Hirad Motamed - CTO and Co-founder of Dr. Bill

3, 2, 1.

Hey, what's up, everyone? We're back at it again this week with another founder journey story. Today we've got Hirad Mohamed hired is a software business developer. I think it's back in 2013, he was at launch Academy. He was building a team and a product. Product ended up becoming something called Dr. Bill. Dr. Bill is an awesome solution. It is a B2B solution. So you as a consumer may not have heard of it unless you're a doct, but it was started with two partners with the intention to help streamline some of the business processes that Canadian physicians have to deal with in order to get paid. The process for them with the universal healthcare, there's a lot of challenges there, but they solved it and today thousands of physicians use it. Dr. Bill is both the easy to use software and they provide amazing customer service and delivery and are really passionate about the space in the industry. They built a great team that's driving innovation in the medical practice field. Hirad, awesome to have you on. I kind of gave a good plug there for Dr. Bill. But let's hear from your words. What is Dr. Bill? And tell us about the space that you're operating in. So it's the back office of the medical industry, right?

Yeah. First off, thanks for having me and thanks for that intro. Yeah. So Dr. Bill is a medical billing solution for physicians in Canada. So the story was that initially my partners and I were trying to build an expense tracker for small business owners.

Yeah, I remember that.

Terrible idea. I actually said this to a room full of young startups at one point and I told them that if you ever think about building an expense tracker, don't. And it turned out there was a. That was building an expense tracker and they weren't happy to hear that. But did they take your advice? Eventually they did, but I think they continued for a couple of months after they took the advice. So we went down that road for a couple of months before realizing it wasn't a great space. But in order to do that, we kind of built this receipt scanning functionality and whatnot into our prototype. And after we decided that the project was dead, we would kind of get together for beers every couple of weeks. And that's.

Your original founding team would get together for beers or.

That's right, that's right. Yeah, it was three of us at that point. And yeah, we would get together for beers and try to kind of mourn the loss of our baby project and kind of figure out what to do next. And my partner Steve came in one day. And he said, hey, you know, my wife, who's a physician, she kind of deals with all these index cards and they kind of look like receipts. If we can scan those, maybe we can scan these. And that's how we kind of found the space and started experimenting there. And he kind of.

So those index cards, what was on those index cards? Is it just notes or.

So this is kind of funny. You wouldn't believe that in the 21st century this is how it's done. But essentially, if you're a physician and you're doing rounds in a clinic or you're doing rounds in a hospital, you are responsible for keeping record of who you've seen and what you've done for them and then submitting those records to the ministry for each province to get paid. And so what they were doing was they were sometimes jotting down the information of the patient and some notes about what they did for. For the patient. And these index cards would go to someone who's a billing agent and this person would encode them into some software that can talk to the ministry and they would go to the ministry and the physicians would get paid for the work that they had done. So you can imagine after a 12 hour shift of doing this in a hospital, there would be a lot of index cards. And so some physicians would just be going home at the end of a long shift and then sitting down on a computer and entering these into an Excel sheet so they could email it to someone else and then have that person enter it again into yet another system that would then actually talk to the ministry, which is where it wanted to go in the first place.

Wow. So this is like. It's kind of like a case study, a dream come true. For anybody that's building a B2B, you come across this archaic process that can be so easily simplified and digitized. And you guys already had a solution that was probably three quarters of the way there. You're just scanning this document and now you're able to service up that data and information for these people in probably a fraction of the time.

Yeah. So this is. I really like this space because it's kind of a lazy man's startup, just in the sense that I'm pretty sure that some of a lot of the really obvious improvements that technology can make have not actually made it all the way to the places where they can be applied. And the medical world is one of the obvious cases where I think a lot of the people that operate there may not be super familiar with what's possible with software. And for various reasons, the incentives may be such that people don't really want to invest in better tools and better solutions. One of the things that we kind of got lucky with with the Canadian healthcare system is that an individual doctor can make a decision of how they want to do their billing. If this was something that some hospital had to go through a vendor approval process for or something, we would, as a small team would have never been able to build a solution for this. But because it was kind of, it is a B2B solution, but it is something that the sales process is kind of like P2C and individuals can make those purchase decisions on their own. So that was just something that we got lucky with. And I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of these opportunities out there. The challenge is finding all of those niches that haven't been touched by people who are typically into technology and know that they can do amazing things with software.

Yeah. And sometimes entrepreneurs, especially at the early stages, you get, I wouldn't say overwhelmed and maybe sidetracked into thinking, okay, we've got to overhaul the entire system. But that system is a beast. And certain things are in there for justified reasons and you can't move them. But there are opportunities to digitize or automate certain aspects of that archaic process. So you don't have to tackle the entire problem, but you can find key pain points within that process that you can address. And that's exactly what you guys did. That's really cool. I want to get to you and your journey to get to where you are today. So, Dr. Bill, again, very successful. You guys are rocking and rolling. But as we all know, no entrepreneurial journey is a straight path to success. Break down some of the challenges and obstacles that you had to overcome to get to where you are today.

