Nov. 14, 2022

How to Create a New Market | Cherif Habib, Founder of Dialogue (IPO: TSX)

There are two types of startups: those that sell into existing markets and those that create new markets.

There are ups and downs to both. Selling into an existing market means you have a clear idea of customer needs and market size. It also means you have lots of competition. Creating a new market tends to cost a lot of money and the upside is uncertain. But you get to define the market and potentially capture a strong position in your customer's minds, like Uber or Airbnb.

When Dialogue started, telemedicine wasn't really a thing. At least, it wasn't a thing companies paid for in Canada. Cherif built Dialogue into a public company in just a few years by creating a new market.

In this episode, he shares details of how we crafted the story and sold the product to his first few customers. If you want to learn how to create a new market, check this episode out.

Send me a message to let me know what you think!

02:16 - The Origin of Dialogue

05:00 - Supply and Demand

09:56 - Shifting to Enterprise

15:51 - Creating Your Own Market

19:42 - Human Capital is Top Priority

23:45 - LOIs are Case by Case

29:30 - The Importance of Focus

33:58 - Recap

WEBVTT

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I think it's extremely important.

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Paul Graham, there's the popular do things that don't scale in the beginning.

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We did a lot of that without necessarily knowing it.

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It really paid off.

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Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show brought to you by Mistral, a seed-stage firm based in Canada.

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I'm Pablo.

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I'm a founder turned VC.

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My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit.

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Today we're talking about how to create a new market with Cherif, the co-founder and CEO of Dialogue, a telemedicine and virtual healthcare platform for enterprise.

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Dialogue is based in Montreal.

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They have over 500 employees and are a public company worth about half a billion dollars at this time.

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Cherif, it's a pleasure to have you here today.

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Thank you very much.

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Maybe for some context, when you think about starting a new startup, there's kind of two ways, two different types of markets you can play in.

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I mean, one market is what you might call an existing market.

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The other type of market is a new market.

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Think about an existing market is, for example, if you were to launch a new phone today, you would be comparing to Androids, you’d be comparing to iPhones.

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People might buy it or not buy it based on very specific feature sets, like the price, the quality, the speed, the camera, et cetera.

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Everything's pretty defined.

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When you think about creating a new market, that's not the case.

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In fact, there's really nothing to kind of compare things to.

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People don't even know that they should be thinking about this in the first place.

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There's pros and cons to it.

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I mean, the upside is, if you launch a phone, people know how to value it.

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They know how to compare it, but it's very competitive.

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If you launch into a new market, people don't know what you're even talking about, but if you can get them to understand it, then you might be the only player in town.

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That's a little bit of the story of Dialogue.

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I mean, Dialogue today is telemedicine.

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Everybody knows about telemedicine.

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Everybody's got some sort of telemedicine.

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When you started five years ago in 2016, that was not the case.

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People didn't really realize, enterprises did not realize that this was something they needed to offer.

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That's kind of a little context.

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Let's really kind of dial it back and start at the beginning.

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2016, you come up with something like the idea of Dialogue.

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I don't think the beginning was what it ended up being.

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I'm curious.

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Maybe we can start there.

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What’s the origin story and what was kind of the first version of Dialogue?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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So we started at an incubator here in Montreal called diagram, and the very initial idea was to create a Uber for healthcare.

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So the idea was very simple.

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You take out your phone and you match with a physician and that physician, um, here's your story and, and gives you a diagnosis of prescription, et cetera.

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So it was really kind of a marketplace to meet, uh, healthcare providers.

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And, uh, this idea was, you know, not new around the world because in some of the best functioning healthcare systems in the world, um, namely the UK or Scandinavian countries, or even the us, these ideas existed.

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Um, and we felt that bringing this idea to Canada, uh, would be a good thing and it would be needed, uh, considering, uh, the access challenges that we have in the countries.

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And we felt that this was a solution that could be helpful to many people.

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We knew that ourselves as individuals and our families would love having access to that.

