Side Hustle Opportunity: The AI Copilot for Doctors

Welcome to the Hustle Wing podcast. Hustle Wing is the leading marketplace for side gigs. Today I'd like to welcome Ahmed Omar, co-founder of Sulli. Ahmed, thanks so much for being here with me today.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, can you tell us about what Sulli is? I'm really excited. I see there's an AI component and I've got a lot of questions. So tell us what Sulli is.

Sure. Sulli is a copilot for doctors. That's the, one-liner that we have. Copilot doing what? It's automating all the admin work on doctor's side, on physician's side specifically. All the paperwork they have to go through, medical history, information about patients, taking notes, documenting, verifying insurance, collecting copays. All these things we're automating for doctors, for physicians in the US specifically. And yeah, we basically simplified by saying if language models are smart enough to do these tasks, why not build a language model for each and every physician? And we started doing it on physician, on the physician side and basically started doing like magic. It started sending referrals by itself, you know, all these things, all the things that are not harming humans or things that are more administrative than in the diagnosis part. So yeah, this is a little bit about Sadi. So think of it as an assistant to physicians today. In the future, could be its own copilot for humans, as a doctor copilot for humans.

Yeah, I see a lot of application even in the legal space. I know there's a couple of people trying to do something similar in the legal space because of how they build hourly. But I, you kind of covered it, but do you want to add an elevator pitch in there or do you want to move on?

Sure. You want me to add an, yeah, sure we can. I think what you want, what you want me to say is what is Sully, the team, basically everything. Is that what you want me to say?

Give us an elevator pitch on Sully and you can do it from the perspective our audience is going to be side hustlers, but you could do it from the perspective of like, I know you guys when you're pitching VCs and stuff like that, like what's the elevator pitch for Sully?

Got it. So, okay, so that's simple, yeah. Doctors spend 13 hours per week on admin work, leads to almost 60% of physicians and doctors burning out. And this is why we built Sully basically. Sully is a copilot for doctors to automate admin work. Checking patients, take notes during appointments, sending patient instructions afterwards, documents for doctors. And we're a team of 4, 3 co-founders, 1 founding engineer from OpenAI, medical researcher, people who contributed to GPT-4. Our CTO built over 25 separate patents at Google. Yeah, and me and my co-founder, we built a $14 million ARR startup before. And, um, yeah, this— Sully is a Y Combinator company backed by a few angels from Saudi Arabia, uh, Bay Area, and yeah, a few VCs here as well.

Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, you must feel pretty accomplished to be, to be in this position. And hopefully your co-founder is a good friend of yours now that you guys have done projects in the past, so it must be a really cool position to be in.

Yeah, it's enjoyable. We're having fun. Good.

You can't beat that. As long as you're happy and you guys are doing the thing, I think you can't ask for much more than that. But I want to transition. So our audience is mostly side hustlers, people looking for contract work. What projects is Sully currently working on or going to be working on where you guys could see yourself leveraging some side hustlers like those folks in our network listening to this?

We love win-wins. Like, my job as a CEO is to build a win-win every single day, a win-win pipeline that will help in each and every aspect of the business. In terms of side hustlers, I think the tool is very, very Like the tech behind the tools that we built for doctors is one of the best in the market today, priced at half the prices that our doctors are paying for today. So the tool that we built is basically summing up 5, 6 tools. If you take one feature, which, or one of the tools that we built inside Sully, like the scribing, we did the speech text better than everybody else, even better than Google. We built algorithms using what tech, like using the tech that is there today in the world and got out with a very high quality speech-to-text. So we can scribe better than a human scribe because a human can miss a word, but the scribe won't miss a word. And we can turn the natural language conversation between the patient and doctor into a note to doctors. So that one simple feature, We build better than anybody else. And this costs doctors about 3 minutes per patient minimum, sometimes 15 minutes per patient. So that's about 1 to 2 hours a day. This tool costs about $399. Doing some offers, promos with first users, we're getting them to pay $250, $299. And there's a lot of room of margin. There's a lot of room of commission. And yeah, I think one of the things that we're looking up to is people distributing this. First, that's good for the doctor, helps him with everything he's doing. And at the same time, it's also good for the person looking to do a passive income on the side. It's an ARR revenue, so it could be also an ARR passive income. And I think when I was like, when I was not building a company, I was looking for tools like that to sell. Like, I knew how— I always knew how to sell, and I was looking for things like that to sell when I was like, um, before like starting to build a company. And, uh, yeah, and I think each and every individual working with us is— we're all the same, basically. A person who's distributing is the same as the engineer, because without him, the engineer won't basically get paid, you know. So it's a, it's a full— like, each and every person contributing to this project is helping saving lives, basically. And that's what we want to That's why we enjoy this and that's what we want to bring to the world. Like if the more people are able to distribute this, I think that's one of the things we're looking for and I guess that's one of the things Side Hustlers are also looking to do, like market a good tool, a working tool.

So you guys operate like a family, it sounds like, and the roles that are open, definitely it sounds like salespeople that are well networked within the healthcare space. That kind of would be helpful for you guys?

Yeah.