A lot of the obstacles, I would say some of the biggest obstacles that I would highlight were in a way self inflicted and I wouldn't have them any other way. So some of the things that have stressed me out a lot over the years where I didn't know what I was doing and I still, in a lot of contexts, don't know what I'm doing. But I still kind of put myself in that situation where I had to figure it out and do it. And so to give you a concrete example, at some point when I was in university, I kind of got it in my head. I read the Four Hour Workweek and I kind of got into my head that I didn't want a typical career and at the same time, the iPhone had just come out. And I think right around the time when I was about to graduate, the App Store had. Had started blowing up, and there were all these App Store millionaires, and I thought I wanted to be that person. So I started kind of. I was studying electrical engineering at the time, and I started shifting my focus more towards software, but I had never made any production app before.

Did you know how to code?

Well, I knew how to code for a long time. I had kind of taught myself that in. In high school, and a little bit of my electrical engineering education kind of helped out with that in university. But I didn't know how to make something that's actually useful. I was making C programs that would kind of implement some algorithm that was kind of famous, and that was all I knew. I didn't know how you would actually build an application that people would use. Right. So I started teaching myself that. And right off the bat, I. I had a contact. I don't even know how I came across this. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I had a contact who wanted a very simple iPhone app made. And I said, hey, I can do that. I couldn't. I had no idea how to do it, but I had. It was a. I remember. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what I effectively did. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I thought I could actually do it very foolishly. But remember, it was a $3,000 contract, and it took me a good three months to do. So. It's probably not a very good return on investment in terms of my time, but that's kind of how I learned. And from there, I kind of progressively ended up taking other contracts through which I learned more and more how to actually make applications. And that was kind of. That was. At the time, I just wanted to be able to make a living by doing something that I liked, which was writing code. But that's really everything that I've done since then. Even if. Whether it was writing code or not or something to do with sales or customer service or how to organize a team, all of that is basically putting yourself in a situation where you're figuring things out for the first time. So I guess that experience kind of came in handy. But it is quite stressful. And I think the. Where it kind of becomes really mentally draining is as you end up having some level of success and you have something to lose, the mental pressure becomes higher and higher because you kind of have this sense that I'm just navigating this for the first time. And I don't know if I'm making the right decisions. When the stakes are kind of low, it doesn't really matter. But for me, I kind of, that was, that was the time where I kind of went for, for some mental tailspins of trying to think like, am I actually good enough to be doing this right decision? Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. So this is one of the things I love about this series and talking to these entrepreneurs. I don't know if it's just because we know each other and people just look more comfortable opening up, but we get down into these taboo topics that a lot of people don't talk about publicly. And founder depression and challenges that you face as entrepreneur are very real. And it's a very, very difficult spot to be in because you don't really have a lot of outlets to talk to people. You can't really talk to your team. You can't talk to your employees, talking to investors or even peers. There's a sense of I can't show weakness or I can't show areas of struggle because it's going to have a domino effect or reverberating repercussions on me. And you continue to just struggle and put your head up against the wall in private and at home, or you take it out on your family and they don't know why. And so, like, I want you to feel a little bit comfortable to talk about this with us and tell us, like, how, how did you recognize that you were facing these problems? Was it apparent from the beginning or took some sort of epiphany moment or realization that, hey, there's something wrong here.

I definitely don't think I recognized it early enough. I wish I'd recognized it earlier. I think some elements of it is more experienced than just age. So one of the factors was that when I started Dr. Bill specifically, I was 26 and I would say I didn't have a lot of the emotional maturity that I could have used at the time. But there was one, one specific moment where I kind of thought the amount of pressure that I'm under or I'm essentially putting myself in by doing this is not right. And that moment was, I remember we shipped something and it was an app update and it broke, broke things on our customers devices and we didn't know what was going on or why. And I remember, so I sat down, I started debugging this thing. This was late in the day and around 8pm I had, we're in a pretty large shared office. Building. So we had one office for ourselves. But then you walk down the hallway, there was, there was other offices. There was like architects and lawyers and other small offices in the building. And so at 8pm it was pretty quiet. And in the middle of my debugging session, I had a distinct awareness that if I have a heart attack right now, there's nobody to find me until the next morning. And you know, one of the things that I think we're so lucky with today is we can actually. We may not have the community right away to kind of provide support for this kind of thing, but we can hear from people who been there through things like podcasts or maybe potentially this series and stuff like that. And I think one of the things I was lucky with, one series of interviews that were on the Tim Ferriss podcast and I was listening to at the time, they really helped me kind of open my eyes to the possibilities of things that people do to deal with high pressure situations. And one of those things was meditation. So at that point where I had that moment of realization of I might have a heart attack here at the ripe age of 27 or 8, I had already thought about doing a 10 day silent meditation retreat. And that was really the trigger that I needed to make it a priority and pull the trigger on it.

So after you solved the bug, did you go on this 10 day retreat?

