In this engaging and informative podcast, hosts Mike Pattengale and Jennifer Jones chat with Alex Frommeyer, the co-founder and CEO of Beam Benefits. Alex shares his journey from being an engineer to founding Beam, a digitally native employee benefits company that's transforming dental insurance and more.
Key takeaways:
The next time you brush your teeth, remember that you can make dental health more fun and rewarding with Beam!
Catch the full conversation.
Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players.
Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at podcast@springbuk.com.
Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!
Produced by David Pittman
Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside
In this engaging and informative podcast, hosts Mike Pattengale and Jennifer Jones chat with Alex Frommeyer, the co-founder and CEO of Beam Benefits. Alex shares his journey from being an engineer to founding Beam, a digitally native employee benefits company that's transforming dental insurance and more.
Key takeaways:
The next time you brush your teeth, remember that you can make dental health more fun and rewarding with Beam!
Catch the full conversation.
Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other popular podcast players.
Have feedback, questions, or suggestions for show ideas? Send them to us at podcast@springbuk.com.
Please rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform, and share it with your friends and colleagues. We appreciate you and thank you for listening!
Produced by David Pittman
Theme music: "Overboard" by Stay Outside
Most kids, and my former college roommates, don't like brushing their teeth or going to the dentist. Today we're going to talk with a man who's trying to make the brushing process a little more fun for kids and adults, while also innovating a variety of health and insurance benefits for employees and employers. I'm Mike Pattengale, Mid Market Practice Leader here at Springbuk, the leading U. S. health intelligence and analytics platform.
Jennifer:And I'm Jennifer Jones, Enterprise Practice Leader at Springbuk. And our guest today is Alex Frommeyer, the co-founder w and CEO of Beam Benefits, a digitally native employee benefits company that provides the industry's most innovative dental insurance product. Beam combines an easy-to-use online insurance platform, AI-powered underwriting, and the connected Beam toothbrush for better overall wellness. Beam has raised over 170 million in VC funding, and also offers vision insurance and group and life disability coverage for employers of all sizes. Beam is available in over 44 states around the US and is accepted at over 400, 000 access points nationwide. Alex, welcome to the show!
Alex:Hey, great to be here. And thanks for the kind introduction.
Jennifer:You bet! So we'll just go ahead and start right in. In your marketing materials, Bean Benefits is called a quote, digitally native employee benefits company. Tell us a little bit about what that means.
Alex:Yeah the I think one of our biggest observations, my two co founders and I, when we first started beam was that the employee benefits industry and really insurance as an industry more broadly, was being clearly built and backing into digital infrastructure. Many of these digital transformations are still ongoing at many large incumbent carriers still today. And it was really striking to us as total outsiders to the industry, my co founders and I are engineers. And so to us, the digital infrastructure thing was obvious. But as we learned more about how the nature of the insurance industry had been built and how benefits were operating at the time and still largely today, It really opened us up to a pretty simple but important insight, which was that the lack of digital infrastructure was holding back dozens of other topic areas that couldn't be improved upon until there was connectivity and interoperability to a degree that just didn't exist. And so still today, when we articulate one of our strongest rights to win, In the market, it's really just about being a native digital company, which from day one has allowed Beam to be more flexible, nimble, and more interoperable than really any other carrier that we compete against.
Mike:That's that's interesting. And I think just from the Springbuck lens, I think a lot of times just being tech or digital first, it allows us to be a little bit more flexible. I would say innovative and nimble to solve problems. Whereas I think long standing there there have been key players in this industry for decades and decades longer than any of us have been alive. So being able to use some of those key differences that have come in the last 20 years or so. I think leveraging the digital aspect or technology is is an awesome way to differentiate yourself. Kind of playing off of Jen's question so you had mentioned you and your co founders have engineering backgrounds. I think I saw you had studied that at University of Louisville. I'm curious, how do you go from that to come up with this idea of creating Bean?
