#313: Sehreen Noor Ali, Co-Founder of Sleuth, on Creating the Largest Crowdsourced Database on Children's Health

Welcome to the Just Go Grind podcast. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital. On today's episode, we have Serene Noorali, co-founder of Sleuth, a childhood health recommendation engine powered by crowdsourced insights and machine learning. Sleuth is backed by Newlab and Antler. Let's dive into the show. Serene, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Yes. And with Sleuth, I want to know at the beginning, how did this start in the first place?

It started like many startups do, which is personal experience. I have 2 kids, 2 girls. My younger one started missing some of her developmental milestones. I went to the doctor. The doctor said, you know what, don't worry about it. She's probably fine. And then we went to go see family and, you know, people who had been parents longer than I have were like, that's unusual. Like, that didn't happen with my kid. Or that's unusual. That didn't happen with my kid. And I was like, it triggered me to actually listen to my intuition. And very long story short, she did end up needing specialists. Um, I appealed to my pediatrician and said, listen, like, we need to do something about this. And, um, when we started looking into the problem of what I was going through, I realized thousands of parents deal with what I am dealing with. Like, they're not getting answers when they need it. They're anxious. They need more information and they turn to other parents and there's power and real expertise in other parents.

Okay. With that, I had to take a step back. A lot of people have ideas or problems or challenges and then they find something on Google and then, okay, they move on with their lives. But you decided to start a company with it. Why start a company? Why start a company? I'm curious.

Because I hate myself. No joke.

Because it's hard. It's really hard.

It is really hard. I mean, I will never deny that. I think that people want to make meaning out of their pain. I think it's kind of a universal truth. And when I met my co-founder, Alex, and he started seeing— he was about to become a parent, so it was very meaningful to him what I was saying about how difficult it was to get good data on children's health and good guidance about what to do next. And we started talking to all these parents and everyone talked to us. So many people wanted to talk to us. And then that translated to so many parents wanted to share their stories on our platform. And when you see that, like, people want to help people, you kind of go with it. I didn't actually really intend to start a VC-backed startup. I had worked for a couple, so I knew that it's hard. It's really, really, really hard. Like, yes, there's like a layer of glamour. But underneath that layer of glamour is just really a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. But I think what compelled me was that there was a huge need and we could do something about it.

One of the things I'm curious about too, even with going the venture-backed route, and I talk with a lot of founders through Vitalize Venture Capital, and a lot of companies are not VC-backable. A lot of companies would be phenomenal lifestyle businesses. You don't need to raise venture. You could have done debt or other ways of financing it potentially. And Everyone's life situation's different. For you, did you always kind of see it as a VC-backable company? You wanted to go that route? I'm just curious on your mindset around that too.

Yeah, we had to. I mean, the way that we are is we're a SaaS company. We did need, we need an infusion of capital in order to grow our product that then has a lot of efficiencies once it's built and tweaked. There are other children's health information platforms that don't need to be venture-backed, and I think have worked really well. We were not in that category.

With that too, then how did you go about that in terms of who you wanted to bring on board? There's angel investors, there's VCs, there's a lot of different ways to go about this. For you, Serene, how did you go about it?

I'm curious. So my co-founder and I met at a startup generator program called Antler. And you know how things in life just happen when you're not really planning for them to happen? That was very much my participation in Antler. It was, I had left my job in 2017. I was about to go back to work. I left in 2017 to take care of my daughter and set up her care. I was ready to go back, and then I was— I had a couple of offers in hand, and then I saw this thing at Antler, and I was like, you know what, it's 2 months, um, 3 months. It's really low risk because I already wasn't salaried, um, so taking an additional 3 months was not a big deal. Um, and it ended up being that people really believed in this idea. I was one of the very few parents, very few kind of mothers that were out in a startup tech ecosystem where people tended to be younger, tended to be male, and tended not to be parents. And once people started believing in this idea, it was like, oh, okay, okay. Like, I guess I, you know, I see something that other people are starting to believe as well. And so we got money from Antler and New Lab, and we were the first team To get— I think we were only 2 teams were funded by both entities. We were one of 2. And we had a unanimous decision by the investment panel. And so by that point that like you get that confidence, you start seeing, okay, there really are legs here. Obviously, you know, you start, there's excitement. And in order to grow the product, you have to keep raising. We've found that there are people who just get it and they are not the people that I thought. Truly, the people who are interested in backing us, I couldn't have predicted it.

