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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 4)

Posted on Saturday, Nov 22nd 2014

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next milestone? How far did you go with the angel financing?

Steve Liu: We grew and then there was a point where we needed more formal funding from an institutional investor. That’s when we brought in Buckhead Investment. They came in about nine years ago. The initial round was a couple of hundred thousand.

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet them and why did you go with them?

Steve Liu: One of the smart things we did early on was hiring a retired advertising executive as a marketing director. It was that classic awesome market where you’ve got folks who were C suite of their own companies but they’ve retired and want to stay in the mix of things. This guy had his own firm. He just wanted to keep his feet wet. I’m not sure how we met him but we hired him as our advertising executive. He would work for us >>>

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 3)

Posted on Friday, Nov 21st 2014

Sramana Mitra: How much did you do in your first year?

Steve Liu: I honestly do not remember. It’s been so long. Over the first few years, we quickly got to a couple of thousand users. During that time, we enhanced the product and started increasing the price. Pretty quickly, we got a lot of clients—enough for a startup at least.

Sramana Mitra: It’s always helpful for us to know the pace at which a startup is scaling because when you’re recommending strategies, there’s also metrics that help validate what is really happening. Was it just you or were there other people in the company at that time?

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Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 2)

Posted on Thursday, Nov 20th 2014

Sramana Mitra: You programmed your PalmPilot to have that available as a mobile application. You presented at this conference and everybody wanted it.

Steve Liu: Pretty much, yes. That was when we figured out we might have something. A few months later, we put up a booth. I was a physician. I just wanted to be a physician, but this took a life of its own. I actually talked to my parents. I said, “Mom, I think I have a company here. I think I have to do this, but I have no idea about businesses.” She thought I was crazy, but she also knew that I made that big decision to become a physician at the last minute. They supported me.

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 7)

Posted on Tuesday, Nov 18th 2014

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how exactly that move played out.

Grant Kohler: We started to get some outside requests from clients who wanted to use our system to provide things other than just strokes. Two of the other service lines were based around trauma patients coming into the ER and patients that were possibly coded as septic patients. >>>

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 6)

Posted on Monday, Nov 17th 2014

Sramana Mitra: That was your second round of financing?

Grant Kohler: That was the genesis of the first round of financing.

Sramana Mitra: In the first round of financing, you already wanted to go beyond stroke into Telemedicine field to be able to cater to these remote communities.

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 5)

Posted on Sunday, Nov 16th 2014

Sramana Mitra: Each hospital would only be paying you a couple of thousand dollars? The hospital would pay in terms of the software subscription service per month?

Grant Kohler: That’s correct. That’s each hospital. Each of these networks would grow to be anywhere between 20 to 25. Some of them have 30 community hospitals attached to them. Each one of those hospital would have to pay that subscription fee.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to look at your 2007 situation, how many of these hospitals were part of your customer base?

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 4)

Posted on Saturday, Nov 15th 2014

Sramana Mitra: During the bootstrap stage, what happened in terms of customers? What were you able to bring together and who were these customers? Who were your target customers to begin with and then how did you acquire those customers?

Grant Kohler: Being based out of an academic medical center, we were very fortunate that our physicians were very well-connected in the stroke community. What was happening was that it was their word-of-mouth publicity. Some of them even left the Medical College of Georgia to go to other institutions. For instance, the Medical University of South Carolina. That was another large institution that was taking our technology with them. Within that year and a half time frame, our primary customers were the

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Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 3)

Posted on Friday, Nov 14th 2014

Sramana Mitra: All these entities were equity partners as part of the licensing deal?

Grant Kohler: That is correct.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of getting the company off the ground, was there any funding involved? Did you bootstrap the business?

Grant Kohler: We bootstrapped the business to get things started. The first thing that we tried to do was go for a small business grant. We applied for, what is known as an SPIR grant through different research organizations to get some seed money to try and

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