Co-founder and COO of Nutrisense Dan Zavorotny always wanted to see real and significant innovation in the healthcare space. With newly-released products and services barely moving the needle forward, he decided it was time to take that leap and pioneer meaningful change in the industry.
After handing in his resignation as a healthcare consultant, he founded a digital health company called Nutrisense in just two weeks. The startup was built upon the simple mission to empower people to optimize their well-being by making behavioral changes based on their metabolic data. The platform couples continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) with one-on-one dietitian coaching to make personalized health recommendations.
Nutrisense was able to generate over $5,000 in revenue through online channels in their first two weeks, but that was merely a taste of what was to come. The company recently went on to close a $25-million Series A round led by 1315 Capital, a healthcare-focused private investment firm.
Nutrisense has raised a total of $32 million in investment thus far and plans to leverage this financing to serve more customers keen on up-leveling their metabolic health. Currently, the company is powered by a team of over 160 full-time employees, with thousands of members amongst their subscription base.
As Nutrisense continues to facilitate change in the health and wellness community, Dan has kept his focus on building customer relationships and making product improvements that serve the company’s evolving needs.
In this Medsider episode, we discuss the benefits and challenges of a direct-to-consumer business model in the healthcare space. Dan also explains how building customer relationships can help you create a product that solves a real problem and shares recruitment strategies for finding the best team members to support your company's growth.
Key Learnings from Dan's Experiences
- Going direct-to-consumer (DTC) brings on its unique challenges but is critical to disrupting the healthcare industry. A DTC model gets you valuable input on real-life, everyday problems, so you can make meaningful improvements to existing infrastructures in a way that drives the space forward.
- Get your product into the hands of your customers as early as possible and be open to receiving feedback that can be used to guide the improvement process. Contrary to popular belief, you may not need high-powered clinical studies backing your product before entering the market.
- The people you work with can make or break your company, and there are creative ways to get top talent on board with your mission. And it’s important to coalesce a diverse team—having the exact same mindset and skillset as someone else does not guarantee that a particular candidate is going to be the best addition to your tribe.
Before co-founding Nutrisense, Dan worked as a healthcare management consultant at KPMG, where he advised Fortune 500 companies and three of the top five hospitals in the US. His company, Nutrisense, combines continuous glucose monitoring with personalized dietitian coaching to help people optimize their metabolic health based on real-time data.
Why You Need a Direct-to-Consumer Model to Disrupt Healthcare
According to Dan, the challenging thing about a DTC business model is the need to constantly convince target consumers to invest in the value the product delivers. Customers may choose to cancel their subscriptions or request a refund if their perceived benefits ever went away. Success requires constant reinventing, innovating, marketing, and delivering value month after month after month.
Besides the need to market efficiently, establish a compelling brand, and offer consistent value to customers, DTC companies also face other challenges. For instance, a recession can make it more difficult to remain competitive and relevant, especially when going up against already-established leaders in the space.
While there are many challenges with a DTC model, Dan states that it's the best way to disrupt the healthtech industry and bring forth innovation that truly makes a difference in the lives of consumers.
He isn't looking to create products that are just a fraction better than existing brands on the market. Instead, his company's value proposition is to develop a first-of-its-kind offering that will meet real needs, solve everyday problems, and drive the industry forward.
"If you want to disrupt an industry, you have to go directly to the consumer, specifically in healthcare. If you want marginal improvements, you should go B2B," Dan says.
And though Dan understands that inherent difficulties with a DTC approach to healthcare, he still stands by the reason that led him to quit his corporate job in the first place — his eagerness to see meaningful innovation in the broader healthcare ecosystem.
"Because if 100,000 people try a product and they love it, and then some B2B company wins because they have more connections even when their product is subpar, they'll always come back and say, hey, I want a product like that one. And we're pushing a B2B company now to upgrade their skills. And that's what we're trying to force — we're trying to force the industry forward," Dan notes.
Nutrisense aims to demystify metabolic and nutritional health for the general population and serve as the "healthcare professional in your pocket." The company was one of the first to leverage CGM devices already on the market and pair them with personalized advice from dietitians who review the data collected in real-time.
Customer Feedback is Critical During the Early Stages of Your Startup
In November, 2019, Dan's team launched the Nutrisense platform on the very day it was technologically possible to do so. At that time, Apple had just made the NFC scan functionality available to all companies, and that was the moment Nutrisense's mobile app hit the market.
Considering they were very early with their technology, the Nutrisense team ran into unforeseen challenges, but Dan saw this as a valuable opportunity to gather crucial feedback. Most customers had to learn how to apply their CGM sensor in the right way and a large proportion struggled to install the app correctly. Through this process, Dan’s team set up video calls to demonstrate the right method of putting the device on for each of their first 100 customers, which allowed them to collect a lot of useful insights.
Despite these hurdles, Dan leveraged all forms of feedback—both positive and negative—to improve and redesign the platform in a way that delivered what customers needed.
