A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:01:13 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:01:13] S1: Great to be here. [00:01:14] S0: So you're the founder of Assured Health. Started a couple of years ago. Just raised a $19 million Series A by Insight earlier this summer in July. We're going to jump into the episode, but just really quickly, like what's the simplest way of thinking about what you do? Like what's a simple example that everybody will understand? [00:01:30] S1: Yeah, we help healthcare organizations hire new providers as quickly as possible and get them to seeing patients as quickly as possible. [00:01:40] S0: And you do that how exactly? [00:01:41] S1: There's a set of very complicated functions that happen. The second and offer letter is sent to a provider. They have to go through a background check, a specialized background check called credentialing. They then have to get paneled with insurance companies. So when they see a patient, the organization is able to actually file claims and collect money on. And all of these things, each individually are separate processes for each of the insurance companies. So it can get very complicated very quickly. We automate a bunch of these operations using AI agents. So under the hood, agents are verifying information in real time, packaging that up, sending that over to insurance companies, following up with them, making sure that you get the quickest effective date possible.
00:01:41 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:01:41] S1: There's a set of very complicated functions that happen. The second and offer letter is sent to a provider. They have to go through a background check, a specialized background check called credentialing. They then have to get paneled with insurance companies. So when they see a patient, the organization is able to actually file claims and collect money on. And all of these things, each individually are separate processes for each of the insurance companies. So it can get very complicated very quickly. We automate a bunch of these operations using AI agents. So under the hood, agents are verifying information in real time, packaging that up, sending that over to insurance companies, following up with them, making sure that you get the quickest effective date possible. [00:02:21] S0: Got you. So the simplest way of thinking about it, like you're a hospital, you're hiring a bunch of doctors. You want those doctors to be able to start work as soon as possible and bill patients. All of that used to be a bunch of manual stuff. Now you have AI agents who do it for them. Exactly. Tell me for you, when was the moment when you felt like things were working finally? Like when was that kind of product market fit moment?
00:02:21 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:02:21] S0: Got you. So the simplest way of thinking about it, like you're a hospital, you're hiring a bunch of doctors. You want those doctors to be able to start work as soon as possible and bill patients. All of that used to be a bunch of manual stuff. Now you have AI agents who do it for them. Exactly. Tell me for you, when was the moment when you felt like things were working finally? Like when was that kind of product market fit moment? [00:02:40] S1: There was a week where my co-founder and I had four new customers coming on and we realized we just couldn't onboard them ourselves. We had to make our first kind of customer success hire to handle onboarding a new customer, deploying some of our technology and then supporting them. Like it was a breaking point for us as the founders and I think the light bulb went off being like, wait, this is actually working now. [00:03:05] S0: How big, like four customers might be a lot, might be a little, like what kind of ACVs are you talking about? [00:03:09] S1: Yeah, our ACVs at that time were probably around like $60,000 or so. They've gone up substantially since then, but back then it was a pretty big deal. It was the first, I think, five months of the company, four months of the company I think is when it happened. Yeah.
00:03:09 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:09] S1: Yeah, our ACVs at that time were probably around like $60,000 or so. They've gone up substantially since then, but back then it was a pretty big deal. It was the first, I think, five months of the company, four months of the company I think is when it happened. Yeah. [00:03:23] S0: So, I mean, the simple way of thinking that is, I mean, you know, 50K deals, not massive enterprise, but it's still going to require, especially because you're probably underpricing. So it's probably going to still require like a decent amount of handholding in terms of onboarding and support and you were at the point where you had so much demand. It wasn't a matter of getting demand. Like you just couldn't meet the demand that was right there in front of you. [00:03:41] S1: Exactly. A lot of the workflows that we were solving then and that we still are solving today are on a forward deployed motion, right? So we have templates of what some of these agents look like, but a lot of our customers work with insurance companies in very unique ways and our agents are kind of built to be reasonably unique in handling any edge cases that a particular customer has. So this is early days where we did have a lot of templates. Some of these agents had to be built by scratch for each of these customers and deployments did take quite a bit of time. So four coming in in one week does take up a lot of bandwidth. Yeah.
00:04:18 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:04:18] S0: I mean, it's a classic, like it's literally the classic definition, right, of product market fit, which is when there's so much pull, the problem isn't getting growth. It's actually just servicing the growth and making it happen. We're going to talk about all that, by the way. Like we're going to talk about everybody's talking about forward deployed engineer, but we're going to talk about how you're doing it. And at the end, we'll talk about two pieces. One is the BDR motion and how you set up your BDRs. You never went all in on kind of the AI BDR, which was, I think, a bit of a hype cycle kind of came and went. Maybe we'll come back, by the way, once we have like Fable 6 or whatever it's going to be. But you decide not to go that way. You made it work. We're going to talk about like real numbers, conversions, quotas, all those sort of things. And then the AI sales tactics, like the tactics you're using today to close customers, to increase urgency and how you're doing like the forward deploy motion and onboarding, which at a high level everybody understands. But, you know, when you want to bring it to practice, the same playbook is not going to work for everybody. So take me back. That's the moment you said that was like five months, that product market fit moment, five months into your journey? [00:05:12] S1: Yeah, it was about five months into our journey. Yep. [00:05:14] S0: And when exactly did you start Assured? [00:05:16] S1: We started Assured in early 2024. So I think it was March of 2024.
00:05:16 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:05:16] S1: We started Assured in early 2024. So I think it was March of 2024. [00:05:20] S0: What were you doing before you started? Like, you know, maybe give me a little bit of your background, especially like right before you started Assured, what was going on in your life? [00:05:28] S1: My co-founder and I actually, we've known each other for years. We went to college together, but we did a business before Assured called Dawn Health. So Weaver, what I would describe as maybe the perfect Assured customer. So Weaver, a virtual sleep treatment center. So we were helping folks with insomnia, get off of sleeping pills and sleep better. And what our company looked like on the back end was really a telehealth clinic. So we hired providers full time. We had to get them kind of paneled by insurance companies. And about 99% of our revenue was either Medicare or commercial like insurance. So our business model was getting paid out by these insurance companies and making sure that you could hire providers on time, that their start dates were actually tied properly with being able to bill insurance was extremely important. So we had faced the problem firsthand and we exited that business. [00:06:20] S0: What kind of an exit was this by the way? Like a big, big success exit? Kind of like things didn't work out? So tuck in, somewhere in between?