Kyle Braatz is the founder of Fullscript, a $900M revenue company that started by helping health practitioners recommend supplements to their patients. It's like the Shopify for doctors, nurses and nutritionists
Even though he captured 50% of the Canadian market in one year, early-stage VCs didn't see the opportunity. So he bootstrapped his way to success. He cracked open the US market and quickly scaled from $0 in 2012 to $25M in revenue by 2016.
Today, Fullscript has grown to a profitable company that makes it easy for health practitioners to prescribe and manage treatment plans for whole person health, through their market-leading tech platform.
If you're struggling to raise but know you have a huge opportunity ahead of you, you won't want to miss this episode.
Kyle Braatz is the founder of Fullscript, a $900M revenue company that started by helping health practitioners recommend supplements to their patients. It's like the Shopify for doctors, nurses and nutritionists
Even though he captured 50% of the Canadian market in one year, early-stage VCs didn't see the opportunity. So he bootstrapped his way to success. He cracked open the US market and quickly scaled from $0 in 2012 to $25M in revenue by 2016.
Today, Fullscript has grown to a profitable company that makes it easy for health practitioners to prescribe and manage treatment plans for whole person health, through their market-leading tech platform.
If you're struggling to raise but know you have a huge opportunity ahead of you, you won't want to miss this episode.
We were lucky that a lot of our VCs didn't see the opportunity. They didn't see the tam. We'll do, call it $900 million in revenue this year with 400 teammates. Staying lean and putting those constraints around you, that's actually what breeds the creativity and allows you to stay connected to what actually you need to accomplish. If you grow too fast, you miss those aha moments.
Pablo:Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo. I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early stage founders like you find product market fit. Kyle is the founder and CEO of Fullscript. He's grown this company from nothing in 2013 to $900 million in revenue today and $100 million in EBITDA. You don't hear many startups that actually have EBITDA. Kyle, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Kyle:Hey man, thanks for having me.
Pablo:Maybe we'll start at the beginning how the idea for Fullscript came about, but because Fullscript is such I think a unique special company, maybe you can spend like 30 seconds just telling us what it is and how the model works.
Kyle:Yeah, so servicing over 100,000 practitioners and six million patients, Fullscript is the leading tech platform for practitioners to prescribe and manage treatment plans for optimal health outcomes. When you think about healthcare today, it's very much you've got a symptom, here's a pharmaceutical. Where it's moving and where it's been trending for a long time it's you've got a symptom, what's the root cause? It may not necessarily mean you need a pharmaceutical or it may mean you do, but it also may mean you need to change your lifestyle. It may mean you need to change your diet; you need to exercise more; you need to use supplementation. We've made it really easy for practitioners that practice whole person medicine. We make it easy to figure out what to prescribe to deliver that treatment plan right to the patient via their phone or email and then we make it really easy for the patient to fill that protocol. Any products or services they need we drop or ship them right to their door and we keep that patient adherent and and connected to their practitioner along their wellness journey.
Pablo:It's maybe a simple way like I like to talk at a grade three level. Could you say this is almost like Shopify for health practitioners, like let's say a nutritionist who needs to get me on some magnesium or some supplements and they have basically this online store fully fulfilled by Fullscript? Is that an okay way to think about it or not really?
Kyle:I think there's a component. I think the way you would compare is Shopify's really there to empower the world's best merchants to offer world-class commerce experiences. We're set up to enable the world's best practitioners to create world-class care delivery experiences.
Pablo:Do you work – is it mainly nutritionists or mainly doctors or who's the main health practitioners that would use Fullscript?
Kyle:Yeah, it's a very broad base modality. It's any practitioner who sees the advantages of recommending nutrition supplementation exercise. If you look across the US, for example, 80% of practitioners recommend supplements to their patients.
Pablo:Perfect, so let's start at the beginning. I mean I'm really curious how this idea came about. Maybe even just because we're talking about Shopify, you're based out of Ottawa, Shopify's based out of Ottawa. It's a 2004, 2006 type of company. You started in 2012. Was that an inspiration at all for Fullscript or just where did this idea come from?
