Your Medical Ally was a startup created by myself and former colleague and head of machine learning at PitchBook, Tyler Martinez. Tyler and I were brought together through adversity after we both experienced major health crises around the same time. Through our recovery process we emerged with a shared need to make it better for those like us who were dealing with major health issues. So we formed Your Medical Ally. Taking what we know how to do, define, design and bring new products to market (me) machine learning and software development (Tyler) we set out to create a platform that supports people through their healthcare crisis.
KEY OBJECTIVES
Take a desire to make a difference and turn it into a product people need and provides benefits
Determine market fit and profit model
Raise capital to build product beta
Design and deliver prototype
Establish Advisory Board and deep industry and venture capital relationships
Though we both had a desire to make managing a health crisis easier for people, before we could start, we first had to get real clear on the problems we wanted to tackle. In order to solve a problem you need to identify what it is first. We brainstormed all the problems we felt we may be able to help address. These problems became the guiding tenants for our long term product vision and helped us quickly eliminate any ideas that were outside these four areas.
These became our north star guiding us through the rest of the process. Those guiding principles were:
Good health should not mean financial ruin.
Making informed decisions about our care should not be hard.
There is wisdom to be found from our peers.
No one should have to face illness alone.
Armed with clarity around the problems we wanted to tackle, we then allowed ourselves to dream big. This meant imagining our ideal solution without constraints. This gave us our long term platform vision from which we could start building a framework around. The dream was lofty and if we tried building it all at once it would be overwhelming. To begin chose a single problem. How do we help people struggling with the financial burden of healthcare costs?
From here, we needed to validate the market need for a solution to this problem. We did this several ways.
Through research we learned that:
56 million adults are currently struggling with health-care-related bills
80-90% of all medical bills have billing errors
40% of all rejected insurance claims are actually covered by insurance
With the need established, we took our research and brainstormed a solution.
Before we committed ourselves to any solution, we needed to test if our proposed solution resonated with potential customers. To do this we created a website for our solution with a prominent CTA to contact us help. Next we placed a small Google Ad Buy. We followed up with everyone that reached out with an invitation to set up a time to talk.
From this experiment we learned several things:
The desire for our solution was real. Our ads had a click rate of almost 6%, this was a staggering 3X higher than the industry average. From that 6%, around 45% setup a time to talk. These were very exciting results.
Gained direct insight into the most common issues - Through our calls with people we were able to hear first hand about the issues they were facing regarding their medical bills. These conversations allowed us to develop our personas, user journeys and opportunity maps. These further helped us hone in on the most common issues people faced. We created personas and corresponding opportunity maps to better refine ad align our solutions and identify adoption barriers and optimal engagement points.
Learned how problems are currently solved and forged partnerships. Aware that the folks reaching out to us were in crisis and that we weren’t able to help them yet, we wanted to find someone who could. Through the non-profit Patient Advocate Foundation we found an amazing partner. We were able to refer people to the foundation for further support and were also able to learn from the foundation as well. The partnership was so successful that they agreed to pilot the Beta of our product when it was ready.
With the problems defined, the dream in place and equipped with enough knowledge to move forward, it was time to get down to the product. We gave ourselves 3 months to build a working prototype we would use to secure funding for the product Beta. To achieve this timeline I needed to be ruthless about prioritizing and keeping us focused. I did by creating a priority funnel as follows:
Beta MVP - Absolute MVP features and user workflows for product beta
Prototype MVP - Single critical end to end workflow where we can demonstrate the most value to potential investors
Mini Sprints - Series of small technical/development experiments that can be completed and we can learn from in a single week
Non- Development tasks - Prioritized and and created a delivery roadmap for the rest of the non-development work. This was reviewed in the same weekly sprint review as the team was small.
Deliver - Stay focused and reevaluate next steps after each mini sprint based on what we discovered.
At the end of the process we met all the goals we set out to achieve and on time. We successfully:
Secured funding to build our product beta from an incubator firm
Delivered a working product prototype on time and were even able to add in a few more use cases than originally scoped
Established a cross-disciplinary Board of Advisors from in and outside healthcare
Partnered and developed strong relationships with industry organizations