Alex:The short answer is, we have no idea, and we totally backed into it. Yeah.
Jennifer:like it.
Alex:Like, many great companies, they start out either somewhat different than they end up, or sometimes completely different than they end up. Good examples today include companies like Slack, which started as a gaming company, and then they built a communications tool for the gaming company, and then they realized later that actually the game was failing, but the... The communications tool was awesome, and then they built that out and called it Slack. And there's dozens of other examples, I think, of companies that have similar sorts of stories. For us, as engineers and hardware engineers at that, like mechanical and electrical engineers, not even software founders explicitly early on, we were really excited about The intersection of healthcare and technology before there was even a thing called digital health. This is 2010 through 2012 when we were working on our first business together, what ultimately leads to Beam that we founded in 2012. And at the time, there was a few emergent categories of innovation that we thought were just spectacularly interesting. One was cloud computing and cloud infrastructure. Another was what later get, becomes the internet of things, but connected hardware Bluetooth cheaper, better Bluetooth radios had just been launched and sensor costs were declining really quickly. So that was leading to the emergence of companies like Nest thermostats Fitbit gets built right around that time. The, it turns out that a lot of the, probably. The unanticipated consequences of the smartphone revolution ended up having all these tertiary third order impacts. One of these is that the proliferation of mobile devices meant that a lot of the components that were going into smartphones that were being purchased and bought in the hundreds of millions of units by that point, they were creating these really interesting declining cost curves for other sorts of electronics products. And so we ended up building the initial vision for Beam, which was creating the first connected toothbrush. And the real goal of that product and the data infrastructure we built around it was to impact how how to first of all bring online a previously unknown, Behavioral component that contributes to health care, especially dental health care, which is your, the preventative component of your health care. Are you brushing your teeth every day? To what degree? How well? And how is all of that contributing to your long term dental health? This is very similar to the approach Fitbit was taking, which was essentially, if I can quantify how many steps you're taking in a day, over a long enough period of time, can I better predict your propensity for all sorts of other, for health issues or health value. And that sort of opportunity existed in dentistry at the time. So we built the Beam Brush, which was the first connected toothbrush back in 2012, and really started a whole new category of consumer packaged goods. Which has, I think, been one of the interesting impacts that our business had early on, even though we ended up morphing the business into one of the first insurtech companies a few years later. And that transition for us was really fascinating because with the toothbrush, we sensed that there was an opportunity to use that data for the purposes of underwriting, but we didn't know anything about insurance at all. Again, we were just engineers and at that point our entire careers had been engineering school and then building Internet of Things products. So we knew a decent amount about custom electronics mobile app development, manufacturing. And we knew nothing about actuarial science, underwriting I didn't know what a broker was. I'm not even sure I knew what a deductible was,
Mike:yeah.
Alex:I was in my mid twenties, I was still on my parents health plan. I don't think I'd ever even bought insurance at the time. There's just complexity to making that transition, but it was one that we were instinctually following these observations that we had as we learned more about The shortcomings and the lack of digital infrastructure that existed in major insurance companies at the time.
Mike:Thinking through like the just hearing your story and everything, it seems like there are probably a lot of problems you all could have solved. I'm curious when you, how you narrowed it down to what, what started as a toothbrush and then became dental insurance and everything. you hate going to the dentist as a kid or did you have a dentist in the family?
