How to start a AI startup in Telemedicine

I have been getting a lot of inquiries about how I helped cofound a startup in telemedicine, specifically how we started an on-demand online therapy platform. I have been putting it in the back burner but since we are all going through a global crisis, I’d like to share my personal experiences to help everyone who is interested in going online.

The following are some overly generalized steps that may shed some light into this industry.

Step 1 : Test the market and get your first paying customer

I cannot stress how important it is to test your market as fast and as cheap as possible.

For B2C, the cheapest way is to do surveys on the streets in the location of your assumed target market. DO NOT SPREAD ONESELF TOO THIN! Focus on one market first, even if the market is small. We did street surveys but I wouldn’t recommend it as this method can lead to confirmation bias. Strangers are usually non-confrontation and would agree on things you want to say. What we did eventually and what I recommend is to build a landing page and pay a few dollars on Google Ads.

We built a simple landing page for less than $50 bucks using Strikingly, a Y-Combinator backed company. Since we are not being sponsored by Strikingly, there are also alternatives like Wix and Weebly.

What are the best practices of a landing page begets a whole new article. If you are interested in building a landing page, please direct message me. As shown in the landing page below, it is important to build a sales funnel from the ground up.

In our case, visitors to our landing page would need to fill out their contact information, especially their phone number. We would then call them up individually one by one. The ideal sales funnel to scale a business is automate customer acquisition using chatbots. If you are interested in building a chatbot , please direct message me

Once we had sign ups and paying customers , we knew there was a business!

Step 2: Get A Key Solid Team

Join relevant meetups, tap into your alumni networks, talk with a friend about your business ideas. Get people who are passionate about your business and use Angel.Co, Yourator, or Cake Resume to quickly fill in skills gaps in your team.

The other good thing about teams is the momentum of your startup can make or break your business. Finding a team to encourage each other and divvy up critical tasks are important.

I personally found my business partner from a startup meetup event in Taipei 101. If you are struggling to find a co-founder, I would suggest finding people with similar background as you. As in my case, my partner went to Duke University as well so there were something in common.

Step 3: Nail down all your vendors, suppliers, partners

To run an online telemedicine platform, you have to nail down both the technical and non-technical components of the business.

Here is a handy checklist of some of things we needed to have for our own telemedicine platform:

Non-technical requirements:

• Vet online therapists
• Sign contracts with online therapists
• Use word of mouth to gain trust amongst the therapist group
• Arrange workshops for therapists

Technical requirements:

• Online video API integration solutions like zoom
• A website to integrate with zoom and online scheduling
• A script on your website where users can choose available and best-matched therapists
• Collection of User Inputs to Train and Deploy AI Models based on ML Ensemble Learning
• Customer support using chatbots or humans

Step 4: Keep growing

The thing about tech startups is that you don’t necessary need to make profits in the first 5 years. If you are looking for VC or Angel investing, they care about your growth traction. If you have exponential growth and a growing, low-churn user base, then you are on the right track.

All in all, startups are easy to start but surviving through year 5, or even just year 2 can be a herculean task. Sometimes it is being at the right place at the right time. Although unfortunate, global crisis such as the Coronavirus pandemic can present itself as an opportunity for traditional businesses to go online and thrive.

What do you guys think? Am I missing something in starting up a telehealth/telemedicine business? Be sure to let me know!

Edit: We’re now moving on to our 2nd startup, Growthbotics. Feel free to check out the website!