Perx – HCF Catalyst Accelerator 2017
By Scott Taylor, Co-Founder at Perx
perxhealth.com
Perx helps health organisations drive patient engagement and treatment adherence in the most positive, effective and rewarding way.
The program leverages proven behavioural science and consumer tactics to help every patient change their behaviour and so achieve better outcomes.
Why did you apply to the program?
We applied for the program because we’re developing a health tech product, but neither of come from the health industry. This has it’s advantages but we knew from day one that we needed to get close to our potential customers so we weren’t building a product in isolation. HCF Catalyst gave use the potential to do this with regular check-ins with the HCF team, introductions to key stakeholders within their business and sound advice from people with years of experience in the area we work in.
What’s it been like working with HCF?
The regular engagement with HCF during the program was really beneficial to best understand the needs of a potential customer as we developed the product. We’ve continued a strong relationship with them beyond the program and they continue to make time to discuss the challenges the health insurance industry faces in chronic disease management and workshop ideas to build-out our offering.
What’s the biggest learning you’ll take away from the Slingshot program?
Constantly revisit your assumptions, both good and bad; it’s easy when you form an idea to come in with a lot of assumptions about what will work and what won’t, who will be interested and who won’t. I think you need to be careful with those preconceived notions, and make sure you’re not leaning into confirmation bias and developing in isolation. Catalyst pushed us to constantly revisit our assumptions.
What was your favourite aspect of the program?
It’s tricky to go past Demo Day. Rarely do you get the opportunity to present to an audience of 500 leaders in the healthtech community, investors, potential customers, and other entrepreneurs, so that was a big and exciting moment for our company. We received a signed first revenue contract as we were walking into the cinema to present, so it was a big day and a big night.
Another highlight was our Entrepreneur-in-Residence Colin Kinner pushing us to launch our product earlier than we had planned to on the App Store. In that first week we received our first review, which was five stars and really inspired us to work even hard to make this a reality.
What’s next for your Startup?
We now have 6 major enterprise customers including Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, and several of Australia’s leading insurance companies who are delivering Perx to their end-customers to improve their health habits and chronic disease management. We’re now looking offshore at markets like the UK and the US where there’s a massive opportunity for Perx to improve patient outcomes, as well as completing a proper clinical trial with the University of Sydney to clinically validate our program.