Alex:Dentists in the family. My sister is a dentist. She married a dentist. His brothers and his dad were all dentists. One of my founders, his mom was a dental hygienist. I have a couple aunts and uncles that are also hygienists and dentists as well. So yes, early on a lot of influences in the dental field. My co founders and I had actually started a consulting or services company before we started BEAM when we were still undergrads at Louisville. And there also happens to be a dental manufacturing company based in Louisville, Kentucky, like literally a hundred yards away from the engineering school. And they were one of our clients early on. So we had all these reasons to just care about the dental field. And because of that kind of broader observation that You know, there was a lot happening in healthcare that later becomes the digital health movement. A lot of that was started by the Affordable Care Act passing just a couple years prior to that, 2009, 2010. If you remember when the Affordable Care Act rolled out, it was like the website crashed and all this stuff. That was happening like as we were getting into that first business. And so it was very obvious that there was a healthcare problem to solve that wasn't just... training, better doctors are coming up with some miracle drug. There was digital infrastructure, like the website was crashing. Nobody could shop for health insurance. There were problems that just felt very familiar to us that we thought we could impact. And that became an inspiration for us broadly. And then we refined that thesis into one that was more dentistry focused because just pragmatically speaking, we saw the opportunity to impact health care in an area of health care that was both a large market on its own, but one that almost no one was paying attention to at the time.
Jennifer:That's really interesting. And as you mentioned going back to 2012, when you all are founded, being the first digital type of company in this huge dental 75 billion. What, were, how were you received? And what type of shakeup did you all cause?
Alex:I think we were, I think of as a reflecting on it now, I think we were actually received better than most innovators of our type in our industry. And I think there's a couple reasons for it. One is dentistry itself and dental insurance as an extension of that. is a pretty small industry, or at least it treats itself that way. It treats itself as a cottage industry. It's small. It's pretty tight knit. There's a lot of collaboration. It's, I certainly wouldn't describe it as cutthroat by nature. And, I think forces like that meant that we were... An oddity. Who are these engineers, know, coming into our that sort of thing. I think we were a curiosity of the industry, but generally speaking the sentiment we always heard was Hey, it's actually really cool that of all the interesting problems that you could be tackling that you're like interested in our little slice of the world there was, it was of charming, I think in a way. And and then further the One of the hottest startups in the world at the time, as I'm sure you guys remember, regardless of industry, was Zenefits. This is 2015, 16, 17 time period when we first introduced our dental insurance product. And we were one of the first InsureTechs. Oscar existed, and Clover Health, and I think a handful of others, but definitely on the earlier end of InsureTech. And Zenefits was already blowing up. But they had taken a decidedly anti broker approach at the time to their distribution strategy. Which I think made a lot of sense for their company, but it definitely offended the brokers in the industry. And Beam, when we came out, we were very pro broker. And I think that helped juxtapose What otherwise could have been in association with this anti broker the tech companies coming to take all your jobs sort of
Jennifer:Mm hmm.
Alex:but instead be one which is no, we want to innovate and impact the industry and solve problems. And we want to do it in a collaborative
Jennifer:That's, you make so many good points there and I think, one, it's interesting to hear that you mention dentistry as a whole is not necessarily like a cut throat type of healthcare area. And I mean I guess in comparison when you look at like medical care versus dental care, every time I go to the dentist there's some new thing they have there. Much more of them are using Laser treatments for different, there's just new x ray machines. There's just newer Innovative type of products whereas I take my kids to the pediatrician yesterday and they can't scan in a picture of my insurance card They have to have the physical cop like it's those little things. So it's I mean, that's just very interesting but to your point as far as the curiosity that they had around your product as opposed to Stonewalling you kind of out of out of the industry is is good to hear And knowing, obviously, you started with dental insurance, and as we mentioned in the intro, you've expanded that into vision, life, disability, some supplemental health care coverage. What are some of the successes and challenges you've experienced through that multi phased expansion?