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And we figured, you know, we're probably not the only one.

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So that's kind of like how it started

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Maybe walk me through that.

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How did you even come up with that as an idea?

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Was this like a very methodical kind of market research driven exercise, especially because you were part of a venture studio.

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I'm curious to dive into how, I mean, Diagram worked specifically, how you worked within it to come up with the Uber for healthcare idea.

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Prior to Dialogue, I had a medical devices company.

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We sold our medical devices all over the world.

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Through that experience, I really got to travel in many places and see how healthcare is delivered in many other places, and kind of get inspired by some of the best practices.

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I knew that for my next adventure, I wanted to do something at the intersection of healthcare and IT.

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I have a computer science background.

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I'm a techie at heart.

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Telemedicine was very appealing.

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At the same time, I met the folks at Diagram and they were starting at the incubator like right around that time.

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I think they were actually incorporated after Dialogue was incorporated, just to show you how early we were.

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Their thesis, given some of their LPs, was around creating insurance products.

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I think there was an inspiration from Oscar in the US that has a vertically integrated insurance and telemedicine product.

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I came in at from one lens of seeing what's being done in other countries and applying it here and they came to it with the lens of let's build a health insurance related to telemedicine and we started working together on that basis.

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What's your first move?

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Do you start building or do you go out and start talking to different practitioners?

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Where do you go once you have this idea?

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As you can imagine, in any marketplace, you have two sides of the marketplace.

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In our case, we had to build supply, which is healthcare providers.

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Then we had to build demand, which is people willing to talk to a doctor online.

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The demand side is super easy because of the access issues in our country.

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Everybody we spoke to was like, yes, sign me up.

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How much?

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Whenever we told them the pricing, it's too cheap, I'm willing to pay double.

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The demand was just overwhelming.

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It wasn't an issue at all.

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On the supply side, it took us a while to get good enough supply.

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That's just because like with any kind of innovation life cycle, you're always going to have the early adopters who are willing to try anything, but this is a minority of people.

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Then with time, you want to convince a larger number of people.

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The good thing is that, as I mentioned, it was not like a crazy new idea that nobody has ever thought before.

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All these folks in the medical profession see what's being done in other countries.

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They might themselves be from other countries.

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They read medical journals.

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I mean, it's not a secret that in other countries, technology is better used.

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We, in the beginning, attracted folks that had either lived abroad or had seen what's being done abroad, were really excited to do something innovative here.

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We even had like a couple of doctors who had an engineering background or a computer science background and had like a really interesting fascination of the intersection of the two.

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We then started building the technology.

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It took us like three, four months from like just a dinner conversation to like we're doing this.

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Let's raise money.

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Let's sign up with Diagram and let's do it formally.

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Back to your question, we started building the product and we started hiring the practitioners and we started doing a little bit of user testing.

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How does it work to have a conversation between a doctor and a patient?

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What's needed?

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What's the technology that you need to build on the back-end, on the front-end?

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Is there anything that's available on the market that will help us accelerate and not build everything from scratch?

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How did you get in front?

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What did that look like getting in front of practitioners?

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You're calling offices.

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You're just showing up door to door.

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Related to that is, what is the value you're selling them?

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Because again, most of– if you think Airbnb and Uber as the classic ones, it's come make money, right?

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Come in my marketplace and make money.

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Whereas there, these are healthcare professionals.

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I don't think they have a problem getting business, especially in Canada.

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What is kind of the pitch that you're giving them?

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In Canada, the imbalance between supply and demand for healthcare services is something that is not seen almost anywhere else in the world.

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These folks don't have any trouble earning a living.

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The money was not an argument.

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I mean, of course, we had to pay them enough so that it's worth their time, but once we did that, that was not part of the conversation.

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I think why we attracted really good people in the beginning is, because again, they want to do something innovative.

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They saw that the way medicine has been done here for the last few decades hasn't changed.

