הם קראו לנו מטורפים: למה הפיכת מוצר ה-AI שלנו לחינמי הזניקה את הצמיחה שלנו!

Imagine like me, your customer is an overworked doctor. They don't really take sales calls. They don't really respond to cold outreach. Um, and they usually barely have time to eat lunch. And that was our market. That was the one we chose where I'd worked and we had no money to advertise and we had to figure out how to get customers. The

problem was like, how are we going to get people to use it? How do we get our new product into market? You know, this wasn't a unique insight. There were a lot of companies that had a similar idea. You probably all remember the litany of different note and transcribers that you've all seen. And this was probably the biggest riskiest decision that we made in the whole

company. We made it free. Now all the CFOs in the room, hopefully not my CFO lead, my co-founder probably are having and had a heart attack still with us, you know. Um, and he was basically he

just couldn't I guess justify how such a computer heavy task um could be made for free. Like how is this business going to work? He's just going to burn all the money and die. Um, and it was terrifying, but it felt like we had learned enough from how doctors use these tools that we thought it was the right decision. Um, to give you an idea

of how terrifying it would cost us about a dollar to generate a note, give or take. So, some doctors would do about 30 visits a day. So, you know, we're pay we are paying $30 a day for a doctor to use Heidi with no revenue. Most people thought we were insane. Um, but we

didn't have any marketing budget. We had no money on ads. We didn't go to conferences. We had no outbound SCRs, no sales team. It was just, you know, 10 to 15 people, just us. And we realized early on after making it free that we didn't really need to buy ads. we needed to buy distribution like we had to find a way to get people using it and we took inspiration from the canvas notions figas all the products that we loved um

and we decided to treat that compute cost or the server cost as our marketing budget like we're all in there's no other option if we're going to do this like we can't really afford anything except um paying for the servers um and we thought that $30 a day on the face of it maybe seems too much but actually if you view this as a customer acquisition cost maybe it's not that bad, like we can find a way to reduce the cost and hopefully they will uh pat us on the back in some other way. And so we went

from traditional enterprise, you know, 90% gross margins to consumer app overnight. And we had to just remove

every single piece of friction on the product. So, we just had to make it super super super slick and easy and just deliver value like no credit cards, no sales call, no IT approvals, like just make it incredibly easy. Sign up in seconds. Kind of like hack them into experiencing the experience with a patient even though they didn't have a patient in front of them. Um, and they just got the magic straight away. And so

pretty much immediately, actually, this was like February 2024, by the time we went this direction, we just saw this immediate shift in behavior. You give a burntout clinician like like me something that will save them an hour a day minimum, sometimes 2 hours a day or more. And they definitely don't keep it to themselves. Like they tell everyone,

they tell the doctor in the next room. They tell all their patients. Some of those patients are clinicians as well. And it creates this incredible viral loop. So we found that pretty much if one doctor did about seven sessions with

the new version of Heidi, their retention was about 90% every week after that. So they just like they were stuck. They would never stop using it. It became an indispensable part of their daily workflow. And that was when the

commercial part of the business started to work. So once you earn their trust then usually in like week two after seeing the notes generate the initial blush of how exciting it is wears off and they're like I really wish Heidi would write like this way. It's a bit annoying isn't it how it writes this way. God and they just forget what it was like before and we built product that they could pay for to customize Heidi in the way they liked integrate their medical record invite their colleagues etc etc and that was what they would pay for. So classic productled growth strategy. The other

key thing was all of the effort we made in reducing friction in the onboarding helped speed up the cycle. So if someone told a colleague, they could also just sign up straight away. So there was no nothing that would slow down the growth of the product because they could just sign up, start using it, and it grew from there. So making it free in the end

actually was the best way for us to generate leads for sales. It wasn't just about giving the product away for free.