Alex:Such a good one. And you're right, by the way, on dentistry. Dentists have classically been small business. Owners themselves, very entrepreneurial by nature. So they, unlike doctors, who are often, especially today, associated with these huge health systems that they have no control over, dentists can go, they can try stuff, right? They can try a, a digital x ray machine when they first came out. They can try a clear aligners partnership. They can try this new software system much more flexibly than their medical counterparts. So dentistry's always had a little bit of that entrepreneurial spirit in it on a relative basis. We probably learned a lot of that, too, or took a lot of those lessons into our work. About 18 months ago, we started hearing more and more feedback from our growing customer base and our book of brokers that they loved what we had brought to the industry with our dental products so much, but there was this problem, and the problem is brokers love to bundle. Employee benefits products together with one carrier, ideally, and we had heard that feedback before, but it started, I think, becoming a more legitimate business strategy because of all of the infrastructure foundationally that we had laid at that point as a business. So we recast the company about a year ago. as Beam Benefits, where previously we had been known as Beam Dental up until that point. And with it, we really meaningfully expanded our product catalog. We had already added a Vision product a few years ago, so that was already in place, so we were doing more than just dental already, but still our identity was very dental centric. And over the past year, 18 months, we've added a half a dozen products, life insurance, short and long term disability. And supplemental health coverage as well and more on the way as we climb through time. But that high velocity of product introductions has also come with an identity change from Beam Dental to Beam Benefits. And really, in many ways, telling a story around how we're more comprehensively solving the benefits problem for especially small and medium sized businesses around the country. It's a segment of the market or a customer that we really Ourselves resonate with having started a company ourselves not that long ago and in my living room in Kentucky and I think if I had to have a customer, I would wish that customer to be one that has meaningful problems to solve and embodies everything about, Entrepreneurship and, and American dream and small businesses are perfect for that. So it's like a very awesome customer to have, and we're very proud to support small businesses in the way that we do.
Mike:that's great. I, I know you had mentioned before just some of the underwriting aspects of what you all do. Could you share more about Beam's AI powered underwriting for our listeners?
Alex:Yeah, we can, we can do the non academic version of it to, to spare you all what would be a terrible go of it. But we have built from the ground up our own actuarial models. It's one of the things, just at a very first principles level, when we were expanding from the toothbrush originally into the insurance company. Again, remember, we knew nothing about insurance at the time, so we were having all of these really, in retrospect, really interesting philosophical discussions about what a world class insurance company should do. Lots of build by partner sorts of discussions back then. But early on, we developed a belief that we should Own the actuarial and underwriting experience and it should probably be significantly better than anything else in the industry because what good are you as an insurance business if you don't have the ability to select risk really effectively and that insight led us very early on to invest in A, if I ultimately find this phenomenal actuary, Johnny, who's been with us for, for the entire journey at this point. Invest really early in this like very unique, very creative actuary actuary human and a very unique actuarial strategy. And that strategy really amounted to this vision that Johnny had to. Automate large portions of what was done by a human underwriter at the time to create scalability in the quoting systems, which in and of itself was operational leverage, which is awesome, but it wasn't just that. And the real magic of the system that we've created is that there's operational leverage, speed, less human variability from underwriter to underwriter, that sort of thing. But beyond that. It's really this big graph of data that we are using to take our aggregate experience data as a business from all of our customers, all of our members, all the claims that are filed, all of the prices that we're offering in all these different geographies, plan designs, taking all of that and smashing it together into a model that allows us to price. One customer, one member, one plan design, one specific piece of business in a very, very precise way. So we're basically leveraging our entire customer base's worth of learnings, and then using it to make the most accurate prediction possible about claims consumption. And of course, as we get more of that data, the model grows and grows and grows, and we get more and more predictable and more and more precise over time. And so what we've been able to demonstrate through that process, machine learning is really the core of that, that approach. We can demonstrate incredible precision relative to anyone else in the industry, especially on small businesses, which are classically thought to be very difficult to underwrite because of the volatility that comes with being small. And we have sussed out. That volatility and turned it into something just as predictable as a larger, more market average underwriting approach. And that distinction allows us to be by far the best and most effective underwriter of employee benefits products in the small business space. Really aligning ourselves to what our customers need. And so for most of our customers, they will either see. lower prices than market average, or they will see, certainly, no matter what, more accurate prices than the rest of the industry. And that accuracy means that we can set their expectations and meet them. So you're not going to get these renewals where the renewals a 20 percentage point increase. And the reason why we don't need to do that is because we were more accurate than to be 20% off, necessitating the big renewal.