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They're seeing their colleagues in other geographies doing something really exciting.

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They're reading medical journals.

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They're seeing what's done elsewhere and they want to be part of that innovative solution.

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Also, the other thing that telemedicine does is that it really changes the flexibility dynamic.

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As a physician here, you have to comply with very strict scheduling and where to work and when to work.

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For a lot of folks, that just didn't fit in their lives.

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Almost all of our practitioners in the beginning, like the first handful or so, were women.

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They were new mothers.

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The practice of medicine in a clinic just didn't jive with their priorities at the time.

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Doing telemedicine at night after putting their kids to bed or on the weekend, or whatever it is, was very attractive, but they can't do that in a clinic.

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A clinic is open from this time to that time.

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You have to see these many patients.

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We very quickly realized that flexibility was like the top reason that physicians are interested in telemedicine.

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Sometimes people accuse Dialogue and other telemedicine companies of stealing resources from the public healthcare system.

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We've, again and again, been very clear that that's not the case.

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What we're doing is actually adding capacity into the system because this lady who is working two hours after putting her kids to bed, these two hours are new.

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These two hours are net new capacity in the system.

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It's not like she was going to work them somewhere else.

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Makes sense.

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That makes a lot of sense.

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Flexibility becomes a key selling point.

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Then the other part I want to dive into a little bit more is the decision to abandon the marketplace idea, right?

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Because what I'm hearing you say, like some of the reasons are that it was in a gray area and that a marketplace maybe didn't align with your goals.

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Some of those things you could have figured out even before starting.

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I think even as you had the idea, probably Uber was already kind of getting into trouble, and if you just think theoretically through a marketplace and what it would mean, I'm sure you had discussions about, well, what happens when they have a strong relationship and they want to move off and those sorts of things.

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Yet you launched it anyways, and then you must have seen things that made you decide, you know what?

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No, it's not worth it.

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Let's shift and go to enterprise.

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What were some of those things?

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I think it's important because you could have ignored it.

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You could have just kept going down and said, you know what?

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No, let's do this marketplace thing.

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Let’s do this marketplace thing.

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I mean, I don't know what it ended up with, but I think your decision was, in hindsight, quite good.

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I'm curious to dive into, what were some of the things that you saw as you launched the marketplace that made you give into that side of it and say there's enough here that it's not worth continuing down this marketplace road and we should shift a little bit.

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The thing that I would just– the position that I would add is that we never launched as a marketplace.

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We never actually, and that's why I was talking about this is like pre-pivot is that we never even got to there.

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It's really in the work of building and talking to users that we decided to not do it and decided to focus on enterprise.

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We had a hunch.

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It was like, well, let's talk to companies and see, and it wasn't– it was like in addition.

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It's like, okay, we're building this marketplace.

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Maybe instead of selling it direct to consumers, maybe we can sell it to companies.

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Maybe that could be like a B2B2C, like that could be a channel.

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When we started having these first conversations, in a matter of weeks, we realized that the pull was just so strong and we realized that doing the two at the same time was not helpful because there's some very different product choices that you have to make, depending on which side you want to go.

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The way we started talking to companies was very friendly companies, right?

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We called up so many favors.

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Every lawyer that we know, we asked for intros in their HR departments and their law firm, every consultant that we know.

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My co-founder and I both had consulting backgrounds.

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We called all the firms.

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All of our entrepreneur friends got hassled by us.

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That's really how we started.

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It really was a friends and family.

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What were those initial discussions like?

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Were they you trying to sell or was it kind of more traditional customer discovery type?

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It was somewhere between the two.

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It was like we wanted to sell, but we also didn't want to come off too aggressively.

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It was like it was selling, but like getting advice sort of, and feedback at the same time.

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Because ultimately, what we wanted was to show signatures and traction and we didn't just want to get theoretical feedback.

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I always believe there's a big difference between somebody telling you it's a great idea and this would work to actually like signing a contract.

