Today we’d like to introduce you to Joe Tuan.
Hi Joe, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I got into entrepreneurship due to circumstances. Looking back, it was likely always a matter of when, not if.
Business school made me feel like a fish out of water, and so did working at PwC and Deloitte consulting. I would spend nights looking up public health programs; it felt like the only area where I would find purpose with my skills.
As fate would have it, I was dealt a hand with a chronic illness that accelerated my path into healthcare. That experience showed me what was deeply wrong with healthcare in our country. Still, it was far from a straight road from business to health tech.
I bounced from one career to the next until finally pivoting finally to healthtech. I felt a fire in me that wanted to change the broken healthcare system. I was also homebound due to my illness, and could only work from my computer, which led to some limitations in what I could do.
Starting in 2013, I launched a few health tech products which turned into HealClick, my first startup. For two years, we got some venture and federal funding, I learned to code, and it seemed to go well. However, I eventually hit a plateau with user adoption and resigned myself to a modest exit.
In 2016 I founded Topflight to help companies build digital products, with a heavy focus still on healthtech. Consulting was originally supposed to be a pit stop while I built my reserves, but over the next 6 years I found an unexpected joy and passion in building Topflight the company; it became my pride and joy.
Now I have a team of 50 that loves problem-solving and being the caretaker to some of the most ambitious visions to create a better tomorrow. We’ve also worked with healthcare powerhouses like Dermasensor, Medable, Cedars Sinai, and Hoag Hospital.
Being a bootstrapped company flying under the radar has allowed us to stay true to that vision and attain growth on our own terms. That was something that I was never able to feel with my previous startup, and every day I’m more thankful that’s the avenue Topflight went down.
With some operational stability, I was able to shift my focus to Topflight Health this year, which means I’m doing what I love most – meeting ambitious founders of healthcare startups and helping them grow.
This year, we hit the Inc5000 list of fastest-growing companies, ranking #171 for software companies.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Our main IP is our people, and people are not machines. Prized talent turning over due to better offers or other circumstances hurts us (because it hurts our customers) the most. As a result, we’ve had to invest continuously in processes and HR to minimize churn.
On top of that, software estimates are half science, and half art. There’s the well-documented reality that software engineering estimates for novel projects simply don’t work, yet are still expected by default. It’s customer nature, and we understand that.
To do well as a business in spite of these headwinds, we’ve focused on continuous internal improvement on sprint efficiency, educating new customers, and finding customers that are willing to pay us for the long-term value more than price by the hour. Having a track record of customer success – fundraising events, acquisitions, ARR achieved – has undeniably helped that conversation.
There have been challenges as well with being a remote, asynchronous workplace model. We attract top talent that enjoys the flexibility of working from home and not on an 8-5, but we also need to balance that flexibility with our competitive edge. To combat that, we recently switched to a semi-fixed schedule so the product team is at their desks for a fixed block every day.
I guess you can say finding middle grounds and always explaining the why has been an ongoing survival tactic.
There you have it, our warts are exposed for the world to see. Next year, it’ll be a completely different set of challenges that encourage us to grow up even more, but we’re excited to tackle it together.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I’ll focus on Topflight Health, our healthcare division. Our deep industry expertise across UI/UX design, cross-platform app development, devops, security, fundraising, and product strategy enables us to deliver competitive healthcare solutions that reduce healthcare costs while improving patient outcomes.
Core applications include biometric tracking, therapeutic decision trees, therapy chatbots, IoT solutions with medical devices, AI/ML solutions with software and hardware, integration with wearables through a breadth of APIs, integration with major EHR systems, and blockchain integrations.
Within Topflight Health, we’ve been able to shift from consulting by the hour into more healthcare venture building. We’re taking high-conviction bets on a subset of our companies, taking them not just to product launch but incubating their ambitious ideas into funding and acquisition events. Essentially taking partners on the full journey from vision to traction.
Although rapid prototyping, full-stack development, and AI engineering are still our foundational technical services, we’ve also begun offering code templates and licenses to shorten time to market, go-to-market strategy, and fundraising assistance with financial modeling, investor outreach, and pitch decks. Starting in 2022, we also invest our own dollars with the Topflight Fund, and altogether, our healthcare startups have raised over $150 million to date.
Have you learned any interesting or important lessons due to the Covid-19 Crisis?
Covid was a very hard time for everyone personally, but I’d be lying if I said Covid hurt our business materially. As a remote-first company, we were already ready to sell and service customers virtually.
The recession, however, has been comparatively a bigger challenge.
We did see this coming last year. We pushed forward recession-fighting initiatives early on, such as fundraising assistance and our investments via Topflight Fund, which offers $100k SAFEs into our highest-conviction startups with limited runway.
All of our Topflight Fund participants thus far have still been able to attain 7-figure valuations in this climate.
Preparing in advance for the recession also made us look harder at reducing custom app development costs, with the first project being a telehealth components license that we’re shipping this month. This would allow customers to launch individual telehealth components for $2k/ month with us, a fraction of the cost of building a custom telehealth project from scratch.
This isn’t a startup-specific need. Our enterprise customers are starting to think more like startups, moving toward rapid prototyping as a way of business in this climate. Being able to help these organizations move fast and capital-efficiently to demonstrate ROI on new digital concepts has put us in a unique position to be a natural partner for more forward-thinking healthcare enterprises.
We’re also eager to use the recession to productize our offerings to make our expertise more accessible to pre-revenue and bootstrapped companies. The goal for 2023 is to be positioned to help 100+ companies instead of the 30-40 we’ll help this year through the various licenses we can offer off the shelf.
With changing market conditions, we see a clear shift toward capital efficiency from the most resourceful founders and companies. We’ll need to continue evolving to remain a trusted technical partner for companies that know how to use a recession to their advantage.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.topflightapps.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/topflightapps/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/topflightapps/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/topflightapps1
- Other: https://clutch.co/profile/topflight-apps#reviews