Kyle:Yeah, my co-founder and I, we had done a couple things together. I had done a not-for-profit and did a cycle across Canada and every day grew up or every morning woke up building that thing and just loving the impact that I was making. Then we moved into more of a service-based business called Simple Stories, which is really about creating animated videos for businesses. Again, I loved building it, I loved creating it, but there was this missing piece of, we're making corporate videos for companies and corporations, where is the impact? For us, we said, okay, the next thing we do has to be focused on impact. Impact for us was helping people get better, which is a core tennet of what we do today. It was also service-based businesses just don't scale to the size; we wanted to be the next big thing. To your point, seeing Shopify out there, being friends with individuals like Harley Finkelstein and Toby Shannan really not only inspired but made it feel like it was a reality that we could make happen. Getting to that level and to that scale was in our reach. My friends did it and I watched them do. They're obviously extremely bright but they're also extremely giving with their time. To be able to communicate and talk to them about all the challenges they faced, it just made it real and possible. My co-founder's wife actually was a naturopathic doctor, so the two things worked out really well. We said, okay, here's a naturopathic doctor, here's one of the problems they need to solve which is dispensing supplements out of their clinic. They don't want to be a retail store. They actually want to be a practitioner delivering care, so why don't we solve that problem by rebuilding Shopify with the products and the distribution already built in because we already know the product set that a practitioner requires? That's basically what we did.
Pablo:Just thinking about that first product and it taking off the way that it did at least within Canada, what was it about that segment, that customer that Fullscript really resonated with? What I'm trying to get at is Shopify for X, like Uber for X, is just such a cliche. A lot of them don't work because at the end of the day it's like, well, I'll just use Shopify, it's fine. In this case, Fullscript is offering something where Shopify just didn't work for that segment. What was it?
Kyle:Yeah, I think one of the realities of vertical SaaS and looking at niche markets as a starting point is they're often under-serviced and the people servicing them are more just unsophisticated. It was a real opportunity In Canada. There's literally no competition for naturopathic doctors to be able to solve this problem the way that they required it to be solved. For us, again, it gave us a little bit of false positive around, hey, this is working, practitioners love us, we're growing so fast, let's go take on the world. In the reality, what they loved was the concept of not having to carry inventory in their office; the concept of recommending the products that a patient needed and the patient getting exactly what they needed. They loved the idea of a patient receiving refill reminders so that they stayed on track. The solution we built was shit, basically. It just wasn't good but it was better than nothing and it was better than the old wholesale way of doing things, which is again like basically having a retail clinic in the practice. Again, it gave us all this confidence.
Pablo:Was the fact that you had this kind of distribution set up, was that a big edge for them just so you could go and just be like, look, we have every product out there so all you need to do is hook in the patient and then we take care of the rest? Was that a big value prop for V1?
Kyle:That was the value prop is you don't have to worry about managing inventory. You don't need to. You'll know exactly if your patients are following the protocol, you're getting the refills, because quite frankly patients weren't going back to the office to go refill. They're going to go find other products which often weren't the right clinical dosages or weren't the right brands or weren't the right ingredient profiles. I think ultimately it was the inventory problem as the core solution in on day one.
Pablo:Was that hard by the way, getting this partnership? You're coming in, you don't have any background in the space, you don't have any volume?
Kyle:Yeah, I mean, I think the funny thing is about the Canadian launch and the success we had here, it again gave us a lot of – even the distribution we set up, we set it up with a retail – there was a retail store at the College of Naturopathic Medicine that had all of the products and they became our distribution partner. At a point though, we were looking – one day I was looking at the dashboard and there was – I forget exactly how many, like 150 open orders that hadn't been fulfilled. Then I just kept getting bigger and bigger. Ultimately the demand we were creating, there was no way a retail store that was already servicing consumers every single day and didn't have the size or the infrastructure to support what we were doing. We grew out of them very quickly.
Pablo:Actually maybe on that, what was that model? I mean capturing 50% of any market that quickly is a big deal. There's a lot of things that must have worked – that must have been super well aligned. Did they pay a fee or was it just pure transaction revenue, pure website for them?
Kyle:Yeah, so again, the first product that we delivered there was a SaaS fee associated with it. It was literally a dumb down version of Shopify with distribution built in. There was such a demand for what we were creating that all of the friction that was built into our user experience. Although we weren't exactly what they needed and wanted, it was such a demand that they're willing to go through all of that paint. Again this false positive; we think we got it, then we go to launch in the US and it's a complete dud. It's a complete dud because what we've built there is competition in the US. There are other solutions that are a little bit more convenient, although they aren't novel. They weren't solving the exact same thing we were solving.
