The following interview is a conversation we had with Aasim Saeed, CEO and Founder of Amenities Health, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $10 Million Raised to Build the Future of Patient Engagement

Aasim Saeed
Thanks for having me. 

Brett
Not a problem. I’m super excited for our conversation. I just would love to begin with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Aasim Saeed
Yeah, happy to. So, as you said, my name is Aasim Saeed. I probably didn’t have a chance at this. I had two doctor parents and so I kind of was in healthcare before I was even born. But a couple of other things that deviated me from that path is aside from going to med school and becoming a physician, I always had kind of a public policy spent or bent. I majored in political science as an undergrad. In med school, I did a joint degree with a master’s of public administration. And then even recently at the age of 40, I signed up for a program called the Presidential Leadership Scholars program, which is put on by the libraries of George HW Bush, George Bush, Bill Clinton and LBJ. And so it really kind of gave me a chance to reconnect with that side. 

Aasim Saeed
But, you know, I really come at healthcare with a policy lens and I’m trying to make a big difference in the industry bent. And I think that’s a bit unique in that side. And then finally, last thing is I’m really product focused. So I spent time before amenities inside of the industry as the lead of innovation for large healthcare system called baelish. Gotten white based out of Dallas where I live today, and it was a place where I think I just reconnected my love of product. So medicine and that clinical background policy in the big picture, macro level impact, I really love to see if what technology and product can do. And so even when we talk about amenities, I think unlike maybe a lot of CEO’s, I spent like half my time on product team. So yeah, that’s a little bit my background. 

Brett
Did you always know that you were going to end up being a CEO or initially, early on in your career, did you want to actually go out and practice medicine? 

Aasim Saeed
No, early on, I wouldn’t recommend going to med school unless you practice. If you plan on practice medicine, it is a very valuable degree in hindsight, but that was definitely not the plan. I really loved surgery, and for a lot of different reasons. I kind of, I don’t know so much. I didn’t fall out of love with surgery, but I fell in love with a lot of other things, including technology along the way. So, yeah, you could see when I mentioned all the policy things, I was highly distractible, to say the least. I mean, I left med school for two years. I went to Harvard to do a public policy degree. 

Aasim Saeed
But even in, during that, I did two internships in the summer, one in the mayor’s office in Houston and one with McKinsey, which I ended up joining instead of doing a clinical residency. That was a tough decision. I didn’t make it lightly, but I knew that’s where I wanted to do end up, and so I figured I needed to build those other skills. I mean, I often get calls anytime any of my old med school colleagues are thinking about leaving medicine, I get a call because they’re like, oh, you’re one of the first people who did that. But I advise them, like, it’s not easier on the other side. You need very different skills. And McKinsey was the first example of that. That interview process was harder than med school to get into. And then on policy and on product and being a CEO. 

Aasim Saeed
No, that was definitely not what I planned when I was a kid. And you draw on paper where you’re going to be when you grow up. Those are definitely like white coats and stethoscopes for me when I was drawing in third grade. 

Brett
Have your parents or has your family forgiven you yet for not going and practicing medicine? I would guess if your parents were both doctors, that’d be a lot of pressure there to go down that career path. 

Aasim Saeed
No, definitely not. You’re very astute. I have not only two physician parents, I have two south asian physician parents. So it’s not so much forgive it. I would say. I would worry the question differently, which is like, do they understand what you’re doing? And very unclear. It’s deeply understood what my job or role is. I think everybody understands every immigrant story, understands running a business. But venture and startups are a whole different beast than, like, opening a restaurant. Right? So why I’m doing that? Instead of practicing medicine or being a surgeon or emergency medicine doctor escapes. I think a lot of people, including myself sometimes. So, no, they’re supportive, but at the same time, obviously they know medicine. They think it was a great profession, and they’re not wrong. It’s just not what I wanted to do long term. 

Brett
We had another founder on, and they’ve built a company that’s now worth, like, $5 billion, or I think it was four and a half billion dollars. And he has a very similar background. And he was describing it as, like, he still thinks that his parents, like, in the back of their minds, they’re just, like, waiting for the day that he’s going to get his shit together and go on and become a medical doctor. So that was his description of, I think it’s funny. Like, they couldn’t understand the scale, the success of building a tech company, but then it just always came back to like, all right, when are you going to, like, really just go out and, yeah, just do it. 

Aasim Saeed
Oh, yeah. By the way, are you talking about Arif Nathu? 

Brett
Yes. 

