#210 Heidi's US & UK Expansion — Lessons from the Startup Growing Faster Than Canva (Playbooks Report Feature)

Hi, I'm Vitt at the Founder and Host of this podcast, The High Flares. Hello, I'm Tom, I'm the CEO and Founder at Heidi. Hey, I'm Jesse and I'm North American Director at Heidi Halsh. Hey, I'm Rex and I lead the Heidi of Team in the UK. Great to have you all on. Tom, I think you were on. Was it 2022 and in the first iteration of Heidi? So it's good to have you on the part again. Yeah, yeah, it was, I think, a few months after, like, founding. I don't think these guys had started yet, so I'm excited to be back. What if we could reimagine the traditional notion of a high flyer? Hey, friends, welcome back or welcome to the High Flares podcast, where we do reimagine a high flyer, showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today. As one of the premier products in our curiosity center, the lineup providing on-demand intelligence to help you be one percent better every single day. Homie host, Vittitagol, and let's have some fun. Our listeners have called this podcast a meticulously researched audio biography unveiling the extraordinary lives and decisions of the most remarkable individuals and companies from around the world. What does it actually take to scale our startup from Australia to the UK and the US with tens of thousands of pan users all in under two years? In this episode, 210, we go inside Heidi's global expansion, and I'm joined by the CEO Tom Kelly, the US market lead, Jesse Crichton, and the UK market lead, Raghav Shemma, the trio of the Australian Fastest Growing Helter Company growing faster than Canva. This episode is one of the company features you'll hear unpacking our recently released Playbooks report that many of you have loved for its actionable insights. The report features nine of Australia's fastest growing startups and scale ups with Heidi one of them. This conversation impacts the insights in the report, specifically how they expanded from Australia to the UK and the US. This is real, it is raw, it is full lessons for anyone looking at scale from Australia to the world. So it's now time to explore your curiosity. Please enjoy. And maybe for listeners who are unfamiliar with Heidi, which hopefully is a very small group, Tom, do you want to set the scene on who is Heidi and what problem you're solving? Yeah. So Heidi's in a medical scribe. We, I guess in a broad sense, try to reduce the constraint on human health care from the medical workforce, try to increase health care capacity. We're starting off with administrative tasks, noteworthy and creating documentation, like you always see doctors furiously typing when you see them. And that's because they have to keep up and do a lot of stuff that isn't really the human bit of healthcare that's the reason most people get into medicine. And yeah, we started off in Australia. We've, we built the initial product focusing on OzuGP and then really in the last two years, which brought under our net to make Heidi useful for kind of anyone with a product strategy so people can use Heidi for free. And then once they reach a certain team size or if the organization is large enough, usually these two or myself will be talking you through how we ultimately sell Heidi into large organizations, compliance, security, organization settings, medical record integrations, all sorts of things. And yeah, it's a, the long journey here is that Heidi becomes an AI care partner for both patients and clinicians. So really extends the reach of what a doctor might be able to do rather making medicine so transactional, you know, just one visit and you never see a doctor again. The vision here is that over time, Heidi can have this continuous engagement with you and summarize an escalate to the doctor at the right time. And doctors can potentially manage either more patients or just deliver a better quality of care with their existing patients. Yeah, so that's what we're working on. Sounds like a very easy problem you're solving, Tom. Exactly. That's a very important thing. You know, yeah. Exactly. Did two, the two Musketeers who joined your team, the two superstars, Rags and Jesse, do you want to just set the scene on what attracted you to them? And then maybe Rags and Jesse, you can each share how you joined Heidi. Yeah, I would say, I know these guys do, but so we lead my co-founder and myself. We always all the startup mythology about who you should bring into the company. Early is, you know, these generalists, like, you know, the smartest people you've met, but maybe who aren't anchored to any specific experiences that are willing to learn and are coachable. That was something we thought was really important that would, you know, latch onto the opportunity that we had ahead of us and be excited by the challenge and the uncertainty and lean into it and basically just help us win and achieve our milestones. And we didn't bring Jesse Rags on specifically with the idea of going international at the time. It was always just, you know, extensions of leading myself that could solve business problems with us and grow as the business did. And I think the unifying trait is we do look for kind of like STEM background, I'd say, is generally not always required, but like really strong problem solving and reasoning. And so we have some in the company that are more the humanities types. And then some of them all the maths background, but having some really strong sort of foundational way to think through hard situations is a unifying trait, I think as I think through kind of all the amazing high deeds. And yeah, I think we initially hired Jesse and then Jesse new Rags, obviously you guys can tell the story, but in 2022, so pretty much when we're starting the company, yeah, I'll let you guys introduce. I still haven't got my referral bonus for bringing rice. Exactly. Yeah. I joined Heidi pretty much straight out of university, like Tom said, I studied astrophysics and finance. It was a bit lost honestly. I had to manage consulting internships and me and Rags actually met a startup like Uniclub and then I went and tried venture capital and I don't know, there was a constantly unscratched itch. And so I found out about Heidi started as an intern right when the company was transitioning from the original OZGP product into what it is now. There were many things that I sucked out that like I stayed away from. Tom doesn't let me talk about product anymore, which is probably what the company, like we found that out pretty quickly. And then yeah, I knew Rags, like I said, from university and convinced him and made him drink the cool air. So you can tell that story. Yeah, for sure. So I guess kind of similar to Jesse in terms of unscratched itch. I think what I was really indexing for was just like the area where you can learn as quickly as possible. And I think it's not just startups, but the right type of startups. I give you that environment. Jesse was working there maybe a year before me. I think a good year. And just kept on saying great things about both the founders and how they provide like a really supportive arena for young talent to grow. I was at a different startup before actually in the kind of blackbird ecosystem. So I heard about Heidi a lot just through the grapevine. And then yeah, Matt Tom and Lee don't call. And to be honest, I think I remember the one thing that actually made me really excited was, I think it was you Tom. You made a joke about everything crashing and burning and like the company going to zero. And that sounds like a bad thing to say. But I remember when Tom made it was like, oh, these are just like two really smart people that are trying to solve a problem and they're not convincing themselves that they're just going to figure it all out from day one. So I really like that mentality and the rest of the history. And I think actually that does matter. I'm sure you've heard all her deadline. Lee learned about people in the dark times, not in the good times. And I remember I've known Tom for a while Heidi going through an evolution. That's always to me fun. Like you've been at the ground floor and built that penthouse, so to speak. Where's if you join once