Maitham Dib, Founder and CEO of Vital, on Building the API for At-Home Health
Listen Now
Podcast Notes
Maitham Dib, CEO and Founder on Vital, joins Aakash to discuss how he started building the API layer for at-home health.
Wyndly lets you live life without allergies: https://ww.wyndly.com
Maitham: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maitham-dib-7380696a
Vital: https://tryvital.io/
Twitter: @aakashdotio [https://twitter.com/aakashdotio]
Aakash: https://www.aakash.io
Music: Syn Cole - Gizmo [NCS Release] provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Audio Engineer: Thomas Troy
Autogenerated Transcript
[00:00:00] Aakash Shah: Hi there I'm Aakash, founder of Wyndly, where we fix allergies for life. This is Founders and Builders, where I talk to people who are working hard to bring something new and meaningful into this world.
Hello everyone. I'm here with Maitham Dib. He is selling shovels into this incredible rise of digital health. I've enjoyed partnering with him at my company, Wyndly, but I'll let Maitham introduce himself and what he does.
[00:00:28] Maitham Dib: Hi, I'm Maitham, founder and CEO at Vital. Vital is an API for at home health. We make it easy for digital health companies to collect data from wearables and medical devices and deliver at home lab tests to users.
[00:00:41] Aakash Shah: Maitham, I have to be honest, working with y'all has completely transformed Wyndly. I know it sounds like this is a sponsored message, guys. This really isn't. What we do at Wyndly is we send out allergy tests to our patients and then they take them and we make them a personalized treatment plan off the results.
We used to do this off with a traditional lab and we were drop shipping the tests ourselves. We were printing everything and it was just an absolute headache. Working with Maitham we've literally been able to scale 10 X and I'm hoping a 100 X as we continue to grow. An API for digital health, what does that mean? What's included in that.
[00:01:21] Maitham Dib: yeah. So, I mean, today we have two APIs right now. , the idea is that healthcare's moving to the at home model or at least a hybrid model and the tools today to collect data from the home really sucked to be honest. So our first offering, we started out in the wearable space. We saw like there's a ton of wearables now becoming more and more you know, medical grade how do we just plug in and aggregate all the data from there? We started out doing that. Soon after we kind of launched that, spoke to a few more customers and realized a lot of people were aggregating this data and then reacting off it. Whether it was trying to tailor a sort of health offering, you know, whether it's coaching, a nutritionist or even more towards metabolic health. A lot of people were actually interested in actually sending out home lab tests to users, as well as, you know, once I've collected data, I need to do something with the data and react to that. So that's where we started looking into at home lab tests. And we started that offering with actually a previous YC company called Maza at the time and then Wyndly, and we just saw a ton of people wanting that offering. That's how we started.
[00:02:18] Aakash Shah: Well, it sounds like a pretty clear story to me. Y'all saw that there was a consumer driven, demand for how do I get my wearable data,into different platforms, whether it's your apple watch or your whoop or your continuous glucose monitor, and you built that API there and then as you continued speaking with your customers who were folks that were serving these end users with the wearables, you saw that they needed more. They wanted to be able to provide actionable outcomes versus just, hey, here's your data. Is that correct?
[00:02:52] Maitham Dib: That's correct. And I think that's really, the reason we need the at home testing sections because wearables are just not invasive enough yet, right? They're getting there, but you need the actual lab test data to be able to provide the actionable insights. Yeah, so we listened to our customers and, and kind of provided that API as well.
[00:03:09] Aakash Shah: So this is very interesting. I see a very strong parallel to Stripe or to Twilio, where they started with a very, very narrow initial surface area and then they slowly started expanding it based off of their customer demand. It's very Y Combinator do what your customer wants, build something people want. Do you feel like the opportunity here just grows forever because could you become the platform for all healthcare data, all wearable data? How are you thinking about it?
[00:03:40] Maitham Dib: We bill ourselves as kind of as Twilio for healthcare. We're starting out in wearables, like I said, with wearable space. Cause we see a demand there right now as well as the, at home lab testing. But you know, where do we go from here? That's a, it's a great question. There's a lot of opportunities I think in how you tie insurance into this at home model? So I think part of areas we're interested, expanding, especially now with the, the recent CMS changes looking into could we become an aggregator for insurance information? Now that all you can actually aggregate data from all the different types of insurers does it make sense to start an API there? So we there's several areas like we've we are looking into, that's just one of them that we think could be interesting, could be useful for, you know, any sort of at home or DTC healthcare company. Cuz right now as soon as you provide at home testing right now a lot of it is sort of cash pay. And very few insurers cover it. But today, if you wanna find out whether your insurance covers it or not, it's, it's a bit of a horrible experience, right?
