Prevention

This week my founder journey seemed, at first glance, to bring a multitude of disparate tasks and topics… various talks and workshops on targeted areas, desk research, catch ups, interviews, record-keeping and consultations with experts.? Such is the life in the early stage of developing a new business… lots of exploration and putting the bones of a structure in place. Only when pulling back my perspective, from the distance of Sunday morning, did a theme emerge for the week gone by - ??Prevention.

The talks and workshops on both The Theory of Change and How to Build a TAM (Total Addressable Market) are meant to prevent us from spending time building the wrong solution, which often happens by focusing too narrowly.

TAM TAM TAM: The Beating of the Drums

I won’t bore readers with the discussions and algebraic equations created to arrive at a sensible market sizing, but suffice it to say there are a few words of wisdom from David Fogel behind selecting a Total Addressable Market.?

1)????? You need to decide the right ‘Unit of Value’ (or UoV in founder and moreover investorspeak).? Our UoV is one chronic condition.? Importantly not ‘one person’ because one person may need help on two or more different conditions, with each one having costs and ideally revenues attributable to it individually.

2)????? Think universally.? We need to get investors excited by our scale of impact and their potential profits (not always in that order).? We need a TAM drumbeat that gets their attention.? At TAM level, you’re not measuring what you can do today, nor what you plan to do tomorrow, rather what is the total ‘space’ of that particular UoV.? In our case it’s number of long-term care conditions in the universe we plan to consider (geography and conditions) and the spend related to those.? Healthcare spend is huge as a portion of GDP, and expense on chronic care is the bulk of total healthcare expenditure, so we’ve chosen a great space to play in as far as TAM is concerned.

Theory of Change

The Theory of Change or ‘ToC’ as it’s known ‘in the biz’, helps us ensure we’re building the right thing and have a clear pathway.? It helps us refine our product vision, assumption mapping and helps with ‘systems thinking’ (ie holistic thinking) which in turn helps us identify and prevent unintended consequences.? We start with the Problem Statement but from there actually work backwards ie starting with the long-term consequence, then medium- and short-term consequences before laying out how people will need to engage with our solution.? And only then do we lay out the fundamentals of our solution.

Below is a first-draft attempt at the ToC for Zonder (working title).? I underscore it’s the first draft because 1) I laid it out before beginning the patient and clinician interviews, so it’s built on hypotheses to be tested 2) It’s still lacking the ‘secret sauce’, the recipe for which I’m hoping we’ll build off the insights from interviews and more research 3) my co-founder, with deeper knowledge of the space, needs to weigh in (more on that later)

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Interviews

I love interviewing people!? But in order to get what we need from the interviews, first there’s a ton of preparation work that goes into it.? In truth, in my corporate existence, I had specialists who would both design the questionnaire based on my specs and do the graft of recruitment. ?In early-stage founding, you’ve got to do it all.? Although sometimes you can ask for help.? Govin and I drafted the discussion guides and questionnaires for clinicians and patients and then tried to whittle them down considerably.?

I was fortunate that Zinc’s new hire, Maria Fomina, offered her expert services to suggest edits to the patient questionnaire, which I gladly accepted.? Whilst I’ve interviewed people on a number of subjects, this is my first foray into health, which can be require more sensitivity.? I hope I’m managing that.? Recruitment still remains a challenge, particularly for the clinician interviews – practice GPs, GP partners, practice nurses, pharmacists.? If you or someone you know would be willing to be interviewed by us, with the aim of making chronic care easier for them, please (ask them to) sign up at a time convenient for them here.

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Fellows

Fellows Day, which falls every other Wednesday, is a firm favourite for me.? This week I exposed the problem and solution statements to each of 3 expert mentors to get their advice, and I requested particular focus on any ‘watch-outs’.? This, too, fell under the ‘prevention’ theme as it served to help circumvent us going down the wrong path altogether or being blindsided by an important variable.?

It’s hard to quantify all the value I derived from meetings with Colette H. (Harris), Amanda Vine and Christina Nesheva .? For starters, I ended the sessions with 10 full pages of notes scribbled in my A4 notebook.? Colette also kindly followed up with a page full of links to useful sites demystifying clinician compensation, learnings on asthma and so much more we needed.? Then Amanda and Christina helped me hone into what’s most important for the next stages.

Naming

Speaking of next steps, last week I promised readers a look behind the work we’re doing to find the right name for the solution (company, service, domain).? Like many founders, I let my optimism run un-checked.? We’re not ready yet.? The criteria includes being easy to pronounce and spell, fairly pithy, being unlikely to be contested by existing companies with similar or same names trademarked and perhaps one of the harder criteria to meet…having a relevant domain name available.? Fie on those profiteers gobbling up all the .com names with the intention of re-selling them at a ridiculous premium.? I’m finding that’s also been happening quickly with the newer TLDs (the part of the address that comes after the dot) like .health.

We’d invested a fair bit of time in the evenings doing desk research to find solid options and felt it was only a matter of making a decision.? However, Govin was unexpectedly down for the count all week with a nasty flu.? We agreed the last thing we wanted to do was make a decision that will meaningfully impact the business whilst he’s not in ‘hale health’ (spoiler alert - also a brand name nominee). ?With this extra time, I couldn’t help myself but think up more names and research their suitability.? I think my sub conscience was aware of the prevention theme before my conscious mind was because mostly I added names to do with prevention. ??

Highlight: The conversations with the Fellows.? I swear I can feel my brain growing every time.

Lowlight: Seeing Govin battling a super flu. In order to meet the Zinc timetables, we can’t afford to down tools, so I forged ahead alone this week.? (Thankfully he’s on the mend now.) I pledge to work on my own flu prevention by booking a jab.

Extra credit reading: the blogs of my cohort colleagues, which you can find in these links:

• Marjo Palanee
• Natalia Baltazar
• Josh Piddock
• Louise Thomas NEW!- Air Aware Labs here
• Pavandeep Rai
• Guy Naor
• Veronika Bridgman
• Lisa Rickers