To Scale: Focus on Your Customer Needs | Mike Pyne

Need product-market fit and pipeline fast? Book a 30-min MESH sprint audit with Bill. https://meshagency.com/lets-connect/ 

In this episode, Founder/CEO Mike Pyne, Medoh Health shares how he turned short-form video + AI into a doctor-specific knowledge platform that saves hours of repetitive patient Q&A. We cover testing in the clinic (not just the cloud), communicating by text vs. QR, when to hire (and not hire) sales, and the founder mindset for speed without sacrificing quality.

Connect with Mike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-d-pyne-627864136/   

00:00 – Why medical information fails patients
04:15 – What patients actually want from medical content
08:30 – Building the “TikTok for medical information”
12:45 – How to earn trust in patient education
17:20 – Using patient feedback to improve healthcare content
21:45 – What keeps patients engaged with medical information
26:10 – Why short-form medical education works
30:35 – Balancing accuracy, speed, and attention in healthcare
35:10 – Scaling a patient-first medical platform
39:20 – Lessons for building patient-centered health products

What happens when you mix short-form video, a pile of patient questions, and a founder obsessed with real-world feedback? Mike Pyne, Founder & CEO of Medoh Health, walks us through his journey from medtech sales and marketing at Smith+Nephew to building a platform that digitizes a doctor’s knowledge and delivers it to patients 24/7.

Mike kept hearing the same thing in clinics: doctors repeat themselves all day and patients still leave with uncertainty. The winning combo: doctor-specific short videos plus AI that answers only from the doctor’s own content and documents.

We dig into building in the clinic, not just in the cloud: direct patient interviews, text-first delivery (ditch the QR friction), and shipping fast while staying safe. Mike shares the hiring calculus (why you shouldn’t add sales until PMF), how to delegate without losing speed, and how the phrase “TikTok for medical info” unlocked stakeholder understanding. If you’re a founder in healthtech or any regulated space, this is a masterclass in iterative learning and pragmatic velocity.

Three Practical Pro Tips

1. Design for the moment your customer stops paying attention
One thing that shows up between the lines of Mike’s story is this uncomfortable truth: momentum stalls because life moves on. Patients forget. Clinicians get pulled into the next room. Founders assume adoption happens just because something is valuable. It doesn’t.

As a founder, your real design challenge is what happens after the conversation ends. The teams that win plan explicitly for that drop. If your product only works when people are focused, it won’t survive contact with reality.

2. Separate “people like it” from “people will actually use it.”
Founders get great at collecting positive feedback. “This is awesome.” “I’d totally use this.” “This would save us so much time.” And then… nothing changes. No behavior shift. No habit formation. No adoption.

They miss the mark because they’re confusing agreement with integration. The hard work lives in understanding how something fits into a real workflow, not an ideal one. Who owns it when the founder isn’t around?

3. Treat distribution as a trust decision, not a tech decision
Mike’s QR-code lesson is a classic founder trap: building something logical instead of something human. People adopt tools because they arrive through channels they already trust. No one actually cares about elegance.

As a founder, it’s worth stepping back and asking: If adoption requires users to learn a new behavior and trust a new channel at the same time, you’ve doubled the risk.