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We really wanted to get to the signed contracts because we felt that was the only actual feedback.

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Everything else is just chit-chatting.

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What were you– you're going into friendly people that warm intros.

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What exactly are you pitching them at that stage?

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What was the offering?

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The offering was we're building this platform that connects your employees to a medical professional, a doctor and a nurse or other, so that when they're sick or when their family member is sick, instead of taking a half day off and going to the doctor, they can see a healthcare professional from their home, from their office and save that trip.

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If they do need to make a trip, we will help them find the best place to go.

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We will help them get an appointment.

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At that time, because we had so little volume, I mean, some days we had no volume and some days we had a couple of consults and we had a medical team, we were covering patients with love and service.

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Because we had no volume in the beginning, so everybody that tried it was like truly blown away, because all of a sudden, you're comparing getting an amazing doctor who's spending all of the time in the world with you, who sends you to the right next spot, follows up with you, explains to you everything in detail.

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You're comparing that to the five-minute, in and out, you're just a number type of thing.

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People were like, wow, amazing, where do I sign?

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How important was that?

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If you think about it, the stuff you were doing there for the first time wasn't really scalable, I mean, in the sense that at some point you try and get efficiencies and you try and get the right ratios of coverage and whatnot, but at the same time, it created incredible, I have to assume, incredible word of mouth.

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How important was it to have it set up that way that you had almost too many doctors relative to the demand?

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I think it's extremely important.

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Paul Graham, there's the popular like do things that don't scale in the beginning.

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We did a lot of that without necessarily knowing it.

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It really paid off.

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The thing is that you can then, as you said, find ways to make it more efficient, fix the operations and fix the technology and fix all that stuff, but that experience and that service is just so important because it shows people the what if.

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It shows people this thing can be amazing and this thing can be really different than trying to optimize in the beginning.

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Premature optimization is not really helpful.

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One of the things– because we're talking about how to create a new market, when you're selling a product that doesn't really exist yet, even the challenges, like who are you even selling into?

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You mentioned you were talking to HR departments.

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How did you figure out– was there a process whereby you figured out this is the right person and organization to pitch this?

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Maybe related to that is like, how were you positioning it so people could get it?

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Again, back then, telemedicine just– today, it's so popular.

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I assume you're making a sale today by saying we're the best telemedicine platform out there.

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You should choose us, not them.

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Back then, it was complete white space and why should I even bother, right?

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How did you figure out who to pitch to and then how did you structure that story in those early days?

00:16:30.289 --> 00:16:31.740
Yeah, so you're absolutely right.

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Whereas today, it almost never happens that you call on a prospect and they've never heard of telemedicine or they don't know why they need telemedicine.

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Today, it's convincing the prospect that they should pick Dialogue instead of one of our competitors.

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Whereas in the beginning, we had to do education from the very beginning.

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It's like, okay, I get it.

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You speak to the doctor on the phone.

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Cool, but like we've never had that and we've been fine.

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We're a law firm.

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We've been around for a hundred years and we survive without it.

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We're good.

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First of all, they have to try it.

00:17:03.941 --> 00:17:09.980
I think in the beginning, giving out demos and getting people to try it and just being blown away and that getting this amazing service–.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
For free?

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
For free.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
What we did is we gave people three months free if they sign up for a year.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
We said, if you don't like it in the first three months, you can cancel.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
Almost nobody canceled because in those three months they got amazing service.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
They were just like bought in.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
What was difficult is to like, okay, everybody gets it.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
What was difficult is that nobody had a budget you're marked with this.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
One of the hurdles when you're in a new market is that you're not competing for an existing budget.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
You're trying to convince people to create new budget.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
Luckily, every company has a budget for compensation and benefits.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It's not a completely new budget, but it is an expense that they had not thought they would make this year.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
The other challenge is it's very difficult to demonstrate the ROI of what we were selling.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It's like, yes, I love it.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It's amazing.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It's a great experience, but what am I getting back?