Aasim Saeed
Okay, so you joke that we’re in a similar background. He’s from Houston. I knew his sister at Rice. And so, like, he’s basically one of the reasons why I knew what McKinsey was. And he had done an MPA, so that’s way more similar than you even think. I catch up with our occasionally, but literally the track for going to medicine and then the Kennedy school and then McKinsey and then startups. It’s remarkable how much I’m accidentally stalking him every step of that way. So, I mean, you know what you’re exposed to, right? And it was a gift. Just, I didn’t know him that well growing up, by any means, but at the same time, he was an example that at least showed me was possible. So, yeah, I can imagine he would say that. It’s funny because, yeah, my parents, again, very supportive. 

Aasim Saeed
But if you had to, like, interview them about what I do, I think we’d all be embarrassed. 

Brett
That’s funny. And that’s amazing. You’re able to figure out who I was talking about from the brief stuff that I said there. As I was listening, I’m like, wow, this sounds very similar to his background as well. So that’s awesome. And it’s the small world. 

Aasim Saeed
Yes, small world. 

Brett
Now take us back to 2021 and the early days of amenities health. What was that like, aha for you. That led to you saying, all right, im going to go in and build a company here. 

Aasim Saeed
Yeah. So for me, the company that I ended up building is something that id been thinking about. The problem. I didnt know that I would try to solve it as a company, but as I mentioned earlier, for the four years immediately prior to amenities, I was back in kind of corporate America. Different flavor inside of health systems. But I was doing something that was incredible. I had free reign to build products inside of a health system, which is pretty rare because most health systems had a digital team or something. But it was typically under resourced, I would say. In fact, it’s part of the problem that we addressed. But that wasn’t a problem at Baylor. Baylor was doing well and we had a lot of funding and we had CEO and leadership that really believed in consumerism. 

Aasim Saeed
The problem that was kind of crazy, that maybe, again, wasn’t a single aha. Moment, was back in my McKinsey days, when we do financial analysis and P and ls about patients in healthcare. If you look at healthcare and patients like any other business would, the lifetime value of a patient in the US healthcare industry is probably measured in the magnitude of millions. It is enormous. And yet, if you put that next to the idea that we just treat patients like garbage, not obviously, end of like cancer care, that’s not what I mean when I say garbage, but I mean like, sorry, we’re only open till four. Nah, I don’t know what it’s going to cost. You’ll have to deal with your insurance. Sorry, we don’t have a registration code for you. You’ll have to go ask requests. 

Aasim Saeed
Like, we make so many things so difficult, and yet patients, their customer lifetime value is so high again, let’s say on average a million dollars, it’s insane. Like somebody will figure out a way to delight users. Just like Amazon figured out. Like, yeah, people shop online, but there’s something really holding them back. And for me, the analogy that I make to Amazon, which is obviously way overused, is, I remember when I only shopped at Amazon occasionally and majority of things I was like, yeah, but I want it tomorrow, or I need to go see if it fits me properly and I’m going to Walmart or whatever the alternative store was. But once prime, I think, figured out that like, two day shipping resolved my immediate satisfaction. Two days enough. It wasn’t today, which obviously they’ve moved toward, but it was enough. 

Aasim Saeed
And that I could return anything without having shipping costs. Oh, my goodness. My moral hazard went away from e commerce. And now I go to Walmart once or twice a year now, and I shop on Amazon monthly, if not weekly. Yeah, it’s insane. So that’s what we’re trying to figure out is what are those friction things that are holding people back from utilizing healthcare, or in this case, also being loyal to one major health system? And so that’s what we’re trying to figure out is how do we take that lesson and say, why is healthcare so miserable to interact with when in fact, the dollar value of patients is way higher? It should be the opposite. People should be rolling out red carpets. Every patient should be treated like a concierge client, and they’re not. 

Aasim Saeed
And so that’s what I think was my forever problem. I was trying to fix. And we fixed some things at Baylor, but I figured eventually I was like, health systems aren’t equipped to do this. I think I could do it better, faster than a larger scale in a separate company. And then it was like, okay, am I ballsy enough to go build a company again, which is my second startup? And so I think it was more of a, am I going to do this, really? But I always knew what the problem was and what the opportunity that I wanted to focus on was. 

Brett
Why does it suck so much? Why is it so bad? Just from a patient perspective, it seems like everyone has the same experience, or most people have a similar experience where you interact with the healthcare system, and it’s not fun, it’s not good. It’s a very negative experience. Everyone seems to know about this problem, and it seems like there’s a lot of money being thrown at solving it. But is it actually getting better? Why is it so bad of a problem or bigger problem, and why is it not fixed yet? 

