Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Abraham Gutman, CEO of AG Mednet (Part 1)

Clinical trials are hugely expensive for pharmaceutical companies to administer. Abraham Gutman has created a solution to make the process substantially more efficient and offers insights on new entrepreneurial opportunities in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Abraham Gutman: I’m the founder and CEO of AG Mednet. I’m a computer scientist by training. This is my second entrepreneurial company. I started the first company in 1998 in the area of telecommunications where we were building software to do provisioning of large carrier-based optical networks. We sold that company to AT&T. In 2005, I started AG Mednet. Perhaps it may be interesting to entrepreneurs that what I set out to build and what I’m doing right now are somewhat different.

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Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the go-to-market? Was it the same? You identified some influencers, sold to influencers, and then leveraged them to sell to the rest of the market, is that right?

Jory Lamb: It was a little bit different, but we started that way. We went into an area of influencers. We worked with consulting veterinarians. On the heels of that, we bought out a green screen legacy system and assumed their clients as well. In a span of about a year and a half of acquiring our own and then through negotiating and purchasing this legacy system and assuming all their clients, we went from 40 to 280. I spun out that revenue stream off into its own business. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 5)

Robin Wiener: The next phase, which is very exciting, is to push that patient information back into the hospital so that they can get better care. We have an alert system. Let’s say your blood sugar gets out of whack, an alert is sent out to let the doctor know what’s going on with you. If your blood pressure is slowly creeping up, they can see that and can get you a doctor’s appointment versus bringing you into the emergency room at an acute time. We’re in the right place and the right time in the United States.

One of my first large clients is the province of Alberta, Canada, which had 3.2 million people. They’re rolling out because their social medicine is totally different from the US. They want to pull down the cost of healthcare. How do you do that? It’s by engaging those patients and making sure those patients know what’s going on with their healthcare and making sure they’re taking their medication. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting that I should have asked you about?

Ajay Patel: One thing I think is very important for every SaaS business like ours is profitability. The market is soon going to not accept that a lot of SaaS businesses aren’t profitable. The argument is always that the customer acquisition cost is the same as if it was enterprise sales, but you only make a little bit of money. That’s why you’ve got losses in the early years. I think what’s been important with HighQ and where we’re different is we’re profitable. We do and have, for the last four years, maintained our EBITDA margins between 30% – 35%. I think that’s important. I’m a Chartered Accountant. You have to make money in a business.

Sramana Mitra: I agree on that. I don’t believe in spending so much money and acquiring free customers who never monetize. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if we’ve got what you’re trying to say here. You got it off by providing training to farmers in Canada. That was the primary revenue-generating business that went on in the beginning. At some point in that time frame, you were offered to do a custom software development work by a client. You did that and you were able to preserve the IP. You packaged it into another product and managed to sell that product to a whole bunch of different customers. This is the summary of what you’ve said so far, correct?

Jory Lamb: Yes. What’s key in all that is we went from basically zero to dominating an entire market.

Sramana Mitra: That’s exactly the kind of detail that I want to get into. You started in 1996. At what point in your cycle did this client who gave you the contract software project come about?

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Bootstrapping Using Services from London: Ajay Patel, CEO of HighQ (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How do you position against a Huddle? We’ve done the Huddle story for instance. SharePoint is a well-known product. Tell me how you position against each of them. The reason I ask you is because we try to give our readers a lot of exposure on positioning. If you could help us think through how you are doing your positioning, that is something that I want my readers to understand and learn from.

Ajay Patel: On day one, we said we’re going to target the legal market. Indirectly, what that meant was we’re going to have to build the most intense security you can think of. Security has always been at the heart of everything we do. >>>

Bootstrapping to $10 Million from Canada: Jory Lamb, CEO of VistaVu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In 1996, you decided that you were going to do something with technology and you were going to work in rural Canada. You were going to get these farmers online and you wanted to teach them how to use computers and so forth. Is that right?

Jory Lamb: Yes. It just makes me smile now. Here is a 23-year-old kid. I had never managed any people. Never really started a business and didn’t take any computer course in a university. I had no money, clients, and no contacts in this market. As a 41-year old looking back at a 23-year-old, there’s no way that 23-year-old would ever convince me to invest in his business. It was a bad idea going out of the gate. It really was. It was sheer ignorance and perseverance that allowed me to actually build this business to a pretty good size.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you choose rural farmers in Canada? Some dot must have connected. A light bulb must have gone off in your head. Do you remember what that was?

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Bootstrapping Using Services: Robin Wiener, CEO of Get Real Health (Part 3)

Robin Wiener: We were lucky enough to do a project. I had gone out and recruited a company that wanted to do wellness. We built a wellness platform for them.

Sramana Mitra: You were basically doing contract software work at this point. Out of those three desks at the incubator, you were taking projects and building software for people.

Robin Wiener: Exactly. One of the software we built was for a wellness company. Microsoft approached them and said, “We’re starting this brand new platform called HealthVault.” >>>