Mike:Yeah, and we love any answer or passion that revolves around data, especially in this industry. It's, it's great to hear how your team's using data from an underwriting standpoint, from a pricing and kind of predictability standpoint. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how beam is using data to help people actually improve their health.
Alex:We built the industry's first and only dental wellness program early on. The brush was the inspiration for it for sure. That physical piece of, of hardware that you engage with multiple times a day. It really created the the Fitbit equivalent of a daily dental hygiene usable product. And that innovation that kicked off the business, we wanted to turn into something more than just A data collection mechanism for underwriting purposes. So we essentially gamified it. Today when you brush your teeth with a beam brush, you are accruing points. Those, those points, or bucks, accumulate in your mobile experience. When you log in to your mobile app, you're gonna see the points that you've accumulated, which you can then redeem. And you can redeem for other Beam products, like replacement heads for the brush itself, for example. Toothpaste, floss, that sort of thing. Or you can redeem those points for gift cards to popular retailers and others. And so that sort of wellness program, which comes with it some education and awards and milestone achievement sorts of things. That wellness program in aggregate is both, I think simple in that it's pretty easy to understand, right? Brush your teeth, get points points turn into cool stuff. It's, it's pretty streamlined and, and direct in that way. It can be engaged with in a very passive way. This was something that, again, from a first principles perspective, we thought was really important early on. A lot of these programs like diet and exercise programs. That a health insurance company would, would put in front of their members require an awful lot of active effort and sustained over a long period of time as well. And so we thought engaging our customers to play a passive game with us, which is brushing your teeth every day. You don't have to worry about uploading data. You don't have to worry about losing brush events. Like it just runs itself in the background. We thought that would be a really compelling way to engage our customers in a way that's just very difficult to replicate otherwise. And it's served for eight, eight plus years now as not only a differentiator for our company, but also a symbol of the innovation that we're doing across many different parts of our product and tech ecosystem. You spoke to this earlier and, and Springbuck's expertise in all things data analytics I think is a great proxy for this. We're trying to create uniquely great customer experiences for all of our stakeholders in many different moments of the customer journey. But the most memorable thing we do around the brush and the wellness program is symbolically representative of all those other things that we do as a business that help us stand out from our competitors. And it's really impacting the market as well. We can demonstrate better. Outcomes and efficacy as a business which is a really cool emerging part of how we're articulating our value proposition broadly as a company.
Jennifer:All fascinating information. So much to take away from today. So we have just a few more questions for you. First one here as far as what would you say is the biggest benefits? If you had to name one, what's the biggest benefit an employer and their employees would get from working with beam?
Alex:Biggest one I would say is simply differentiation. Beam has a memorability and clear distinction from the rest of the pack. And that really stands out to employees today. Who are looking to, they're looking for evidence that their employer cares about them. So when their employer brings them something new and fresh and different, it really stands out.
Jennifer:I can agree with that. My BEAM app is extremely easy to use. So nice to be able to just forward the cards, as I mentioned, to my vision or dental provider. But yeah, I completely concur. It is memorable, very usable, very user friendly.
Alex:Love it.
Mike:I'll ask maybe the most important question of today, is, and can people still get a free toothbrush?
Alex:Absolutely, yeah, any of our members regardless of if they're the employee or a dependent has access to the Beam Brush. And we're actually just launching, we just announced it actually a couple weeks ago. We are just launching our third generation of our hardware, which we call the Beam Brush Pro. It's our biggest and best product that, that we've built. We're really proud of it. It's a Wi Fi connected brush for the first time and sits on the charge base, has incredible battery life, a bigger, better motor than the second generation hardware that we have. So we've actually been investing in an even better version of the beam brush that's just rolling out now.
