Bootstrapping Using Services from Atlanta: Avelead CEO Jawad Shaikh (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit more about what the product is? What was the process of identifying this product that you wanted to build?

Jawad Shaikh: This was during the Obama years and the stimulus package of helping healthcare systems move to electronic medical records. Our job was always to help hospitals implement those systems. We migrate data and get electronic as much as possible. There were a lot of challenges with that.

We identified the business problems that those guys were facing in migrating data as well as managing and maintaining the data on an ongoing basis. Beyond that, once you do migrate and you are in an electronic network system, you need to figure out how to maintain and optimize it. You need to make sure that what is supposed to happen is happening.

A lot of those problems are what defines our tools. We didn’t have a great idea of saying, “Here’s a great software product, let’s go take it into the market.” It was the other way around. We were living and breathing the problems that our customers were facing with them and we created these products out of that.

We help them identify system maintenance issues and transactions that might not be logged correctly. The biggest ROI value that we give our customers today is synchronizing and managing actual clinical activity and their billing activity. Things are happening all the time where you might do some type of surgery or lab test and the accuracy might not be captured correctly. This results in inaccurate billing. Healthcare and insurance is complicated and it is a manual process historically. We have modernized that and automated a lot of that to make it easy to synchronize and reconcile on a day-to-day basis. 

Sramana Mitra: The methodology that you are describing is something that we have formalized in our accelerator. We call it Bootstrapping Using Services. We see this methodology all the time with people doing consulting projects around a particular domain with a set of customers that are synergic with the particular problem.

They identify the problems through customer intimacy and also identify productization opportunities. It’s a very effective process of identifying product ideas. 

Jawad Shaikh: Definitely. You get that feedback almost immediately as well by asking, “Hey, is this fixing your problem or not?” 

Sramana Mitra: Take me back to the point when you started identifying the productization opportunity. What year was that?

Jawad Shaikh: It was probably in 2015. 

Sramana Mitra: That was five years into your journey as consultants?

Jawad Shaikh: Yes. It was two years into consulting in the new company Avelead. We have done a lot of consulting in the previous business that we sold off. We had the experience and expertise to jump off. 

Sramana Mitra: It was just you and your brother in this second round?

Jawad Shaikh: Correct. 

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Atlanta: Avelead CEO Jawad Shaikh
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