A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:21:46 · Wardah Inam
[00:21:46] S0: The first institutional check that was written by E14 fund, so MIT’s fund, I think they took a chance on us, so it took a chance on me. I think that was very crucial in starting to make it into a real company. Before that, I think of it as more of a project that was happening. That was one thing that happened, as well as we got space in at Harvard Innovation Labs. We had a space and we had an institutional investor behind us, and then it was literally traction. We had to prove that this works. We had to get customers. On one side, we were trying to figure out how do we commercialize this technology, which can have so much impact. We found that insurance companies had the biggest need and urgent need in terms of – they were reviewing a lot of claims manually, and they were making the same decisions that dentists were making, so they had hired a team of dentists who were looking at this data manually and making these decisions. We knew that we could help solve some of the – at least automate all the administrative tasks that they were doing, checking for completeness of a claim, checking for, is this the right x-ray, the data, et cetera? Then we could actually start to look at helping them in clinical aspects of it as well, so medical necessity. We started observing that, trying to figure out what that would look like. At that time, I think from the investor’s belief was insurance is very slow, so you guys are going to die before you get a contract there. Now, I understand it. I now understand how slow they are. But at that time, I think naivety helped us a little because I said, seemed like they’re moving. It seems like there’s a need, so we started actually pursuing that. I would say once we built enough that we could show a demo, we were able to get insurance companies. Then by the time, you mentioned the seed route, we had signed Guardian and Delta Dental. These are large insurance companies.
00:23:52 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:23:52] S1: Why do you think insurance companies were the better first customers than dentists themselves? [00:23:58] S0: For dentists, we needed FDA clearance, and that itself is a longer process. We started the FDA process while we needed actual customers to get the funding, to build what we needed to build. [00:24:12] S1: Perfect. That makes sense. We’ll stop it there. We’ll end on the two questions that we always end on. The first one is, when did you feel like you had true product market fit?
00:24:12 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:24:12] S1: Perfect. That makes sense. We’ll stop it there. We’ll end on the two questions that we always end on. The first one is, when did you feel like you had true product market fit? [00:24:22] S0: For me, I started feeling that this was real when we started signing these insurance companies. The way it worked was we actually got these two insurance companies that we piloted in. We showed that it actually works and it could work. After that, there was this inbound from a lot of other insurance companies doing RFPs to see if this works. We basically won every RFP that we participated in. That hadn’t translated into revenue yet, but for us, it was like, okay, this is real. This is going to be huge, and this is going to have a huge impact, and the customers were seeing it. If you actually talk to even a customer right now, they see the same thing that they were seeing at that day. This is magical. People jaws were dropping when they were seeing our demos, and I think it’s harder to – revenue came in later, but I think that earlier, the demos were – when we actually do our demo, I would say, one out of three would get a wow. Then after that, when people would actually deploy it, mostly they would say, oh, the results were much better than we even imagined in the beginning. I think that’s where, for me, it started. [00:25:35] S1: What was the number one RI for these insurance companies? Was it not, let’s say being able to deny some claims, or was it just efficiency and just having fewer people on staff reviewing claims as they came in?
00:25:47 · Wardah Inam
[00:25:47] S0: I the same problem that we were facing or I faced was you show data to two different dentists. They’re going to say different things. How do you know what is right? Now, what you don’t want is a dentist on the other side saying, I don’t think this is what it is. Then they’re going back and forth with each other, and then now bringing in – and these are visualizations that come into play. There’s quantification that we add into this data. Now, two people can at least have the same rulers. They can have the same information, and then they can actually talk to each other and be on the same page. I think that is what really changed in dentistry. I think for these insurance companies as well, that translated into higher consistency in decision-making. Now, the amount of training that they had to do of all these people – and then people could spend time on the real things rather than spending time on things that were super easy. Everybody knows, as I mentioned it as like administrative tasks. Anybody can do that, and getting that out of the mix as well, and making sure that then they’re spending time on the right things. They’re focused on the right problems. Then even for the reviewers who were using this technology, some of it got fully automated, and that was great. These were all the sets, so now you’re making faster decisions, so it’s better for the provider. The ROI was pretty high in terms of financially, but also quality-wise, and provider experience-wise. It was a game-changer in how they were actually operating.
00:27:23 · Pablo Srugo, Wardah Inam
[00:27:23] S1: Last question, if you could go back to 2018 when you were just starting this company with one piece of advice for yourself based on what you’ve learned over the last six years, what might that be? [00:27:33] S0: For me, what I learned over time was that speed is probably the most important thing in a startup. Inherently, I am very impatient, want to do things fast. That’s something that I have, but I’ve always thought of it as almost a negative in me. I’ve always been like, oh, I’m very impatient. I’ll use the word impatient rather than like, oh, I need to go fast. There are things that I realized a little later in my career that they were actually the positives and I need to actually instill the same culture in the company rather than saying, hey, this is the negative, and I need to slow down, and I need to do things a certain way. I think that’s something that I would change if going back. [00:28:22] S1: Perfect. We’ll stop it there. Wardah, thank you so much for spending the time. [00:28:25] S0: Awesome. Thank you, Pablo. Thank you so much for speaking with me.
00:28:25 · Wardah Inam, Pablo Srugo
[00:28:25] S0: Awesome. Thank you, Pablo. Thank you so much for speaking with me. [00:28:30] S1: I just gave you content that you liked so much. You actually listened to the end. Guess what, you didn’t pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn’t even put any ads in your face, so you just got a bunch of content for free. Now that I’ve delivered that value, I’m asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple Podcast, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button. It’s actually going to help you because it’s going to help you make sure you don’t miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.