Optimize Health | Bonfire Ventures

Optimize Health makes it easy for healthcare providers to offer patient-centric, reimbursable remote monitoring. Optimize Health’s solution offers a wide selection of affordable devices, which integrate seamlessly with its easy-to-use technology platform, empowering patients and providers alike to improve health outcomes and contain costs.

Why solve this problem?

It’s not hard to find big problems within our country’s healthcare system, but one of the larger problems we will face over the coming decade is how we will collectively manage a rapidly aging population when the number of healthcare workers will not necessarily keep up. To put this in context, about 20% of our GDP is already spent on healthcare, and this will most likely increase further.

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There is an opportunity to use technology to move a greater portion of healthcare from hospitals and nursing homes back into the home, where it’s less expensive and where most people would rather be. However, the complexities and regulations within healthcare often hold back progress and are part of the reason the industry is 10 years behind many other industries in terms of how it uses technology to coordinate work.

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In addition to appreciating also having a social mission, I’ve personally always been drawn to working on complex, multifaceted problems. For me, it never gets boring working on something that combines various disciplines ranging from UX design to software and hardware to medicine to policy and finance. There is always something new to learn.

Hardest thing about being a founder?

Never having time to accomplish everything I know I could accomplish if I had more time. Overcoming that challenge requires ruthless prioritization.

Biggest piece of advice for aspiring founders?

When you’re starting out, try working backwards from the point where you are selling your product and then shape your product and marketing strategy around that. It helps to start by clearly understanding the problem that you want to solve before finalizing your core idea, not only as you think you perceive it to be, but as your customers actually perceive it. Try interviewing as many potential customers as possible in a condensed time period, and use that feedback to refine your product. Aim for 50 - 100 of these feedback interviews spread over 1 - 2 months (2-4 interviews per day). Iterate on mockups until you receive repeated, “I would buy that”-type feedback, with bonus points if you can actually take a few pre-orders.

Most exciting moment so far?

The first time a customer paid us for our product, and then told us they loved it. It’s always incredibly gratifying when somebody values a new product enough to spend their hard-earned money on it, and especially when they give that type of feedback. It’s validation that all of the other time and sacrifice was totally worth it.

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Why did you choose Bonfire?

In addition to being (kind of) funny, Jim and the whole Bonfire team have been nothing short of amazing to work with. We have regular but not too frequent check-in calls, and on these calls, it’s incredibly helpful to get advice and feedback from people who have been in SaaS for so long, and who have seen so much. When we started working on the Series A, every single person on the Bonfire team stepped up to help, from providing feedback on the pitch to making a ton of intros to many top Series A investors. I can honestly say that I’ve never had a better investor experience.

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