floor one, two, three is ready and you're just building floor five and six that impact is not the same. Yeah. And I'd say maybe on that. So we, yeah, it's part of kind of trying to evolve to go global first. We had to actually kind of undo some of the decisions we made early on. So we basically we built a product that was very tightly down to an Australian medical record, which was great before chat GPT. But then when that moment happened, everyone was going to start using AI really quickly. And so we were kind of a little trapped. So yeah, we had to make some hard decisions, reduce the size of the team by about half. And then I guess in a way, what actually happened was it kind of elevated Jesse and Raghd's position because we now, they were the highest context people in the whole company that, you know, I guess assumed all these different roles as we grew from start of 2024. Again, it didn't have exact titles, but they're doing kind of everything from head marketing to analyzing the funnel to leading sales and service and setting up into calm. And yeah, that feels like a key moment. I don't know what you guys think, but it felt like the time where everyone got experience and everything, enough that then when you left and had to run your own show, you kind of knew how the machine worked. Yeah, I think it was enough of the hard reset to go back to pretty much zero new product, new set of value props, like the whole thing had shifted. And so we had to figure out like all the things that mattered all over again, what are people paying for, how much do they cost to acquire? Like Tom said, you just learn the end to end funnel about from people that are totally ignorant of what Heidi is all the way to people that are like renewing their subscription and everything in the middle is 80% 90% of what makes up like a business. And so you go and plot that around in different countries and kind of the funnel is mostly the same. It's just like differently shaped at different places and different dynamics lead to different success on it. And I guess like the fact that we had no subject matter experts was like gave us the ability to just be as broad as possible. We had people who were really good salespeople. And Jesse and I probably would have never got that experience from day one. So I think that I don't think I was intentional, but that was a really serendipitous thing that we had at the start where everyone was quite generalist and we could all play the field. Back to the episode in a moment. Let's talk about some of the most intimidating acronyms in business. Hi so 27001. Sok2. Essential 8. They sound like an alphabet soup. Don't they? Trust me I've been there. Vanta is like your business's compliance superpower. They automate the messy mind numbling parts of security monitoring compliance tracking and audit preparation. All of you as listeners of this podcast get a special offer. All you have to do is go to vanta.com/high. H-I-G-H. Or reach out to me via my email in the show notes. And that link vanta.com/high is also in the show notes. Now back to the episode. Okay so the topic for this conversation and Heidi's playbook in our report is essentially how you've expanded from beyond Australia into the UK and the US and how you've got tens of thousands of users in each market. And for context at rags is leading the UK business and Jesse leading the US business. I feel like before we go into each of those markets and talk about some of the tactical elements, it could be helpful and maybe Tom you can help us with this is setting the scene on because one of the things I've learned through gathering the information for this report is it's pull and push factors. It's not a clear go moment where the time is right. And I think that is really interesting and I'd say it's also very dependent on the category of the type of product, the customer base. Tom can you paint a picture of when was the right time to expand beyond Australia and why was the UK and the US potential expansion markets? Yeah I'd say so when we made that initial pivot the first problem we were trying to solve was the product one. You know did a doctor who was using Heidi get value out of it like really basic stuff. Did they stick with they use it consistently or is their feedback like I'd say call it February March time we decided to solve that and we were getting a few hundred active users seeing my kind of mechanics were working, word of mouth was working well enough and we yeah the first thing we did was actually paid marketing so again it wasn't that much desktop research we actually didn't much to our believes shegren but we didn't do like as much planning as probably we should have but in my head I was thought that you could just see what happens with those users you know you usually paid users a kind of the worst at activating like they're the hardest group to get to use something new. I mean think about yourselves like how many times have you picked up a new software from a Facebook add or an Instagram ad pretty rarely but if those users would stick in behave similarly to the Australian ones then it was like a signal that something was going right and yeah and I'd say like we really I don't want to get to the end of the story too quickly but we I think we really validated like how to do that effectively you know start with paid really closely monitor those users and then you slowly go through different milestones along the way yeah I don't know what you guys thought I knew it was I think we just started to get paid ads right and then saw what happens before we can ask and maybe Jesse will come to you first is even discovering paid ads is a right strategy I think if you were telling me correctly there was a bit of flying fly out first and then it was paid ads is that correct? Yeah I think the paid came before we were physically there I think for us like we really were just throwing everything at the wall to be honest again back to the fact of us not me and Ryzen really having proper context of how do you actually go from zero to 100 users it was let's buckshot everything we know about anyone that's ever picked up a tool and see what works it was paid it was influencer marketing it was like we hired a group of six interns to start doing like cold sales and emailing all of our black book and so it was just kind of throwing everything at the wall and then once we felt like we knew which channels were ROI positive and which funnels made sense to deeply pursue then I think we started to point the laser beam at different markets to see if the economics still held up I think in pretty much in the UK and the US they net held up but within that funnel there were very like a lot of nuances around around how people activated and what tier they subscribed to and things like that which back to Tom's point about desktop research I almost gave us an intuition on how the market function without sitting behind a computer for eight hours a day with that makes sense. How specific if we just focus on US perhaps Jesse how specific was that was it a conversation with Tom we said okay I've got $10,000 I'm going to spend it on these channels and focus on this ICP or was it more broader than that? It was way more like I said buckshot and it wasn't like we didn't delineate across US UK, Canada or Australia really to begin with we just went okay Australia we'll start here because we're here right? Let's shoot everything at a wall let's spend you know this much money and see what the payoff is how many users we can get on the product. I think honestly and Tom arrives you guys can the memories are a bit hazy but felt like pretty much from the start the economics were at least good enough or the glide path to get somewhere good was so obvious that I think we just kind of kept throwing fuel at the fire. It was stuff like if we deployed this much spend this many people would activate but we knew we had a 50% leaky onboarding channel like onboarding sort of thing in the product so we knew if we tuned that we could get very easily to get better outcome. Yeah also like local compliance right? Like obviously we we had some elements but in the UK usually each region you have to go through like the CIOs and like this