was doing my MBA there] about the Student Start-Up Challenge asking “do you have an idea?” and I was like, “sure, I have this idea!” Barely two weeks before I put the idea on paper, no prototype, no website, little data, I ended up winning the competition. I took that money and made an MVP. I was like, “Ok, let me see if this thing has some legs.” I took it to the next level of competition, won another competition, and won a third competition. It was an evolution, and it was super cool that Hopkins was able to give me the opportunity to do that. If that competition never existed, the site would never exist and it would still be just an idea. Right now I would wake up and think, “I should probably start doing that.”
Did you ever see yourself as a company founder? Is it something you wanted to do when you were younger?
I have an internal struggle with it. I love sitting around doing absolutely nothing, but when I’m sitting around doing nothing, I’m constantly telling myself that I should be doing something. No matter what, I’ve always been doing something: I’ve done consulting on the side, I’ve done website builds for people, I used to be a wedding officiant on weekends. Yeah I know, it’s crazy. I have the mentality where you have to keep moving. If you’re not continuously building then you’re not learning. I keep up with so many trends because of this mentality, and it’s cool because it affects so many aspects of my life.
To answer your question, I guess I saw myself as an entrepreneur eventually, maybe not this early in my life. Definitely not at this time in my life, it just kind of came up. You know, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. It was more like I stomped on the lemons and made the quickest pavement lemonade I could make.
What have been some of the hurdles you have faced? I’m guessing COVID has affected you in some way.
It’s funny that you bring that up, because COVID has had the opposite effect on Sifter. The telemedicine industry, just in the past 8 months, has grown 180%. The trajectory for launching the website was initially set for June [this was back in January], but after the pandemic I was like, “no, this has to be out by March”. COVID actually accelerated our timeline.
In terms of hurdles, one of the issues that we are working on is that almost everything on the site is public knowledge, but it takes a long time to collect. At this time, I own the largest telemedicine database with the most robust information. However, it took me hundreds of hours to gather that information. It’s not something we can scrape from a central database, or use API to get; people aren’t plugging information in. I literally had to sit there, look up every telemedicine company, their features and prices, and plug it into a giant spreadsheet. It was really daunting. One of the issues is how do I continuously grow this while also finding something proprietary? Technically the database is proprietary, but anyone could make a similar database if they wanted to do it. We are working on something right now that is proprietary, which is nice.
Another hurdle is that a lot of these telemedicine companies have millions of dollars in advertising budgets. While I’m trying to help the same patients, I’m also trying to capture the attention of the same people that are looking. It’s finding a balance between how to capture the attention of consumers that are looking for telemedicine without pulling eyes away from the current telemedicine providers and competing with them in terms of keywords and backlinks. I need to be able to capture attention in some sort of way. I think we found our niche, and we are seeing growth and good reactions from it. It took awhile for us to get there.
How long have you been working on this company?
11 months. This is fresh! I’ve had the idea for a while, I had the idea back in 2019. Like I’ve said, the Carey School of Business had that competition last December. We really went forward with building the site about two weeks into December, but we’ve only been launched since the end of March. We are really starting to see people sign up for our site and seeing providers wanting to be a part of it. People are seeming to like what we are doing. I’m providing that Kayak.com, Expedia type of model but for telehealth [and in a pandemic].
Where did the name Sifter come from?
I’ll be frank, I was sick of sifting through the bull****! You go to google, I’ll do it right now, and type in “hair loss telemedicine”. I’m looking at 12 different companies [Oh, Sifter comes up!] on the front page. How are you, as a consumer, going to know what’s correct? If you go to my website, you can filter down to state, do they accept insurance, price threshold, over the counter versus prescription medicine, how fast is delivery, etc. That’s how I want it to go. I want people to be able to sift through all the options and select the one that’s right for them.
I also like cheeky one word titles.
Do you have any advice for students looking to make a start-up or get involved in entrepreneurship?