They initiallystarted with just one dietitian. But Nutrisense strategically turned nutritional coaching into a core part of the platform when the team realized that many customers wanted personalized advice on glucose management, sleep, exercise, and diet.
"We actually only brought in one person in the beginning, who's our co-founder, to be a dietitian. She'd answer some questions people had here and there. And then we started getting bombarded," Dan explains.
"We started to change things where the dietitian became the focal point, and the glucose became an input for the dietitian to interpret—then the glucose, plus the workouts, plus the sleep, plus your annual physicals became a combination of inputs. And that's the focus you could only get by just going ahead and letting people try it."
Dan further pointed out that, at times, innovation may have to happen before clinical research can occur. He mentioned that with some products, it shouldn't be necessary to wait for years of scientific studies before creating and launching a product. If you can commercialize with a compelling proposition, despite lightweight medical data, you may be able to pick up on key learnings that you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Why the Right People Will Make or Break Your Company
As Nutrisense experienced exponential growth, Dan had to find the right talent to hire. And convincing them of his mission was one of the keys to bringing the right people on board.
According to Dan, podcasts became part of the company’s recruitment strategy. Whenever they were on health and wellness podcasts, they took the opportunity to let people know Nutrisense was hiring.
Most startup founders understand that it’s challenging to get in front of the best talent if they don’t even know your company exists. So if you have the opportunity to. raise awareness around your value proposition, mission, and future plans with an engaged audience that has similar ambitions, it’s a win-win-win.
Instead of having to convince job seekers to make a move, this flips the script and gets them excited to apply and get on board with your vision.
Another mistake entrepreneurs tend to make when building a team is bringing on people with operational frameworks that are too similar.. This could bottleneck the company's progress due to the lack of diverse skills, opinions, and experiences to draw from.
"So, it's always about looking for someone as extremely opposite from you as possible. Yes, this will create a lot of conflicts and a lot of tension during your company's growth. But that's a positive tension, not a negative one, because you do not want to be in agreement all the time," Dan noted.
And as your company continues to grow, Dan warns that one of the hardest pills to swallow will be the fact that different people are better-suited for different parts of your startup journey.
"So when you're at five people, [you might need] someone who is a generalist, who's amazing at ten things. And all of a sudden, you're at 100, and that person may not always be the right person. And now you need specialized people for unique things," Dan explained.
Your company's workforce needs will also likely change as it advances. And though this may sound like more effort than it's worth, learning to pinpoint your hiring needs and recruit the right talent is key to scaling your company's growth.
"You eventually realize that when you have the right people, it just exacerbates your success," Dan says.
Co-founder and COO of Nutrisense Dan Zavorotny always wanted to see real and significant innovation in the healthcare space. With newly-released products and services barely moving the needle forward, he decided it was time to take that leap and pioneer meaningful change in the industry.
After handing in his resignation as a healthcare consultant, he founded a digital health company called Nutrisense in just two weeks. The startup was built upon the simple mission to empower people to optimize their well-being by making behavioral changes based on their metabolic data. The platform couples continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) with one-on-one dietitian coaching to make personalized health recommendations.
Nutrisense was able to generate over $5,000 in revenue through online channels in their first two weeks, but that was merely a taste of what was to come. The company recently went on to close a $25-million Series A round led by 1315 Capital, a healthcare-focused private investment firm.
Nutrisense has raised a total of $32 million in investment thus far and plans to leverage this financing to serve more customers keen on up-leveling their metabolic health. Currently, the company is powered by a team of over 160 full-time employees, with thousands of members amongst their subscription base.
As Nutrisense continues to facilitate change in the health and wellness community, Dan has kept his focus on building customer relationships and making product improvements that serve the company’s evolving needs.
In this Medsider episode, we discuss the benefits and challenges of a direct-to-consumer business model in the healthcare space. Dan also explains how building customer relationships can help you create a product that solves a real problem and shares recruitment strategies for finding the best team members to support your company's growth.
Key Learnings from Dan's Experiences
- Going direct-to-consumer (DTC) brings on its unique challenges but is critical to disrupting the healthcare industry. A DTC model gets you valuable input on real-life, everyday problems, so you can make meaningful improvements to existing infrastructures in a way that drives the space forward.
- Get your product into the hands of your customers as early as possible and be open to receiving feedback that can be used to guide the improvement process. Contrary to popular belief, you may not need high-powered clinical studies backing your product before entering the market.
- The people you work with can make or break your company, and there are creative ways to get top talent on board with your mission. And it’s important to coalesce a diverse team—having the exact same mindset and skillset as someone else does not guarantee that a particular candidate is going to be the best addition to your tribe.
Before co-founding Nutrisense, Dan worked as a healthcare management consultant at KPMG, where he advised Fortune 500 companies and three of the top five hospitals in the US. His company, Nutrisense, combines continuous glucose monitoring with personalized dietitian coaching to help people optimize their metabolic health based on real-time data.