sort of formal process to get approved so even the fact we had like any users who are willing to use it in private practice and some setting was just a good sign I guess. I think it was almost like two phases like the first phase you just had to have people going through the funnel to figure out what you need to optimize like we just had no one so we just like Jesse said through everything at the wall and finally you get like 100 people coming through and you're like okay this many people came through in Facebook or AdWords or whatever and this is how they convert in this set this what their activity looks like and then I guess the second phase is you can look at that across regions. I do think it's important and I know Tom you hyped on this a lot at the very start but not being completely like blinded by the data as in sorry like blinded following the data like it for example in the UK even though the activation the start was really low the fact that anyone was activating and using it was an incredibly strong sign because of those compliance hurdles that we have like we just hadn't jumped over in like the formal way yet. So then yeah it was important to know that okay this is what the data saying but then chatting to users having and always on like booking length that they could communicate with us through was super important to to figure out okay like if the data saying this it doesn't mean that the UK is like half as good as a market as Australia or the US it just means that there's different dynamics of play and yeah qualifying that was really important as well I think. Back to the episode in a moment this episode is one of our features unpacking our recently released playbooks report that many of you have loved for its actionable insights. The report features nine of Australia's fastest growing startups and scale ups with Heidi Health being one of them. This conversation unpacks their insights in the report and you're listening to Tom their CEO Jesse, Thurkett lead and rags their UK market lead. And the users how did you get access to them in conversation or in a meeting but how did you know who they were? Like who was that ICP? Was it the same as the Australian ICP? Yeah I think so. I guess the twenth we realized earlier on that the clinical interactions were really similar you know I mean intuitively it made sense if you go say a doctor somewhere around the world they're roughly going to do the same thing. They might speak in different languages they might have different systems but the new clear to what Heidi does transcribe and create a note is effectively the same thing. So as long as we could you know get the right template in front of them or the right settings they should get a similar value out of it. And so I think that was what I was going to say like I reckon that was something that maybe other software startups don't do because they're trying to scale be scalable they try and spend their time effectively but early on I don't know how many demo meetings we guys doing like 30 hours something, 34 hours like every 15 minutes or something. Yeah. It was like and it wasn't just us it was like a whole army of people. I think superhuman did a super similar thing a little bit less scale but I think that whole thing was early on they didn't let people actually use the product without talking to a human. Our condition was a little bit different but I think the point is the same that we built just an incredible local but also international intuition on buying behavior and what people cared about and that flip like flow through to everything. What we should build in the product, what kind of community things we should be doing, how we should be messaging the ads. I think being exposed to the unit of the individual early on really helped us build a super efficient machine. Okay, so it sounds like focusing on paid ads and doing that remotely in some ways is helpful and too is understanding the user and really at human service where that line would do things that don't scale like service them in a way where you can't do that on going you can't spend 40 hours a week on going but in the first couple of months first year you can. Yeah, and I think for different businesses it's just find a way to get users in the door like maybe pay doesn't match your model because you're a B2B sales motion or you do conferences or whatever the mechanism is that you can get users in to validate your funnel behaves the same that's probably the I guess the unifying thing you'd have to do to figure out if a market's going to work. I don't know I don't know what you guys think is a little time in Jesse but it almost felt like there was always going to be one channel that was going to dominate the others as well like I think it quickly became paid so it seems like it could have been any of them but for us it just seemed to be paid was like a power lot at the start and then I think the others were probably like a 30% additive on top. Also because it's differentiated for us so not many people in healthcare do paid ads to so for us the it changed but early on there was a lot of cut through and it was just easy going whereas I'd say if we were going to conferences or we were even physically going to practices and we tried all these different things actually that was very similar to other things like pharma reps and they just wouldn't give us the space so yeah we just found the channel that worked for us and we're lucky enough that it traveled relatively easily. Interesting. It sounds like in healthcare the general go to market approaches conferences and in person interactions was paid advertising was actually controlling it and in some ways that actually allowed you to get to the end user because they weren't being targeted by everyone else. Yes. I think one nuance there as well as that traditionally most healthcare software is sold business to business whereas direct to the individual doctor is very uncommon especially in the US but really everywhere and so that direct consumer channels like paid I don't think have ever really been explored more as a function of a traditional business model not so much that it's a leaky funnel or something like that. Fascinating. Maybe a side point that came up when we were collating the information for the report Jesse and Rags is how referenceable the Australian healthcare system is that surprised me but in hindsight that makes complete sense was that an important role in in helping Heidi get traction is you didn't have to reinvent the wheel. I think maybe a couple of things to note I think on Tom's general point the kind of back usage patterns and the way that they behave was pretty similar doctor to doctor everywhere in the world so in order to get that initial PLG motion running to then feel the sales led efforts it was basically the same. I would say it's more of a cultural thing like in the UK they love the fact that we weren't American and that we came from a country that had a very strong public healthcare system and that there's very strong clinician connection between Australia and the UK like they kind of almost see an exchange program. I guess probably you came more to the more Australian than other way around but like you know it was always like a really good icebreaker when they asked all where you guys from are used American and we would say Australian it really got their guard down so I would say that was probably the most helpful thing about being Australian just the culture aspect. So good go Australia. Outside of a cool accent it didn't really do much for me over here. So this is interesting. The one thing that helped us that we had just you could kind of obfuscate where we had traction. I would often say we've got a couple thousand users working with hospitals and sometimes it would be enough to just if you obfuscate it enough for them to not really dig deep. And so the biggest thing for US companies I think is for better or for worse there's a big pride of US tech industry that kind of the machine behind it. And so to be from the outside I think the first instinct is lesser product or less you know inferiority. I don't know Tom if you felt the same way but for us it kind of felt almost like we would have to