Book a 30-min MESH sprint audit with Bill. https://meshagency.com/lets-connect/ 

#DigitalHealth #MedTechMarketing #ProductMarke

Transcript

0:00

You might have ideas of how you think it should work, but your ideas aren't always right. So that's why it's very important to listen to the people you want to sell to. Hi, I'm Bill Schick, Fractional CMO and host of LifeSci Continuum. In this episode, I'm joined by Mike Pyne Founder and CEO of Medoh Health. Version one, that was basically just TikTok for medical information, just videos of doctors that any patient or person could access. And I asked them, hey, I'm trying to basically build out this platform to give patients reliable health information. Mike and I dig into how to launch a new technology platform when new products are popping up on the market daily. You basically have to build something, give it to the customer, give it to the user and then just listen to what they say they like and what they don't. That tells you very quickly what you should focus on. That tells you very quickly what you should improve on. In this episode, Mike shows founders how to use short video, AI and ruthless focus to hit product market fit before they burn cash on the wrong bets. It is very important to move quickly because there's no point in focusing on something that doesn't work for too long and then you spend a year worth of capital, worth of time and then the product isn't going to work. All right, let's go. Tell us a little bit about you. I'm Mike Pyne. I am the founder and CEO of Medoh Health, which is a digital health platform that digitizes doctors' knowledge. Best way to think about it is we take all the information that's stuck in a doctor's head on pieces of paper that are given to patients, and we allow patients to access it 24-7 without even needing an appointment. So I used to work in the medical device industry for 10 years with a company called Smith & Nephew. I was in sales, marketing, sales management, and then I left a few months ago. I'm originally from Ireland, I moved to the UK when I was 18 for college and then I worked for Smith & Nephew there for five years and then moved to the United States, San Francisco five years ago and I've been living here ever since. Tell me a little bit about how you started coming to the idea that would eventually become Medoh Health. I actually have had like four different businesses that I've tried to start. A few years ago, I realized that when it came to getting quality health information online, it was not very good. So the first company I had was basically a blog that helped people understand treatment options that were available for orthopedic conditions. And then that didn't work. And then I started a marketplace that helped brain cancer patients find clinical trials. That ended up working a little bit, but it didn't go in the direction that I wanted. My third business was literally TikTok for medical information, just videos of doctors answering patients most commonly Google questions. And you know, it's coming from a credible source. And then that evolved into what I was doing today. So what I kind of realized is there's always opportunities to improve or help people get better access to health information. And I've always kind of had a really keen interest in that. And I always want to be trying to solve something for it. So with that in mind, how did you get to this particular idea? Do you remember was there a day that it just kind of struck you like inspiration struck or how did you get. Yeah, so my dad actually got a hip replacement last year. And I remember him calling me and said that he had 10 minutes with his doctor. His doctor basically was like, you're getting a hip replacement, you're going to get it in three months time. I'll see you at the operation. And my dad was like, hey, I have so many questions. What about this? What about this? What about this? And the doctor was like, just go and Google it. You'll find all the information you need there. And my dad said he basically was given a piece of paper and that was it. He didn't understand anything that was on it. And when he went to Google, he found it really difficult to find relevant answers to the questions he had. So initially, he was just like, I don't want to watch long videos that are 10 years old on YouTube. I don't want to read articles that are vague on WebMD. I just want to hear from a doctor, answer my question directly, so I know it's coming from a credible source. That's the version one. of what Medoh was basically TikTok for medical information. And that's how it started. But what I started realizing is that worked for patients, but it didn't work for doctors. Patients loved the content that was on Medoh. We had like 10 million views in the space of like, or 10 million videos watched in the space of three months. And what was interesting is patients loved it. And I tried to sell it to doctors. And when I spoke and engaged with doctors, 80% of them were like, are 20% of them like, this is really good. This will build my practice online. This will build my brand. This is more the younger people in private practice. But the other 80% were like, I don't need to build my brand online. I need, they were like, but I would use this for my own patients. And then I started to ask questions about why would you use this for your own patients? And they started explaining that nothing they do scales. It's one conversation with one patient at one time. And they repeat themselves over and over again to every single patient. about the condition, about the treatment options, about the next steps of the healthcare journey, and then answering the same repetitive questions to patients. But then what I realized is patients forget everything that the doctor explained anyway. So they call them, they message them, they call their staff asking these questions over and over again. And I realized that, oh I could create a platform that uses short form content and AI to answer all the patient's questions, but they'll be customized and tailored to that doctor's particular knowledge base. the doctor's expertise, the doctor's decision making. And that's where I am right now. That's great. you were basically using voice of the customer to develop the future path of the product. Yeah. So walk me through that process a little bit. What did