Pablo:That's right. It's a classic hair on fire prom. Just to right size this, when you say capturing 50% of the market in a year or so, how many customers we're talking about; 100 customers, 1000, 10,000?
Kyle:Yeah, we're talking like 1500 practitioners or so.
Pablo:Okay, and how did you even get in front of them? I mean even if there's hair on fire prom, you still got to contact them, onboard them, et cetera. How did you do that?
Kyle:Yeah, a lot of that hasn't changed honestly from where we're at today. When I say we're adding 2,000 a month, one of the realities is every single one of these practitioners, they have their sign up "I'm a practitioner". They're marketing to patients. Being a vertical SaaS, you can literally know every single customer and where they are and who they are. Now the question is how do you get that value prop in front of them? As I said, for naturopathic doctors, my co-founder Brad had built a database and website called Find a Naturopath. It had all of the information from email to phone number to everything. We did things like email nonstop to these practitioners, and we would run campaigns where if a practitioner opened the email, then we follow up with another one and then if they opened that one, we follow up with a fake salesperson that was there to do a demo. It was always me. We would run them through this drip of emails that would eventually get them to convert. Again, this problem was so big that the response rates and the open rates were pretty high.
Pablo:By the way, that database was that built before Fullscript just because – was that built as a way to get those first customers?
Kyle:Yeah, I had mentioned Brad's wife was actually a naturopathic doctor, and so him and I had built Simple Stories but actually that had started as a web development company. While she was in school, he just started building this Find a Naturopath website because he figured there's an opportunity here, I could earn a little advertising revenue or whatever else I earned in this niche market. He just built it on the side and then it ended up becoming a key asset for us to leverage to really kick off the product both in Canada and the US..
Pablo:That's great. I just think a bunch of things came together there which is I think pretty classic for most of these stories. Okay, so you have that early traction, you start thinking about going to the US, do you raise some funding at that point or do you just go to the – what's the timing?
Kyle:Yeah, so we funded a lot of Fullscript with Simple Stories. We had that service-based business. Everything we would earn would go right back into Fullscript. It didn't make for a very comfortable life personally but it allowed us to invest in where we were going getting ready for – we always knew we needed to be in the US. Actually, before we launched our product in Canada, I had started linking in and networking with the biggest professional grade distribution companies in the US. I told you a story about how the Canadian distribution didn't scale. While we knew going into the US we needed to find the right players. Luckily there was massive – not massive but large scale companies in the US that service practitioners. It's a funny story because the one that we knew about was a company called Natural Partners. Atlanta Brad's wife, who was a naturopathic doctor, connected us with them. We started networking and at the end of the day they said, "No, we don't want to work with you". At this point too, we had no product yet. When we started trying to network, we told them we did. We had some vaporware landing page. They're like, "No, we're not interested. We can do this ourselves." Then we're like, hey, how do we – if we can't get distribution in the US there's no way we can succeed. We ended up calling Natural Partners customer support line and asking them who their biggest competitor was, and they told us it was Emerson Ecologics. Then we found Emerson, actually a larger business, and I linked in with the CEO and told him we have this product and he invited me down to Manchester to meet him. That kicked that off even before we had actually built and launched our first product in Canada. We had already started networking with that US distributor, making sure that we have the infrastructure in place for when we launched in the US. He had an open mind and saw the opportunity in front of us. Before we launched in the US, we actually joined up with Scott Annan of Mercury Grove and joined – I would call like semi joined their accelerator and got some support from that network and quickly raised money from two angels. Mike Ello and Shane Curry in town, they invested. There was –
Pablo:How much did you raise?
Kyle:We raised I think under a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Pablo:Normal pre-seed back in those days?
Kyle:Yeah, exactly. I think quite frankly, we were a business that had the perfect trifecta mix of a front end developer and designer, a backend developer, and then myself jack of all trades. We had the ability to basically get to revenue and get into almost immediately. We didn't have the same funding needs plus the service base company.
Pablo:Was it just the three of you in that first year?year
Kyle:Yeah, at the first year and then quickly added a team of engineers and other individuals to continue to scale the product.