work uphill to convince even though we're Australian that's where we're really good at what we're doing. Yeah yeah totally agree. Yeah I actually don't even know. Just culturally the way it's a much more stiff upper lip like suits you know very serious sort of healthcare model because a lot of people are just employed by health systems. You know you're talking to essentially like C suite that run multi thousand person organizations whereas the way healthcare works in the UK and in Australia it's very decentralized like lots of small practices or even the departments within hospitals still have their own head department and it's only kind of 30 people so they feel like small business they're more friendly and easy going. Yeah so I definitely agree Jesse it was more uphill it remains like a challenge to be considered like a real option or like a real company in the space. You have to give them the sense that you're you are American and you have American team and development and support to be able to like not to get your first customers but to win serious market share I think it's important. Maybe this is a good time to go double click on each of those markets so maybe Jesse if you start with you I think we've set the context and talked about some of the differences and similarities and some of the push and pull moments. Tom's alluding to one point which is the messaging and how you present yourself how the company presents itself in the US. If you had to do it today Jesse given your lived experience in the US and with the Heidi product what would be the three things you'd focus on to expand into the US if you were expanding again for the first time. Yeah some of the things that we did well that I would have doubled down more on and others are things I think we either were scared to do that we didn't want to accept the reality of or things like that. I think the first thing which it took us a while to accept was like putting sales almost ahead of the product lead motion to some extent in certain pockets of the market. We had these visions of grand or of product letting our way through to hundreds of doctors in large complex institutions. I think it took us a while to sober up to the reality that whilst the product can get you in and get you usage in most cases that usage is against the will of the decision makers in most cases that is activity that they don't want anyone else in the organization to know about. We I think it took us a while to actually accept that can we do need a fledged out sales team we do need people to take these initial conversations decision makers and run them through pilot process and run them through a sales process and then give them the customer support and success that they need. So I think that's one thing that if we had earlier may have helped us accelerate into more traction early on something that I think we did a really good job of that we probably could have just thrown more energy and effort out in hindsight is pretty much all of our initial traction came from really strong ambassadors and advocates. People that had tried a bunch of scribes were evaluating them purely of product and also our vision. So they talked to myself or Tom or someone from the team and had kind of been evangelized about our view on what scribing was. It was also very early as well so there were just rabbit fanatics just by way of the fact that they never seen a scribe before and hide it was the first one they'd seen. So most of the big first contracts we signed came from those individual people within the industry that almost acted as a bridge from what I just alluded to like our outside and this into the market and we did a great job of each of us had four or five really close contacts that to this day I'm still very close to. We probably could have done a lot more built like stronger community we could have really made it like a strategic focus of everyone in the company because even to this day it's still how people operate is it's all who you know and how they advocate for you and having people on the inside. Probably the last one is more on a product philosophy which I won't speak to out a turn of but I think accepting figuring out which parts of the market we have to accept as reality and which ones we can build our own reality around. So we have kind of complex perspectives on what integrations look like in the future and how that shapes up and when I say integrations in the sense of there's these big you know electronic health records that are effectively the databases for all health that goes on and they act as the stalwarts of anything health related you have to integrate whether or not it matters for the product you just it's like this cognitive dissonance for all the executives in US healthcare. I think we saw that cognitive dissonance and tried to skirt it which I think in the long term is actually the right and correct play but in the short term is almost like a barrier to enter entering the market which I think we held out against maybe a little bit too long which we're now getting on top of but yeah I think those are the kind of the three things. The faster growing companies in history like Figma, Ramp, OpenAI and Kyrsa are all built on notion. Notion gives startups everything they need to move fast, stay lean and scale smarter. It replaces eight plus tools like Trello, Confluence and meeting no apps saving founders and teams, thousands and reducing chaos. Over 50% of the Y Combinator and 90% of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies use Notion to run everything from fundraising to hiring and here's the best part. High-flights podcasts, listeners like you can get up to six months of the Notion Business Plan free saving you up to $12,000. So if you're a founder or executive team member looking to move faster and stay focused, Notion is the place to build. Get that off for now at ntn.so/highflyers. That's ntn.so/highhiGH flyers fllys. And now back to the episode. So interesting, I want to come to you rags in a moment for the UK but I think the best summary for what just you've just said is all three matter, the trifecta which is the market you entering, the product you have and the person representing that product from a company perspective, it almost all three of them need to line up. It sounds so basic but that is so important at least in the US. Rags, it was at the same in the UK and similar question if you could do it again with your lived experience and your learnings, what are the three things you would focus on to expand from Australia into the UK? I think I'll qualify by saying it's highly contextual, like I think if I went back in time and gave myself this advice I'd probably take it the wrong way. So I would completely agree with the ambassador topic that Jesse mentioned I think is worth focusing on that as well because it's a complete power law that your most active users, the ones who love your product are going to open doors for you that you're going to try and replicate over the next two or three years probably with a lot of success. Do you just think about how a market kind of expands or is developed? Did these kind of innovators, these early adopters are always going to be the ones who are going to proliferate your product? I think like we did things in this regard really well, like both with an ambassador program but also just having that really high touch. I believe that was able to turn users into ambassadors. There were a lot of people who came through the product that didn't know about it but were able to book in a call with myself or someone else in the team showing the value in all of the sudden they're really accelerating the market in a way that we didn't expect at the start. I would also say is a second point. And again, like I said, highly contextual. I think there's only very specific things that I would want this for but there are particular things in a market that you want to know from an expert. I think when we chatted last bit, we were talking about how a lot of the experts that we initially chatted to in the UK were actually wrong about basically everything. So again, like I said, I'm highly qualifying this but if we're thinking about like selling to the NHS, we're