Why You Need a Direct-to-Consumer Model to Disrupt Healthcare
According to Dan, the challenging thing about a DTC business model is the need to constantly convince target consumers to invest in the value the product delivers. Customers may choose to cancel their subscriptions or request a refund if their perceived benefits ever went away. Success requires constant reinventing, innovating, marketing, and delivering value month after month after month.
Besides the need to market efficiently, establish a compelling brand, and offer consistent value to customers, DTC companies also face other challenges. For instance, a recession can make it more difficult to remain competitive and relevant, especially when going up against already-established leaders in the space.
While there are many challenges with a DTC model, Dan states that it's the best way to disrupt the healthtech industry and bring forth innovation that truly makes a difference in the lives of consumers.
He isn't looking to create products that are just a fraction better than existing brands on the market. Instead, his company's value proposition is to develop a first-of-its-kind offering that will meet real needs, solve everyday problems, and drive the industry forward.
"If you want to disrupt an industry, you have to go directly to the consumer, specifically in healthcare. If you want marginal improvements, you should go B2B," Dan says.
And though Dan understands that inherent difficulties with a DTC approach to healthcare, he still stands by the reason that led him to quit his corporate job in the first place — his eagerness to see meaningful innovation in the broader healthcare ecosystem.
"Because if 100,000 people try a product and they love it, and then some B2B company wins because they have more connections even when their product is subpar, they'll always come back and say, hey, I want a product like that one. And we're pushing a B2B company now to upgrade their skills. And that's what we're trying to force — we're trying to force the industry forward," Dan notes.
Nutrisense aims to demystify metabolic and nutritional health for the general population and serve as the "healthcare professional in your pocket." The company was one of the first to leverage CGM devices already on the market and pair them with personalized advice from dietitians who review the data collected in real-time.
Customer Feedback is Critical During the Early Stages of Your Startup
In November, 2019, Dan's team launched the Nutrisense platform on the very day it was technologically possible to do so. At that time, Apple had just made the NFC scan functionality available to all companies, and that was the moment Nutrisense's mobile app hit the market.
Considering they were very early with their technology, the Nutrisense team ran into unforeseen challenges, but Dan saw this as a valuable opportunity to gather crucial feedback. Most customers had to learn how to apply their CGM sensor in the right way and a large proportion struggled to install the app correctly. Through this process, Dan’s team set up video calls to demonstrate the right method of putting the device on for each of their first 100 customers, which allowed them to collect a lot of useful insights.
Despite these hurdles, Dan leveraged all forms of feedback—both positive and negative—to improve and redesign the platform in a way that delivered what customers needed.
They initiallystarted with just one dietitian. But Nutrisense strategically turned nutritional coaching into a core part of the platform when the team realized that many customers wanted personalized advice on glucose management, sleep, exercise, and diet.
"We actually only brought in one person in the beginning, who's our co-founder, to be a dietitian. She'd answer some questions people had here and there. And then we started getting bombarded," Dan explains.
"We started to change things where the dietitian became the focal point, and the glucose became an input for the dietitian to interpret—then the glucose, plus the workouts, plus the sleep, plus your annual physicals became a combination of inputs. And that's the focus you could only get by just going ahead and letting people try it."
Dan further pointed out that, at times, innovation may have to happen before clinical research can occur. He mentioned that with some products, it shouldn't be necessary to wait for years of scientific studies before creating and launching a product. If you can commercialize with a compelling proposition, despite lightweight medical data, you may be able to pick up on key learnings that you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Why the Right People Will Make or Break Your Company
As Nutrisense experienced exponential growth, Dan had to find the right talent to hire. And convincing them of his mission was one of the keys to bringing the right people on board.
According to Dan, podcasts became part of the company’s recruitment strategy. Whenever they were on health and wellness podcasts, they took the opportunity to let people know Nutrisense was hiring.
Most startup founders understand that it’s challenging to get in front of the best talent if they don’t even know your company exists. So if you have the opportunity to. raise awareness around your value proposition, mission, and future plans with an engaged audience that has similar ambitions, it’s a win-win-win.
Instead of having to convince job seekers to make a move, this flips the script and gets them excited to apply and get on board with your vision.
Another mistake entrepreneurs tend to make when building a team is bringing on people with operational frameworks that are too similar.. This could bottleneck the company's progress due to the lack of diverse skills, opinions, and experiences to draw from.
"So, it's always about looking for someone as extremely opposite from you as possible. Yes, this will create a lot of conflicts and a lot of tension during your company's growth. But that's a positive tension, not a negative one, because you do not want to be in agreement all the time," Dan noted.
And as your company continues to grow, Dan warns that one of the hardest pills to swallow will be the fact that different people are better-suited for different parts of your startup journey.
"So when you're at five people, [you might need] someone who is a generalist, who's amazing at ten things. And all of a sudden, you're at 100, and that person may not always be the right person. And now you need specialized people for unique things," Dan explained.
Your company's workforce needs will also likely change as it advances. And though this may sound like more effort than it's worth, learning to pinpoint your hiring needs and recruit the right talent is key to scaling your company's growth.
"You eventually realize that when you have the right people, it just exacerbates your success," Dan says.