Pablo:What do you think about that, just getting started with such a small team? I mean, on the one hand – because these days people are raising I mean less so but still $1, $2, $3 million proceeds hiring 10, 15 people from the get go. What's your feeling?
Kyle:I mean, as an entrepreneur, and I've gone through the pain, staying lean and putting those constraints around you, that's actually what breeds the creativity and allows you to stay connected to what actually you need to accomplish. If you grow too fast, you miss those aha moments, or you miss the why around why isn't this working or why is this working? Honestly, if we would've grown too fast, we would've created an environment where – in our culture, even today, we have this belief that lean teams are the key path to building great success. We'll do, call it $900 million in revenue this year with 400 teammates that are driving that from a knowledge worker perspective and 400 distribution workers. A relatively small company, but it's because I think people are motivated by impact and recognition. If you have this bloated team, you're sitting there and you're making little incremental impact, you don't even really know what you're doing and you're not being recognized versus two or three people can make magic if you unleash them. I think that has been a principle from the start. We lived it as three co-founders. We saw the magic of what the three of us can do when we care and I think that's been a principle throughout our development of building Fullscript.
Pablo:I love that. I think you have more people, you can technically do more things, but at the beginning you're trying to explore as much as you're trying to produce and there's just no time wasted in management, communication. There's no overhead. It's just three people fully aligned, making things happen, and learning every single day because like you said, you're super close to the customer?
Kyle:Exactly. Yeah, you're doing the work that you were built to do. Most entrepreneurs are not built to manage people, especially before they're ready. Go experience every component of your business and then you're ready to see your weaknesses and start hiring up. Go be that customer support agent for three months and feel the pain of the customers. If you don't, you're going to miss out on building what they actually need.
Pablo:You wouldn't believe how consistently I've heard that through basically every single successful founder that I've interviewed on this podcast. Going back to that, so you're about to run the same playbook in the US. You've got the distribution set up, you've got a couple hundred thousand dollars, similar team, and it doesn't work out. Why? You mentioned competition, so I get that, but I guess I'm curious what did the reality look like? What happened to open rates? What happened to conversion? Where did things start to fall apart?
Kyle:Yeah, so what happened was we built that API integration with our distribution partner. We had all of the backend infrastructure set up. We knew the user experience from getting the product into the hands of patients was going to be top-notch. We launched. The amount of signups was incredible but the usage patterns were completely different. We knew that we were solving the problem, but the friction point of adding a URL, the friction point of adding your payment processor, the friction point of paying a SaaS fee, the friction point of designing your e-commerce store, all of these friction points compared to what they already had we're too high. They said, "Okay, we have a solution that works for us."
Pablo:Yeah, what did they have? Maybe tell me –
Kyle:One, they had a wholesale distributor. Instead of buying products from 15 different brands, they could buy it from one and have it delivered right to their door.
Pablo:Just to make sure I understand, status quo in Canada was like, I'm buying from a bunch of different people, like I'm naturopathic doctor, I'm buying from a bunch of different people and I'm trying to do this retail thing and it's super hard versus in the US it's like, maybe I just have an affiliate link and I'll just take 20% over here when I sent the distributor or at the very least, I have a wholesaler who again will just at least take care of a logistics. It wasn't perfect, but status quo was maybe an automatic way to do better, let's say.
Kyle:Yeah, a hundred percent. For me – again most entrepreneurs say they started with this massive vision and we were going to go solve healthcare and everything like that. That actually wasn't the case for us. We were like, yeah, let's just go solve this problem, this is cool, and then we started tinkering. Honestly, this failure in the US for us was one of – it is the turning point in our company. It was the most important failure we've ever gone through. The timing was right because I had gone from an entrepreneur who had built corporate videos and cycled across Canada and raised money for the Canadian Cancer Society to someone who all of a sudden saw healthcare completely different. It was like when I was solving this problem, I was solving an e-commerce problem. Over the first year of building this thing, my co-founders and I started recognizing this is a healthcare problem. As an entrepreneur looking at healthcare, the idea of whole person medicine just made so much logical sense. What was happening was a practitioner was building a treatment plan and they were taking 30 to 40 minutes to figure out what to prescribe because they're going through all of the evidence on Google or they're looking through their textbooks or they're asking a colleague. Then they're actually building the treatment plan and they're building that treatment plan on a piece of paper and or a PDF or they're sending it in an email. Then on the patient side, the idea of following a treatment plan is just as hard. I remember early days speaking to a patient who was battling cancer, and she referred to her integrative treatment plan as a part-time job. It's really hard. You got the anxiety around figuring out what you need to do, then you need to stay accountable to those things, and what you're doing actually has no direct connection back to the doctor. We looked at this and said, okay, this idea of whole person medicine makes so much sense.
Pablo:Maybe walk me through that actually just to make it tangible. Take this cancer patient, what she or he is going through, like how many different doctors? Is it just supplements? What else is part of this? Let's say treatment plan, what does that look like?
Kyle:Imagine they're going through chemotherapy or whatever else they're going through, and that's hard enough. Then a lot of the symptoms that they're getting because of a result of the chemotherapy and everything they're going through, they're starting to do IV treatments and supplementation. They're changing their diet to help them actually recover better throughout their chemotherapy. They're having to look at how do I actually stay fit? It's just all of the different components. I have to make sure that I have no stress, so stress management. It's making sure I actually get sleep. The whole recovery side alone associated with chemotherapy is extremely hard. When you think about whole person medicine, you're looking at every component of that individual and saying, what can I do? It's not just, hey, go on chemotherapy and hope for the best. There's a whole protocol that patient needs to go through, one, to combat the symptoms that come from chemotherapy but also treat that patient with other components as well. It's just everything. You have to literally change your lifestyle, you have to change your diet, you have to change everything in order to make sure you give yourself the best chance to get well, to get healthy.
Pablo:You're seeing this in the context of – how do you find Fullscript fits into it at that time? What changes do you start making?
Kyle:It doesn't at that time. I think what you're recognizing is, okay, I see this makes logical sense, this is what healthcare should be, but there's no infrastructure to support it. There's a huge tailwind behind this. This is where I believe healthcare is going to go but there's no infrastructure. We can build that infrastructure was our focus.
Pablo:What were some of the key features that took you from what Fullscript was, helping people sell supplements to this clinical tool that you mentioned? What were some of those key features and those key new value props that changed what you were especially in the minds of your customers?
Kyle:Yeah, so imagine just really simply on day one with our product it was, hey, patient, go find these three protocols or these three products. They would land on this e-commerce store. They go try to figure out what they're supposed to buy. I think we still got conversion rates for every patient that a doctor told to go find the products they were supposed to find. I think it was about 17% of patients who were added actually went and bought the products. We said, okay, let's mirror what a practitioner is doing in their office. They're actually developing a prescription for supplements. They're saying, here are the supplements you need, and they're handing those products to the patient. What's equivalent to that? If you look at the pharmaceutical world, there's e-prescribing. You get an e-prescription, it goes right to the pharmacy, you go pick it up. I go, why don't we recreate? We said, why don't we recreate that? A really simple feature at the start was e-prescribe the supplements you want your patients to take. Instead of the patients having the anxiety around what do I have to find, what do I search here, it was delivered right to their phone. They clicked a button and they filled their protocol.
Pablo:Version one of Fullscript didn't let a naturopathic doctors sell you magnesium on their website. It would just shoot you to a third party website where you had to find –
Kyle:No, it was their website. Imagine doctor says to you, hey, go to this URL and go find these four products out of 30,000? It's like, okay, what's the odds of you doing it and following that protocol versus doctor says, hey, I've put a protocol together, did you receive it? Yeah, it's in my inbox. Click that button. Everything's added to cart.
Pablo:Right, it's like preloading your cart. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Kyle:Yeah, all of a sudden we went from a 17% conversion rate to about a 50 plus percent conversion rate on every treatment plan a patient or a practitioner was putting together. That would be V1 of starting to move into becoming more of a clinical tool.
Pablo:It's incredible what some simple changes can do on conversion, just lowering friction.
Kyle:Totally.
Pablo:Makes a lot of sense.
Kyle:Yeah, all of a sudden we went from a 17% conversion rate to about a 50 plus percent conversion rate on every treatment plan a patient or a practitioner was putting together. That would be V1 of starting to move into becoming more of a clinical tool.
Pablo:It's incredible what some simple changes can do on conversion, just lowering friction.
Kyle:Totally.
Pablo:Is that the killer feature? What I guess I'm really curious on is obviously today you're doing extremely well in the US, what was the thing that – and you mentioned you had the interest, people would sign up but then they wouldn't go through the work of, let's say, onboarding and fully relying on Fullscript. Was that the thing that tipped people over the edge or was it a combination of many different new features?
Kyle:Yeah, I think one was getting a practitioner to try. A big part of it was removing all of the friction. We decided that the platform would be free. We decided that the practitioner experience from an experience perspective would be integrated into their EHR so it was a part of their workflow. There would be no real customizations other than, yeah, you can upload a picture in your application; so create a little personalization for your patient when you send a script. You can change this quick blurb but the customization is really, really small. You don't have a custom URL. It's all done through Fullscript. The Fullscript brand is going to be front and center in this experience moving forward.
Pablo:How long does it take until you make these changes? Was this 2013 and then I guess 2014? You go back to market and then as you go – is that the right timeline? As you go out, how long does it take until you're feeling like you've got real pull in the US?
Kyle:We launched in the US I believe it was end 2012 or fall 2012, quickly realized that this isn't working and we got to go back to the drawing board. We rebuilt the platform really quickly. It wasn't a matter of hey. I think it was a matter of three months heads down, this is what this thing needs to be, and we re-launched. It was almost immediately from the re-launch that we saw this is going to work because again, we had such a – there was such demand for what we were building and no sophisticated players solving problems for these niche audiences of practitioners of practice whole person medicine. They wanted solutions. They were looking for solutions. Again, immediately they start using this product. They start seeing their patients converting. They start seeing their patients actually staying adherent to their plans. They start seeing the value of not having to send emails and do all this extra work. They see the convenience of how fast they can search and find the products they need and research those products. They started to see all of that on day one. They started to see the value of integrating in their EHR and being right in their workflow, so all of those things. Really quickly they started to see, okay, this is exactly what I need, and we started to see that in our metrics. It was very Canada all over again.
Pablo:What were some of the numbers do you remember back then? How quickly did you get to a million or even 10 million in revenue?
Kyle:Oh man, we have a wicked – Brad, my co-founder, put together a wicked presentation which shows the scale of where we got to. I can tell you, from 2013 to – in 2016 as an example, I think we were doing about 25 million in net revenue which from a GMV perspective would've been like call it $34, $40 million of GMV on the platform after a couple years. By the end of 2017, we were doing 40 million plus.
Pablo:Right, you're still doubling that rate?
Kyle:Yeah, and so they just started to accelerate and move really, really quickly.
Pablo:B2B2C is just known to be tough. What do you think is the difference between the ones that work and the ones like Fullscript that do work? Do you have some theories on that?
Kyle:I don't know if I have theories on why it doesn't work or why it does, but I can tell you some of the things that were really critical for us. It was really looking at ourselves. Even one of our guiding principles still today is put the practitioner first always. Especially as a young company and you look at margin profiles, it's such a, hey, why don't you do D2C? Why don't you do all these different things because you get better margin, you control the – and for us it was like, no, we're here to partner and service these practitioners. I think Shopify did a really great job of that. They are there to empower merchants and lift the merchants up and the rebels; either marketing was always incredible. What their mantra of who they serviced was that practitioner. In B2B2C to be successful make sure that B is happy. Make sure you're there to partner with the B. You're not there to take their customers, you're there to work with them to do whatever it is they're trying to accomplish. I think that principle for us was really key. Then full circle back to that starting mindset of every patient matters or every consumer matters. In B2B2C it's really easy to just focus on the business partner, the person you're selling directly to, but if that consumer experience isn't good or one person has a bad consumer experience, you risk losing the business partner and you risk losing every one of their customers which is a massive loss.
Pablo:That makes sense, perfect. Look, we'll stop it there. Maybe just we'll end on the two questions we always end on. The first one is, when would you say that you felt like you had true product market fit?
Kyle:I would've said 2012 in the summer in Canada, I thought we had it. Then we had the root awakening and call it spring 2013 when we launched Healthwave and the vision broadened. We started to see – again, one, this wasn't just for naturopathic doctors. When we relaunched that product, medical doctors started using it immediately, nurse practitioners started using it immediately, naturopathic doctors started using it immediately, and we saw the profile of usage and we saw the conversion on the patient side. That was it for like we have something here, there's magic in a bottle, let's go. I think that would've been the timing. Actually one last full circle moment, relaunching in Canada we still lacked one thing which was strong infrastructure from a distribution and fulfillment perspective. A couple of our investors at the time actually ended up building out the first professional grade fulfillment center in Canada to support naturopathic doctors and chiropractors and the healthcare practitioners using the Fullscript platform. When that happened, that's when we got the Canadian market and the product market fit here too.
Pablo:By the way, I didn't ask this, but you mentioned raising a couple hundred thousand dollars, then you launched in the US, then you got quickly to many millions in revenue. Did you have a bunch of VCs knocking on your door at that time begging to invest? What was the fundraising climate like?
Kyle:No, I mean we had the exact opposite. We tried to raise capital. I think early days actually – you watch This Week in Startups and you watch all these different things and you think, what? This is how you build a startup? I think we were lucky that a lot of our VCs didn't see the opportunity. They didn't see the tam. There was no kind of real – oh I get this. There was no kind of aha moment.
Pablo:How is that like? I get it but I just don't. How do you have a company that goes from zero to one that quickly, from one to probably three, four, five, just getting that poll and VCs are not able to say who knows where this is going to go but let's put a bet over here?
Kyle:Yeah, I think it was one of those things like when you grow up in – when you look at healthcare, you look at conventional medicine and you say, okay, well this isn't going to solve a problem and so who is this for? Oh it's only for naturopathic doctors. It's only for people that practice this way. You needed to have a perspective that healthcare was going to change, that consumers were going to take more control of their health, that they were going to demand value-based care versus volume-based care. There's all these what ifs and aha moments. When you live in a world that's a certain way, it's really hard for a VC to see beyond that certain way that the world is today versus where the world is going. I probably just wasn't a good enough salesperson to convince them that the world was going there. At the end of the day too, we just didn't need that much money, so I probably didn't push as hard as I really needed to. We ended up raising – I went down to the US, one, to – as we were launching the US product and getting it to market the second time, I decided I wanted to go move to California in Santa Monica area. Let's go spend time with all of our customers and really understand them. Down there I ended up raising almost $2 million from a few angels. Really that was the only funding we raised throughout our life cycle of building this thing.
Pablo:If you could go back in time 10 plus years ago and give yourself one piece of advice, what might that be?
Kyle:I'd say follow your gut and make people decisions quicker. I think a lot of the time as you’re building a great company, there's people that are perfect for certain parts of that journey. Those people that come in, they do their tour of duty, they grow with the business, but at some point they hit that ceiling but you love them, you care about them. At the end of the day, making those key decisions of when you need to rebuild the executive team, when you need to bring in a new CTO or when you need to do things that just feel uncomfortable but you know they're right, I think entrepreneurs will fester on that way too long or they won't realize how important it is to bring in top talent. At the same time, you just got to know you can't move too fast. You got to be just behind whoever you're bringing in. Never bring in a VP of sales from a big company when you're 10 people trying to figure out how you scale sales. That won't work. You got to find that person who's one or two or three steps ahead of you, bring that person in and let them scale sales. Hopefully they can scale with your business, but if they don't and they last two years and they do an amazing job, that's okay. That person's still a full scripter for life. We wouldn't have gotten here without them, but it's time to bring in the next person, pass that torch and move on. I just think that those people decisions that you need to make as an entrepreneur, it's really critical to make the right decisions and make them fast. If you do hire too fast and you hire way ahead of yourself, make the decision to make the move and replace that individual as quick as possible, because that's going to be the difference between making it or not.
Pablo:I couldn't agree more. I mean, at the end of the day, you're in the CEO seat for a reason. I mean, nobody else can make those decisions. It does fall on you as hard as it might be. Thank you, Kyle. That was an awesome episode and I appreciate you jumping back on the show.
Kyle:Yeah, thanks for having me.
Pablo:If you've listened to this episode and the show and you like it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. It's actually a really small favor but it has huge impact. Whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to the Product Market Fit Show and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me to be clear; it's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. The reality is if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing great podcast or I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously, the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars and you'll be helping me but most importantly, many other founders just like you, discover the show. Thank you.