Cool. Yeah, I know we have— I'm sure we have folks in that space. My significant other's father is an orthopedic surgeon. And so I know that this part of the job, you know, especially when you're working in the ER and then you have to go sit down and write notes, these guys, they don't— well, guys and gals, they don't want to be doing that. So I think it's pretty cool what you guys are doing. And I want to ask, This is a perfect segue. How did you end up here? Like, how did you end up here with your previous co-founder, but why this specific thing? Like, how did you get here?

That's a good question. I grew up looking up to my dad. My dad was, moved in 1988 to Dubai. He was a cashier at Pizza Hut, just, you know, selling pizzas. And 20 years later, he became the CFO of the company. So I grew up looking up to him a lot. And it always gave me the feeling that I need to start from scratch the same way he did. And since I was like 8 years old, I was selling. I was always a hustler. When I was like 9 years old, I was selling my snacks in school. 13 years old, I was making a lot of money selling online, like selling used products. Um, and yeah, and at some point I decided to build companies, like build proper brands, and I felt like being in a brand or contributing to a brand is like the most valuable investment that you could do. A company can, a business model can die, but the brand never dies. Like a lot of things can die, but the brand, if it's built right with the right culture, with the right dynamics, it never dies. So I felt like I want to build brands and I did that in an e-commerce company. I was actually a hustler in New York City, just like looking for a job. And one company, I offered one company to build the e-commerce for, and yeah, I grew their e-commerce channels to $55 million. I built it basically, it was zero. They have no, they have not had any online presence. And yeah, from there basically I made some money, built my market tech marketplace in the Middle East. We had a lot of partners. Grew that to $14 million in ARR, came into YC, spoke to a few big names at YC. They were like, you guys are exceptional, you guys should come back to the US and build something bigger. And yeah, we pivoted the whole model, came to the Bay Area, and we always wanted to work in something that had a lot of impact on humans. So it was basically for us, it was edtech or healthtech. And when we came here to the Bay a year and a half ago, we started building a search engine based on GPT-3 with a single result. So what you use today is GPT, like ChatGPT, like we built that. And then we started seeing how LLMs can just disrupt any market. And we saw a huge gap in healthcare and we thought we can fix it. We know how to build tech companies, we know how to scale companies, so We had confidence to do that. And we got, honestly, it was me, my co-founder built a previous startup before, and then we got our CTO, Chetanya, built the whole stack basically from the beginning. Chetanya has 25 patents at Google over, I think, yeah, he's one of the people who built the NLU and the NLP part of Google Assistant. Been building in AI and ML 12 years ago. He has a video on YouTube. With an autonomous driving car that he built. So it's like been in AI for years. And he had 2 years of chronic illness. Dealing with the US healthcare system was a pain for him. So he's like, "You know what? I always wanted to solve this problem. I'm going to join you guys on board." And then we had Sully Chen, our 4th founding researcher. Sully is a contributor to GPT-4, one of the guys who built GPT-4. Actually the only one from the 200 people that has a medical background at GPT-4, like the— from the GPT-4 contributors. So he's the only one with the medical expertise. And yeah, our first user is our investor as well, so that shows a lot about the product. He invested in the company before even like— like he invested in the company after using the product, so before any other investor adds money. Like when he heard we're starting around, he gave us, uh, he cut, he cut us a check. So yeah, I think the, the whole story is lining up. He's helping, helping us a lot in building the product from the primary care physician perspective. Um, so yeah, um, we have a demo I can share with you as well after the call. It could give you like a holistic view of the whole pieces of every part of the product. So yeah, um, I think, hope that answers your question.

It does. I, I coming into this call, I'm like, I'm just blown away on how much I relate to a lot of the things that you're saying. And like, you strike me as a person that's so focused on impact and legacy and some of these big things, probably from your parents, it sounds like. And I'm just like, I think it's so cool even talking about your venture capital. I just had a call earlier and I was talking to a guy that went VC. He's like, big mistake. I shouldn't have done it. And he was saying from the position of he didn't select the right partners. But, and then that's happened to me a lot where I've worked for a company and it's like the VC was saying, build these features, do this, but they didn't buy the product. They were never gonna buy the product. They didn't have that use case. But you guys have partnered with true partners who they're helping you build it and guide it just the same as your users were, right? Because they're in that field too. So, um, I, I, you're just such an interesting guy to me and I think the team is in good hands over there being led by you. And I know our hustlers, there's a lot of people on this that will be listening to this that'll be inspired by your story. I think it's really cool and I really appreciate your time like speaking with me today. I know the site is really awesome. It does a great job explaining kind of each of the features that are packed within Selle. But to close out, where can people find you? Obviously, It's sully.ai, right? S-U-L-L-Y.ai.com. Is there anywhere else where you'd want people to connect with you or you guys on YC site or anywhere else?

[Speaker:AHMED OMAR] Yeah, like you can connect with me on Twitter. It's my first and last name, 1993. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, like yeah, whatever. I believe in like being available, so I'm always available to anyone who needs the company, besides my priorities. But yeah, other than that, I'm always, I'll always get back to people regardless when. But yeah, it depends on the priorities though. But yeah, they can reach out to me through you, an intro through you or through any other social media. I'm open. My email is omar@sully.ai. So yeah, they can also reach out to the email as well.

Excellent. Ahmed, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and thanks for launching this company. I know it's a need in the marketplace and I I hope it leads to better outcomes for patients, so thank you.