How Sesame Is Going Deeper With Supply-Side Value Add

You know, so on the side, as far as like recruiting and kind of, or I'd say like onboarding supply with, you know, the doctors, you know, what are some ways that you're doing so?

I mean, to be honest, you know, every marketplace has a hard part and the easy part, right? I see lots of nodding out there. So I think people know, like, you know, you talked to Aaliyah at Slice last week, right? So is it finding customers who want pizza or is it pizza owners, right? For him, it was the pizza owners, right? For us, it's been shocking to me because I think if you asked me before I started at Sesame what was going to be the hard part and the easy part, I would have said like, oh, selling to doctors is going to be impossible. Doctors really like Sesame. It turns out they think healthcare is broken too. In fact, they think they know it's broken because they're in it every day. Like you and I who don't see a doctor, we see a doctor 3 or 4 times a year, like we kind of know it's broken. Doctors really know it's broken. So it's been largely word of mouth. I know it's a very unsatisfying answer, but doctors have found other doctors that say, you know, you should check out that platform Sesame, and they come to us. When we do need to go out market and get those specialists, then we do start to reach out. But inevitably, we sort of explain it to them and they're like, oh, I get that. That's cool. It's fascinating because, you know, turns out doctors got into practicing medicine because they like helping people. I know that sounds weird. They don't like filling out insurance paperwork. They like getting paid by insurance companies, don't get me wrong. And insurance companies are not evil or anything else like that. Like, they are— if you get hit by a bus, you want to have insurance. That's a good thing. But, you know, if If you want to treat people who don't have insurance, you know, doctors don't often get paid, right? They send out these invoices, they go unpaid. The fact that Sesame guarantees payment, you know, it sounds very trivial, but it's, it's a big deal for them. And so they get it. And then we say like, hey, book out a couple weeks, put this time on your calendar, and we're going to try to fill it up. And doctors kind of get it and say, okay. There's more slack in the system there than people realize. It's just a matter of finding that demand for that doctor at that time. Yeah.

So you did just mention as far as guaranteeing payment for the doctor, right? So what are some other ways maybe that you kind of go deeper in the kind of value chain or value add for doctors?

I mean, for doctors, it's— they at one point, and this is just— that is no longer true, but they had one person filling out Insurance paperwork for every doctor that was there. Companies have gone a long way to help automate that and other things. But you know, doctors just want to practice medicine and get paid. When you kind of cut out that middleman, right, of saying like we're going to pay you decide your rate, we'll pay you exactly that rate minus sort of Sesame's cut there. Doctors get paid more and patients get paid less, right? Sorry, patients pay less. And so. it's for them, it's, it's quite— they kind of get it quickly. They're like, wow, I can make more money per hour and actually just see patients, make them happy, and, and service a whole bunch of patients that I wouldn't normally get to see. Like, that's great. I mean, a couple of stories about providers that I love is that, like, you know, imagine you're a doctor, right? And you, you went out of— you dropped out of the market, you might drop out of the workforce to have a baby. Right. And, but you want to get back into the workplace, but you don't want to join a big hospital. You don't want to sort of open up your own shop. Sesame allows that to happen. A doctor who's a mom, she can practice 10, 15 hours a week during mom's hours, charge the rate she wants to charge, and then sort of go back to full-time work when and if she wants to. Maybe she could go to kindergarten and she can go from 10 hours a week to 25 hours a week. It's sort of like the original dream of Uber, but meets a highly specialized workforce. And then that's not all of our doctors. Some doctors have their own practice. Some doctors are hospitalists for 90% of their revenue and Sesame helps pay for something else. So it's all over the map like a lot of ones, but It hasn't been hard to sell the doctors on this. It really hasn't been. The patients, on the other hand, have been more of a struggle, which is interesting. It's like patients tend to overthink this. I can't buy— I can't get a doctor's office, you know, book a doctor's appointment online. I've never done that before. You know, like, why not? You buy all sorts of stuff online.

Yeah, certainly.

It's not the way we think about buying a doctor. So as with most things, changing consumer behavior is tricky.