Wait, tell me more about that. Like, I want to hear more about that.

I mean, most of our— it's a lot of older white gentlemen who really believe in what we're doing. I would not have ever guessed that, actually. And it's interesting. And I think what I really love about it is that we've had conversations with angels who are passionate fathers and said, you know what, I 100% understand what you're going through. Like, my son is 20-something years old, and the first several years of his life, we went through this and navigating this. And I'm like, that means so much to me that it is actually different than what I thought. And then of course, we get the people that I thought would be more aligned to Parent Tech as well.

Okay, one thing with this I have to ask about. So anything that's like Parents, children, and then I'm gonna also put this in the same category, don't judge me, like pets, people go crazy about, they'll do anything for, right? So with that, how do you even begin to price business model around this? Just take me through that side of things.

Yeah, that is a great question. I don't know much about pets, but what I can say is risky about what we're doing in the parent tech is that a lot of people assume that there's just too much noise. in parenting and technology. What we say is that when it comes to children's health and development and data, there's not a lot on. And so the pricing strategy is, you know, there's a lot of freemium, like free content. You can go to Facebook groups, you can go to something like BabyCenter. But what we do is say, we know a certain amount of parents are going to pay a monthly price of like $10 a month to get personalized data and step-by-step guidance for their children. And we know that that's one possible business model and the pricing, we're pretty comfortable because that's where the market kind of is, right? You think about like Canva, people pay $13, like, you know, that range is very comfortable for people. But we also have the benefit of creating a crowdsourced open dataset on children's health. Once you have that, you have many, many, many more opportunities. And we've already seen very strong signals for those opportunities. So we kind of foresee flexibility on the business model, but we're doubling down on this B2C side first.

Yeah, that's always what I think about because we invest in B2B software and future of work at Vitalize. And we're always thinking about, obviously it has a B2B component, but there are some companies that are B2C that You can see where they can leverage that in a B2B way. Like even one company I bring up a lot is Toucan. It's a browser extension, help you learn language while you're surfing the web, and they're definitely B2C right now. But on the backend, it's like they can help you learn anything so they can help upscale, rescale. You can see a B2B model with other ones. It's like seeing the business model is a huge part of what the company is gonna be for you then too. So with that, so obviously you're starting B2C on that. You have this dataset you're developing. As you go about this, what has helped you grow from the early days to where you are now? I'm curious on the growth side.

I think some of it is personal brand. I am getting more and more comfortable sharing my own story. And my story's my story. It's not my daughter's story. It's what do I go through as a caregiver? What do I know? How do I advocate? What are my battles? I think this business, relies on trust. And I think people knowing that the team behind it are both parents and that they can understand what it feels like to have the anxiety of not having answers for a child, whether your child is considered normal or atypical or whatever, means a lot, right? Because what we're asking for is your data. So that's— it's really important. The other way is that We started actually focusing kind of on special needs and kids with medical needs. And so that started getting us more stories. People started understanding, like, I want to share my story. The third way is that not a lot of people are buying words on children's health. You know, like, they're—

Fair.

Right. There's some things that people will buy, but there's just a lot of stuff that is kind of a white space for us. And our team is really good at leveraging that and we've proven ridiculous marketing efficiency. And that kind of extends out to a lot of different things. I do think kids' health is getting more popular. People have more mindshare towards it, but it's still new. It's kind of what femtech was 3 or 4 years ago.

Yeah, which has definitely grown a lot. And I've interviewed a number of founders within that as well now at this point in time. And with that, you mentioned we obviously with the team side of things, how has that been building your team? And I always talk about this a lot with like how the war for talent is crazy. Take me through that side of things as you start with an idea, progressed it, obviously getting more paid customers, but building the team behind it. How has that gone for you?

