Starting a Healthcare Startup: From Idea to Funding

Identifying a meaningful problem is crucial in starting a healthcare startup. The founders emphasized the importance of enjoying the work and ensuring it has a positive impact, focusing on healthcare and sustainability. They identified complexities in bringing medical devices to market as a significant challenge, which stemmed from their prior experiences and insights from extensive customer interviews. Conducting 40 interviews within a month and a half, they analyzed various customer needs and challenges, ultimately discovering that maintaining compliance for a portfolio of medical devices was a pressing issue due to regulatory changes. They narrowed down their focus to develop a simple prototype based on this problem. To gauge market interest, they sought feedback from prospective customers and secured letters of intent (LOIs) from 10 out of 20 approached clients. These LOIs, along with a pitch deck and prototype, facilitated their successful pre-seed funding of $1.8 million. The founders invested significant time in research and customer validation before entering the development phase, spending seven to eight months on preparatory work before writing code. This thorough upfront research reinforced their strategy for building a business and influenced ongoing experiments to refine their solutions.