Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What form did the idea take? When you decided that you were going to build your own product, you said you observed the gap in the CRM space within the healhcare market, what format did this idea evolve into?

Bill Moschella: It evolved into what it still is today. We built a healthcare CRM platform that’s powered by analytics.

Sramana Mitra: Who is the customer?

Bill Moschella: Hospitals and providers. The story behind it is very simple. There’s a problem of rising healthcare cost. It’s not going away. It’s not stopping. It’s not slowing down. That rise in healthcare cost brings in opportunity. The next thing you know retail steps in. Healthcare goes from public health service to retail-based. Years and years ago, did you ever think that while you’re grocery shopping that you’d get a flu shot? These aren’t things that used to exist. Retail comes in and steps in. It changes the whole dynamics. The way retail approaches the market is to market to people. Whatever product it is, you have to make them think of you.

When you think of your health, do you think of your primary care provider or insurance company? No. You think of Advil, gym, or health food store. It’s a transformation of brand alignment. When retails steps into this market, it starts to take market share from these public health service providers. These organizations now have to market to consumers in a completely different way. They didn’t have an engagement strategy. They were void in actual engagement, brand, and communications from a CRM perspective. They didn’t even call their patients customers. They’re like, “When you’re sick, you’ll come in because there’s nowhere else to go.” Guess what? There’s a lot of places to go. The market, which was spending very little on lead initiatives, now all of a sudden has to step up. It’s a business transformation into a completely new vertical that was absent.

We just happened to step into this. We saw it start to happen when we were looking at different adjacent markets. When we got to this market, we said, “We shouldn’t just resell other people’s stuff here. We should build our own.” That was at the end of 2009. The opportunity presented itself. We started to build our own solution. Then in 2011, we raised our Series A from Health Enterprise Partners out of Manhattan. It was a very specific equity firm whose LPs are hospitals and payers. We felt very close to them because they understood our story. The traditional VC market wasn’t really interested in the story. They didn’t really feel the market moving.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Evariant CEO Bill Moschella
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