Yeah, I mean, between Alex and I, we cover 2 very different parts of the business. So that gives us a lot of efficiency. We have an engineering team that we work with that actually has a deep roster of talent from design, engineering, to some of the data side. And then we have worked mostly with freelancers after that. We're currently fundraising. After this fundraise, we will be bringing on full-time talent. I think the question about how do you recruit is always interesting. I think people are compelled towards values and founders, and both Alex and I have recruited technical teams before and have an ecosystem in New York that we're hoping to lean on a little once we are ready for that full-time hire.

Well, even with the part-time hires, I know we've looked at, I think we were 6 or so part-time hires at Vitalyze, 'cause we're trying to use that model. I think it's better in some ways, challenging in other ways. For you, where did you go in terms of finding part-time help? What was maybe the most useful areas, locations, or ways to go about that?

Yeah, it's a good question. So some of them were inbound. Um, people were saying like, listen, I really believe in what you're doing, let me help you. The other way was Upwork. Um, Alex, for example, is really good. We needed to do some data cleaning and data transcription, and, um, Alex just— it's like you just rely on what you've done before, you know?

Yeah.

Um, and we found some great people who were really, really efficient, and then And honestly, they ended up being underpriced. So we ended up paying them more because they were underpriced. I think it's this, they were moms who felt less, you know, it's like as a mom who had to leave her job in 2017, I'm very sensitive to this. And so as long as you start cultivating a relationship with someone that does work well and they're treated fairly, I think you start creating a bench of people that you can call on. But the freelancer sites have been good for us.

Yeah, I think there's definitely, there's so many different ones now and even just Writing a newsletter for a little bit of sourcing and how to find different talent and how people go about it. There's so many different ways. I know we invest in a company called the Mom Project. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they are helping yeah helping moms in a lot of ways get different careers. And so there's all these different marketplaces, and now we're seeing more of these things pop up. Palette is another company that just popped up relatively recently, and they have a kind of an interesting different way of people finding jobs. And so there are so many platforms we're seeing now with that to hire talent because. Whether it be part-time, whether it be full-time, like you need to figure out how to do that to grow and scale your company, which is so challenging. With that too, you mentioned the fundraise coming up. As you're looking at building this team even more, you mentioned some of the things on the engineering side, but the product, building out the product as well, like how has that side of things gone? How has this evolved in terms of the product itself as time's gone on?

That's a really good question. You know, I think that we— some people will say you're trying to boil the ocean. Um, one of the things that we stand by is that we know our customer really well. And so just as an example of why our product covers a lot of health areas is because one of the things that I think a lot of people don't consider is that conditions have relationships to each other, right? So, um, if your child has a speech delay, your child Maybe has a food aversion or whatever, right? There's relationships between these, and that being diagnosis-specific is not the reality of how a parent lives. So my daughter has a speech delay and she has a swallowing issue. Like, I'm not— I'm interested in the relationship between these two and the treatments that go, that work with her in the most efficient way. And so that's why our product can intake information across multiple diagnoses, multiple timelines. And over the course of several years. And so we looked at that, we did that, but now we're at a point where we have to say, okay, we can do it. And we're focusing on 4 areas of children's health that we know parents are looking at the most, partly related to COVID, partly related to actually being able to then create the next part of it, which is displaying that information in a compelling way. And when we first started, we collected information, but then when we started doing the data visualizations of that information, things got really exciting. Because we hadn't been able to previously, you know, if you go on a Facebook group and parents share information, um, because Facebook is very popular for parents to share information about their kids' health, um, you can't see a profile of that parent's child. You can't see it displayed in a way for you to really understand if that child is like your child enough for you to take advice from that parent.

Yeah.

Um, so we think a lot about the display of the information. The choice to be anonymous and what that means, how we actually position it with parents about what they can do with it. And so a lot of those same principles are there. I do think it's going to change a lot after this fundraise.

Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned that. And I can't help but think of other companies. And if you're on Twitter at all, like VCs and stuff, obviously giving advice from their experience or other founders giving advice. But to the exact point you mentioned before, it's like, does that apply to me and my situation? Like they have their, their lens or their context from 10 years ago, starting a company, running a company. Things change a lot really quickly. And so there's always that lens of like, the advice you get, who is the person? What was their situation? How's that fit into what you're doing? With that too, diving a little bit deeper, what is that experience like? I'm a parent wants to use Sleuth the first time. Like, walk me through what that even looks like for me.

Yep. So if you are a parent who is concerned about their kid, like speaking, like you would go to our search bar and say speech delay, and what you would get is these really data-heavy, rich profiles from parents talking about their children, right? It'd be free text about when they first saw the symptoms, what they did, and what they recommend. And then it'd be structured data after that in a timeline of when they first saw the speech delay, what kind of interventions they had, and whether or not it was useful. You can also tab over and start seeing recommended treatments and specialists from parents, and it's just a different way to display that information, right? So like one thing that is surprising is that occupational therapy is useful for kids with speech delays, and so you'll see people rate, you know, occupational therapy and if they would recommend it or not. And then something that I really love is parents can start taking assessments to see if their child has a speech delay. So there are ways that pediatricians can actually help parents and give them an assessment and say, okay, you told me you're worried about this, but here's actually, you know, 25 questions about your child that you uniquely answer as the caregiver. And we can see based on those answers if something else should be done. Those parent assessments are actually really hard to get. Like I went, every time I go to my pediatrician, I see them on a folder in the back. Um, and parents don't know to ask for it. And so we've actually brought them to our website and parents can start engaging and actually seeing how other people answered those questions anonymously. So there's a lot of different kind of browsing and providing information to get answers that you can already do in our MVP.

With that too, so one of the things that comes to mind right away is just as a parent, then you're looking through this, you're seeing all these different answers. How is that filtered to not give alternative opinions and That, like, how does that work for you? I'm curious.

Yeah, it's a really good question. Well, we take the stance that we're pro-science. It sounds kind of, you know, that's really important. And so on the back end, what we do is you can start seeing which profiles should not be surfaced, right? If someone says drink Windex, don't take a vaccine, like that will get filtered down, right? Right? And so there's all these ways to start seeing how data interacts with each other, whether it's kind of weaker data or also if parents start upvoting certain profiles, some— it's often a sign of credibility. And so you can start surfacing that even higher. The other way that you do it is you ask for structured data, you know, and we do that. When did you see the symptoms? Were they severe or like, you know, what's the gradation of those symptoms? What's the timeline? And so there's a lot less room for error when you're asking such structured questions.

Yeah, no, that's such, gotta be such a challenge. 'Cause I mean, that's the thing you see, you see like both sides or you see, always see alternatives and like really anything in terms of advice. It's like, how do you sift through, how do you prioritize the right things for you?

Yeah.

Especially when it comes to your children. It's like, that's a, it's a pretty important thing to figure out.

Yeah. Yeah.

Which, which, yeah, I'm always curious how people go about that. And, and for you too, so you mentioned, you know, fundraise coming up. Essentially as well. So like, what is the next step, the next phase for Sleuth? Like, what are you trying to do next in the next, you know, 6 to 12 months?

Let's say the next 6 to 12 months is us building out that database with kind of depth and breadth and putting a priced product into market. Yeah.

Then I'm just gonna, then even bigger, I'll step it back a little bit farther then.

Yeah.

Big vision. What does that look like?

Oh, the big vision. Is to create the largest crowdsourced database on children's health. I expect that we will be able to use that data to find more diagnoses, um, to inform clinical trials, to help communities in the rare genetics communities. I mean, one of the things that I think is really interesting is we were talking to the Cytomegalovirus Foundation, and CMV is a condition that a child can get when someone kisses them on the face. Because it's a virus, it's an active virus. Wow. Which is funny because like after that, all my friends who were pregnant, I was like, don't let anyone kiss your child.

Don't touch my child.

Don't. Yeah. And when we talked to them, one of the biggest problems that they have is that there are children who are impacted by CMV, which is the second leading cause of hearing loss in children and can cause severe disabilities, is that after, I think it's 6 months, the virus is inactive, so you can't test for CMV. So your child might be 12, have these disabilities, and you may not know why this child has the disabilities because you can't test for CMV. And so there's a lot of nuance in children's health that I think we don't appreciate, that parents often don't have answers. And when you start building a database based on caregivers, you can start providing answers in a really meaningful way.