you do to get that information and get that feedback back from the clinicians? Yes, so it's very experimental. And what I mean by that is you try something, it fails, you try it again. So what I used to do is I would build something based off asking doctors some questions, and then I would test it out with them and I'd listen, I'd actually tell them, what do you not like? What do you think doesn't work? And then they would tell me honestly, what didn't work, what they didn't like, what the problems were, and I would take all that back into consideration. And then I would make changes, iterations to the platform. Initially, I started with just a few doctors. It was 15 in total, but then I started expanding it out to more because I knew I needed a broader pool of opinions from different doctors. Same thing with patients. I used to literally go to hospitals and ask them questions when they were going to their doctor's office. And the patients gave me great responses on what they thought was good, what they thought was bad, what they would like improved. And it's constant feedback. The more feedback you get, the more you're able to understand what's not working and the more you can improve. I like that because a lot of not a lot some of what I see, you know out on the market is occasionally a company will do some voice of customer but they almost use it for validation of the decisions. They've already made they're they're looking to make sure that okay we're headed in the right direction. Let's not really change anything and what it sounds like what you're trying to do is develop the close to perfect product for them and you're letting them drive quite a bit of it. Is that true? So I would actually say I'm not trying to build a perfect product. I'm just trying to build something that works, put it in front of the people who would pay for it or use it, and then listen to what they're saying. The way I look at it is, if you think about ChatGPT, they weren't advertising their services. They basically built a product over the space of five years in the background. They got loads of feedback, they made loads of iterations. And then over time, they ended up building close to a perfect product. or a really good product that people love, and then they had product market fit, and then they started, people would tell other people about it. And I feel like in order to get to there, you basically have to build something, give it to the customer, give it to the user, and then just listen to what they say they like and what they don't. That tells you very quickly what you should focus on. That tells you very quickly what you should improve on. And that's the analogy and philosophy I try to take when I'm building any product is just, build it. If it's terrible, that's absolutely fine. Just get people to use it and they'll tell you what's wrong with it. And then you can make improvements because as someone that starts companies, as someone that tries to build customer facing products, you might have ideas of how you think it should work, but your ideas aren't always right. So that's why it's very important to listen to the people you want to sell to, but also the people that are going to use your platform. So if I understand, were you monetizing version one or was it really in beta and you were trying to recruit users and eventually when you got to this latest version, now you're. Yes, so version one, was basically just TikTok for medical information, just videos of doctors that any patient or person could access was not monetized. was basically, I went around to 15 doctors that I knew from my old job and I asked them, hey, I'm trying to basically build out this platform to give patients reliable health information. Would you be interested in recording some content? And they were all like, yes, we would, because I gave it to them for free after. And initially when we got all those users, it was not monetized at all. Once I had the traction from the patients, they were watching the videos. I was getting a lot of videos watched. I was like, okay, how can I make money on this? And that's when I started going speaking to doctors about it in more detail, asking would they pay for this? And that's where I came into a lot of no's. 80% of the people I spoke to said no, they wouldn't pay for something like this because... They didn't need to build their online presence, but they would use it for their patients if it worked in a slightly different way. Okay, was there like a specific moment where it was kind of like a lightning bolt for you that this was the pivot that you needed to make or was it was it over time? So it actually happened in phases. remember initially it was roughly around a month or two after I launched the platform that was TikTok for medical information. And I remember one doctor mentioned to me initially, but I didn't quite register it. I thought about it, but I was thinking, oh, I'm going to stick to what I'm doing right now. And then over time, I consistently heard the same thing that doctors don't have much time. They hate repeating themselves over and over again about the basics to patients. And they spend two to four hours every single week answering questions that patients send to their portal or email them. And they have teams of people around them that do the same thing. And that's when it started to hit me more and more over time. Maybe like three months ago, I decided to build this particular part out. And that's the part that started to get more traction. And that's the part that doctors were a lot more interested in because there was a huge benefit to them. saving a lot of time from repetitive conversations, taking phone calls, answering messages. And that's when I kind of started to see a lot more traction when it came to people paying for the product, doctors wanting to use this because there was a major benefit to them other than just trying to market themselves online. Okay, thank you for that. That was great. you like during the process, have you ever felt compelled or pressured even just through yourself like internally to move this thing as fast as you can? ah Talk about the pace or the tempo ah of building this company. Yeah. So personally, I've never felt that pressure, but I put that pressure on myself. So I think that happens for two reasons. Like we're actually