Fast pitch
Nine startups unveiled their progress Aug. 13 after 13 furious weeks of planning, research and development as a part of The Iron Yard’s Digital Health Accelerator in Spartanburg. From cybersecurity and ‘Siri for doctors’ to service stations and smart watches, the programs’ fifth cohort faced a range of business and product development challenges over the course of the term. In case you missed it, here they are, in their own words.
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Data Minded Solutions
The Pitch: Integrated, data-driven approach to chronic care
The Curveball: The most complicated portion of startup life thus far has been transitioning from technical leaders to business leaders. The complexity of launching, building and scaling a business has taken more effort than anyone of us had expected.
Current Inning: We are currently in Private Beta release and continuing to develop and iterate on the lessons we are learning.
Next Up: Our next big milestones rely heavily on raising seed capital so we can increase our human horsepower and move to market FAST!
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Hygeia Health
The Pitch: Improving access to telehealth and remote healthcare.
The Curveball: The intricate nature of the sales process. The interrelated components of delivering the product are different in nature; formulating a way to scale the product has been a challenge. By forming strategic partnerships we have been able to overcome these challenges by aligning the incentives of the different stakeholders in the supply chain.
Current Inning: Customer acquisitions and beta.
Next Up: Raise capital, beta locations and employees.
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InTuneTo
The Pitch: Smart CRM dashboard for fitness facilities. We’re increasing retention rates, communication and member engagement at fitness facilities.
The Curveball: Our biggest challenge during this program was narrowing down our original idea to what we wanted the final product to be, what features the gym found the most value in and getting partnerships and pilot programs. Other problems were more development roadblocks but we were able to iron them out.
Current Inning: We’re almost complete with our development and we will have a working demo at Demo Day and hopefully have it deployed to one of our pilot sites.
Next Up: Our next milestone is to get seed funding that way it gives us 12 months of runway so we can go back heads down on developing new features.
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Play-It Health
The Pitch: Personalized software that successfully motivates health engagement
The Curveball: I have been surprised by how difficult it has been for me to communicate the importance and urgency of the problems caused by the lack of health engagement. The most elegant and well-intentioned treatments are only effective if they are followed. Data demonstrate that almost half of the population do not follow prescribed medical regimens. I truly admire those who are able to motivate people by communicating ideas simply and succinctly in ways that everyone can understand. Without a clear communication of the problem, it is not possible to begin to discuss the solution.
Current Inning: Customer acquisition
Next Up: We are trying to complete a bridge raise to allow us to solidify our team, increase our sales, and add some superb features that will continue to solidify our position as the world’s most personalized health engagement system.
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Triage Security
The Pitch: Defending enterprise information from internal and external cyber threats.
The Curveball: Cybersecurity is a huge and growing problem and as very experienced software engineers and development managers, it was natural to try to explain the complexity of our approach that better protects sensitive data of businesses and governments from hackers. What we found was are presentations were too detailed and using too many unfamiliar terms to explain our solution to a non-technical audience.
Current Inning: Our demonstration version is currently being tested with several organizations.
Next Up: We’re looking for customers to experience how much easier our product makes security and audit compliance. We are also looking for investors to help us prepare for market launch.
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Prenovate
The Pitch: We’re WeightWatchers for diseases.
The Curveball: For us, the biggest challenge was changing our focus about a month before Demo Day… What was especially tough was not so much that we were pairing down the frills to get to the product that already existed, but we were essentially building a new MVP.
Current Inning: It’s such an iterative process. We’re building out our software, we’ve launched publicly… but you’re never finished building and you’re never finished testing.
Next Up: We’re preparing to raise funds…Now that we’re identified a bit more of the business model, it’s time to get some funds surrounding future development and some funds to try to keep the wonderful team that we have.
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Pro Alert
The Pitch: Helps first responders save lives by saving time
The Curveball: One of the most unexpected challenges would be my cofounder leaving and going back to Myrtle Beach and me having to pick up and march forward…I put on my big boy pants and kept going forward.”
Current Inning: We’re raising funds, and we’re going to use those funds to build the team and finish development.
Next Up: We have two pilot sites lined up, and it’s just a matter of getting the product finished …and into the hands of first responders.
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Glass Chart
The Pitch: Smart watches for caregivers to deliver smarter care.
The Curveball: There’s a bunch of credentialing we had to get as a company to work with Spartanburg Regional, to get in the hospital. Glass Chart as a company had to get credentialed, which means everyone in the company needed to get background checks, vaccinations, professional liability insurance, HIPAA and blood borne pathogen training… Every vendor has to do it, but it was something that we weren’t expecting.
Current Inning: We’re primarily in a fundraising mode right now.
Next Up: We’re about to go live at Palmetto Proactive, which is the right care clinic in Greenville. Then the next after that is to go live as Spartanburg Regional in October.
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Heads Up Health
The Pitch: Empowering individuals with health information.
The Curveball: Managing the demands of a startup you’re just pulled in so many different directions and trying to maintain focus and trying to build the business.
Current Inning: We’re in beta right now. We’re in customer acquisition and we’re also fundraising.
Next Up: The next big milestone is our public GA launch, so going GA on the product and then closing our seed round.