Aasim Saeed
Jeff? Well, if I could give you a definitive answer, I’d have the Nobel prize, I think. But I’ll give you my version, which is to say, there’s a couple of things. One is there’s a hundred problems. Like, by the way, I’m a small business owner right now, and so I’m having to choose an insurance plan for my insurance is just so silly, complicated. Just that fact you have, like, the buyer is not the buyer, like in e commerce kind of stuff, right? There’s a one, there’s a physician shortage, which is artificial and has some roots and some terrible public policy back in the day. So there’s like a hundred of those things, but we can list those out. And honestly, we take 2 hours just getting started. 

Aasim Saeed
But I think for me, the thing that I would focus on, though, is, at least for me, and keep in mind I have a masters in public policy in healthcare. I’ve worked inside of a health system. I’ve worked at a international consulting firm that focuses on various health systems and did international work comparatively in the Middle east and in Europe on different health systems. So I say this not like haphazardly. I say this to say that I can only think of one core thing that we can do something about because everything else is kind of entrenched. And I don’t have a great answer of how do we fix it. But the thing that I think we can do something, or the problem that I think we can do something about is fundamentally I would answer that it sucks because they don’t compete on experience. 

Aasim Saeed
Like, nothing about how you picked your doctor was because you thought that doctor is going to give me the best experience. Or that health system, is it Sutter and San Francisco? Is it Mount Sinai or Northwell in New York or cedar Sinai? You’re not picking these things because you know anything about the consumer experience. That’s not how it’s done today. Now, my hypothesis, the reason I think that’s the question or the problem to solve is because like Amazon prime example I gave you earlier, if you actually did something about it, I think it has cascading effects. So if one health system could see 10% market share shift from their competitors to them because they created a better experience, now the profit motive and greed and all the best parts of capitalism take over. 

Aasim Saeed
And so that’s why, like, yeah, there’s a hundred reasons, but I don’t know what to do about the physician shortage, not making enough docs, which is a silly public policy and funding problem. Why is insurance so complicated? Well, people need to be insured, but we have thousand different insurers in this country. I don’t know what to do about that. But fundamentally, I think if we competed on experience would get better. And I think the way to compete on experience is show that it’s profitable and show that it’s wildly profitable. And that’s what we’re trying to do, again, using that Amazon prime example. So we’re trying to show health systems that if you did this, you can move 10% market share and that would be worth $100 million new that year kind of thing. 

Brett
As we’re talking here, one experience that comes to mind was recently I got a piece of glass stuck in my foot like an idiot, and I had to go to urgent care to get it taken out. And I was dreading this idea of like, kind of the traditional experience that I’m used to. Like, I probably go there when I was like, a little kid, right? And you go sit and you wait, and it’s miserable. And I’m like, I’m in San Francisco. There has to be something better. I did find a company called was Carbon Health, and I downloaded an app, I booked my appointment, and I went over there and I was like, in and out within, like an hour. And it was a awesome experience compared to, like, the other experiences that I’ve had. 

Brett
Is that kind of the core idea here is you want to help other health systems be able to operate in a similar way and have kind of mobile apps and have a mobile experience and just have it feel easy and seamless. 

Aasim Saeed
I think that’s part of it. And the part that I’ll just double down on what you said is carbon did that because they could start from scratch, right? They built their model to be that way. But as you just pointed out, the reason I say yes and is because health systems can’t do that. They’re not starting from scratch. They’re on a legacy. EMR, epic, Cerner, Athena, whatever it is that is just not built for that experience. Carbon health can tell you, hey, if you don’t have insurance, here’s the ALA car pricing. There’s so few else in the country that are, like, comfortable sharing their pricing because they have perverse incentives with large payers, right? So, yes, there’s a lot of bigger bureaucracy that we are going to help try to create that carbon light experience, but it’s also the scope of services. 

Aasim Saeed
They can do that because they combine virtual and urgent care, but that’s the extent of it. Whereas Bayless, Scott and White, my old employer, has inpatient, outpatient ambulatory surgery, rehab facilities, every different specialty under the sun. So, yeah, part of it is we’re trying to do it for a brand that can serve the entire scope of your life and therefore really could be the beneficiary of earning your loyalty. Whereas carbon health, when you need a dermatologist, they need to hand you off. Right? Like, if that, let’s say, was much worse and you needed to see an orthopedist, they’re handing that off. And what we saw with carbon and one medical as an example is they’re not great loan standing businesses, and this has nothing to do with them. 