bootstrapped right now and all the money we've made is basically from my own investment and the small amount of friends and family money that I put in. Because I don't have investors putting an insane amount of pressure on me. I don't feel that from anyone else because I'm pretty much funding this myself as we speak. But it is very important to move quickly because there's no point in focusing on something that doesn't work for too long. And then you spend a year worth of capital, worth of time, and then the product isn't going to work. I don't actually, I think it's very important to move as quickly as possible. For example, even the new version of what I built, like I mentioned, I integrated and built out an AI that basically can answer any question a patient has. but it only references information from the doctor's documents or the doctor's videos. I built that out in the space of like a week with my engineer. And I remember one of the doctors saying, holy shit, you move really quickly. But that's a very important thing when your backs against the wall, you don't have unlimited resources. You have to move quickly. You have to go with the market because if you're not doing it, someone else is probably thinking of it and they'll do it before you. So I do think it's very important to move as quickly as possible and try to get things done. So I think that's something that a lot of founders struggle with. in their cases, they do have other investors. And there's pressure to get to exit quickly. for you, how are you, at least in your own situation, how do you sort of balance being as quick or nimble as you can be, but also, especially in an industry where we face a lot of regulations, how do you balance those? Yeah, that's a good question. How I try to do it is I try to take that upon myself. I never wait and rely on someone else to do something for me. I think that's a really important thing to remember because when you're the founder or the person who started the company, it's your baby. It's the thing that you love the most. You're the only one that's going to get it to where it needs to go. So you need to do all of the work and never rely on anyone else. When it comes to regulation, for example, we're dealing with health information. You need a lot of security. You need to make sure that it's right. And the way we do it is you have to constantly test, not just you, but the people around you, the people on your team, but also your customers to make sure it's perfect in every way it can be. And if there is any mistake, do not be afraid of it, lean into the mistake because you need to fix it because it's only going to get worse. I feel like those two areas are really, really important because one, no one will do it for you. I always have that like belief in philosophy in life is you have to do it yourself or no one else ever will. And then. Lean into the mistakes. You're always going to make them. You just have to recognize them, improve on them and make sure you can eradicate them. And I think those two things are very important. Yeah, I think it's it's actually really common in the space for a founder to feel exactly like you do. Like you can't you can't you don't want to rely on other people too much. You mentioned that you have an engineer working with you as you look at that situation, but also you look forward. How do you decide now is the time for me not to do this? This is something that I should bring someone else in. or lean on someone else's expertise. What does that process look like for you? Yeah, so for me, I always knew I needed someone that could do the technical side. I don't have any technical skills. Like I mentioned, I was in sales marketing, sales management. I have no technical skills at all when it comes to building technology, but I understand how a product should look, how it should feel, how you should interact with it. So it was very important for me in the early days to get an engineer on board that I could basically sell the vision to. What I was building, what I think it could be, like what the opportunity was. That was very important for me in the early days. And like now at the moment we have three full-time engineers, or sorry, three months. So you have to have other people do the things that you don't have to strengthen. The same thing applies for other positions that I also have filled, like other employees that I have doing other things. It's really important to make sure that you can delegate work to other people that will have a better strength in that area. Because what I found was in the early days, I tried to do things that I wasn't skilled at, or I tried to do things that I didn't necessarily have a good understanding of how to do it. And I would get very frustrated in the early days. for example, I remember this one time I was trying to schedule posts on YouTube and my account kept getting blocked on YouTube. And I just get so frustrated with it and I'd spend half a day focusing on this insignificant thing. And it would put me in a bad mood and I wouldn't want to do anything else. So I think it is very important to delegate the things and tasks out to other people that are a lot better than what you are doing those things. I think that's a really interesting point and I love that story because you know, in talking to a lot of founders and partners who work with founders, a lot of founders really want to do all of the work themselves. They feel that it might be faster or no one else can they can't trust anyone else, know, whatever, there are lot of reasons for that. But one thing that I haven't heard before is just drowning in the minutiae. You know, those things that, well, of course you can do it or you can eventually figure out what the issue with, you know, scheduling posts on YouTube was, or, you know, whatever that was, you could figure it out. But why would you spend your time on that? know, focus on the things that only you can do. And delegate like how, like for you, what's the benefit of that? You don't get those, that frustration. You get to spend your time doing other things. