Tapping into market after market? With Sievert Weiss, Amboss

Amboss founder Dr.Sievert Weiss on product market fit, business model expansion and the advantage of a slice-by-slice approach.

As a medical student, young entrepreneur Dr. Sievert Weiss struggled with analog and ineffective exam preparation resources. To spare other aspiring medical students this very problem, he and two fellow students decided to make it go away:?

Med-Ed-Tech startup Amboss is a platform that makes exam preparation easier for medical students. It's an idea that seems to fill an important need: Now with 95% market share, the platform is not only the leading learning resource for aspiring medical professionals, but also for those who want to further their education or quickly look something up during their career.??

And yet, for Sievert Weiss, a trained physician, the path to entrepreneurship was by no means planned from the start:?

"For us, it wasn't completely obvious to start a company. As a medical doctor, you're on the path to becoming a doctor for ten years first. Deciding against the normal, predefined path takes some overcoming. And then to decide on a path that involves a lot of uncertainty and an obvious risk is not so easy. The environment doesn't take that too kindly to it," recalls the founder.?

However, since exam preparation is such a major pain point and the young physicians could not be sure that anyone else would take on the subject, Dr. Sievert Weiss and his fellow students Dr. Madjid Salami and Dr.Kenan Hasan then decided to take the plunge into the unknown after all:?

"The decision was easier for us when we said to ourselves that we'll first see how far we get in two years. Of course, you give up something predictable for something unpredictable, but you know that you will learn a lot in the process, even if it is not financially successful," Dr. Sievert Weiss sums up.?

Meanwhile, the platform is designed to serve not only medical students, but physicians at all stages of their careers, as a learning tool and resource. In this way, physicians can seek out necessary information, look things up and refresh their knowledge long after they have completed their studies:?

"Basically, what we're doing is providing knowledge for physicians in a digital way. And we do that from day 1 of study until retirement. In our view, these individual stages are interrelated. Everything builds on each other and I cut out the slices I need at the time. The goal is a lifetime subscription," says the founder, summarizing the business model.?

While the costs for the platform were originally borne by the users themselves via a subscription, this has also changed over time:?

"We started B2C-over time, it became more and more apparent that the hosting institutions, such as the universities and hospitals, were covering the fees,"

the entrepreneur recalls.?

Expansion into other countries also came about organically. "We saw that people from different countries were accessing the platform and translating it with Google Translate," says Dr. Sievert Weiss. "We realized that everything fits into this system and you can keep expanding it. That's when we thought that maybe this principle would work globally."?

The company now has a presence in 180 countries and most recently raised €30 million in Series B funding in 2019. And that's despite a "step by step" approach that hasn't caught on to the aggressive scaling hype in the business world:?

"It's not necessarily a disadvantage if you're in a smaller space first. I don't think the piecemeal approach is bad at all, because you can focus better that way," says the founder on this topic:

"You don't have to conquer the whole world right away, but can show that you're good in one place. That then acts as a beacon for everything else."?

Of course, this doesn't mean you have less to do:?

"The core work is to really tap into that first market and really own it with good traction. You always have this issue that you have to prove something. You have to show traction somewhere, but you don't get anywhere," the medic adds. From the looks of it, he's more than succeeded with Amboss.??

If you want to learn more about the physician's unusual path and the success story behind Amboss, listen in to the podcast....