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
Then the third thing is that in Canada, employers don't view themselves as responsible for their employee’s healthcare.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
In other countries, for example, in the US, your employer pays for your healthcare insurance and benefits.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
In other countries, it's structured in different ways, but in Canada, the state is responsible for healthcare.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
As an employer, I don't want to get involved in that relationship.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It was a bit of a shift of mentality, but the way we counter that is we say, you're right.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
You're not responsible for the employee's health, but the fact that they're not healthy and the fact that it's so hard to find a doctor is costing you direct dollars.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
Although philosophically, you're not responsible, in practice, you are because every time Pablo takes a half a day off because they're sick or their kids, or whatever it is, that’s half a day you lost.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
Then we also realize that a lot of people were putting off seeing a doctor or getting medical help for issues because it was so difficult.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It's like, because there's such a barrier to see a doctor, in Canada, people wait much longer to get help than in other countries.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
In other countries where you can just see your doctor anytime, the second you think of something, you just call them, they come to your house, let's say some developing countries, the doctor comes to your house.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
You paid them$100.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
It's done.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
People are very quick on the trigger.

00:17:09.461 --> 00:17:09.980
Where in Canada, we discovered people really wait a long time.

00:19:42.059 --> 00:19:46.589
I think a lot of startups can come up with a compelling reason why this is important, why this matters.

00:19:46.890 --> 00:19:50.470
Then there's this kind of delineation between nice to have and must have, right?

00:19:50.471 --> 00:19:54.670
Where you do jump to the top of that list and you don't get caught in this, you know what?

00:19:54.671 --> 00:19:59.150
Next year, we'll put you in the budget and next year comes and they don't and you just keep getting pushed off because there's higher priority things.

00:19:59.151 --> 00:20:01.630
Was there a timing element to this?

00:20:01.631 --> 00:20:08.309
Was there part of the story– like could you reflect on, because obviously, you found a way to make it to the top of that pile.

00:20:08.310 --> 00:20:08.950
How did you do that?

00:20:08.951 --> 00:20:15.269
How did you make yourself be understood as something that must be dealt with now, this year, this budget cycle?

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
It was not easy.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
It was not easy.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
As you said, some people said like, this is great.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
We love it, but it's not our priority right now.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
Come back.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
I think it was explaining to people that employee engagement is a top priority, explaining to people that every day you wait, it's costing you money.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
You're playing with employee engagement.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
You're playing with retention.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
You're attracting less new employees.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
At the top of every company's priority list is human capital, right?

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
Some companies mean it and some companies don't.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:17.868
What we really try to do in the beginning is target those companies that meant it.

00:20:17.519 --> 00:20:18.509
The companies that didn't mean it were a huge waste of time for us because it's like, yes, they have devised on their website, whatever it is, but like, they don't really want to invest in employees.

00:20:18.799 --> 00:20:29.150
I think we got pretty good at the beginning in figuring out which kind of companies cared and which companies didn't and what are some of the other things that they did that showed that they cared versus they didn't.

00:20:29.151 --> 00:20:35.868
If you go into a company, for example, they don't have good group benefits insurance.

00:20:35.869 --> 00:20:42.349
It's like, okay, well, are they really going to invest in telemedicine if they haven't done even the basics?

00:20:42.351 --> 00:20:51.319
Sometimes you walk into a company and we used to kind of joke internally, it's kind of like the dirty carpet syndrome.

00:20:51.320 --> 00:20:54.160
Like you walk into it and it's like disgusting.

00:20:54.161 --> 00:20:59.759
Obviously, this is not a company that's thinking like let's invest, let's have an amazing work environment.

00:20:59.760 --> 00:21:00.759
They don't care.

00:21:00.980 --> 00:21:06.559
That's why when we started, a lot of our initial business was really high value kind of knowledge worker company.

