Jun 8, 2017 · 24m · top-founders
684: How to Raise Your First Round of Funding with Healthcare API, Redox Founder Niko Skievaski
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Redox co-founder Niko Skievaski joins host Nathan Latka to discuss building an API integration platform for healthcare, bootstrapping from lean beginnings to raising $14 million, and scaling to $400,000 in monthly recurring revenue.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 28.5% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
When Nathan suggests Epic could be a 100 million dollar exit, Nico immediately counters that Epic has a core operating principle against acquiring companies.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 14:19 Nathan demands clarity on customer metricsNathan interrupts to challenge Nico's figure of 100 health systems, pointing out that pricing is based on developer seats rather than hospital endpoints.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 2:59 Explaining the failure of API-call pricing in EHR dataNico educates Nathan on why typical per-call API pricing fails in health tech, where health systems emit hundreds of thousands of unsolicited automated messages.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 14:58 Nathan does instant back-of-the-napkin MRR mathNathan synthesizes the 200 developers and 2,000 dollar average contract values on the fly to deduce Redox's 400k dollar MRR run rate.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Redox Business Model and Health System Connection Pricing | 5 | 5 | 1 | 3 | Nathan inquires about Redox's business model and why anyone would enter the difficult healthcare market. Nico educates Nathan on why API-call pricing does not work in healthcare data due to unpredictable firehose data feeds, leading to their per-connection SaaS model. | |
| Founding Redox and Early Bootstrapping Sacrifices | 4 | 3 | 0 | 2 | Nathan asks detailed questions about early founder salaries and financial trade-offs. Nico transparently walks through taking a pay cut from Epic market salaries down to 35k dollars to bootstrap the initial team. | |
| Pitching Early Potential to Raise Series A Funding | 5 | 4 | 1 | 3 | Nathan presses Nico on how they negotiated equity and valuation for a 3.5 million dollar Series A on barely any revenue. Nico explains the distinction between pitching traction versus selling pure market potential and the developer-first go-to-market strategy. | |
| Capital Growth and Scaling to Four Hundred Thousand MRR | 6 | 3 | 1 | 4 | Nathan catches an ambiguity between health system counts and paying developer accounts and pushes for clarification. He then quickly multiplies average connections and developer counts to calculate four hundred thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue. | |
| Team Structure, Low Churn, and Acquisition Discipline | 5 | 2 | 1 | 3 | Nathan queries Nico on churn, CAC, team distribution, and acquisition interest from big pharma. Nico details their low churn rate and explains why they previously rejected early acquisition offers that lacked mission alignment. | |
| Host Nathan Latka Promotes Hotjar Website Analytics | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Nathan delivers a solo mid-roll sponsor pitch for Hotjar analytics with no guest participation. |