If you truly believe that something is missing, do a little research. If other people think it’s missing it’s probably a good idea! If there is a gap or a way to optimize something then there is probably a need for it. If you can improve the consumer experience, good things will follow.
Get involved while you’re still in school. Once you have a “grown up job” it becomes pretty hard. When you’re young you have time. I remember when I was in undergrad, but even as a graduate student, time feels like it doesn’t exist. However, when you get into the real world, time really doesn’t exist.
Also, networking. Another hurdle I was having is that when I was in pharmacy school, there weren’t any entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial resources there. I didn’t have a technical background, but I figured things out. My advice is to network and get to know as many people as you possibly can. And if you don’t know something, figure it out. Youtube is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my entire life. I eventually had someone hired to build our website, but our first MVP [It was horrible looking, you should have seen it] was something I figured out how to make. I knew how to talk to developers that I was hiring much better because I had sat down and tried to learn how to code and build UX sites.
That’s the one thing about entrepreneurship, try to figure it out. If you don’t know something, really dive into it and try to learn everything you possibly can.
Where do you see yourself and Sifter in 5 to 10 years?
I would love for Sifter to be bought, that would be pretty cool. I’m a little different from most people. The way the company is moving, I’m really not looking for VC money or funding. I don’t need to give away my shares, so why would I do that? I’m trying to actually bootstrap my company. It will take a while to pick up, and this could even technically stay as a side thing. It all depends on where our trajectory goes.
I’ve played everything by year my entire life, but I’m doing okay! The opportunities arise and I will take them. When it comes to looking for funding, Sifter is already making revenue. We aren’t profitable yet, but we are getting close, really close. For a company that’s only 11 months old, that’s pretty good!
It’s different to be able to see something scale up that I’ve built from grants. You don’t always need to go running for VC money, there’s also grants. Specifically for Hopkins students, the amount of medical grants and biomedical grants that are out there … Even right now, anything that has to do with COVID, there are millions of dollars of grants out there. I talked to someone the other day who built his entire company on grants. He owns 100% of his company and it’s now profitable. It’s really moving, he has nearly 40 employees… never took a dollar of investment. All because he focused on getting grants. VCs and angel investors, all these people, they’re not your only option. Always look for other options.
I think I skated away from your original question. Where do I see myself? Maybe on a beach somewhere, that would be pretty sweet.
I do believe that over time the site will grow. We have one competitor right now, but they’ve already backburnered their project because they have other priorities. I see myself evolving with the time and evolving to the needs of the patient. One thing we just launched is patient reviews. I don’t know about when you go on Amazon, but I’m looking at the reviews first. I’m not going to buy a Halloween costume if the size XL only fits a 12 year old. I want patients to be able to review their telemedicine experience; I want people to be able to see everything. Another thing we’re looking into is how to get discounts with telemedicine providers, how do we financially incentives patients to make the right choices. We’re really trying to adapt to the needs of the patient. On a weekly basis, I’m talking to people who use telemedicine and asking, “What would you like? What do you want to see? What were your issues with finding a telemedicine provider? What motivates you to choose one provider over another?” I’m constantly asking those questions. As the needs of the patients change, that will motivate the way Sifter changes.
Final thoughts?
Deep down, if you think you have a great idea, follow through with it. It used to burn me up inside, every night, thinking, “Oh, this thing could be so cool, it could make a lot of money, it could help people out.” The resources were at my fingertips, they were within the university I was going to. Johns Hopkins is really fostering that entrepreneurial community; they want to be the leaders in entrepreneurship. If you have ideas, see what’s available at your university. Go talk to counselors and departments. At Hopkins alone, there’s probably around seven different entrepreneurial organizations. Fast Forward U’s Spark Program was one of the coolest programs I went through. There’s also A-Level Capital, the student VC group. Even if you aren’t looking for VC funding, just go talk to people. See what options are out there before running for funding. If you feel like your idea is a great idea, run with it and figure things out.
Find Sifter Health here:
