SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
713: You'll Never Guess What Salary They Gave Up To Launch Their Startup
07 Jul 2017
Chapter 1: Who are Ryan and Zach, and what is Simplifeye?
There you guys have it from Zach and Ryan. Accepted into AngelPad in 2015, they both gave up multiple six-figure salaries, one being in tech M&A, one being a doctor to launch the company. They've since raised about $3 million, serving about 1,000 healthcare providers as customers that pay on average somewhere between $150 and $200 per
Per month, they've got great churn rates in the form of 98% annual retention, again, with their team of 13 based up there in New York City to help doctors, again, communicate efficiently and, most importantly, securely in a HIPAA-compliant fashion. This is Episode 713.
Chapter 2: What motivated Ryan and Zach to leave their high-paying jobs?
Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from Sherry Atwood, and you won't believe what this divorced mom raised $7 million to do. But first, here's today's episode. This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk.
Chapter 3: How much funding has Simplifeye raised, and what are its terms?
Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Hello, everybody. My guests this morning are Ryan and Zach Hungate. They're the co-founders of a company called Simplify Inc. It's the number one technology experience for healthcare providers, patients, and their businesses.
The company's platform of software solutions help healthcare providers improve productivity, efficiency, and profitability. Ryan is an orthodontist and previous Apple retail strategist, and Zach is a previous founder and Wall Street alum with a background in tech M&A.
Chapter 4: What is Simplifeye's revenue model and pricing structure?
Zach, Ryan, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. It sounds so much sexier. Like being an Apple retail or a tech MNA, you decided to go into healthcare. What the hell is wrong with you?
I know. Right. It's, it's one of those things where it was like always my dream. I'm like a, I'm a Midwest guy, right? That's all I wanted to do was, you know, be that doctor growing up on a golf course.
Chapter 5: How does Simplifeye ensure HIPAA compliance in its services?
My dad's actually a golf pro. I always saw the doctors out there getting the golf.
So that was exactly what I wanted to do. Trust me. I never thought I would talk to doctors all day long, but here I am.
And so, so I need to make sure I get you for those of you watching the YouTube. So we've got Zach, you're on the right and Ryan on the left. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah.
Chapter 6: What challenges do doctors face with current communication methods?
So which one of you is the orthodontist? Raise your hand. Okay. So great teeth on the, on the left side. Okay, good. And on the left side, sorry, you were like tech M&A. Were you at an investment bank?
So started in fashion e-commerce company called Southern Tide. I was an early employee there and then quickly went to the M&A side to see how companies go public and how they're sold. So that's kind of how we operate our business, where the end game is eventually, hopefully.
Chapter 7: How does Simplifeye maintain customer retention and satisfaction?
Quickly, did you get equity at Southern Tide? Small piece, so it's not life-changing, but the company did sell in 2011, so it was good.
We saw it all over the place. Those kinds of businesses really set the stage, I think, for what Dollar Shave Club ended up doing with direct-to-consumer. Take us into Simplify. What does the company do, and what's your revenue model? How do you make money?
Yeah, so we're a SaaS company, and basically what we're doing is we're trying to make doctors' lives easier. Every day, I was finding that I would walk up to patients and not have a clue what I was doing when I walked in the room. You've probably experienced it.
Chapter 8: What advice do the founders have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
If you ever listen to your doctor when they walk into the room, they'll do something really generic like, hey, buddy, how are you doing today? It's because we have no clue what we're doing when we walk in there. We have no clue who you are. whether I've seen you before.
So it's one of those things where it started merging with the technology where I could start to provide something to the doctor and say, hey, here's all this information before you walk in. Now you know your patient. On top of that, you're going to know where you're going first to make your schedule as optimized as possible.
Got it. And so what is the, I mean, I want to get a sense of where your guys' brains were at and financially where you were at when you decided to take the risk on this company. So, I mean, I assume you guys probably had a lot of savings. One was coming from tech M&A, one was coming from being a doctor. Is that true or did you go for broke?
Oh, God, I wish that was the case.
I was following Ryan from afar. He's in college. And we fleeced the idea out with a lot of our VC buddies. And then I raised some money from some of my hedge fund friends and decided to apply to one of the top incubators. So we picked AngelPad, which is big, a lot of the original Google guys, and took the chance. We got in, actually. Over 10,000 companies applied. We were one of 10 or 12.
And so things worked out really well.
That was our big jump moment. Right. So we kind of got together. I was practicing. Zach was having a really successful career on the tech investing side. And we were kind of just it was kind of like limping along. Right. It was kind of like a halfway project. And then we were kind of saying, you know, this is going to be big if we put our whole selves into it.
But, you know, what's going to be that signal? And when we applied to AngelPad, we were like, okay, if we get in, this is what we're going to do. And boom, we got in and ended up, you know.
What year was that? Did you get in? That was 2015. Okay. And Zach, how old were you at that point? 25. 25. And what salary did you give up doing tech M&A? Hundreds of thousands. Between 100 and 500? What's that? Between 100 and 500? Yeah. Yes. Okay. And, and Ryan, same question to you. What salary do you give up? Yeah, about 500.
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