selling to a big hospital system, there are particular things that I wish we knew that we didn't get tripped up on like we're to find budget, who is the decision makers, what is their process? In a more general sense, just to structure our thinking. Again, I wouldn't say there'd be like hands on or anything but just getting some of that information. I think maybe I was an as open to it at the start because I was like nowhere, super contrarian company and any kind of advice on how the market works is we should chuck it away. I'd say the third bit is maybe, I don't know how the best way to describe it, but like almost taking the market where it's at in some respects. There was a lot that we did, I think in the UK, to accelerate the adoption of AI scribes, but there are particular parts of the market that move much faster than others. Also for example, general practice in the UK because it is very small practices that are in live and to make their own decisions on budget and what tech to use. That has moved at a pay like 10X, any other segment of the market. Whereas there are others like hospital systems that we just know will take a while and even if we want to accelerate it, there are particular like main players within the market that will actually make it move. If we think about the UK, like there's a few collection of trusts which are like hospital systems which are the ones who brought Epic into the UK or any kind of tech. If I went back, I would have acknowledged how some of the other products that have proliferated in the UK were developed and then just focused on those market makers. Again, like I said, highly contextual. It could have been completely different based on experience, but I think if I went back, that's what I would say. It sounds like that is only learned by being on the ground right back to the earlier point of yes, we can, you can advertise it and you can have a great product, but until you don't actually do those demos, speak to customers, speak to users, you can't develop that insight. Yeah, I think so. And probably, I haven't seen that often, but I know some software companies that kind of fall in love with their romance of just being from Australia and doing everything remotely and keeping the team super small and how much revenue my generating per employee and all this kind of stuff. But to some extent, I mean, healthcare is tricky because there's a lot of hand holding and selling and compliance, so maybe this doesn't generalize, but I don't know, it feels like you're missing a bit if you're not putting the team and just like the resource physically there, even if it maybe doesn't quite make sense. You could argue in the UK at the time when Rags moved, it didn't really make sense. We had a lot of free active users, but we hadn't really shown how we would monetize them or how we would sell into the hospital trusts where, you know, yeah, we basically hadn't almost no users. We had a few doctors in pro-practice, but you know, the compliant, we didn't even know where to start, we'd only talk to it. It seems like there's 50 people that need to sign off on this together to prove and the procurement frameworks didn't even exist, so couldn't even get paid. But the thing is, it's, I guess that's the part where you have to commit and lock in your investment in that market for a period of time and then let whoever is taking it have the latitude to solve it, even though it feels very uncertain, which I think Rags and both you guys just as well have done a good job of. Yeah. Can we double click on that point, Tom, because that's such an almost undirrated point, and I wonder the framing is what advice you would all guidance, you would give to other operators or founders who are expanding to a new market for the first time is you're touching on metrics or signals, but also the internal investment. Up to you, if you want to give actual numbers and stats, but two bad questions, how would you guide other, let's call leadership teams, founders and operators to think of getting invested in a new market from Australia and to what metrics or signals did you use internally to go, okay, this is working. Let's continue to support them. Yeah, I think you need to understand how your go to market machine works. I do think we, and specifically, so there's the, okay, first is product and one user. So what are the things that have been true in your current market and what has to be true for it to work in another place? So for us, that's kind of how often is someone using Heidi, how many sessions in their day or their week are they actually using Heidi to generate nodes? Do they stick around? So are they, you know, is this a behavior change and they're starting to adopt this in their workflow? And probably that the, like earlier parts of the funnel, like if they land on the website and do they sign up and do they get through onboarding on their own? Basically, you know, given any doctor that fits in out, like let's call it a GP, do they actually turn into an active user at a similar rate because that gives you a signal that you have product market fit, which I wouldn't do anything until you feel like you have that because that's the biggest concern we initially had was that there is something that we don't know that is different about this country in the way they practice so that would make Heidi not translate effectively. And we had to prove to ourselves that wasn't the case before we thought about anything else. The other thing is the go-to-market aspect. So given that product working, what, how does your go-to-market mechanic work? And for us, that's usually free active users will convert to paid at some clip that that is to do with buying sensitivity and how important the paid features are for them in their market. And then if that's happening, then usually they'll ask that we'll start getting, we call it marketing qualified leads. So people will start coming inbound saying, "Hey, I used Heidi. This is great. Please meet my clinic or can I buy this for eight people?" I'd love to understand the compliance here to sell to 20 people. So we had clear milestones. Do you use the behavior the same way as previous? Yes. Okay, we have product market fit. Do we see MQLs coming inbound that are roughly proportionate? So does the go-to-market aspect work in the same way? I'd say it actually was more potent in the UK and the US than in Australia. We got more leads coming in because there were more used to human selling. So it's just like it filled up these guys kind of more quickly. And then I'd say the key tipping point investment decision is once you're getting that much inbound for a moat without doing any outbound, any on the ground efforts, then assuming you have the resource and you raise the capital and you can make this decision, then you'd have to at that point say three to five head count, just like dedicate the salary, call it 500K, something like that. So you have to commit for a year or something at least to just give them the runway. Because you won't know early on everything, all your assumptions to what these guys have said are probably incorrect. So you just have to let that team have latitude to figure it out for themselves. Also you as a founder probably should also spend a lot of time with the team. Like I'd say, we'll lead and I generally split between lead spends more time in the UK. I spend more time with the US team and that time spent because slowly becomes less as the team becomes more self-sufficient and we're just steering rather than being like in every sales call and every demo. But we were like I was in during you know, 20, 30 US demos as well as Jesse in that early phase, like trying to absorb how they behave, how they're different. Yeah. So I think just whatever those milestones are like product market fit, how it's going to market machine work, is it similar and then do you need to do it on the ground sales and support? The point at which one person is busy enough means that there's your missing a bit, there's a million more people you could be talking to that you're currently not because the product only gets you so far and that's the point where I would make that investment. If you're doing a product that's