Your personal mission is your greatest power. So, as an entrepreneur, it’s your responsibility to embrace it to drive customer value and improve the quality of their lives. Today, Renee Dua from Together by Renee sits down with A.J. to discuss how her personal experiences shaped her business venture, helping her build an innovative health tech product that’s now improving patients’ lives and outcomes.

About Renee Dua:

Renee Dua is the Founder of Together by Renee, an AI assistant that supports patients and their caregivers to achieve better health outcomes by helping them with healthcare tasks. She’s also the Founder and Advisor at Heal, another powerful software to improve health outcomes by providing in-home primary care.

Renee completed her BS in Biochemistry at UC San Diego, her MD at Rosalind Franklin University, her residency in internal medicine at UCLA, and her fellowship in nephrology at USC. Before founding Together by Renee and Heal with her husband, Nick Desai, she built a nephrology practice that was noted for the successful use of electronic health records and practice management.

Episode highlights:

Entrepreneurship tends to be a lonely road. So, having support along the way makes all the difference. It gives you greater confidence to build a product or a service that can change someone’s life. So, if that support doesn’t come to you naturally, look for an experienced and savvy mentor to guide you toward your business goals and help you become a better entrepreneur. (06:43)
Focusing solely on innovation won’t cut it for entrepreneurs aiming at long-term success. The real achievement is creating products that consistently improve people's lives and not just sit on the shelves. That’s why it’s vital to deeply understand your users and focus on solving real-world problems while at the same time ensuring your product is both mission-powered and user-focused. (09:50)
When you combine your personal mission with your business vision, you can draw unique insights to help you innovate in your company. This alignment can help to improve people’s lives and drive meaningful change in society, ultimately skyrocketing your business growth and leaving a long-term legacy behind. (18:40)
Understanding what people need and creating solutions for those needs is super important in business. Your own experiences can be really helpful here. They can help you find gaps in the market and understand what problems people are facing. By putting yourself in their shoes, you can develop creative solutions that connect with them. This makes your product stand out and gives your customers something that really matters to them. (20:28)
Autonomy is an important aspect of building user-oriented products. This is particularly critical in sectors like healthcare, as it puts the control back in users’ hands and makes them feel in control. Empowering users is a win-win strategy that fuels your product’s success by improving user experiences and fostering trust and loyalty toward your product. (29:18)

Renee’s best advice for entrepreneurs:

“Everybody has this story. And hearing my patients, having the privilege of being able to still see patients, and then having our parents and me being their caregiver, that has been so instrumental in every aspect of what you see.” (22:23)

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