Zocdoc

“Most people thought it's normal that people have to wait 24 days to see a doctor because there's a doctor shortage. And our insight was really that, no, you know, doctors have last minute availability because of these last minute cancellations, no shows, resch…”

“You know, we, what we started doing is actually mocking up the site and how we imagined it back then in PowerPoint and just the image of a website. Yeah, wireframe. Exactly. We would, And then we'd go to Starbucks and we'll chat up strangers and say, hey, here…”

“Oh, everyone. Everyone told us we're crazy, and we got a lot of negative feedback on the idea, too, right? People would say, this is, this just won't work, you know, I would never pick my doctor on the internet, or I already have a doctor or, you know, doctors…”

“For a while we wanted to have a descriptive name, so we looked at physicians.com and doctors.com, and we actually tracked down the owners of one of these domains, and they wanted several million dollars for the domain name, and we were funding the company ours…”

“In the early days, when we went out there, we were the ones installing internet in the doctor's offices. You know, we, they were many times just migrating from paper books to scheduling systems. We were sort of at the cusp of digitization for healthcare.”

“Selling to doctors is one of the hardest things to do.”

“So we began with dentists because our thinking was that people go to dentists most often, and we wanted to make sure that we have an offering that is relevant for patients as often in their lives as possible.”

“Guy Kawasaki, who we knew and valued, As an evangelist for Apple, he came out and just said he didn't get it, he would never use this in front of everyone, right? And his direct quote was something like, honestly, it would just never occur to me to go to any s…”

“It actually took three days before we got our first legitimate patient, and in this entire first month, we only got five bookings.”

“When you think about it, healthcare is hyperlocal and very complicated, so you have to match supply and demand on a zip code specialty level, and then we have thousands of insurances to take into account, and so we realized that our odds of actually finding a …”

“It was incredibly complicated to sync the doctor's calendars with ours, because none of the software was actually made to sync”

“I was our customer service I personally would call the doctor and confirm the appointment was all set, and if it wasn't, I'd Personally contact the patient to let them know and then I would offer them an Amazon gift card alongside with an apology.”

“Initially, we offered it for free, but we eventually started charging 50 dollars per month.”

“And so in August of 2008, we ended up raising five million from Coastal Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Marc Benioff.”

“Yes, we charge doctors 3000 dollars a year, and that was a flat fee, no matter how many bookings ZocDoc actually facilitated for them”

“And, you know, at some point during this time, you know, Nick Actually ran an analysis that showed that it would take us several years, if ever, for us to make our money back on, on many of the doctors we signed up.”

“Very few companies really change their underlying business model once they have a certain scale and then live to tell about it, right? We know the names of the companies that have done this, like Netflix went from DVDs to streaming, Adobe you know, from box so…”

“Yeah, you look, in New York, We facilitate roughly one in five new patient-doctor relationships in the entire city on ZocDoc.”

“Yeah, we, within a year, we had we finally had some incredible momentum. You know, it was really going better than we had expected in our wildest dreams. You know, our existing client churn went down to essentially zero. I mean, people still retire and move jo…”

“So when the lockdown started happening, we saw in-person bookings declining. Anywhere between 50 to 90% by the end of March.”

“I think what has been really fantastic to see is how we really finished two years of roadmap in two months.”

“ZocDoc.com wasn't only available. The price they paid for that domain name? Six bucks.”

“And so I thankfully, you know, raised a bridge round from, actually Cyrus from ZocDoc helped me Raise that round, which got me into, got me through to January, which is when I officially closed my seed round that was going to let us launch in other places.”