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so like there's actually two aspects to that and I should have probably clarified my last question. Sometimes as the founder, you just have to do the shittiest tasks possible because no one else is going to do it. Like I truly believe that as a founder, your job is to do the most difficult tasks that no one on your team can get through. Like you can just help them, like help them get there in whatever way. the most like being a founder is it's mostly shitty work. It's terrible work that no one wants to do, especially in the early days. but you can only do that for so long until you just won't be scalable. For example, if you tried to do everything yourself, only have 12 hours a day that you might work. And if you're spending three hours doing tedious tasks that are very, very repetitive forever, you're just never going to be able to develop the company, hire the people, or actually scale it in the way that you want to. So you have to be able to, one, make money quickly, and then two, hire people. and reinvest that capital or that money you're making into someone that can actually do a better job. That's the whole idea of building a good business is getting other people to do it. But you do learn a lot from doing the tedious things in the early days. It's nearly like, how would I put it? It's nearly like when you go into fraternity and they pledge you and you have to do all of these terrible things first before they know they can trust you and before they actually know you can like. be part of the fraternity. I never was. I went to university in England. They don't have them there. But that's what it nearly feels like. You just have to put yourself through these terrible things, these terrible days, the terrible work that no one else wants to do in order to be able to get to the phase or stage you want to be at. It's kind of a rite of passage or a paying your dues. I find that over the course of 20 years at, you know, marketing changes quite a bit as we add new components to the system, learning them myself first and understanding how, or figuring out how they integrate with everything else is important. So that I can, I can actually work with my team, but also best advise my clients. So some of those things. Some of my peers aren't interested in the details. They don't really know the nuts and bolts of certain things. But I think it's really interesting to understand a lot of that. I probably wouldn't want to do it every day. But I think learning it early on, like you say, is really a key piece of this. You mentioned having other hires. I think you said three engineers right now. Those people would be responsible for the technical aspect of the product. Who's your next hire after that? Okay, yeah, so the people I hire, like who I've hired on the team are all orientated around doing the very tedious tasks I really, really don't want to do or just don't have the time. So for example, we do a lot of video editing because like I mentioned, Medoh has a series of short form pieces of content of doctors explaining, elaborating and talking about the conditions, treatments, surgeries, patients that we get in. So that's one area. Two. It's also basically scheduling and coordination. So making sure that each doctor knows that they have to do this, this, and this in a certain day and having someone communicate with them to make sure that they do it. And then the other aspect is I always try to have someone just kind of looking at trends and kind of seeing and understanding, okay, what's out there? How can we incorporate it into Medoh? And then basically how can we make our product better overall? So they're the areas that I primarily focus on when it comes to. when it comes to hiring some other people. When we have more revenue, we'll obviously do it in a slightly different way. And what I mean by that is, I would probably hire a full-time content manager, just because I feel like content is such a pivotal and a key thing to driving your business and marketing your product and you as a brand. And then I personally think, we don't have any salespeople besides me. And I don't think you should hire anyone in sales until you know you have product market fit. So you make such a good product that one doctor will tell another doctor and another doctor before you start any sales process really, because if you have a team of five sales reps and they're going out trying to sell a product that isn't very good, you're just gonna be banging your head against the wall. I think that's great. think, and I think in, you know, in our space, it does help if you've had some experience at some level selling, because you know the dynamic. think if you've never been in a position where you've had to sell, you don't really understand sales. And I think that sales and marketing has such a close connection and intertwined in new product development. I think a lot of founders see those as really separate things. And they hire sales because they need sales, but they don't really plug into the thinking and the strategy around sales. I've seen that a lot where a lot of small firms just think to hire in, you know, one salesperson to just crush sales. And then after two or three years, they've sold like two or three things at a trade show. and they're really floundering. So it's interesting to hear from somebody who has experience in sales building a product now for the market. What I've realized with sales is one, if you don't have someone working full time for you, they're pretty much useless. They won't put the time, effort and energy to actually understand the sales message for the product, understand who they should be targeting and understand how to actually go through the sales cycle. So it's, I personally am not a fan of like part-time people who sell, like I just don't think it works at all. It goes back to having a product that actually works. You you have to help the salespeople. They're not the ones building the product. They're not the one developing it. You have to make sure that it's teed up for them to be able to go out and do their job and execute correctly. I think that's an interesting perspective because in what I do by the very nature of it, I am a part-time person. I'm a fractional and I work with four different companies. And part of my process in getting in under the hood so quickly is I work to connect with their sales team. Like we're working a marketing function, but get in with the sales team in the first meeting and go through, if possible, their sales training. Yeah. And in one of my recent accounts, um