You call up your insurer have to find out or, you know, go through the explanation of benefits, etc. But what if that was just a seamless experience? I think a lot of DTC companies would prefer it to be that way, especially tech companies, right? So then we see there's a natural evolution there and tying in some sort of insurance API to our product.
[00:04:43] Aakash Shah: You're speaking my language. The, reason that we don't take insurance is because it's just a completely horrible experience to our end users. When I think about first principles for my company, it's very much how do I improve the allergy care experience for my patients and the headaches that insurance causes are not worth the additional revenue or additional market share that it would bring. It's just such a heavy lift, but you're absolutely right. after the diagnostic, we want to put them on a treatment. And that's where in America, especially people are just very used to paying for their medical treatment with insurance. We're starting to see a small change there, but we wanna serve everybody, not just folks with disposable income. I totally agree with that. And I think that that's where a lot of D2C companies get to is like, they, they scale to a certain amount with cash pay and then it's like, okay, well , how do you appeal to everyone, right? Not just those who can afford it.
One thing that was very interesting to me. And again, you positioned yourself as a Twilio for healthcare or Stripe for healthcare is they really took a, just absolutely shitty experience. And made it better for developers. So Twilio, it was for sending text messages, Stripe was for making payments and what we've seen is they took something that required a lot of human interaction that required just knowing somebody and they turned it into one API call and we've seen this phrase get flung around, I feel like it's on every single SaaS startup site nowadays get X with one API call, but healthcare is particularly interesting because I don't think the people you're integrating with have great APIs either, right?
[00:06:28] Maitham Dib: No and that's the biggest challenge for us. There's massive complexity in what we are doing. Even if you just start out in the wearables API, we integrate with, you know, over prob we have about 300 plus devices, you know, over 15 integrations now. Just integrating with those 15 in has been painful, right? Everyone has a different API. There's no agreed standard. Some use OAuth some don't so just even staying in the software realm, it's extremely difficult with the wireless API and then you go to the labs API and that's, you know, there's human elements involved, logistics. You gotta integrate with lab partners. And I think you guys know this right? When you first started doing this integrating with labs. It's horrible. A lot, they're not tech first, you know, you still get your results as PDFs. There's no APIs. It's just a nightmare and you know, that's something that we've tried to really help you guys out here when that's what we attentionally taken over all the operation complexity and just giving you guys the ability just to make an API call and get the results, right? So, yeah, both sides, even if you stay in the software realm of healthcare, it's still a nightmare to integrate despite the better standards that are coming out. And even on the lab side, it's a lot worse. So as soon as you get logistics and labs involved, it it's even harder to integrate.
[00:07:38] Aakash Shah: Absolutely. One thing that I hear just during this conversation though, is there's like a eagerness you want to get down and dirty. How did you get started in healthcare data and healthcare softwarethat launched you into doing Vital?
[00:07:51] Maitham Dib: I actually studied aerospace. Completely different. So I slide out as an aerospace engineer at the time after I graduated was working on some pretty cool projects around electrical vertical, take off, et cetera and design a control system for aircrafts but then at the time I think I'd had about, you know, what, I think it was about 10 surgeries. And then I had a, a, chronic like healthcare condition with my stomach. was misdiagnosed. I just got fed up and just was like, you know what, I wanna fix this. So at that point I kind of really focused on my own problem, which was you know, I I'm very, I, cause I had a lot of different sort of health ailments during my time.
I kind of do my utmost to optimize my health as much as possible. So before I kind of got stuck in, I wanted to learn more about the area. So my first transition was going from an aerospace company to a health tech company. So I joined Babylon health at the time in the UK and there sort of just started learning, absorbing as much as possible and I think that's where I first spotted the problem. So the time the company I was working for had a product which involved aggregating data from wearables. I saw what a nightmare that was from an engineering perspective and on top of that, they then had, you know, an at home testing product.
They had set up a whole team. They hadn't like had a, really a focused effort on that and what that meant was that the product was kind of subpar and I just saw the problems they, they went through, which was exactly the same problem as you went through when you started Wyndly. It's just integrating with labs, dealing with the logistics, handling customer support issues. So I really supported those two problems at the healthcare company that I worked for and then decided to do something about it and that's kind of like how vital started. So we started out in the software space simply, cuz that's what I knew best and then we quickly iterated by the scenes customer feedback.