Coming back to you now, I'm curious, you mentioned how hard it is to build a company, obviously, in the beginning of this. What keeps you on track, level-headed, able to think clearly? What are some of the things you do in terms of taking care of yourself as well?

I'm not the best at it. I go to therapy. I have a therapist.

Helpful.

That is immensely helpful. And it's this idea of being able to think through the way you think with someone. You don't get that luxury, right? And you kind of need a third person to help you remember things that you were passionate about if you're in a moment of frustration or stress. So that's been pretty critical. And I live in New York City and I really like taking walks. So anytime that I feel like I need to think through, it's like the whole, like, it's like the shower thing. Like you're taking a shower and you think through things. Like for me, walking through New York City is like the other greatest form of therapy and thinking. It's a I don't have time for much more.

Wait, you're saying that with 2 young kids and running a startup, you don't have time for much more? Yeah. That's shocking to me. Absolutely shocking. I wanna go back to the therapy thing. What made you— was there a certain time period where like, okay, now's the time? Like what made you do the jump? 'Cause I also talked to a lot of founders who they're either thinking about getting therapy or even eventually the executive coach that comes down the line potentially. But what for you was like timing or made you take the jump? Like, I'm just curious on that.

I was struggling with the passing of my dad. Um, I think it might have been a year after, and I was just trying to figure out how do I get through this. And so I've been working with the same therapist since then. And it's funny because like when we first started Sleuth, I'm very open about the fact that I go to therapy. I'm very open about most things because I think this shit's hard.

Mm-hmm.

Like it's, it's, it's, it's not hard, it's harder than hard, you know? And so when you are a founder and someone from your cohort just raised $8 million and you're like, why are people telling me I should change the name of my company? That's not what I'm talking to you about, like NLP. You just have to work on your mind game. I truly believe that you can differentiate yourself just by the health of your brain. I will be My daughter was hospitalized for two and a half months. I spent every single night in the hospital with her from August 26th until October 31st. It is a badge of honor that I have not lost my mind, because what I saw, what I went through, what she went through would be enough trauma to last a lifetime. And I credit, I credit my therapist. And when we were starting Sleuth, a VC actually asked me. They're like. You know, some founders were thinking about getting offering founders in our portfolio company therapy. What do you think? Totally do it. Because you want, you want your founders in your portco to be healthy.

Yeah, I think it was AlphaBridge or some, there's some VC that has like that as part of their kind of value add as an investor. They offer therapy, mental health kind of services. And also I remember thinking it was Aman Abizaid from Accredible Health. And she mentioned like, Managing your own psychology as a founder is absolutely everything. Like, if you can't manage your own psychology as a founder, you're never gonna be able to make it because you're going through so many metamorphoses as every stage of your company go from the early stage of the challenges that brings up, even hiring your first few employees, raising venture capital, scaling. There's just different problems constantly and you have to be able to adjust to that. And if you can't manage your own psychology, it's gonna be even more of a nightmare than it already potentially is. So I always thought of that whenever I talked to anyone, it's like, She mentioned that and she's been very successful. I think she's raised from like Andreessen Horowitz and the best VCs and her company's incredible. Incredible health. It's incredible. But it's like you have to manage your own psychology. And I know we're almost outta time here, so I wanna give people a chance to know where's the best place to find more about your company and talk with you or connect with you if they'd like to as well.

Yeah, please find us on Instagram. I also post, it's @hellosleuth and my Instagram is just my full name. And I've started to post more about what I'm going through as a parent and an advocate. And so I love feedback on my story. It's been kind of fun. So please reach out.

I will be sure to link that up in the show notes as well. JustGoGrind.com. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today, Serene.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Just Go Grind. If you want to follow along on the socials for all things Just Go Grind and with me as well, you can find Just Go Grind on Instagram and Twitter @justgo-grind. You can find me on Twitter @justingordon212. Find me on Instagram @justingordon8. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.