Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: During the bootstrap stage, what happened in terms of customers? What were you able to bring together and who were these customers? Who were your target customers to begin with and then how did you acquire those customers?

Grant Kohler: Being based out of an academic medical center, we were very fortunate that our physicians were very well-connected in the stroke community. What was happening was that it was their word-of-mouth publicity. Some of them even left the Medical College of Georgia to go to other institutions. For instance, the Medical University of South Carolina. That was another large institution that was taking our technology with them. Within that year and a half time frame, our primary customers were the

Medical College of Georgia, Medical College of South Carolina, and the Department of Health in New York. They were our three primary customers that were feeding us, from a revenue standpoint. Since we were bootstrapped, we didn’t have a sales team, but at that time, we were so busy responding to incoming requests for the technology that we didn’t need to have that sales team to go out and start mining all the leads for us. We were able to survive and get by on word of mouth throughout the industry.

Sramana Mitra: What was the profile of the customers you were going after?

Grant Kohler: We weren’t technically going after these customers. They were coming to us.

Sramana Mitra: Who were coming to you that were of interest to you?

Grant Kohler: Most of them were academic medical centers or teaching hospitals.

Sramana Mitra: They wanted to use this system as a means of reaching into the community, is that right?

Grant Kohler: To be able to provide better stroke care to the patients out in rural communities in their state.

Sramana Mitra: What were you charging for the technology that you were bringing into the market?

Grant Kohler: I cannot remember what we were charging back then. There are two different pricing models. There is a pricing model around the major medical centers. Then there’s a pricing model around the community hospitals. The majority of the cost was on the major medical centers. It was somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,000 a month to use our technology. The rural hospitals paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 to $750 a month to have access to the technology.

Also, understand that we’ve always been a software company. We’re an application services provider. It was always a subscription-based service. The numbers I just told you was the monthly cost to be subscribed to our service. There were hardware costs and some other things that would go along with our service in order to get things up and running. From a subscription standpoint, those numbers are relatively accurate.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler
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