[00:09:30] Aakash Shah: You had talent, you had a personal pain point. Sounds like it was a very personal pain point. An unfortunate common occurrence is a lot of healthcare founders seek to have been personally affected by just how atrociously American or sometimes even non-American healthcare systems can be and just how frustrating it is and when they really start digging into it, once they meet a partner or once they meet a subject matter expert, they realize that there's no reason that it can't be better. It sounds like you got really deep in there and you started trying to fix the consumer experience and then you realized that that's not enough.
You can't change healthcare fundamentally by only fixing one consumer's experience.
[00:10:12] Maitham Dib: Exactly exactly and my initial thought was, okay, let's build a consumer product the idea was it would aggregate all your data and then you know, provide care on top of that. I think a lot of when you first sign out in healthcare, you're like, okay, I wanna do something like this and you realize, you've gotta take a much more focused approach and you've also gotta really get down to the problems, like, okay, why haven't other companies done this before and the main reason that we saw was it's just very difficult to do with just one vertical. Imagine trying to, you know, if you're just looking at metabolic health you're trying to integrate with a device and you know, one of the devices that measures diabetes. It's extremely difficult and then you try to tie that data in with, data from other sources. It gets even harder. Right? So that's where I kind of got the ideas, why don't we take on all that heavy lifting and just focus on, aggregating all the data, making it easy to, collect data from where was at home lab tests and then we'll hopefully empower more digital health companies to provide better offerings to their consumers.
[00:11:08] Aakash Shah: And that's why when I started out with your introduction, I said, you're selling shovels.
Everyone else is treating patients. You're just enabling them to do it better. I think it's an incredible opportunity the largest healthcare company or healthcare enablement company, so to speak in the US is Epic systems and they are very old and ready for disruption and there's no reason it shouldn't be you. They have lock-in in all the hospitals. It's a whole,
[00:11:32] Maitham Dib: they
[00:11:32] Aakash Shah: whole
[00:11:32] Maitham Dib: They do. There's a there's a ton of incentives there that you'd have to work around but it's
[00:11:37] Aakash Shah: incentives in healthcare. Oh, we're gonna need a second podcast episode.
[00:11:42] Maitham Dib: More than one,
[00:11:44] Aakash Shah: So this is runaway success, you're a billion dollar company now. You've done the Airbnb from throwing air mattresses onto people's floors, during conferences to changing the entire shape of the travel industry. What is an analog for Vital experiences at growth? What are the secondary effects of you guys becoming so large. How has the world changed positively?
[00:12:10] Maitham Dib: I think the way we see healthcare evolving at Vital is there will be many, rather than sort of going to see one doctor. There will be many companies, all looking within one specific vertical of healthcare so there'll be increased verticalization of healthcare and with that, what we see is we'll be powering these companies just as Wyndly will probably have the best at home allergy treatment or even allergy treatment in the long run. We see there will be many verticals within healthcare will have, you know, many companies like yourselves that are focused on one specific protocol. the reason or the driving forces behind that is, is that people want more personalized treatment at the end of the day, this model, this idea of, you know, I go to a GP, the GP today prescribes a treatment based on his knowledge and his experience, which is, the best of what we have now. A lot of times when I've, you know, been to a GP in the past, they've, you know, might have Googled problem, you know, Google symptoms in front of me. It's I think it's recognizing that GPs do the best they can with what they know, but that we can do even better. And we do that by having specialists looking after one specific vertical in healthcare and you'll have companies forming around these specialties and Vital will be powering these companies you know, the healthcare market and yes, I hate to say it, but you know, something like $6 trillion or an insane amount so there's definitely opportunity here and I think people are unhappy to pay when they don't see good outcomes from a therapy or, you know, paying too much for insurance, et cetera
so it sounds like really you will change the fundamental healthcare experience. No longer, is it sitting in an office for maybe 30, 40 minutes feeling like you don't matter, having a doctor spend five minutes maximum with you telling some nurse practitioner to run some tests on you and then just feeling like as a patient that you're just not valued instead. What you're really enabling is for a fundamentally different type of healthcare company, not one that's built around the traditional insurance and practice model, but one that is solely focused on maximizing the patient experience, whether it comes down to value based care, whether it comes down to making the patient feel like they matter. Maybe it simply comes down to even having them wait in an office for 40 minutes once they show up. You are going to be the platform that healthcare will change on and that's what runaway success looks like for you.