they didn't have anything at all as far as sales training. So when I requested that, they said, just go look at our website, you'll learn everything you need to. And it's like, that's not really going to work. So I you know, I think you make a good point that it is hard to get people who are semi committed to be fully committed. So I get that. And so from your perspective, you're looking at entirely full-time staff, not contract. You're building a true team, right? Yes, yeah. The only reason I noticed, especially in sales side is I've seen plenty of distributors that I've worked with and that I've seen sell a product here, a product there for this company. I just personally think it's really hard for them to hyper focus on something. The way all is looking is if you want to get really good at something, you have to have everyone pointing in the same direction and focusing completely on that. And I feel like it's very, very hard when you have, you hire someone and they're like trying to sell five other products from five different companies. It's really hard for them to basically hyper-focus and do a really good job on all five of them because their attention's diluted. And I noticed this too from like working in my old job, like Smith and Nephew Orthopedics have a huge amount of products and the reps had to sell loads of different products. And it's very hard to focus on one particular thing. So like that was my job is making sure that I could get the reps attention, help them get to the next step of the sales cycle, help identify targets when it came to this one product that I was only managing. And I think that's like a really important thing because focus is extremely important when it comes to getting a product off the ground, because you have to remember you have zero traction, like nothing is going to go right for you. It's all going to go negatively for you. So focus is really important. So everyone's pointing in the same direction and they're doing the same thing. I think that's a really great point. had a client a few years ago that was switching from having a small internal sales team to a distributor model. And they would run into two types of distributors. One, they were just looking for one more product to put in their bag. Like when I go in, I want to be able to sell something. And if I can't sell this and this and this, I just want to keep having kind of a fallback position so I have something to sell. And then you had other distributors that actually sought them out because they were seeing a vacuum in the market where there was a need for a product and they found this company as the solution. So they really wanted to sell it. And from my client's perspective, his expectation was when a distributor starts to care, when I sign a distributor, it's just going to start flying off the shelf. They're just going to sell so much of it. And that's simply not the case. Not all distributors are created equal and they're not all driven kind of by the same thing. I mean, you sell what you get compensated for selling. And if you have a big catalog and your margins are higher over there, your comp is higher. Maybe these smaller products don't get as much attention. I'm sort of, sort of off the beaten path here with this particular topic, but it is one that's kind of near and dear. We're seeing a lot of this right now in the market where sales is getting shaken up a lot. Is there a particular feature? I think you talked about this early on where the general direction of the product went more towards TikTok, but then you you made a big shift. But let's say and where you're at right now, is there a particular feature that you had in place that made sense as you were building it maybe in your head, but then as you roll it out to market maybe it wasn't as interesting as you thought it would be. Yes, there was one thing and we've kind of fixed this. like I mentioned, know, Medoh evolved from being a, and it still is in ways, an open platform with videos or thousands of videos of doctors answering patients most common orthopedic questions. And then it transitioned to a section that's a private platform where patients could only access those videos or information from a doctor that they just saw. And I initially thought that, oh, all I have to do is basically get a patient to scan a QR code every single time to go to a doctor's office. And the patient will get access to videos and everything that they need. That turned out not to work at all. I was so naive about how the flow of the platform worked. And what I noticed is that was too much work for a patient. Like everyone now, because every piece of information is given to them directly, just think about it. We no longer Google questions. We got to ChatGPT and you get the answers. You don't even have to look for them. So I took a play out of that book. I realized like instead of them asking them to take out their phone, do a scan of QR code and then go to my website. I was like, how could I get the information that the patient needs to understand and read from that doctor directly to the phone? And I realized, oh, sending texts from any company that I've ever worked with in the past. The best communication I've had is when I got told what I should be doing or a text communication telling me, hey Mike, this is this, this and this, you need to do this, this and this, here's a link that you can access. And I always access it if it's from a credible source. That helped so much and the engagement went through the roof because everyone communicates through text and the fact we can send it directly to the patient's phone number in a way that they already engage and communicate with people was huge for us. Yeah, the thing that I probably built initially was just expecting people to scan QR codes. There was actually too much work involved in that. You just need to simplify and make it really easily accessible for patients and obviously not make it too difficult for the doctor to do that either. Okay. And do you ever get pushback from anyone kind of, you know, around you saying, well, you know, that's not how people work. Like I don't, I don't use that technology. Don't bother investing in that. Do you ever get any feedback like that? Pushing back on some of the new stuff? Yeah. I actually do not necessarily, I do actually, and like, it's very