00:21:06.720 --> 00:21:08.839
I mentioned the lawyers, the consultants, the accounting firms, the technology companies.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
This is really where we started.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
With time, as this moved from being a niche product to a mainstream product, as we got this flywheel turning, we now have companies in every single industry of the economy, including a lot of blue workers, including government employees, including police forces.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
There's not a single industry that is not represented, but we had to start somewhere.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
I was lucky enough that a company that was owned by some of my friends that had about 50 or 60 employees, I really put a lot of pressure for them to sign so that we at least have one logo to show.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
I look sometimes at our old sales decks, we have like three logos, but every company starts somewhere.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
It's really a snowball, the first get the second and then you have two logos and three logos and four logos.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
Sometimes you have to give away the service for free for a few months.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
Sometimes you have to discount very heavily just to get the feedback and get the logos and get the case studies.

00:21:09.039 --> 00:21:09.319
I think every B2B company goes through that motion.

00:23:29.839 --> 00:23:32.029
To be clear, you're not giving free trials, right?

00:23:32.030 --> 00:23:37.750
People are signing your contracts with three months free and kind of no questions asked, money back guarantees.

00:23:37.750 --> 00:23:38.990
Is that right?

00:23:40.279 --> 00:23:40.950
Correct.

00:23:40.950 --> 00:23:42.309
Which makes a lot of sense.

00:23:42.310 --> 00:23:55.640
I always talk about how, these days, like LOIs have been very popular, but I always think, and I'm wondering kind of what your perspective is on this, that instead of going out and chasing LOIs, and this is kind of for pre-product companies, they're not ready to ship yet, but still they're going out, they're getting LOIs, they’re non-binding.

00:23:55.641 --> 00:24:04.118
Why not get people to sign a real contract and just give them all the guarantees in the world, plus a discount, plus extra customer support, etc.?

00:24:04.309 --> 00:24:06.319
I'm curious on your thoughts on that.

00:24:06.480 --> 00:24:08.480
Can you do that pre-product?

00:24:08.579 --> 00:24:09.358
Maybe you'll get less.

00:24:09.359 --> 00:24:14.720
Maybe you'll get 30 LOIs and only three of these contracts, but isn't it worth way more than 10 times as much?

00:24:18.470 --> 00:24:22.400
Yeah, I would say the answer to that is it really depends on a case by case.

00:24:22.401 --> 00:24:24.400
It really depends on the size of the company.

00:24:24.401 --> 00:24:27.319
In some companies, to sign a contract is a very complicated thing.

00:24:27.320 --> 00:24:35.960
Let me actually rewind and give an important precision of what we were trying to do versus what some other B2B companies try to do.

00:24:35.961 --> 00:24:46.480
As you know, there's a bottom-up tactic of you get somebody from a company to sign up to your product, and then they invite– they put in their credit card.

00:24:46.480 --> 00:24:47.160
They invite their colleagues.

00:24:47.579 --> 00:24:54.200
Now you can put the logo of the company on your website because a handful of people use that product.

00:24:54.201 --> 00:24:54.880
We were not that.

00:24:54.881 --> 00:25:00.759
We were from Day 1 trying to sign up the company as a whole, because our service is like an insurance service.

00:25:00.760 --> 00:25:07.480
This means that the reason the price is so low is because we are mutualizing the risk over a hundred people or a thousand people.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Of course, not all these folks are going to be sick at the same time and cost at the same time.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
It's an insurance product.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
You're paying a premium.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
The risk is spread across a number of people.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Because we were not bottom-up, it was a little bit more difficult to kind of sign them up.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
If we were an SMB or a land and expand type of business, we would've been able to put logos very quickly because we would've just gotten like ten friends and ten different companies to sign up and pay$10 a month and we would've been done, right?