strategy, it's B2B, it's probably a bit different, maybe the south of the founders going there and trying to generate leads and then still prove yourself product market fit, how it's going to market going to work, then commit. Yeah, I think the product market fit one is so important. Maybe Jesse and Rags, what guidance would you give leadership teams or market teams? Maybe Rags would be set with you in the UK. What should they keep in mind when keeping headquarters updated or even the founder updated? Is that a weekly update where you'd send an email to the founders? I would say you should be challenging them daily, you need to be challenging them daily. Just because of that first stage, you're getting so much information. If you think about Jesse and I's calendar in the first few weeks there, it was like you wake up at 8 a.m. until maybe 8 p.m. your own calls all day. You can't even have a lunch break really because your calendar is all booked up and you're getting so much information and you actually need to almost get that out without having to feel like you're compressing the information into an email or until a Slack update or until some memo. You want to just keep providing that information to someone else and then you can almost like bounce ideas off of each other. So I would say that's really important, almost like a sparring partner when you're entering a new market and I think it was helpful that it was both Tom and Releed so you could get a different perspective because obviously they both have different backgrounds that are really helpful when you're launching a new market. And has that strategy in terms of how to communicate back with the team and keep Tom and Releed in the rest of even some of Jesse in another market updated. Has that changed now because you've got consistency in some customer feedback? Yes, it definitely has changed. I think over time the bets you're making or like the thoughts you have start to crystallize into patterns that you want to almost be like this is what we're doubling down on now that I've absorbed everything that I could in the first few months. Ideally you do want to write those bets down or like those strategies or whatever you want to call it to say this is what we're focusing on based on everything and we're going to see how that plays out. To be honest, I think personally I'm still trying to do a better job of that, like whether it's in a memo or an update or a slide deck like I'm not still a show but I do think it's really important because as you start doing better in a market, the size of your team grows and the size of all the supporting mechanisms in HQ grows as well. And if I can't not only keep Tom updated but like the ops team and like the rest of the sales teams or just anyone else that's like helping support the UK and the US, then I'm just like doing a disservice to my team here in the UK. I do think like you need to put it in a way that's not just like on a WhatsApp call with Tom or Lily just being like in our brain down like an active event more instructions for sure. And I'd say when you write things down, it's often for you more than the person reading it. So it helps you to your point, like just get the space to actually have a think about like now, really now pushing these guys to not do as many demos and like actually give them some space to think because having coordinating 10 to 15 people locally and also like calling the right resource from 150% to 10 that it's a different exercise. You still, it's still a trick of having to be close enough to customers to not lose touch but like to the rags as point, you know, once you've got enough, you've had enough lessons, like you've shown enough basketball for you've now got to play the game. What's okay, great. Now you know how it works. What's the actual like team strategy like standing back and looking at the battlefield ahead, like how do you go, go forward? So yeah, I think we started to do that pretty well, but we're still learning. Yeah. Do you guys agree as well? Like maybe at this point, this is like where you start to bring in the experts, like people like Leah and the team or Paul or you know, John Beads. You want to just define this point, Tom, when you said this point, you mean revenue milestone or user milestone? I think once you want to grow the sales and support teams regionally, so call it like, I don't know, once that once each team in that region gets past maybe five, six people if you have more than three sellers starts to feel like less general, more like you're setting up low-clire sales teams. Once I think you've gone from building the processes that are regionally nuanced and mapped to the market and you go from creating it to improving it, I think that's kind of like the point at which you realize, okay, now we need someone. Yeah. I know, I hate the word like scale up or scale because like it doesn't really explain like what it actually is. I think it's when you're bringing roles on to do the exact same thing as someone else, that's the point at which you are now no longer solving net new problems. You are just trying to grow the resource under an existing strategy. That's how I think of it. So these guys are both currently hiring for roles in their teams that are doing exactly that, like just resource support more, resource sales more, resource X or Y more. Once you start to find yourself doing that is an established behaviour and like way of growing that their experience tends that are better than you at it. I've had to learn this the hard way. There are much better people who have done this in a much go way that will help you avoid mistakes even in multiple regions. So she's not here but like will you for example, ran a multinational, multi-language product marketing and go to market team. And so she helps us avoid all the stuff that she's saying from having done that before. So we're not hiring like three or five marketers in every region that do all the same thing and compete with each other. She has a clear view of this as how if you seriously want to have 10 countries, Tom, this is how you do this. You have a central team, you have field marketers, you create this constructive tension. So I'd say like that, when you're hiring someone that looks very similar to someone you already have and they're just using established playbooks and like the degree to which those are changing is like 20, 30% but like the majority of it is solved. That's scaling and that's the point at which you want to bring in experts I think. I would slightly qualify that by saying I think it's helpful to bring in experts not to help scale the machine. Sorry, I think there's two ways. I think I agree that we bring in experts when we did and I think it was a really good thing. I think it's also helpful to have them at the start to just inform your mental model as well, not necessarily to listen to them, but just to be like, okay, that agrees or disagrees with my information that I'm getting and I like it's a helpful feedback. For example, Leah, like before Leah joined the company properly, she was actually advising us at the start and I was really helpful to feedback of our lived experience and the data and then what she was telling us could be like a good thing to do. I would say that was probably something that would have been helpful when we were scaling in the market just to be like, okay, this is like the general geometry of the UK health care system and this is how they buy software and just some of those things even if you didn't listen to it, just to clear it. Jesse, you've been very kindly listening to this conversation. Talk about the US. I think there's two topics here. One is how do you report back to HQ and are there any technical things you've done there and how that's evolved and two on the hiring front, how are you thinking about that and I guess what have you learned? Three experiences in building a team on the ground. Yeah, I think I'd mostly agree with everything Rags said on the point of the style of communication that has to happen early on. I don't think there's been a day for the last 365 days where I haven't spoken to Tom or Walheat for five, ten minutes at least synchronously, but if not synchronously, like