funny how people think. So it's actually a lot of the time it's doctors and they're like, well, we give the patients all of the information that they need on pieces of paper. And it's nearly, naivety sometimes because they don't fully understand their patients. Like they don't think, they think that they have the 10 minutes with them and they understand everything that's been discussed. And I have heard it's like, well, we give it to patients on a piece of paper, automated text telling a patient what to do every few days across their healthcare journey won't do anything for the patient. And then be like, well, you nearly have to put things in perspective and you only have to simplify and break it down for them and how they would do things. For example, it's like when someone's like, oh, I read papers all the time. And be like, but what do most people do day to day when it comes to social media? They watch videos. It's the easiest way for people to digest information and break it down. That's what we can do here is like take all the information that you have on pieces of paper, put them into videos. The other way is, for example, it's like the texting for me is huge because when we were in sales, we used to realize or we'd always hear that you're 10 times more likely as a doctor to open a text, read it and understand it than you are through email. Just because it's more personalized, it's easier for them to access. and they get notifications all the time and they communicate with everyone they trust through text. And that was another thing that I kind of realized was like, okay, some doctors are like, texting, blah, blah, blah. And I'm always like, how many times have I texted you in the last week? They'd be like five. And I'd be like, what did they discuss? And they'd be like this, this, and this. And I'm like, exactly. I emailed you five times as well. Do you even realize I sent you those emails? And when you put things in perspective for people, they start to understand it more, but I definitely always get that. I get that a lot and that's not necessarily just down to the person I'm talking to either. It's how I articulate things. Sometimes when I was explaining Medoh in the early days, I didn't do a very good job of explaining it. And then I changed it to explaining and saying, oh Medoh's TikTok for medical information. It's just videos on a platform of doctors explaining everything patients Google. When you simplify things, it's a lot easier for people to fully understand what you're talking about as well. And that goes back to the sales skills. That is really, really important in how you articulate your message and how you explain things clearly to people. How did you initially approach the market and how did that messaging maybe not resonate? And then what did you do differently? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so in the early days, was very much like I was trying to explain, was like, oh, Medoh's, a video platform that has doctors answering questions. And then people would be like, oh, well, you can just message your doctor. Why would I wait? then the other aspect was I'd be like, oh, it has videos of doctors answering patients' questions. And they'd be like, oh, how long do you have to wait to get the video back from the doctor? And I realized that was like, saying all these things that weren't quite articulating my message clearly to the people I was explaining it to. Because just by even saying something like, there's like doctors answer your most commonly asked questions on video. People automatically think that you have asked a question and then you wait for the doctor to record themselves and respond to it. But as soon as I changed it saying, it's like TikTok for medical information. It's short-form content of doctors explaining and answering the most common questions that are Googled. Because you correlate TikTok and medical information, straight away people know TikTok is all content that's been pre-recorded, it's been uploaded, it's already there. And that was really helpful for me in the early days to be able to explain to people what it does, especially doctors. What I also kind of realized is you have to, depending on who you're talking to, you have to know your audience. So my message is very different when I'm speaking to doctors. It's very different when I speak to patients. When I start speaking to investors, it's going to be very different to them as well. So you really have to understand who you're talking to and who you're articulating things to to make sure you get the right message across to them so that they can understand it very easily and clearly. Again, a really great point. So what do you think, again, to put you on the spot, what do you think is the messaging or the type of messaging that works for a clinician versus a patient? And if you feel like bonus points, an investor. Yeah. So when it comes to a patient, I always explain that Medoh is a platform that gives you access to your doctor's knowledge 24-7 without ever needing an appointment. You can watch videos of the doctor talking and answering the most common questions you have. But then also there's an AI that you can interact with, ask questions, and it only answers it based off the doctor's knowledge from videos and documents. For doctors, I'd say that Medoh is a platform that digitizes your knowledge. We take all the information that's in your head, put it on the platform in content and AI, or by using content and AI, and then that will save you having to answer repetitive questions with patients over and over again, or even having to message them when they have a basic question about something that you already went over them in clinic. And then investors, it's actually something that I'm still working on, because you nearly have to marry both of them. And what I think is you either have to focus on pretending that they're the patient or focusing on the customer. So I probably right now I'm leaning more towards, it's like, mental health is a digital health platform that basically scales doctors knowledge. So it saves them time from having repetitive questions. Automatically they know, okay, scaling doctors knowledge, they're taking it out of their head, they're putting it somewhere it's been scaled. And then it helps them save time from answering repetitive questions with