Aasim Saeed
It’s just that the reality is, and this is the McKinsey talk coming out at you is like, primary care is a loss leader in America. The things that make money are these high dollar surgical procedures. Apologies for that. These high dollar surgical procedures like orthopedics, cardiovascular GI and then inpatient stays, intensive things like intensive care, others. So primary care doesn’t make money. And the reason these health systems have bought all these up is so they have a feeder for those things. And so that’s where like, I think, yes, we need to take what your experience was at carbon, but fill it in. But here’s the. And part, which is, I don’t think it’s just the physical experience of the waiting room and how fast I was in and out. That’s obviously huge, right? 

Aasim Saeed
Like I went to a dermatology visit for the first time in like 20 years for a mall or something, and they had very basic technology, but they just organized themselves to where I was in and out before the 15 minutes parking window, the free window was up and I was just like, this is unbelievable. I had the same experience you did. But I think there are other things in broader healthcare that the physical experience won’t solve. And I’ll give you a good example. When we say we want to build loyalty and what is the two day shipping and free returns in healthcare, everything in our research says that it’s not the physical experience. Yes, people want better access. They want it to not be horrible. They want to not. They want to have better parking. 

Aasim Saeed
They want the doctor to be nice and not be 45 minutes late. But the number one problem in us healthcare today for patients is cost. It’s the fear of bankruptcy. I have no idea what this will cost and I won’t know until six months after I’ve already consumed the service and on the hook to pay for it. And so when we test features, we test things like no surprise billing, guarantee satisfaction, guarantee insights on who are the best providers and hospitals in your area. Data driven insights or just transparent cash bay pricing. Like I mentioned, that carbon does offer, but I think they’re probably going away from eventually because they haven’t proven. Now, I think there’s a package opportunity to solve a problem that is looming over everyone that isn’t obvious or that most health systems aren’t considering right now. 

Aasim Saeed
And so, yes, we want to take it to them. But also, I think it’s not just a physical experience. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. How do you think about the market category? Is this patient engagement? Is it patient experience or something completely different from what I’ve just listened out? 

Aasim Saeed
Those two things are definitely things that sometimes we check the box when we’re forced to. I think there’s a couple of things. So one is, yeah, patient engagement. But like, what is it? Patient engagement, right? Like nothing I think the term you hear often that we have started out in is this somewhat nebulous term called digital front door. Because right now, the amenities platform, more and more people are not wanting to call in for anything. So just getting the digital tools right, this industry is abysmal, right? So we do fit that category. We help you find a doctor, book an appointment, register as a patient, all of that in under two minutes. And so we fix a lot of deficits in the current legacy systems. 

Aasim Saeed
But the category that we always want to extend, we say we’re the premier digital front door and loyalty platform. Loyalty is the category we want to get to and create, but that doesn’t exist. I would argue there’s no loyalty in healthcare today. And it’s not, again, a haphazard guess. We’ve done now 6000 patient surveys and we’ve literally not found a single patient that hasn’t been to multiple different healthcare brands in the last two years. And so everyone’s splitting, everyone’s cheating on everyone’s going to fragmented ones because no one has stepped up. Even these large healthcare systems who again, have urgent cares, have primary care doctors, have specialists, they have the full gamut, but there is not a single patient that is dedicated to one of those. 

Aasim Saeed
And we think that’s a gap of loyalty and opportunity to say, whoa, imagine if that was like Amazon. How much commitment I have to Amazon right now. That is worth, again, $100 million in those markets, especially the big ones. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. 

Aasim Saeed
You show up and host and we. 

Brett
Handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io – podcast. Now back today’s episode. If we think about loyalty, if you look at like, retailers or e commerce or even in enterprise b, two B software, you know, everyone’s been talking about loyalty for a long time. There’s a lot of people with a job title that has loyalty in it. It’s a very established discipline, I would say, in these worlds outside of healthcare, when it comes to healthcare, is that a big conversation right now around loyalty? And has it always been a big conversation or that kind of like an emerging thing that’s like just now starting to be discussed and talked about? 

Aasim Saeed
I think if I’m being fair without being patronizing. It’s being discussed, but it’s being discussed in a very unsophisticated way. So I’ll give you a couple data points that justify that statement, even if it sounds harsh. So one is, there’s not a single health system in the country that can tell you the lifetime value of a patient. It is literally not a metric thats defined. There is probably five to ten health systems and were one of them. And it took me 18 months to do this. That can tell you the one year contribution margin of a new patient, which was like about $600 for baelish gotten white. And again, when we say, hey, were going to help you get new patients, they’re like, great, whats that worth? Nobody has any idea. 