a long paragraph where I'm complaining about something to Tom or you know, like it's constant and it's never ending because you have to create a facsimile of what would actually be happening if I was in the Aussie office as well. Like back then it's you're in person every day, the founders getting constant signal from the troops on the ground. I think the other part of the founder regional relationship, which is like a specific example of that is knowing when to pull the founder card in different engagements. So whether it's making sure that Tom is on every call for a really important deal early on and telling Tom, "Lew, you're going to have to wake up at 2am for a couple days this week next week, but it is what it is." Or even pulling the founder card on, "Hey, Tom, there's this conference where they've got a speaking spot. Can you fly out here for a weekend?" You know, it's a brutal flight, but we think this has to happen. I think, yeah, there needs to be like a super tight rope between the founders and the people on the ground in order to make those things possible and to have the trust to pull that thing off. And if you're doing asynchronous weekly memos or a once-weekly hour-on-call, you miss that completely. On hiring, I maybe I'll ask you more specific question because I realize it's a very broad topic and we could be here for days. I think what all three of you spoken about is high agency, ambitious people that potentially don't get biased by logos. I think that's been consistent actually in the findings of this report and generally in my own experience. What's your process, Jesse, to find them? Because compared to Australia, the UK, the US is such a big market and everyone in my experience is very boastful and high in confidence and think they're changing the world. But what is the actual process to find them and what is potentially one red flag that costs you a lot of time and energy in the early days? Yeah, I think the process is still evolving, honestly. Like we're still tuning our read on filtering out for that. I think early on as a way to kind of cheat that risk, we actually did pull a lot from Australia where we kind of knew what real, what that archetype looked like in an Australian context and then ship them over. Or like people that had worked at the Aussie team for six months who showed sign of that, right? So that early on helped us take on less risk when bringing on new people. But I think now as we look at it, when we look into the talent market and how we find people that match, I think this is maybe like a bit out of their field, but there has to be some, it can be a dark or a light. There has to be something that is like a real deep, dark motivating force as to why you want to prove yourself out in at Heidi, right? And I look at everyone we've hired and I can point to something and I'm not going to call anyone out in the team, but it could be previous failure in startup. It could be previous failure in your industry. It could be my parents are these incredible successful people and I feel inadequate, right? It could be I'm friends, like my whole world revolves around healthcare and I was the only one that didn't make it through medical school, right? And those are all very negative exams. There's also positive examples, but I think you need to find someone that is like the mission at hand, subsumes all parts of the things that they care about and the signals and the signs for that can be any of those things that I just previously mentioned, but also just like they care about the right things. Like when you talk to them, they're not so fast about what's my day to day, Judy going to be what is all the salary conversation, like it's not about how quickly you guys growing. Obviously those questions come up, but you can get a read pretty early on what do you actually care about? And I think the people that have been most successful in the things we look for is almost people that are bit self-serving in are these conditions right for me to like absolutely kill it because I'm going to show 110% energy and for all the right or wrong reasons I really want to win. Just like looking for winners that are motivated by something like, great, I don't know Tom, if you agree. Yeah, definitely. It's not like a fun day job where you get to clocking clock off and it shouldn't be like transactional. It should be, especially in early phases, like pretty all-consuming, you know, slack is on your mobile all the time, like you're, you know, welded to these people and you're trying. You want to have been remembered, we want to remember Heidi as a time where we did something in our lives that was, we're slightly irresponsible, but was like full on and we were all in and we tried to change the world and we, and people knew about it and they knew what it meant to have worked at Heidi, at least in Australia, maybe around the world on day as we succeed. And I think that those traits, like some sort of trauma, like driving force actually is important. Not that other people describe it as like grit, which I do think you can get a sense for, you've been someone's past work or what they've done in the past. Just how do they think through the problems and where do they, like there's an interview term called Locust of Control. So when people answer questions, they talk about how they solve the problem and if I find people who have high agency generally take responsibility for everything when things go wrong and it's like subtle things in the way that they explain things and increasingly is intuition. Like I went from having no structure in interviews to highly structured interviews at the beginning to no structure in interviews again and I just try to weed out like how they think how they approach problems and the thing I'm looking for is just ultimately it's just that grit. And then of course now with specialists and some experts joining the team, of course you want to test that you feel like this person is someone you would work for if you were in their industry. Like they have so much expertise as like the minimum prerequisites, but they still need to have these characteristics where they are willing to, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know if I'm going to have anyone in the team, but like they're willing to go from their 20 person team to being one person, both doing everything coming up with the strategy, talking to the founders, talking to these guys and then building out their function. And that's not for the faint of heart. Like it's a really challenging, you know, 60, 80 hour weeks initially. And then as you set up the functions and stability, you can have balance. It's not the end of the world, but if someone's coming in saying, you know, I want this to be great work life balance for me, then that's fine, but probably not the right place. Go somewhere where it's established and there's a clear role and there's not that much uncertainty and you'll have a better time. Yeah. One other thing I think that was really important locally and I rise, I'm sure you feel the same as I can't imagine having done any of this with people that I didn't personally like. Right? I mean, you work 80 person, 80 hours a week with the same five, six people. If you get the feeling initially that you can have collegiate relationship with them, but not like a deep and personal relationship, I think it's a red flag and feel like we've learnt this the hard way, honestly, because it might sound like a secondary assessment, but it's, I can't tell you how important it is to building trust to making things fun at work to all of the 1% as around the edge. If you don't like the people you're working with, it makes it like incredibly difficult. Yeah. I think that some reof this is attract the missionaries, not the mercenaries, but you still need to be paid and you still want to title and all that. I think mercenary is in, can be filtered. I think sometimes it can be used as a gas light, which I always find interesting. And yeah, on your point about life experience, yeah, I was going to say, I'll keep that in mind when I have a need a job, I'll definitely reach out. I think I fit that criteria for sure. That is spot on. Maybe we'll come to a wrap