Mike:And I think I saw you can change colors on the light.
Alex:Yeah.
Mike:was trying to figure out how to get a free one earlier today because I accidentally left my toothbrush at my cousin's house in Toledo, Ohio
Alex:i, you know a guy now, so we can, we can make that happen
Mike:Thank you.
Alex:The brush the second generation brush we produced in three colors which was great, but we wanted to be able to build one product that could flex to our customer's interest even more broadly. So the light ring that goes around the the off on button Is customizable, so you can set it to 50 or 80 different colors and then that'll be the, the glow of the light ring when you pick it up.
Mike:That's awesome.
Jennifer:Very
Alex:Yeah.
Jennifer:Alright, Alex, last question for you. What do you think the future of employee health care benefits? It's looks like.
Alex:It's a much more integrated version of benefits than we have today and one that is distinctly more comprehensive health oriented. Today still. Despite lots of progress, by the way, products are still purchased very a la carte and some of them even have overlapping features or overlapping coverages. And then there's this whole separate topic area that's around wellness and care delivery and these sorts of things. So just take, we'll just use the easiest example, which is in major medical. You buy your health insurance. And then you buy a wellness plan. And then, by the way, you might also buy an HSA FSA plan, and then you might also buy some supplemental health coverage, and then you might also get some mental health coverage, and then you might also put in a a little allocation for your employees to be able to get a gym membership and get a other health related services, and comma, comma, comma, comma, comma, it never ends. And so I didn't just buy healthcare, I bought 15 different things that are all aiming toward better health for my, for my team, for my company. And there's reasons for why that is the way it is today, but we've got to figure out as an industry how to create something that's comprehensive and more integrated so all of that data is being shared, all of those experiences are unified. And that people are getting the right thing at the right time for their life situation. We're still at very like level one in that discussion. We sell people life insurance when they have a baby. And it's that's not, that's a good, that makes a ton of sense. But that's level one. What's level two, level three look like in that same topic area? I think that's what the industry is going to do a lot of over the next 10 to 20 years.
Jennifer:Do you think that push will come from the insurance side of it or from the employer side of it?
Alex:I don't think I would say the push is likely to come from the employers. I'm not sure even the execution can come from the insurance businesses. I think this is distinctly a a new topic area. I think this is a place where tech and entrepreneurship and incredible new founders and entrepreneurs innovators are gonna come in and, and solve this. To me, it's unlikely that the already at scale insurance businesses can create the world that they themselves can identify. They can see the problem, but can they get to the solution, I think, is something worth examining. It's much more likely, in my view, that companies that are world class at customer experience will get there. And that's why I think so many people, for example, are really bullish about Apple entering healthcare. What they're really saying is not, I need Apple to enter healthcare. They're saying, I need a company that understands customer experience to enter healthcare. And, and I think there is a lot of opportunity for that.
Jennifer:I think that's an excellent point to end on. Fascinating conversation and we really appreciate all of your thoughts today, I think. really invigorating, exciting conversation. So we can't thank you enough for joining us today. But we certainly want to make sure that everyone understands how to get in touch with you if they'd like to follow up after the podcast today.
Alex:I hang out on LinkedIn a lot, so Alex Meyer at LinkedIn send me a message. I'm also at fro fro@beambenefits.com so you can shoot me a note there as well. And I appreciate the time. We're huge fans of Springback over here at Beam both for the Midwest angle and your great work in healthcare. So thanks for doing what you do.
Mike:We appreciate that. Well that's it for this episode of Healthcare on the Rocks, Employee Benefits with a Twist. You can find all our previous episodes at springbuk.com/podcast or in your favorite podcast player. Remember to hit that subscribe button.
Jennifer:And while you're at it, we would really appreciate it if you would take a minute to leave us a five-star rating or review and leave a comment to let us know what other topics you'd be interested in us covering. Thanks for listening today. And until next time,
Mike:cheers.