Aasim Saeed
So even if they wanted to talk about loyalty, they have no idea what its worth. The closest thing to loyalty, which shows you how healthcare just jargonizes and clunks everything up, is called network utilization management. And this is the total visits that your patient had as the denominator and the visits that they had inside of your network as the numerator. And good in this industry. So how many times did you shop at target versus how many times did you get any groceries? Kind of fraction. Right? Really, really good in this industry is 30% to 40%. And again, keep in mind those are health systems where they offer the full gamut of everything in your area, and they only even know that number on patients where they have the records for their full life. 

Aasim Saeed
So either their health plan members, their Medicare advantage, or their ACL populations, which are typically in most large health systems not called Kaiser, is like 10% of their population on average. So we barely even know. So yeah, we’ve said the word loyalty. Be like, yeah, we really need to work on loyalty. Why would somebody pick us? We have up no metrics, we have no concept of it. We’ve not defined anything. But that’s where, again, I think amenities, we’re trying to step in and say, you know what’s undeniable loyalty is when they’re paying $9 a month to be a member of your membership program. But loyalty, and I think there’s two reasons that’s been blocked. Why our sophistication hasn’t grown, is because one, you don’t want your third urgent care visit free. Like you don’t want a third urgent care visit. Right. 

Aasim Saeed
Nobody wants their third surgery free kind of thing. Right? There’s that. But I think the second thing is everyone has this irrational fear of like Medicare inducement they’re like, oh, if we give anything away that’s over $10 to a Medicare patient, we’re all going to end up in handcuffs. That’s not how legal recourse or regulatory, but there are some things that you need to consider. But because of those two things, I’ve seen complete stalling of any imagination of how to actually build a loyalty program in healthcare. But that’s what we do. I mean, that’s why I say, I think we’re defining this market is we’re saying, oh, you like the concept of loyalty? Here’s exactly what that looks like. It looks like a $9 a month financial protection package with no surprise billing guarantee, satisfaction guarantee, and transparent cash bay price. 

Aasim Saeed
I think that’s where we start. The world’s the oyster. Cause as you pointed out, like, healthcare sucks, there’s, you could throw a rock and hit a problem you need to be solving. What we’re trying to establish is a financial model that the largest players in healthcare can get excited about to really shift the market for the majority of Americans. And, oh my God, when I say that sounds so stupidly ambitious, but, like, that’s where I meant what? Like, I started with the public policy. Like, I’m not trying to start a company. I’m trying to fix us healthcare. I think starting a company and trying to make this one bet is the best way to do that. And I’m willing to be wrong, but like, I’m going to try for you to be successful. 

Brett
It sounds like you have to really build that discipline of loyalty and get people to not just, you know, talk about it in a boardroom, but they need to take action on it. They need to operationalize it. What are you doing to kind of evangelize this point of view on the market and to educate the market and get them up to speed on how to actually do loyalty. Right. 

Aasim Saeed
Well, I think there’s two things, and these probably aren’t that unique to us. So one is we need to do the research. So again, we’ve done the like, when I say this is not a concept, we have as much hard data as we can. Early on. We’ve debated constantly, like, okay, maybe we got to show it to them. You know, one medical obviously launched their business before they went to health systems for partnerships. The most of the public doesn’t even know thats how they actually make most of their money, is they sell back that partnership to health systems. Its not the $200 a year from the public, but we don’t know how much utility that would actually because again, it should be obvious that any better experience today would be popular. And we’ve price tested everything, all that. 

Aasim Saeed
But to your point, we need to get that out there more. Were still a young company and I think literally awareness of what we do and the approach is the biggest challenge right now. But I think that the next big one is the one thats probably a ubiquitous answer for most startups, which is we need to find evangelists. The good news is there are, we are already in talks with about five to ten different health systems who are talking about loyalty and were going to help them define and build it. And so I think the one thing about healthcare is its incredibly hard to break into its incredibly long sales cycles with health systems if they’re your target like they are for us. But once you have real proof points with big brands and competitive markets, it kind of shows everybody what’s possible. 

Aasim Saeed
And I think unlike 15 different chatbot companies which has been bought and sold or sprouted up like that’s undifferentiated. If you had something unique, this happened at Baylor once. The my BSW Health app that we spent $25 million building over four years, once it went live, it was the best thing since sliced bread. It was so much better than the status quo. It became the campaign of everything we did because that’s the thing to offer. I mean, just think about how major health systems in your area today market, what do they do? You know, the week that the US news rankings come out because they all put up their merit badge, like, we all got the best GI surgeon for this zip code. We all got the best this in Texas or this top rated in five specialties. It doesn’t mean anything to consumers. 

