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Bird Blitch of Patientco
Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup
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Bright and early on the morning of May 8th we hosted a Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup at Atlanta Tech Village. Coffee was flowing and after attendees broke out into small groups to talk about some lessons learned on how to overcome security/privacy concerns as a startup, we dove into an interview with Bird Blitch, CEO and Founder of Patientco. The Patientco technology helps health systems address growing patient out-of-pocket challenges by providing a superior patient payment experience.
A.T. Gimbel, Partner at Atlanta Ventures, kicked off the interview with a question about beginnings and why Bird decided to go into entrepreneurship. Bird felt like the world was increasingly moving toward technology which is what drew him to Georgia Tech. It was there that he learned how to think innovatively, the importance of grit, as well as manage a calendar! He said, “it taught me that life ain’t easy.”
“I remember driving across Georgia with my dad and I would just listen and think ‘I want to create the future.’”
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The Beginnings of BroadSource
It was through his Georgia Tech baseball connections that he met the co-founders of his first startup BroadSource, a Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) technology provider. Telecommunications was a fast-growing field, so the timing was right, and before long they all decided to quit their jobs to go all in (having raised zero dollars at that point).
At BroadSource, he was instrumental in transforming the venture-backed company into a market-leading TEM company (as they eventually raised Series A, B, C, D, and E). The organization was twice listed by INC magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in the United States.
A skill set that was most valuable along his journey was his itch to know how to piece things together. As an engineer, he really wanted to understand how everything worked and fit into place. He had a strong tendency to just learn and try and understand.
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How Patientco Began
The Patientco story starts with Bird pondering the time tables around the movement of money. He was interested in how money moved, and the potential of moving data and dollars together. He started looking at payment sources and over time talked with Josh Silver (who later became his co-founder) about why it took so long to transfer payments down the line. The two eventually stumbled into healthcare and saw how difficult it was to manage healthcare payments. Around the same time he and his wife had a child and their medical experience was great, but their financial experience was not. When he started thinking about a solution, Patientco was born.
Finding PMF
Customer discovery was a big part of the Patientco path to Product/Market Fit. Bird asked himself three questions when pursuing PMF:
- Are you solving a problem?
- Will people pay you for that problem?
- Would people pay us enough money to solve that problem so that you can grow that business?
He knew he was on the right path when his first customer wrote a check for $7,000 before they had even written any code!
...And it didn’t stop there! Bird says he is still finding Product/Market Fit because their industry is changing so fast. He has to find a way to work within the hundreds of millions of dollars they already have. One of his biggest challenges is how to track Product/Market Fit.
“You can’t get to home plate without going through first base. All I really care about is how do I get to first base.”
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Would You Raise Before you Build?
Bird believes that at some point to get scale you need to raise capital, but he’d rather an “entrepreneur crawl over glass, than spend time raising money. Every hour you're spending raising money, you could spend in front of a potential customer learning.” He didn’t raise any money until he got to a seven figure run rate.
Pre-raising he had to make some tough decisions about where to spend his money. It was more like survival mode, which is never fun or easy, but it forced him to make really good decisions.
Today’s Focus
Bird’s current goal is to be externally focused and listening to the market. He has a great team that is doing incredible work, and with hard work comes growth. He has to figure out how to deliver on that growth. He has to try and synthesize data from marketing and sales and the voice of the customers across the whole business.
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Next up: Greg Benoit!
If you missed Bird Blitch, you can come to the next Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup on June 26th with Greg Benoit of QGenda.
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