Takeaways from Journey to YC

General lessons I want to remember.

• Survive long enough to get lucky: As long as I didn’t quit, Vitable was still alive and the chance of figuring it out was > 0. The longer you are alive, the more likely it is that you’ll get lucky. 

• Commit: The hardest moments (team quitting, no growth, etc) are when you should double down on your resolve. 

• Control your own destiny:  Get to break even fast. No one was going to save me. I was stuck on a deserted island and I had to find my way out. But must not die from hunger before hitting escape velocity (lol too many metaphors).

• You don’t have to be a visionary if you talk to customers: Talking to customers and closely watching their interaction with our product has made all the difference. We initially launched as a simple healthcare provider - nothing else. We now provide healthcare coverage and cover everything from your provider visit, lab tests, and imaging. I didn’t do this enough at the beginning. But every major shift has been informed by conversations I had with members or potential members that had rejected our service. Potential members were less useful, but sometimes I’d hear the same thing over and over again and I’d go back and think, what could we easily add to convert the highest number of people that passed?

• Focus in on high-pain-point users: We had two main groups of users - rich moms and working class families. The rich moms demanded that we arrive in 30 minutes and used us as a substitute for their urgent care center. The working class families paid for a membership and hoped to never use us. We were the only healthcare coverage they could afford. We still have some rich moms, and our service is more convenient than an urgent care center, but our core focus are those families without any other options.

• Pivot Faster: Fee for service, consumer subscriptions, B2B benefit. Each shift was painful. I should have pivoted much sooner, but was attached to the ideas.

• Cost constraints are good (being broke is good): I initially wanted to hire a full-time nurse practitioner (NP) and set up a physical clinic, but I didn’t have the money. So I had multiple part-time 1099 NPs working with me, only getting paid when they made a visit. It gave me time to test things without dying from the no-money-in-the-bank syndrome. This is now a cornerstone of our model.

• Work on something you’re uniquely qualified to do: I love building for the sake of building (Phil Knight’s you don’t go running for the destination, but for the act of running itself). But I wanted an unfair advantage after multiple failed projects. Why me and not the millions of other qualified engineers? I knew the perspective I’d gained growing up working alongside my parents in their home healthcare small biz was something few people had.

• Work on hard problems: It took me 7 months of constant work to finally launch and be able to see patients. And then the real task of actually getting users and iterating began. But I thought that barrier would keep many would-be competitors away. At least no other students I knew would have tried.

• Run your own race: Many friends were starting their lives making $120k/yr, stock bonuses, etc. Meanwhile, I was stuck in my parents’ attic. Or other friends were raising millions of $$$ and building huge teams while I was driving an hour just to pick up lab specimen from a NP at a patient’s home at 10 pm. Tuning that out is hard. But I learned to enjoy my journey - run not for the destination, but for the act of running itself.

• If you don’t have a team, keep building: I tried to find a cofounder that was a nurse practitioner to figure out the medical stuff that I didn’t know. I tried to find a sales cofounder to do the sales stuff that I didn’t like. I tried to find a technical cofounder so I could focus on customers. I failed at all three. It forced me to do each of those things and it’s made my understanding of the business that much more robust. I later realized that the more progress I made, the more people were interested in working with me. The best way to recruit a team was to actually build the company and grow. Also, seems pretty lame to say I couldn’t build a company because no one wanted to join me. Although, it is pretty easy to build a mediocre team.