A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:23:34 · Pablo Srugo
[00:23:34] S0: of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. You know, I wanted to get to that because I was trying to figure out like, where's the pull? Why is there so much pull here? And when you think about, there's the back office side, right? The labor that it takes. You're like, okay, I get it. There's a person doing that, maybe many people in a big organization, but like how much can that really cost, right? And then you spend a hundred K on something else. It's like, but once you start talking about revenue and revenue generation, I always find if you can have a real claim to more revenue, it's just so appealing. Every business wants to make more revenue, whereas not every business wants fewer costs. Like in theory, they do, but if it means firing someone, I don't know, right? It can mean all these implications that it's not, whereas we can give them more revenue, like it's a no brainer, right? By decreasing the delay, like from 90 to 60, you get somebody 30 more billable days. And you're talking about, let's say 10,000 a day, which is like obviously on the high end. That's 300K times the number of doctors. If it's on the low end, maybe it's 30K times the number of doctors. 10 doctors a month or back to 300K to $3 million that you're making from them every month. That is something that's hard to say no to, right? Whereas it's a lot easier to say, I know, you know what? Johnny's been working here for like five years. I don't want to fire Johnny. And like, you know, yeah, maybe Johnny could do it in half the time, but what's he going to do without the half time? Like whatever, you know, it just becomes a little bit more questionable. I don't know if that's true. That resonates. That's just my kind of on the outside looking in. I feel like reducing that delay and getting them more revenue feels like a pretty crazy ROI.
00:25:00 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:25:00] S1: Yeah. That argument works super well for one segment of our ICP. You'd be surprised actually for another segment of our ICP actually doesn't land at all. Interesting. Where they go, hey, look, we have enough providers where getting them in faster doesn't really matter that much for us. [00:25:16] S0: Because it doesn't translate to revenue. Correct. Okay. That makes sense. [00:25:19] S1: You want to be like very careful. Like this is one thing like we've pushed so heavily on our go-to-market team, which is like really, really, really understand like why a buyer would want a shirt, right? Like this revenue argument makes total sense, but they might come back and say like, look, we don't have enough patient demand as an example, right? So what we're doing is we're just pushing more of these patients to an existing provider. So even if it takes 30 more days, that's not a lot. [00:25:45] S0: We're not losing much. [00:25:45] S1: Correct. And then that just falls on its face. And you basically like blown that deal, right? [00:25:51] S0: And then why would they buy you though? If they don't need them to come in faster?
00:25:51 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:25:51] S0: And then why would they buy you though? If they don't need them to come in faster? [00:25:54] S1: What they come in then is like, hey, look, we're going to hire another 300 providers this year, right? Our current like onboarding team is like five people. They're coming and telling me that I have to hire four new people to hit these targets. I don't want to spend that much money in FTE costs. I don't want to grow my FTE team. I like the team that I have. I don't want it to grow. Can I scale on Assured with just those five people? Right? And typically our solution comes out to about a third of an FTE or your entire like FTE talent that you're allocating towards it. So if you're saying I need to go hire three more people to do it, pricing of Assured is probably just one person. So they're like, wait, if I can scale at just like one third of the cost, like I'm very open to it. And I think there's a lot of tailwinds in healthcare for cutting down costs. [00:26:41] S0: Do you find that they're talking about tailwind that people are already more kind of prone to looking for these sort of things because they feel like, man, I'm hearing so much about AI. I'm hearing so much about automation. Seems stupid for me to double my count to do this kind of manual like tasks. I should be looking for AI. Is that, do you find that that's a tailwind for you as well?
00:26:41 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:26:41] S0: Do you find that they're talking about tailwind that people are already more kind of prone to looking for these sort of things because they feel like, man, I'm hearing so much about AI. I'm hearing so much about automation. Seems stupid for me to double my count to do this kind of manual like tasks. I should be looking for AI. Is that, do you find that that's a tailwind for you as well? [00:27:01] S1: I think we've been super lucky. This wasn't intentional at all when we thought of building Assured as a business. But one of the things we realized early on and actually the first version of the product and the first version of the messaging that we put out, we didn't talk about AI at all. We were just like, hey, we'll help you like, you know, like get providers billable faster and like how we do it doesn't matter, right? Like, because we're going to be able to do it. When we started getting like prospects hopping, I recall being like, do you use AI? And I was like, why does that matter for you guys? And like, they're like, wouldn't it matter like a year ago? [00:27:31] S0: When is this, by the way? When you feel you're starting to get that stuff? [00:27:34] S1: This was like late 2024, mid to late 2024. [00:27:37] S0: Okay, so it's been a while. Okay. [00:27:39] S1: August, September of 2024 is when we were like, wait, people are like asking like these specific questions and I highly recommend by the way, all your sales calls like record it. Have Fireflies in there. Like obviously, you know, Fireflies app.
00:27:39 · Rahul Shivkumar, Pablo Srugo
[00:27:39] S1: August, September of 2024 is when we were like, wait, people are like asking like these specific questions and I highly recommend by the way, all your sales calls like record it. Have Fireflies in there. Like obviously, you know, Fireflies app. [00:27:52] S0: I don't know who's not doing that right now. I was crazy for you. [00:27:55] S1: It's a good repository of information, right? In isolated cases, it's hard to detect a pattern, right? We as an example, every week, I have a Grok bot that summarizes like our sales calls and it just spits out to me and the product team. These are things that customers are talking about. Existing customers and new customers, right? So one of the patterns that we saw there was like people kept asking, like, you know, how are you using AI under the hood? And another pattern they kept talking about was how they had actually deployed something like a bridge, right? Like a scribe, right? An AI scribe in their office and how patients loved it because the doctor was paying attention to them. They weren't taking notes. Doctors loved it because they didn't have to type and kind of look at their patients over their shoulder and talk to them. And the administration loved it because they didn't have to hire more human scribes. It was a lot cheaper. So they were like, we deployed that and we loved it and now we're just looking at other places we can deploy AI to bring costs down. So it's almost like a trend that you're seeing across. Yes. It's still happening today, by the way.
00:28:53 · Pablo Srugo, Rahul Shivkumar
[00:28:53] S0: Do you think that's growing still? Yes. You got to assume that every business owner, every business manager is getting pressure from themselves and from outside to guys, how are we leveraging that? What are we doing with it? Everyone's talking about ROI with AI. You know what I mean? And so they're just looking like, how can I bring AI into my business? And if you're somebody selling AI for a specific vertical, you get to basically ride that. And obviously, there's got to be real ROI behind it, but you're riding that tail when you're meeting customers where they are just by the fact that you're selling AI to health clinics. [00:29:23] S1: And one of the things that we've actually told our go-to-market team is ask the customer. Ask them, hey, where have you deployed AI so far and where have you seen ROI? And that actually starts the conversation off on such a positive note. Right? [00:29:37] S0: Yes, right. [00:29:37] S1: Hey, I did this and it works super well. And then you're kind of like, imagine if you do the same thing but in your back office for this workflow and like threading that needle of like, hey, like this is a value you can see from this when they've already seen value somewhere else is so much easier than starting from scratch. [00:29:53] S0: You got to find like the AI-pilled person in that org. Like just go find that person and they'll break through walls for you. [00:29:59] S1: Totally. And there are AI-pilled people even in super like, I'd say like, non-tech.