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😱 How This 19-Year-Old Dropout Built a $$$ Healthcare Biz
Published 11 months ago • 4 min read
Hey Changemakers,
Today’s story is as about as good as the “college dropout to successful biz owner” genre gets.
We’re talking saving millions of lives while making millions $$$ good.
We met Justin Fulcher (Forbes30U30, Healthcare & Sciences) back in 2021 during OCE’s inaugural cohort. He is the brain behind RingMD, a pioneer in telehealth that brought accessible healthcare to rural communities on a global scale.
Inspiration? Check. Frameworks he uses to build his biz? Check. Wholesome little story at the end? Check.
But FIRST
If you are new, welcome to OCE’s weekly newsletter curated for the ambitious youth…here are some articles you missed from previous weeks:
When Justin was 19, he enrolled in Clemson University studying CS but not very long after starting college, he dropped out. “Just decided it wasn’t for me,” he told us.
Instead of kicking around, he bought a ticket to Southeast Asia planning to spend three months exploring other cultures.
During his travels, a few trends caught his eye.
1. Extreme lack of healthcare. In Southeast Asia, many of the problems that people face in rural environments could have been solved with basic antibiotics and very basic healthcare access. But those were actually leading to more life-or-death situations.
2. Smart devices were becoming widely available and affordable in Southeast Asia at the time in 2012 – surprisingly, even in remote places.
It gave Justin an idea. What if he could start a company that connected doctors with patients who own smartphones, so they could receive proper medical advice on their mobile devices?
With a mission in mind, he sets off to build RingMD.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy? The rest is history?
….Not exactly.
He had no product, no customer, no money.
So what did he do?
I started by coding. I decided to make a basic prototype of what I thought would be the application and from that point in time, kept building that out.
And for a number of months, it was essentially a hobby project.
There is often a misconception that you can get customers and investors with just an idea.
As a startup, your product must be 10x better than the next best alternative for that pain point you are addressing.
Because your initial customers/partners will only bet on a no-name startup if you are 10x better.
Sometimes this might mean your prototype has to be a heavier build to be investable.
The very first version of RingMD
What about convincing people to use your product?
Consumers were very, very hungry for this type of service. In places like Indonesia, where people have very few options to healthcare, or essentially no healthcare access at all in some places.
However, they want to ensure they're talking to a proper doctor, and it's a proper doctor that's going to be able to help them. That's on the education and the product side.
That included:
Implementing crowd-sourced review system after each call
Developing a credential verification process when onboarding physicians
Improved version of RingMD
Which brings us to how did you get so many healthcare providers onboard?
Doctors actually saw it as something that they were a little bit skeptical about as a new model of care.
It really was a big educational challenge of, "This is not a replacement for in-person; this is an augmentation to what you're currently doing,"
RingMD was first launched with ~100 Singapore-based physicians to the platform.
And of course, it took years of building up a reputation with consistency to eventually reach thousands of health providers— a huge accomplishment in its own right.
Still, he wasn’t satisfied.
So…what happened next?
The ultimate power of tech is scale.
Aside from Southeast Asia, Justin saw similar emerging markets like India as an opportunity to play.
So in 2016, RingMD partnered with the Indian government under the Digital India program to provide access to more than 883 million Indian citizens through the RingMD platform.
Today, RingMD manages patient records of 15 million people in more than 50 countries globally, while working with 100,000 healthcare providers.
Talk about badass gangster moves.
Let’s breakdown the business model
RingMD started out as a marketplace where patients would pay for the amount of time they are on call with the physician — usually about $3 or $4 per minute and RingMD would take a percentage of that as commission.
Once they’ve established a reputation, RingMD shifted away from the marketplace model to focus on providing a turnkey digital healthcare platforms for governments and public health programs – aka SaaS (Software as a Service).
What do you see for the future of healthcare?
To Justin, the future of healthcare will be completely data-centric.
This will be achieved through the use of technology, taking advantage of widespread accessibility of mobile devices and empowering doctors and other healthcare professionals.
Justin also expects wearables to be able to provide more real-time data to doctors.
Unlike many people leading successful tech companies, Justin didn’t come from a prestigious school, heck he didn’t even finish college.
Justin was a teen on a mission. He saw the business opportunities in emerging markets and grown RingMD into something incredible.
But here’s what you need to know: It wasn’t just about building a viable business but rather transforming healthcare, one provider at a time.
I know that if I only get to bet on one thing, my bet will always be on humans who believe in something bigger than themselves.
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PS. This summer, we are going to tackle pressing global issues and drive innovation in regions (such as your own community) where it is needed the most. Want in?
We run a summer cohort for ambitious youth (high school and undergrads) to work directly with world-class founders while learning from Silicon Valley leaders.
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