A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:16:37 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:16:37] S0: And so maybe related to that, like, when you do decide to launch in March 24, or is that when you launched or is that when you started working on this? [00:16:44] S1: We were working on it lightly through kind of, like, I'd say, like, late 23, like, winter break, like, November, December, like, the holidays we were working on it. And then our first couple of customers committed in January were like, okay, let's sprint. And then I think March is when we, like, incorporate it officially and we had, like, the first build of the product. [00:17:02] S0: And those customers were customers you had before from Dawn? Like, you knew them? [00:17:06] S1: They were friends that we met through Dawn. They were building similar types of businesses to Dawn. Yeah.
00:17:06 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:17:06] S1: They were friends that we met through Dawn. They were building similar types of businesses to Dawn. Yeah. [00:17:10] S0: I think that's one of the advantages of, we talk a lot about, you know, moats these days, right? And we think a lot of it obviously is BTs and it's like, one of the big ones is domain expertise has always been one, right? But when anybody can build anything, distribution just kind of jumps up, I think, in terms of importance and that's just one, it's a small example, but it's, why do you get customers faster? Why do you get more customers than the next person who has, the next company I should say, that has a similar product, right? Well, if you're from the space and you can get, people will trust you and you have built-in credibility, then it just helps you, right? Get those customers before you even have anything which helps you iterate faster, which helps you get the next feature faster, which helps you get the best product and now it's like, okay, I have the best product and the best distribution and it just becomes this execution mode more than anything more fundamental. [00:17:53] S1: Totally. I think distribution has always been king. I think that's like more so true now than ever,
00:17:53 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:17:53] S1: Totally. I think distribution has always been king. I think that's like more so true now than ever, [00:18:00] S0: tell me a bit about V1. Like, how do you scope it out? Because you said yourself, this can't work 80% of the way and I agree, by the way, like building with, as we all do with quad code these days, you know, the thing you get at first is so easy to get but the thing that is production grade, whether that's production to customers or production as an internal tool, that's where you spend most of the time but at the same time, you need to get something out fast, right? So how do you scope it so that you give something that is 100% even though maybe it doesn't do everything?
00:18:24 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:18:24] S1: I think for us, we focus a lot on human in the loop to close some of these workflows, accuracy on workflow X, right? Let's have a human on our team or on our customer's team depending on the model in which we work with them, like check that off before the work actually went out and any changes that were required kind of went back to us in two forms. One, feedback for the engineering team and then also feedback for the kind of like agent itself to like improve, right? So I think human in the loop is very underrated, right? Like I think YC had this old thing which was like, hey, initially your backend can just really be people, right? Like where the fulfillment and things like that are actually being done by people and then you figure out ways to automate it. I think we're lucky today where some of the tooling has gotten significantly better that the first version of your product can look like something like 60% done by AI and then 40% done by people, right? And then you're trying to like narrow that gap of like how can I go to 80, 20? How can I go to 90, 10? Like how can I keep the reliability really high while increasing that like ratio? But I think human in the loop is very, very underrated. [00:19:30] S0: So even your V1 actually was able to deliver onboard doctors very fast at 100% accuracy rate. The only drawback was you had to put humans in the loop to kind of make some of this thing work.
00:19:30 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:19:30] S0: So even your V1 actually was able to deliver onboard doctors very fast at 100% accuracy rate. The only drawback was you had to put humans in the loop to kind of make some of this thing work. [00:19:41] S1: Correct. So maybe our margin structure looked different than it does today, right? Or the way to scale was harder back than it is today because again, there is a balker of a human needing to sign off on some of the workflows and maybe it wasn't as faster as it is today but that accuracy thing is something we had to guarantee, right? Like if it wasn't as close to 100% as possible, no one wanted it, right? They're like, you could give it to me super fast, super cheap but if it's only 80% accurate, we don't want it. [00:20:05] S0: How many doctors do you need to be hiring for this to even be a problem for you? [00:20:10] S1: Yeah. So it's not just doctors, right? It could be therapists, it could be dieticians, it could be physical therapists. [00:20:16] S0: Any health practitioner. [00:20:17] S1: Exactly. So the spectrum kind of gets really large and post-COVID there's this trend of providers working at multiple practices, right? Like working in a 1099 capacity across four practices, five practices. So you actually see people, even if Practice X has 100 providers, for them to stay at 100 from one year to the next, they've probably had 15 people leave and they've added 15 people, right? So there's always consistent turnover just to stay at the current level.
00:20:17 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:20:17] S1: Exactly. So the spectrum kind of gets really large and post-COVID there's this trend of providers working at multiple practices, right? Like working in a 1099 capacity across four practices, five practices. So you actually see people, even if Practice X has 100 providers, for them to stay at 100 from one year to the next, they've probably had 15 people leave and they've added 15 people, right? So there's always consistent turnover just to stay at the current level. [00:20:46] S0: Is that that big of a deal? That's like one a month, like whatever. Somebody does it, takes an hour or two, you know, big deal. Or is it worse than that, more painful than that? [00:20:53] S1: It usually ends up being more, right? So I think it depends on kind of the type of group. So if it's a group where each provider actually has to be licensed in multiple states, right? They're seeing patients over telehealth for 30 states. And in each of those states, they have to work with four insurance companies. That becomes, for every provider I hire, there's actually 120 insurance workflows that I have to kick off, right? That can suddenly start stacking up a lot. Like even if I hire two providers a month, it might be 250. And then I need one full-time person just doing that, right? So it can like quickly stack up depending on the way the organization works. [00:21:28] S0: Walk me through, like actually, if you don't mind going deeper on that, like the ROI of it, right? So like if somebody spends, what's your ACV today? Let's say it's 100K? Is it more?