[00:14:51] Aakash Shah: Is Yeah. And what happens there is, yeah, there's an opportunity because healthcare is an opportunity, but I love that, you know, you're not leading with the money. You haven't, you're not like an MBA who sat down and did a, you know, SWOT analysis and said, this is what we should make. You're someone who has personally been frustrated, has seen other people be frustrated and is just trying to change the world and is succeeding in my opinion and I love it. With that being said, though, it's not easy to change the world. We've been working for about a year you've guys have probably been working on this for maybe two years or three years. Let's say you went back in time two years. And you could say something to your past self. What would you say? What advice would you give yourself?
focus on working on something you are very, very, very curious about. you hear a lot with founders is like focus. What intrinsically motivates you? So really just focus on a problem that matters to you. I think we wasted a lot of time by not focusing on an area that we just weren't , we just focused on things that were hot right now and there are some founders who can do that. Some founders are happy to work on things, you know that they don't really care about they see growth and they they'll just, you know, go into that area and grow that company, whatever it may be without being that, curious or passionate about that industry and the other founders, which I think I place myself in that bucket, which is I have to be like intrinsically motivated. I have to be infinitely curious about the problem and I think that that would be my advice is really just hone in on what you really, really, really care about. And focus on that. Just keep speaking to customers iterating. I think one thing as well is try to sell something before you have it really. I think that's also like a, a, good exercise gauge interest before you write any, any line of code. I think that's super important.
[00:16:48] Aakash Shah: So be intensely interested in the problem because it's hard to stay motivated and get revenue as quickly as possible because there's no better. There's no better proof of people wanting to do something.
[00:17:03] Maitham Dib: Exactly. Exactly. Ultimately, if people are paying for it, then it's a product that people want provided they don't chime instantly. That's a good indicator that you're onto something.
[00:17:12] Aakash Shah: I would certainly agree. Even with Wyndly, there are times where I feel like is this worth it? And I've heard this echoed by every founder I've ever spoken to and you need something that makes you push through on the late nights and as far as the revenue thing, look, maybe I'm old school, but I think revenue beats everything else but I also don't work in social media. So who knows?
[00:17:36] Maitham Dib: No, I think, like I said, revenue is extremely important. I think you have to operate in two modes, right? One mode is like, you've got the pressure of investors and you know, you need to grow the company, but you know, you gotta take a step back sometimes and also be like, okay, well, you know, what am I really interested in and that's, what's gonna keep you motivated. Not the, for me, at least like, money motivates you, but it's a byproduct of me being really curious about what I'm working on. Right. You know, seeing growth is amazing and that's, that obviously motivates me as well. But I think it's important to have both.
[00:18:08] Aakash Shah: The the growth is simply proof that you're doing something that matters. I love it. Before we. wrap up the conversation. Is there anything you wanna tell the listener?
[00:18:18] Maitham Dib: No, just, check out tryvital.io. We're interested to chat to anyone who is in the digital healthcare. Whether you're looking at, you know, you have to be healthcare, it could be fitness. We're happy sort of to onboard you, give you access and yeah, take Tryvital out for a spin.
[00:18:32] Aakash Shah: Thanks for your time, man. I'm sure we'll catch up later.
[00:18:35] Maitham Dib: Awesome. Thank you. Aakash. (--)
[00:18:37] Aakash Shah: This episode of Founders and Builders is brought to you by Wyndly. At Wyndly, we fix allergies for life with personalized treatment plans that train your body to ignore your allergies.
Our doctors use an FDA-approved treatment, allergy immunotherapy, to train your immune system to ignore its allergy triggers. By exposing you to naturally occurring allergens in gradually increasing doses, we fix the root cause of your allergies. Plus the entire Wyndly experience is convenient and easy with telehealth visits and medicine sent right to your door. You never have to go to a doctor's office.
If you want to live without allergies, then visit https://www.Wyndly.com that's wyndly.com. Remember, life's better without allergies
(--)
[00:19:23] Aakash Shah: Thanks for listening to Founders and Builders. Make sure to subscribe and share this episode with a friend. You can find more episodes at https://www.aakash.io. That's aakash.io, or just find Aakash on Twitter @aakashdotio.