with the closing wrap and fire around what have been the one big mistake in each market that's taught each of you the most. Jesse, what maybe a painful learning. There's two that come to mind. I think I'll focus on one. The one biggest thing I think is realizing that in very complex systems like the US healthcare, as much as you want it to be true, the best product doesn't always win, which means that not only do you have to have the best product, you also need to supplement that with doing all the right other things. If you imagine it's like a decision pie for these CXOs, whoever they are, product is one part of it, but it's not the whole part. Accepting that early on, we knew we had actually the best product and the vision of the product was definitely far away the best from all the, what would I call it, like bland taste in the US healthcare and the same category. The hardest part was learning that you'd run a pilot against another product, which was significantly inferior. The other product, the pricing was even better on our side. All the things were right, but you didn't play 18 rounds at the local cost with the CMO, and so you lost the deal, or you didn't go to the same fraternity as them. Those are very specific examples, but more generally, in a deal process, you learn that doing all the things right is only the stuff that you can see on the surface. There's a whole iceberg below that you have to also do right in gaining influence in playing the right stakeholders, in having an insider and creating the incentive structures for the actual people and the real humans that are making these decisions, because at the end of the day, the decision makers are just algorithms that are picking based on some immeasurable set of product measurements. They're humans that are picking because they've got friends, and because they have their own proclivities to different types of products. The thing that maybe has caused us the most pain is not understanding that, and it's something that I continue to obsess over how do we put ourselves in the best position to ensure we see the full iceberg, not just the tip of it in every deal process, but also customer success, partnership, just every part of the business. I think that would be my take. Rags, what's been a painful learning in the UK? Yeah, I would say offsetting all of the things that you're learning with some kind of expert opinion or like a view from the top warmers. If you're being an intentionally contrarian business, you want to have some kind of feedback that even if you don't agree with it, still helpful to feed your mental model. And I would say, I also agree with Jesse, so I just said it is. Perfect. Tom, what's the first thing you do to enter a new market now with the learnings from the UK and the US? It's the same thing. We probably start trying to, luckily now we have a lot of international users, so try to find existing users in those markets, talk to them. It's impossible to find another Jesse Rags type early journalist in the team, give them remit over that country, and basically start generating leads for them, so start with some paid ads, localize the product if it's not English speaking, and yeah, go through the same stages. Jesse, what's the most underrated market signal no one talks about? It's a good one. Like, fanaticism, like customers that form over not only the product, but you as a person or like the founder or like just pure adoration. I think it's not something that shows up in any of your data rooms or hub spot or anything like that, but if you hop on a call, you quickly find out if this is just something that's like a nice to have versus something that they literally can't live without. The one that I've seen in my own experience and I was talking to Chief Commercial Officer the other company that's quite well known is he said, "How quickly do you move to text message and WhatsApp? Get off email and I think that again is industry dependent. Some industries, of course, you have to go through the process and people have eAs and all that, but I think in my experience that has been, we were thinking about, we work with 10 commercial partners in my business and nine of them are on text message or WhatsApp." Yeah, I think I've heard the saying like in enterprise sales, like deals get closed over text, not over email. Potentially, potentially. Yeah. Rags, what's the one underrated market signal that no one talks about in the UK? In my experience, it's seeing a user pattern that if you put yourself on their shoes, you wouldn't even do yourself. Like I think the example I like to give is people are using Heidi in their hospitals when everything is tracked on their hospital Wi-Fi and they would be definitely caught if they were using it. If I was a doctor and I was like a risk of a doctor, I wouldn't do that. So the fact that they were doing it is such a strong signal that it feels even unreasonable for someone like me who is the entertainer. Tom, what's one business metric that you think is most important above all else? For us, it's free active usage because people will turn and come back. So we focus a lot on weekly active usage and then basically the weekly activities are divided by now. So basically how many of your multi-activities are actually using it every week or like every second week? Because for us, because there's paid and free, like it doesn't matter if someone's not paying us in the long run of how much Heidi will do for them, I think it's more important that they're sticking around. At least once in a while because we can win them back over time. So activity, I feel like leads all but if people, if it's alive, then we're fine. If that's going down or there's problem there, that's leading into caring for everything else. Maybe last one is a bit more human personal one to close on. We've talked a lot about working hard and childhood experiences and life experiences, but I always say that it's a marathon and rest is important and some curious how do each of you switch off? What are those passions outside work? So Jesse, what's one thing you have to do each week to get the best out of yourself mentally and physically? Probably eating out in the city. I really enjoy exploring New York. I think it's, and I'm sure Rice was the same about London, but you kind of, it helps you just put into perspective that, yes, this week was bad, yes, this week was good, but in my 20s I'm living in New York working for a really cool startup. Things could be worse. Nice. Rags, what's one thing you have to do each week to get the best out of yourself mentally and physically? Superb, I just exercise. Yeah, same for me. Tom? Yeah, great. Great. Just weightlifting, spend time with the cats, you know? Just like stroking, relaxing, calming. Watching TV shows, other boring, nothing exciting. All man stuff. Yeah, exactly. Planting trees and hurting my back with an anger. Yeah, I mean for your height, that would be fun. Yeah, nice. Oh, that brings us to the finish line. Anything that we have in cover that you want to share in closing? No, we're hiring lots of roles, so please come and join us. Yeah, please look at our pages, especially if you're an engineer, we need you. Back in injured days. Ignore the grids. What is this Heidi Helter? Heidi Helter, there's a new jobs or careers page somewhere there. Yeah, any of those. Cool. Very cool. Tom, Jesse, Rags, thank you for joining me and Chatsun. See you guys. Once for it. Well, there you have it. What are my squats? For pivoting the product, the firing up paid ads and earning tens of thousands of users across Australia, the UK, the US, and other countries, the Heidi team has proved that audacity, clarity and role execution really matter. Huge thanks to Tom, Jesse and Rags for their openness and to you, the listening. If something in this episode sparked a thought, send it to a team member or to a colleague or a founder or operator who might benefit. Infocurus about partnering with us at the Curiosity Center from this podcast to our reports, events and other products. Enjoy the likes of Google, KPMG, the University of Melbourne and many more, my details and the show notes. Until next time, I'm Vida Tagalau and this is the High Flies podcast.