Aasim Saeed
They have some vague sense that like UCSF is a good system. How much better or worse is it than Sutter? I don’t know. Stanford’s a good system because it’s like an Ivy League school almost. We have these vague senses of quality, but nothing where our advertising today matters. But if you were able to say we guarantee you no surprise billing, we guarantee you satisfaction, we can give you cash, pay pricing for everything, give you peace of mind. We’re on your side. I suspect everything’s going to shift to that. Everything will shift to that and it’ll be a catch fire because now you have to keep up with that. It’s like, for me, the other example is T Mobile was always the best at this. They were just like, what’s the worst part of our industry? The price for data. Okay, data is unlimited. 

Aasim Saeed
What’s the worst thing. After that, you can’t use Netflix. Exclude streaming, all right? Netflix is included. What’s the next thing? That’s the worst thing. Contracts. All right, no contracts. But everyone has to follow it afterwards. So if you take the worst thing and make it the differentiated best thing, you have first mover advantage. But everybody’s got to keep up. I mean, that’s capitalism. That’s the beauty of capitalism. So that’s why I’m betting on this versus policy, because I think it will catch on if we can just establish some roots. But we got to do that with some early adopters and with evangelism. There’s nothing besides pounding the pavement. There’s our secret sauce there. 

Brett
You know, I’ve probably spoken with about 50 or 60 healthcare technology startups so far. And when I go on their websites, they all typically look the same, or I would say 70% of them look the same. And in my conversations, the founders wanted them to say, like, yeah, we need our websites and our branding and our marketing needs to look kind of similar to those that were selling to. It needs to look familiar. When I go to your website, it doesn’t look like a standard healthcare website. So talk to me about the intention behind the branding. 

Aasim Saeed
Yeah. Somebody you picked up on that. We get asked about that a lot. They’re like, what the hell are you doing? Where’s the Red Cross and the EKG sign and the snake on a staff? And I’m like, screw that. I hate all of that. First of all, it’s very deliberate, and I’ll tell you why. And I appreciate the question is, healthcare is really bad at experience. We just established that, right? We don’t need establishment. Everybody knows that. If we’re coming in and we’re saying we’re really great at experience, why would we want to look as awful as healthcare does? And so part of that is, you see the trees, you see the a frame. That’s what we want to feel. We want patients. 

Aasim Saeed
We want to show you that we have skills that you don’t, and we take risks that you don’t and that we fill in the gaps that you don’t have. And that’s. Yeah, exactly. The branding shows that we’re not the same. We get a lot of compliments on the brand, the name as it implies, though. We’re not trying to take over their brand. We’re not making Bailey, Scott and White put trees on their logo. We’re just saying that, like, we fill in a gap that you don’t have. And most importantly, you know, when I think of healthcare, to your point, like, you are dreading that experience, right? And what do you. I. 

Aasim Saeed
And by the way, this is definitely why I shouldn’t have been a doctor, is I cringe at the idea of being inside of a hospital, and there’s obviously other places I could work. But like, austere white walls, the bright lights, no matter what day of time it is, you lose the time of day. Everyone’s coughing or sick, and then everyone’s like, wearing this all feels like not what I want to be a part of. But when I look at our logo, I’m like, that’s what I want to feel. And so it was an attempt to say we fill in some gaps. 

Aasim Saeed
We are not trying to be just what our, you know, I think I respect the idea that you want to look like what your conservative market may look like, but again, we’re trying to make a very different point, which is we fill in the experience gap that you are missing, that we do it with. And for you, we are obviously deep healthcare experts, so we’re not going to do frivolous, outrageous things, but we are trying to bring you into a delightful consumer experience which is not where you are today. 

Brett
What I love about this approach is it kind of digs deep into some of my core philosophies when it comes to marketing. But what I see with a lot of companies, they just have this belief that better is all it takes. If you’re better than the competition, you’re going to win. I think better is important, but different is probably more important. I think one of the best ways to be different, one of the best ways to stand out is with a very different brand. I love that you’ve taken that approach, and that definitely caught my eye. And I was super excited to have this conversation with you as soon as I saw the website. 

Aasim Saeed
That’s all I appreciate. I agree with you wholeheartedly. And the last thing I didn’t say before is you need to stand out. Right? And honestly, but look, we are trying to be a lifestyle brand. But like, I would wear this, like, I wouldn’t wear, you know, like every other startup on my jacket type of thing. And then we get, people ask us like, oh, that’s cool. Where do I get that brand? It’s built like a lifestyle brand. But it’s not just that. But it’s, to your point, to be different and to make it desirable. But my argument is also like, this is the business of what we’re doing. We’re not just trying to be different. I think both are important. In fact, I would take arms with that. You have to be a little better. I think in healthcare this is the tough part. 

