Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You programmed your PalmPilot to have that available as a mobile application. You presented at this conference and everybody wanted it.

Steve Liu: Pretty much, yes. That was when we figured out we might have something. A few months later, we put up a booth. I was a physician. I just wanted to be a physician, but this took a life of its own. I actually talked to my parents. I said, “Mom, I think I have a company here. I think I have to do this, but I have no idea about businesses.” She thought I was crazy, but she also knew that I made that big decision to become a physician at the last minute. They supported me.

Sramana Mitra: You stopped being a physician to do the company?

Steve Liu: No, I still am. That’s probably one of our secret sauces. I still practice about three or four shifts a month. I do it because you have to use your own product to build a good product. If you know anything about healthcare, physicians are your Achilles’ heel. If they don’t like something, your whole project is tanked. To get them to like something takes a lot of work. I always use the hair club for men analogy. I’m also a member of it. That’s how we can make really good products, but also, I really like it. I think it’s a privilege to take care of patients. I’ll never get that out.

Sramana Mitra: You continued your life as a physician, but on the side, you started developing this business. You didn’t have to do very much to acquire customers because you’ve already generated a lot of interest and there were people who were beating on your door to access your product.

Steve Liu: Very much so. I was lucky because I actually had a great career as a physician. Obviously, this was a side project back then. Side project means you do your other job 100% and this other thing at 50%. So it takes 150% of your time. It was a nice safety thing for me because rather than being one of those entrepreneurs who just jump and put everything on the line, I had this as a side project, which grew and grew. It got its legs and became a little safer to put more and more time into. Then I began to ramp down my full-time career as a physician.

Sramana Mitra: You would be pleased to hear that our next book is called Bootstrapping Using a Paycheck.

Steve Liu: I did all that.

Sramana Mitra: Clearly, there’s a lot of time that it takes to get to that safe place. All this time, you still have to pay the bills and survive. We are very big believers of this whole bootstrapping using a paycheck.

Steve Liu: We’ve done really well. We’ve done it all on probably less than $8 million in total funding.

Sramana Mitra: You had all these customers. How much did you price your product at when you started to sell?

Steve Liu: Our first product was priced at $199 per user for a lifetime license. It was a new product. We had no idea about pricing. We were happy. We were like, “These guys gave us $200.”  The ROI was humongous. It was in the thousand percent range. We had no branding and no company. In a way, we did that to just get people to buy it. Because we were physicians, I grabbed a couple of my colleagues who I worked well with. We had a little bit of funds from our personal paychecks that could withstand low prices like that. Obviously, we developed, very quickly, a rabid fan base. We ended up dominating that hospital and getting this incredible branding recognition.

Sramana Mitra: The primary market you went after were hospital physicians?

Steve Liu: Yes. Basically, we built for ourselves. We had polls of what people needed. We were able to deliver real value.

Sramana Mitra: It was a mobile product on the PalmPilot at that time?

Steve Liu: It was mobile on the PalmPilot. I got into Access programming and built this involved Access desktop interface. That was the $199 lifetime license.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping With A Paycheck From Atlanta: Ingenious Med Founder Steve Liu
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