patients. Right. delivering, I mean, we're delivering a more personalized experience for patients because I mean, this the whole thing started, I think with your experience with your father. Yes. And, you know, if we think about it, when we look around, people, and people as patients are craving more from our clinicians, we're getting less. And a piece of paper doesn't create a connection, but a video, even if it's prerecorded, I think has been shown to strengthen that connection. And so you've kind of lightning in a bottle here. Yeah, it's so true. that's why, like the reason I kind of evolved the platform from just being content, like short form videos and integrating an AI as well as because I know doctors just don't have time to record videos on every single topic on every single thing that a patient asks. So the recording aspect, you can do a whole topic on, let's say, ACL tears in 45 minutes. Once that's done, that will cover 80% of the questions patients have. But then you can use AI to digitize the documents that they would normally give a patient. So the patient can interact and chat and ask questions after they watch the videos or about their appointment or about the next things they should be doing. And you know it's coming from a credible source, which is the documents or the information that they give to patients normally. And that's the beauty of marrying them both together is like the videos allow you to basically extract all the knowledge from a doctor's head. It's really easy for them to do, but then the AI can give direct answers to that patient. without them having to call the office, without them having to message a doctor, without them having to basically go in and speak to a healthcare professional, which they're not gonna be able to get access to very easily. And that's the whole idea is you could scale very quickly by digitizing knowledge. And this will dramatically help both patients and doctors, I personally believe. Yeah. And I think, I think one of the things that you're doing here that I often see missed is that you're looking at both sides um of the equation. You're looking both at the user, but also at the, you know, the patient, how it's impacting both of them. And, and I think some founders and some product teams do get that a lot do, but many don't. And they struggle for a long time because they're simply. overlooking one side of that dynamic. And that's a great point. I think the most important thing to always remember when you're dealing with two people, a customer and a user, you first have to focus on, and depending on what stage you're at, you know, like for me on bootstrapped, you first have to focus on money. So you have to make sure that the customer, paying customer, real likes your product first. But then when you have money, you have to make sure that their users are having a good time with it. Because if you don't, they're basically gonna stop using it, your customers are not gonna be happy, and it's just going to end up, you're not gonna be able to scale, because you're always gonna be trying to get new customers that you might have for six months and then they leave. On the other side, if you have venture backing you, it's a lot easier to focus on building a really good product, make sure the users love it, and then worry about paying customers. So it depends where you are, but like there is a few very important factors there, depending on like what, how much money you basically have, you know, if you've went to professional investors or you're bootstrapped like me. So it's always a unique thing to think of, but you have to do both. You cannot be blind to focusing on one or the other because it just won't work. Put you on the spot again. Three tips for another founder or maybe time travel back to when you were starting this up. What are three things that you wish you knew at the beginning or tips to somebody else starting a similar venture? First thing is never expect anything to work well right off the bat. Everyone has that idea that, oh, it's going to work. I'm going to get so much traction so quickly, similar to, I think everyone watched that movie about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Everyone just thinks it goes to the right. Be prepared for, like, that never happens. You just have to, like, build on things and prove on things and then small incremental improvements over a long period of time. go so far. That's probably the first thing. It's never just gonna take off by building something. Second thing is, just start. I pondered on the idea of doing something on my own for two years before I actually did it. And I kinda wish I'd just started earlier, built something, because it'd probably be two years ahead and further than what I currently am right now. And I think by just doing something, and even if fails, it's great, you learn from those mistakes. And then the third thing I kinda wish I had is I wish I realized what my weaknesses were earlier. Like I mentioned about the uploading of that video to YouTube, I'm not very good with dealing and managing with content. I just don't have the patience to do it myself. Work with people or partner with people that have strengths where your weaknesses are. That can help you just move so much quicker as well in the early days because, for example, when I built my first company, I remember I spent $50,000 with a development agency in Ukraine and it was terrible. Like it just did nothing. was just, I way rather wish that I found someone that could build the product and then we partner together and then see if it worked and it would have saved me $50,000 of my own money. So that's how I think about it. It's like, are the three things I personally believe is like, just start and don't expect anything to take off and then partner with the right people. I don't think they have to be geniuses. You just have to find someone that you're willing to work with and that's a good worker and you're both try to contribute and improve and make something. What's the web address? www.medohhealth.com Mike, thank you so much it was great having you on today. If you made it here, thank you. If you haven't already, like, share, and subscribe to the channel. If you want to learn more about this topic, I expand on it below, as well as in my LinkedIn newsletter. That's all for now. More soon.