SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 556: They 3D Printed Baby Sophia's New Foot Faster and Cheaper than Alternatives with Mecuris CEO Manuel Opitz
31 Jan 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this 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.
Chapter 2: What is Mecuris and how does it utilize 3D printing?
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 top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: Who pays for the prosthetics and how does the reimbursement process work?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the $100 is Zach Theron. He's a 22-year-old Apple employee, and he's listening to the show and loving it. For your chance to win $100 every Monday, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now, and then text the word NATHAN to 33444 to prove that you did it to enter.
Many people ask me what tool I used to sell my first company, Heyo. The answer is thetopinbox.com. I used it to send emails, schedule emails to be sent out later, and set reminders inside my inbox so I would know when potential buyers were actually interested. And I easily remember to follow up with ones that hadn't replied to me.
Chapter 4: What is the cost comparison of 3D printed prosthetics vs traditional methods?
You can try it for free at thetopinbox.com. Nathan Latke here. This is episode 556. Coming up tomorrow morning, you'll learn from a company called AppointLit. It's a scheduling application that just hit $35,000 in monthly recurring revenue. It's weird how the co-founders met. They found and met in a Reddit thread. Now they're serving over 1,100 customers. Top Tribe, good morning.
Nathan Latke here, and our guest today is Manuel Opitz, and currently he's the founder of Micuris.
Chapter 5: How did Mecuris secure funding and what was the purpose of the seed funding?
Now, before founding the company as CEO, he worked as a medical IP broker in innovation management and as a technology scout in China. He graduated in industrial engineering, topped by an MBA. He takes a keen interest in optimizing healthcare process chains by digitalization and 3D printing. Manuel, are you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do this! Okay, very good!
Tell us first what the company does, and specifically, what do you sell? How do you make money?
So we are in B2B. We are not directly treating patients.
Chapter 6: What challenges did Mecuris face in the early stages of development?
We are in medical technology. We are an enabler for orthopedic clinics and medical supply stores who allows them the step to the digital world, meaning we provide them customized, personalized, patient-specific prosthetics and orthotics. And we do this by 3D printing, of course.
That's great. Give me an example. I'm on your page right now, and I see the young child walking down the steps with a prosthetic leg, it looks like. Who pays for this? The hospital, correct?
Yeah, it's actually the insurance company.
Chapter 7: How does Mecuris plan to expand internationally and grow its market?
In Europe, especially in Germany, we have a quite well-funded insurance system. This little girl you see there is Sophie. She's three years old. She was born without one of her legs and we provided her with a foot. The leg was made custom-made, handmade. This is the current way which is done by a medical supply store.
We provided only the foot and both together then were reimbursed by the insurance company to the medical supply store. And we just get paid like a service provider by the medical supply store.
Chapter 8: What unique advantages does Mecuris offer in prosthetic development?
Okay, got it. Let's focus on Sophie. She's so cute. This will be great. We'll focus on Sophie. What is the cost of printing, say, a foot for Sophie?
Well, it depends. Of course, you could try some low-cost 3D printing methods like FDM or FFF, but we mostly use laser sintering, so-called SLS, which is slightly more costly, but for a children's foot, it's less than 100 euros.
Okay, so less than 100 euros. How does that compare before 3D printing? What would you have to pay to build something like this?
Actually, for children, you would need to do it by hand. There are not so many children. Luckily, there are not so many children out there who need a prosthetic foot. So the big suppliers, they don't really have it in their product portfolio. We can just scale it up and down as we like to on the PC because we use 3D software and then we can print it.
And actually, the smaller it is, the cheaper it is for us. I mean, some prosthetic foot for adults, it's much more expensive.
Like how much?
For adults, if you think about cost-wise, it would be several hundred euros. And compared to what, for instance, insurance companies used to pay to suppliers, it's usually something in the area of 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, depending on the mobility of the patient, of course, how sportive they are and stuff like this.
And we also charge in this area, so we can directly be reimbursed by the insurance company. Nothing changes there for our customers, which is really helpful to them.
Let's finish out this story with Sophie. It costs you less than €100, that's about US$104, for the foot that you print.
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