Aasim Saeed
You don’t have to just better. You have to be undeniably ten times better. Like, if you do what epic does with one feature and it’s a little bit better, you will never make a sale in this industry. You have to be a hundred times better and at that one thing, and you can’t be 100 times better at 100 different things. So having 15 features that you excel at is not a way to make a business in this one. But yeah, I wish the bar was just better. In healthcare, it has to be so much better because we’re so bad at adopting technology. And I say that having sat on the other side where no matter what we did, it took us nine months to launch any project, fastest we’ve ever done. 

Aasim Saeed
And we know that unlike, I think, a lot of health startups, sometimes I feel advantage, sometimes cynical, because I’ve been the buyer here, and so I’m very familiar with what the challenges are, but then also the intricacies of getting something live. I think we’re accounting for that. I think ultimately, not only obviously are we making a bet that consumer experience will change and that’ll get better, but we’re also kind of making a bet that health systems internal teams aren’t built to do this. And hopefully we can do a lot of these functions for them. But again, with empathy, with familiarity, not with, like, we’re not coming to innovate healthcare for them. 

Brett
Kind of attitude switching gears a little bit. From a policy perspective, what pisses you off? What makes you mad about healthcare policy in America today? 

Aasim Saeed
Oh, I mean, I don’t think it’s just healthcare policy, but the incentives are so perverse. Let’s just be real. Like, by the way, I do this anytime I meet a politician, I write them a letter and I hand them a note, say, here’s four policies you should fix right today. And some of those are things that we could do overnight. There’s no good reason they exist today other than a few people benefit from them. And I’ll give you the most obvious duh, one that everyone knows, but we just never fixed, which was state by state licensures of physicians. I mean, with the ubiquity and the demand for virtual care starting in COVID, you think we would have like slipped that in as a fix? Be like, this is insane. 

Aasim Saeed
But you know, who benefits from that is local medical and dental boards, they’re the only ones who benefit. Doctors hate it. Health systems hate it, patients hate it. It limits virtual care options and care beyond that. It’s horrendous. There’s no good reason to have it other than text God. I keep saying tech, but the Texas medical dental board is an example of just like they are the ones who benefit. But I know that you can’t take away states rights to do that. It makes no sense whatsoever. Then there’s more aggressive things, which, you know, I’ll give you a potentially unpopular opinion, which is that AI is not going to do jack in healthcare for the next five to ten years, and it’s not because AI is not amazing. I’m not a Luddite. 

Aasim Saeed
I think we do not have any sort of use case that is exciting that we would actually allow it to do. But again, back to that policy question. I said if I had a magic wand, I would say we need to stop making primary care doctors. We need to defer all of the medical students today into becoming specialists so we can have a lot more of those and frankly, teach people to behavior change and coaching experts, with Chad GBT serving as most of the primary care knowledge base in the decision making, because, like, it can do that. And I’m not saying we should do that tomorrow, but I’m saying we should work towards that, because that solves a lot of core root issues, which is we have a physician shortage. And even more than a physician shortage, we have a specialist shortage. 

Aasim Saeed
But again, there’s a lot of people who benefit from the status quo. And by the way, having a medical degree and not using it is horrendous, like me. But I’m one of the people who benefits from the prestige of the medical degree, that it’s frankly unfair and unearned because there needs to be more of them. This should be a utility that we have for the people of the country, let alone the world. And so, yeah, there’s more abstract ones where there are ways to do them, but, you know, I don’t have the foggiest of how to make that happen in Washington, let alone in the states. But the virtual one, no brainer. The medical licensure, the privileging, all of this stuff that we have in healthcare is so jacked up. Jeff. 

Brett
Well, thanks a lot. All the AI tech bros that listen in, they’re probably going to unsubscribe now that you said that AI is not going to do anything for five years. So thanks. You just cost me some subscribers in. 

Aasim Saeed
Healthcare I’m sure it’ll build up some cool new crypto and all this other cool stuff and website pictures, but we just won’t let it do anything cool in healthcare. The silliest use case, just to give you an example, is like, I saw the company, I’m like, yeah, that makes sense. That’s what healthcare is going to do, which is this really absurd thing. We have called prior authorizations where the insurance company wants you to get prior authorization. The doctors have to get on the phone to try to get it. We’re just going to have bots competing against bots and who can outlast them on the phone tree. Now that’s going to be like the best AI use case I’ve heard. It’s just silly. It’s because we won’t fix the problem as opposed to just layering AI on top of it. 

