Yerbba - Venturing A Startup

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Develop Idea

The more severe conditions patients have, the more likely to desire more information about the conditions. The cofounders and I narrowed our focus to breast cancer for several reasons.

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Breast Cancer

Highly Complicated Care Process

Long And Extensive Treatment Period

High Chance To Become Severe

Well-Established Care Standards

Prevalent Disease In The US: 1 in 8

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It seems breast cancer is a right business item to go. We wanted to confirm potential consumers' needs. Through extensive customer discovery surveys and interviews, I found following needs:

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Contact Doctors

• Time-consuming
• Expansive costs
• Possible bias from doctor
• Gaps from advance care methods
• Not responsible for educating the patient
• Fear of liability from sharing information
• Some patients prefer to learn on their own

Search the Internet

• Generic, low-depth information
• Not personalized
• Browsing and searching is time-consuming
• Patient can't know if a piece of information is relevant to them
• Some sources are medically unreliable and outdated

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Find Funding

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We started with some of Angle funds. I prepared a presentation to impress the investors and polish the company to shine. Funding chances were slight, but we got funds enough to survive. The rest story is under Non-Disclosure Agreement.

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Find Core Members

I joined this company at the very early stage, when it was just an initiative with a vague idea. I leveraged good relationships with my cohort graduates in my program. I helped to join another cofounder, Brian, to the initiative. And I have been recruiting employees and interns to the team when needed.

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Set up Legal professional and accountant

We used available resources around us. Some of the University of Michigan departments runs Startup Incubators or Excellerator. We participated one of the startup bootcamp that provide financial benefits and further connections with more investors. Luckily, we gained a good relationship with the program executives, and earned free legal advise service and accountant service for startups.

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Understand the market, find niche, be a benefit to existing stakeholders.

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Discover Business Opportunity

The patient-centered services is relatively new in healthcare, and it is our chance. A good atmosphere toward patient-centered service with government level supports.

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Market Trend in patient-centered service

MIPS

Value-based reimbursement model

HITECH Act, ACA

Increased patient's awareness of their conditions through internet

Information
Accessability

Patient satisfaction rate affects to hospitals' compensation

hospitals adopt better patient-facing tools

There are growing needs to enhance patient satisfaction, and patient-centered communication is getting important to healthcare providers and payers.

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Healthcare providers are putting more importance on taking a good care of their patients than before those acts execution.

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Main Players In Patient-Centered Service

Through customer discovery surveys, I found that patients' questions fundamentally fall into two categories: condition and cost. They collect information to solve those questions.

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Although the hospital did provide information through the Patient Portal, patients could not distinguish what information is critical to decide a treatment plan for them. This information gap that comes from relatively low health literacy hampers  patients to control their health and have clear vision over their disease.

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Find Appropriate Information Delivery Method

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The major technical requirements are following:

• Information Reliability: Yerbba reports should be medically accurate and reliable. The payload should implement standard of care.
• Medical Information Translation System: Medical jargons will be translated into ordinary words.
• User Profile Management: All user profiles should be unique with applying de-identification method, and they should fully connected their healthcare providers.
• Automatic Update: Medical information should be automatically updated  in Yerbba system when healthcare providers update patients' medical records.
• Fast and Easy Initial Setup: The Yerbba system should be easily and promptly manageable whenever needed.
• Data Security: All data transaction and storage should be protected at recent data security methods.

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The whole process of building Minimum Viable Product (MVP) consists of three parts: building High-Fidelity Wireframe and fully functioned working mockup, and User Acceptance Test. The detailed information is in Product Design section.

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I used React.JS framework for frontend and Meteor.JS for backend. Server was deployed by AWS. The revenue model is from the one of the subscription business model. We tweaked the subscription model to be more accessible and give more room for free trials. Backend developer attached the payment solution and I created UIs to the product.

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Medical products are quite different with other industries in terms of advertisement strategy. Medical product is basically a credence product, so we thought slow marketing would be better than aggressive marketing. I have been setting up Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies such as creating Youtube channel and blogs about breast cancer, and improve website.

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I learned there is no designated path to success for a startup. I have learned how a healthcare startup ought to be successful company at several business courses and entrepreneurship courses. I could confirm few things are true. There are no common path, but own path. No one have the correct answer and tell me what to do. Sometimes such uncertainty works as a strong motivator, to be like a pioneer of something, but sometimes it works almost the opposite. It will work as a motivator when things go well, but won't work when things don't go well.