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
When you're trying to sign up the whole company, depending on the size of the company and their compliance and whether it's a public company or not and all of their legal rules, it is sometimes very, very difficult for a company to sign a contract.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Even if the contract has so many outs and guarantees is just like from a governance point of view, like for some companies, it is really hard to sign a contract.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
I would say arguably like Dialogue now six years in is there.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
We can't just sign a contract with anybody.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
It has to go through a full legal review and all of that.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
I think it's because of that that a lot of entrepreneurs and companies sign LOIs in the beginning, because frankly, getting a full contract would not be realistic depending on the size of the company and their internal rules, but yes, of course, contracts are worth much more than LOIs.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Even if they have an out and even if they're not binding, but at least the reason a contract is worth so much more is that you've negotiated all of the other things that you need to discuss in the future.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Whereas an LOIs is like, yeah, we're going to do this, but it's like, we haven't yet negotiated a bunch of other things that are really important.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Sometimes the devil is in the details and like, yes, we agree on the price and the implementation data or whatever, but we don't agree on security and data retention and all these other things.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
I would say that we learned very quickly as a company to be enterprise ready and to sell to enterprise.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
From a security point of view, we were going through security questionnaires on a daily basis, because a company like to send you the list of their employees and their email addresses and to trust you with their medical data, that's a pretty big risk.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
You want to make sure that you're entrusting it to a company that is serious and credible and has done their homework.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
When you ask since when are you around and you're like four months, it's kind of like, do I want that?

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
I think there's a very natural human behavior of any employee at any company.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Yes, they want to do great things, but above all that, they don't want to get fired, right?

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Now you're like signing up for Dialogue.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
It's great, employee engagement, all of that, but am I going to get fired over this because the security is not where it needs to be, the personal health information, like all of that stuff needs to be really buttoned up.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
That's somewhere we were invested a lot.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
I would say that compared to our competitors, because in 2016, there were three or four telemedicine companies that kind of started around the same time.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
You often see this in industries, right?

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
Where like around the same time, like market conditions are right and a few companies just attack a market at the same time.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
All of the other companies started as B2C.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
They focused a lot on B2C.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
They saw our success in B2B, and then they kind of had a double strategy of doing B2C and B2B at the same time.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
I think that one of the reasons why we were successful in breaking away from the pack and being leaders very quickly is that we focused on B2B from Day 1 and we never did anything else.

00:25:07.119 --> 00:25:07.480
We did a lot of product and organization decisions that allowed us to be good at B2B and not kind of squander resources and being all over the place.

00:29:30.279 --> 00:29:34.049
Maybe touch on that, like just the importance of focus.

00:29:34.050 --> 00:29:39.289
I think that comes up so much with startups where and the thinking is always like this.

00:29:39.290 --> 00:29:39.890
We have this product.

00:29:39.891 --> 00:29:41.559
We're selling it over here.

00:29:41.560 --> 00:29:46.200
We're doing it like this, but it's the same product if we just sell it in this other market or to this other segment.

00:29:46.201 --> 00:29:48.960
We just do that thing over here and we can do both, right?

00:29:48.961 --> 00:29:51.279
I'm always in the opinion you probably can't do both.

00:29:51.280 --> 00:29:54.440
You’re somehow going to spread your resources, but you chose not to do both.

00:29:54.441 --> 00:29:55.839
You’re talking it's better do it and fail.

00:29:55.840 --> 00:29:58.920
Can you just speak maybe a minute or two about like just the importance of focus, especially early on?

00:30:03.940 --> 00:30:07.069
Yeah, it is extremely important.

00:30:07.070 --> 00:30:09.390
It is one of the most important things.

00:30:09.391 --> 00:30:13.230
The problem is like, what is the right amount of focus?

00:30:13.230 --> 00:30:16.589
Like, is it this, is it this, is it this, is it this?

00:30:16.590 --> 00:30:22.390
Like that is a judgment call that every entrepreneur and every company has to make.

00:30:22.391 --> 00:30:23.430
There's no science to that.

00:30:24.119 --> 00:30:31.589
It's just like the more you close the aperture, the better it is, but it's a lot of judgment and intuition.