Brett
Makes perfect sense. In the intro I mentioned there that you’ve raised about 10 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Aasim Saeed
Yeah, that’s a great question. So for me, fundraising has been a really educational journey for me. I think I would say a couple of things. One is everyone I’ve met, you have to one feel and believe your passion. And hopefully you can see mine is a little bit broader than like this company needs to do x. I’m trying to do something bigger, but I need to be narrowed. I don’t know, there’s not too many people don’t feel the passion whenever I kind of talk about it. I’m really excited about, right. But the thing that I learned that maybe a little bit more shocking is for me to date everyone that I’ve met that felt that and wanted to invest knew that really soon, if not the next day, within the week. Right. 

Aasim Saeed
Everybody that I spent like two months, three months trying to convince on the way just did not work out. So I feel like venture is kind of a funny thing for me where like a lot of folks have hypothesis and they’re looking for somebody that matches that hypothesis and that they are excited about. And a lot of times startups and founders are running around being like, oh, I can convince that person, they seem to do this or this. Instead, its like you need to talk to as many people as you can find to find the match that you’re both in love with the same problem and that they believe in you and your passion, as opposed to trying to convince somebody that you’ve met that they’re not thinking about it right. Or they’re. So that’s what I’ve learned is like don’t convince people. 

Aasim Saeed
Talk to more people and find the people that match what you’re trying to do and believe in you. 

Brett
Let’s imagine that an early stage founder comes to you and they say, hey, I built this new technology, I want to sell it to health systems. Based on everything that you’ve learned so far and everything you know about this space, what would be the number one piece of advice that you’d give them? 

Aasim Saeed
Oh, it depends on where I catch them in that question, but I would say sell it before you build it. Anything can be built, anything that we’re going to use can be built, especially with, I mean hell, things can be built faster and better than you ever believe. Especially by startups that have all these tools like Chaspt and other things. Most things cant be sold like thats. Actually people don’t often think of it like thats. The harder part is do you have product market fit? You only find that out by selling it. And so I think that might depend on the market, but I would also say in healthcare, selling it is significantly harder than building it. 

Aasim Saeed
And so Im not saying building is nothing on none of these technology companies, Im just saying that like especially selling the health systems, there’s six to 18 month sales cycles. I would really test that before you spend a bunch of time selling. And frankly, we’re constantly asking ourselves, okay, we’ve got a couple of customers, is that enough product market fit? Like finding product market fit when you’re at enterprise is so hard because the end is so small, the dollars are so big and the trends are subjective, let’s say. So you really need to be at bat selling to really hear what the market’s demanding before you put any code down. 

Brett
And GitHub, final question for you, let’s zoom out three or five years into the future, what’s the big picture vision that you’re building here? 

Aasim Saeed
Yeah, so for us, you know, we have a lot of digital front door tools and we’re making some traction there. I do think we have some unique value propositions. I think for us the big picture is always going to be demonstrate memberships have the ability to reward health systems massively while delighting users. So that was a mouthful. They’re saying get a membership live, show that people love it and that they start to create loyalty in an industry where it doesn’t exist. Today, if we can do that, the flywheel will spin. And that’s our big bet because I think the other thing that people don’t often realize when you sell the health systems is, I don’t know. There’s an argument to be made. 

Aasim Saeed
There are no unicorns because you can’t get big enough with the enterprise technologies that are available in this market and how competitive they’ll be against anything that starts to get big. So if you sell the health systems, you’re kind of somewhat automatically in a smaller market. But if you do something that’s tech enabled, services like a membership is way bigger. So that’s what we’re excited about is prove loyalty, prove that health systems can get excited about having somebody help them accelerate this and build something that, frankly, that’s just so long overdue for this industry. 

Brett
Amazing. Love the vision. I really love this conversation. I think our audience is going to really love it as well. Before we wrap up here, if there’s any founders that are listening in and they want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

Aasim Saeed
So they can always check out just what we’re doing at Amenities Health.com. But reach out to me on LinkedIn. It’s awesome. Site a s I m s a e e d LinkedIn is typically where I live. I’ve been as big but I need to get back on x and some other things. But drop a line to LinkedIn. I really appreciate anybody that listened this feedback and thoughts and wanting to connect on these types of topics. Always welcome. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks again. Really appreciate it. 

Aasim Saeed
Thanks, Brett. 

Brett
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