Leap from Google to Startup: 11 things I learnt

The pathway to startup has no dead ends. Every twist and turn has a new message.  I decided to write down my learnings from the leap-dive from Google to the bumpy roads of my health-tech startup. I am hoping this will help the other entrepreneurs who are either considering a startup or are already on their journey.


1. Don’t quit your day job if you don’t have a good idea of what your startup is about?

Post quitting Google at Zero Point @ Zojila Pass, Kashmir, second highest transport pass (altitude 11649 ft) -- one of the most dangerous passes in the world.

I quit my Google job while I was cruising high in Nov 2016 after 9.5 years. At that time, I was running a ½ B$ diskless massive horizontal program from remote. I had to make a conscious choice whether I can move back to the USA to continue this wonderful job or should I start something local. That said I wanted to experiment with different ideas but I hadn’t nailed it to one. I was well known for running unique retrospectives for Google teams, now time came for me to run a retrospective on myself. The months post resignation were like the ECG.

I did go through times where I felt perhaps I left Google too soon. I was considering consulting part time while I bootstrapped my startup, but soon realised it was a huge distraction.

Learning Lessons:

• Don’t quit till you have a definite plan
• Don’t rely on consulting while running your startup, it is a time stealer.

2. Never rush to create a company structure 

Rushing to create a company structure or incorporating one can be a huge time sink.  Be it the meetings I had with chartered accounts, although educative I agree, but not a good investment of  time. The paperwork chase for this varied from naming the incorporation, to trademarks, to getting DIPP certified,  to Director DINs etc, registering with local county etc, all in all took so much time away from building the product, not to mention the money it drains too.

Lessons learnt:

• Talking to customers to understand the problem &
• Building a product that solves a real customer pain should be the focus

3. Be focused on time and create your own deadlines 

Although you think you can release software at your own pace, it is very easy to let time slip by. What happens is that the nature of customer problems you are addressing changes.  While phone consultations were a big pain when we started, by the time we launched our product, there was an IMA ban on phone consults. If we had a product in the hands of the customer within a month or so, we would have had traction long back.

It took 2 months to get the first drop, and then an additional 5 months for the cloud enabled version of product to be launched with payment gateway integration. I could have easily cut a few features like payment gateway which costed me quite a bit of waiting time since it needed incorporation paperwork and banking setup, and other approvals. This was not in my control.

8 month launch window from idea to production 

Lessons learnt:

• Anything you depend on external approval or process can be nixed in the early phases. Cut the chase and launch the product

4. Pivot early and incorporate customer feedback quickly

By mid Jan it was clear our product market fit was not showing exponential  growth and we were stalling due to IMA regulation around phone consultation that hit many of our doctor audience. In addition, doctors didn’t want to adopt digital platform due to the transparent nature of transactions. We targeted the patient audience instead of the doctors with a Hepatitis checker on March 29, 2019 and had early prototypes of a AI-based chatbot to help with diagnosis.

Figure: Symptom checkers ( (left)AI chatbot and (right)expert system based)

Lessons learnt:

• When you know your product market fit is not going too well, and the traction graph is hitting a plateau, super important to pivot and either overcome the obstacle or pivot another idea so that you don’t stagnate. We did pivot, but it was a too late

5. Don’t chase investors, let them come to you
3 months into our launch we started meeting with investors, and our slide decks and presentations were consuming so much time. Instead I felt I should have used that time to talk to more customers, pivot and launch more products to create value for my customers. Beware, most investors will come to you for your ideas and competitive intelligence and some not so serious tasting of your product. If someone asks you to send a deck by email most often take it as a waste of your time. If you build a product with good traction, investors will smell it and come to you.  When you do get investment, remember it is not your money. Treat it with care. Obviously, if you are in hard tech or moonshot which needs significant investment upfront, it makes sense to reach out to the investment community.