00:30:31.590 --> 00:30:43.069
From our perspective, B2B was so big that it wasn't like we were make– like it's not like we were– it's not like we said, we're only going to sell to mining companies in the west.

00:30:43.070 --> 00:30:43.829
We said B2B in Canada.

00:30:43.830 --> 00:30:45.910
That's a pretty big market.

00:30:45.911 --> 00:30:49.470
I'm just like a person that, in general, I like to be very disciplined.

00:30:49.471 --> 00:30:50.549
I like to be very focused.

00:30:51.119 --> 00:30:55.470
I was lucky enough that this is not my first company and I've made the mistake many times in my career of not being focused and paying the price.

00:30:55.030 --> 00:30:55.470
I think for me, at least, it's something that I really needed to make the mistake myself to learn it.

00:30:55.030 --> 00:30:55.470
Even within Dialogue, we've chased a lot of shiny objects over time.

00:30:55.030 --> 00:30:55.470
We know we made some mistakes and we got to a place where I think now we have a good level of focus.

00:30:55.030 --> 00:30:55.470
We're going after one thing.

00:30:55.030 --> 00:30:55.470
We're doing it really well.

00:30:55.030 --> 00:30:55.470
I think we're succeeding.

00:31:25.789 --> 00:31:28.829
You'd started selling to a few people, a few companies.

00:31:28.830 --> 00:31:31.710
You had a few companies with employees on there.

00:31:31.711 --> 00:31:41.450
When was the first time where you started to feel like, okay, this is really working, this is the way to go, and you had those first signs of product market fit?

00:31:44.720 --> 00:31:49.730
I think it was really when we started signing companies that were not friendly.

00:31:50.230 --> 00:31:55.220
The friendly, it's the first times when we were in a real competitive process.

00:31:55.221 --> 00:31:57.339
McKinsey is a good example.

00:31:57.340 --> 00:31:59.900
My co-founder and I both worked at McKinsey.

00:31:59.901 --> 00:32:11.069
The very strange thing is that at the time the two other companies that were doing telemedicine also had McKinsey alumni as part of their co-founding team.

00:32:11.070 --> 00:32:19.230
McKinsey got like hounded by three telemedicine companies at the same time, all calling in a favor.

00:32:19.230 --> 00:32:23.670
McKinsey did a pretty detailed comparison of the three and picked us.

00:32:23.671 --> 00:32:29.150
Then a few weeks later, we approached BCG and we said, hey, we signed McKinsey.

00:32:29.960 --> 00:32:39.640
BCG essentially hired a benefits consultant Mercer at the time and then Mercer did an RFP and we won that RFP.

00:32:39.890 --> 00:32:43.079
Then Ubisoft was kind of our first big enterprise client.

00:32:43.140 --> 00:32:48.799
They wanted to revamp their health and benefits and they did an RFP.

00:32:48.800 --> 00:32:50.279
We worked like crazy on it.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
We really gave it everything and we won.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
All of a sudden, it was like, okay, these are not just like friendlies that are signing up because they know us and we have a good reputation and they want to help us.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
A friendly is a friendly.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
These are arms-length companies that either did an RFP themselves or did an RFP through a benefits consultant.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
We won those fair and square.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
We were not always the cheapest.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
When you're winning a competitive process and you're not even the cheapest, that's when we're like, okay, we really have something here.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
This was probably spring or summer of 2017.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
This is like, we've been doing this for like ten months, just under a year.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
We're starting to win those first few competitive situations.

00:32:49.921 --> 00:32:50.279
This is really when we knew like, okay, like we have something real.

00:33:58.990 --> 00:34:00.339
Perfect, all right.

00:34:00.340 --> 00:34:01.380
We'll cap it off there.

00:34:01.381 --> 00:34:13.579
Maybe just as a refresh kind of going over what we chatted about, you started off with this idea, with a lot of kind of market research, things that were happening in other countries about a marketplace between practitioners, health practitioners, and consumers.

00:34:13.650 --> 00:34:23.460