Lessons learned:

• Ask yourself if you really need the money to take the product to the next level.
• When you are not able to keep up with your customer growth demands, it is good reason to seek investment. Wait for the transition from push to customers to pull from customers

6. Don’t underestimate the tech
The transition from a technical program manager at Google to hands-on coding was a daunting task. Since I was an outstanding programmer 10 years ago, I thought I can easily get back. But the tech changes were significant, and it took me 2-3 months to be back on par with web frameworks. Juggling between building a product and talking to customers and the incorporation leg work was a hard one to balance.

Outsourcing is a bad idea, especially during the early stages, unless you are willing to spend huge $$$, which you don’t want to since you are a startup. I initially tried out with one firm to get speed, but the accountability of such teams is not to your advantage. There is a lag in time commitment, precision of the product.

It is critical you choose a tech stack that you are very familiar with no matter how fancy other frameworks might look. Because I had over 220 android bugs and 36 critical stories to resolve on the server side in between the launches which I had to personally manage.

Lessons learnt

• Don't outsource your tech build unless you are working on an operations company
• Choose the tech stack you can manage initially instead of something that scales fast.

7. Don’t make your app FREE
2-3 months into launch we realised we made a mistake by making the app free. No matter how much doctors loved our product initially, because of the FREE nature, seriousness was lacking in evaluation of our product by the doctors.  We had over 75 doctors (representative of a panel of 100,000 patients) who had installed our app. However, they showed tech sluggishness and were lacking the drive to use digital way of working, since they had not paid for the product.

Lessons learned:

• In market segments where the cost/time of on-boarding is very high, having a setup fee for doctors could potentially motivate doctors to stay longer.

8. Don’t pay to get your customer leads
 As a startup don’t invest in any trade publication or marketing campaign to bring in customers. We paid for one ad in a magazine and got only 5 leads from it. Healthcare is a very tough segment to enter, especially marketing to doctors is very hard.

Learning point:

• Better ROI if you choose a larger audience such as patients where you can harness the  power of word of mouth.

9. Trust but verify your assumption
At the time of launch we had a doctor only app, we thought SMS/Email would be very welcome with no need for patient App. Not really.  In reality doctors wanted a patient like app more so that patients could talk to them using the app or look them up.  Secondly, we thought phone consultations was the selling point. Nope. It was growing their practice. Not having a lookup service was a wrong strategy.
We thought patients will pay easily with our single click pay solution. But the transition from  free phone consultations to a paid service wasn’t easy.

Voice of IMA: We underestimated its impact. On the field, it has hit us hard, and everywhere doctors want to ensure that IMA approved our app, and doctors feared documenting their phone consults via our app.

We assumed that doctors would be happy with Rx delivery in a pay-after mode. Doctors wish to charge upfront for payments rather than post Rx delivery.

Learning Lessons:

• Make assumptions, but verify them quickly using experiments that can be rolled out quickly. Immediately pivot and carve out the problem space well.

10. Never stop meeting your customers

Post our launch the next 3 months I met over 300 doctors in 3 months with a 10% conversion ratio. All of them were road trips to 3 cities Thrissur, Coimbatore, and Chennai. We managed to get around 75 doctors to download our tool. These meetings are the place where crucial conversations happen, and where the context of your app usage is better understood. Focus the questions on their problems rather than on your solution. I wish I had done these before I built the app!

Lesson Learnt:

• Talk to customers before building any product, throughout the journey and even after!

11. “Discover” those you can count on

The startup journey can be very lonely when you are at the Zero point. One discovery that comes through this journey is the people whom you can count on. While you may think, “ Persons A,B, C are my friends and will help me", you learn that A,B,C stop communicating where as an unknown set amazing people (X,Y, Z)  come forward and start helping unconditionally. Some of these new friends(X,Y, Z) help in ways who would have never expected to with their amazing skills which you never knew they had! I am thankful that I found these new set people I know I can count on.

Lesson learnt:

• Don't worry if people whom you expected help from stop responding 
• You will discover new people in this journey who will help all out with. But for the startup journey, you would have never known them otherwise!

So where next?

Whenever a door closes, a new door of opportunity rises. For each one of us there is a path. My optimism never sets, I know I have my own unique path. What looks like the end, I know hides a new beginning. I look forward to keep walking! keep walking! I have learnt from from the many hikes I have done, paths only open out to those who keep going.