Yeah. Yeah. So it was the end of that year. I did my first 10 day retreat and I've been making an effort to do one every year since. So once a year.

Are you on one right now? I see you in the middle of mountains. Are you on a retreat right now?

No, I wish I was. I was right now, I think in 2020. I need an extra couple of retreats to do with the three after this year.

But sorry, I don't want to make.

Light of it, but nobody I've tried. Once a year it's been a.

Walk us through it. Like, what does this retreat entail? This is really intriguing. This is obviously one solution. I don't think we've had many people talking about taking these kind of sabbaticals or these little mini retreats to decompress. So if you don't mind sharing, tell us about the experience. Maybe just tell us about the first one that you did and the emotions and the challenges that you went through as you did that.

Yeah, so the first one. The first one was actually the easiest one for me because it could be again, like everything else, I didn't know what I was getting into and So I just kind of sailed right through it. I think some of the subsequent ones that I've done have been more challenging, but I would say so the overall process, at least for this way of meditation that I've been following, is that for 10 days you have no inner stimulus and your primary focus is observing your own thoughts and your own sensations. The meditation is essentially body scanning meditation. So for the first few days, you kind of start off by focusing on your breath, focusing on building up your ability to even focus your mind on one thing without having it constantly wander, although it always does wander. And then you start kind of going through the, observing various sensations on your body. And the theory behind that is that as various stimuli arrive, you before you even can recognize them mentally irrationally and react to them, you have some kind of reaction that you can identify by a sensation on the body. This is kind of the theory that this is predicated on. And if the training is essentially that you observe these emotions, observe these reactions on the body and you practice being equanimous towards them. So as an unpleasant sensation arises, you kind of observe it and you remember that it's going to pass away like everything else that had come before. If a pleasant sensation arises, you're going to observe that it is also going to pass away and you don't get attached to them. Now, there's all sorts of Buddhist theory behind why this would work. And I don't really care if the theory is correct or scientifically proven or, you know, one can ask all of those questions. But for me, in my experience, I'm much calmer and much less reactive when I come out of one of these and invited. By the time a year passes, I think it's time for another one. I could really use one.

So you end up looking forward to it because it's not quite a vacation, but it's something that becomes a part of you.

Absolutely, yeah. Those 10 days are not easy. It's not a retreat in the sense of you're going somewhere to have a good time. Getting through the 10 days is quite challenging. You know, you're sitting and trying to focus for 11 hours a day. It's a pretty rigorous program and essentially you, you can't exercise, your food is already provided for you, so you just have a few meal breaks and otherwise you're just practicing all the time. So it is guided there.

Is it guided? Do you have people helping you?

There are, yes.

Yeah.

So there are instructions that are provided. So there are some sittings during the day where you receive instructions and there is a teacher where you can ask questions at specific designated times. But for the most part, for most of those 11 hours of the day, you are trying to practice on your own. And it is by day six or seven, you really want to get out of there because it's getting really repetitive and really boring. We've all been in lockdown this year. Right. We know how. We know. We all know how that is.

Yeah.

And. But I still. It's a worth worthwhile challenge to take on, I think.

And so you said the first one was probably the easiest. What made the other ones harder? Why did it get harder each time?

That's a good question. I think maybe I just had more and more things to work through, which seems logical.

Right? Like, your business is getting more successful, but with success comes issues and problems, and money doesn't solve those problems. And so I can just imagine, like, being away for 10 days was probably the length of days was hard at the first time. But it gets harder and harder. You can't be away from your business that long without having contact and your team not knowing. Not knowing what's going on with your team, but also the type of challenges that you had to think through.

I think the emotional pressure is higher. It's not so much. I say a lot of those mechanics of how the team is doing and whatnot. I think we've generally been in a pretty good spot with. I'm not worried about things falling apart without me, and I haven't been for. For a while. I think we've. We've been pretty lucky with that. I'd never hired before either, but I think we've managed to hire some really great people. But it is. It is the emotional pressure. And I think some of it is that I'm actually kind of getting better at the technique, at the technique of meditation, which means I'm actually. I know when I'm cutting corners and when I'm not where I think the first time around, I kind of cut myself a little more slack than the subsequent times.

Okay. Now, again, these are not easy things to talk about, but we all face them as entrepreneurs. But a lot of people don't fall under the pressure to abandon entrepreneurship. It's kind of in our blood. Like, we. I don't know if we're a glutton for punishment and we keep going back for more pain, but entrepreneurs keep sticking their hand back in the fire. So with these challenges and issues, like, thankfully, you've found an outlet and you're. It seems like you're Being very rewarded by that process that you're going through. But how did that shape your vision of what entrepreneurship. What does entrepreneurship mean to you? Why do you keep doing what you're doing?

Yeah, it's definitely a more of a masochistic career than some of the alternatives out there. I think the thing that I'm trying to answer this question without hitting all the cliches that are out there, because all the cliches are actually true. And I'm someone who's really skeptical of a lot of the hype that gets put out there in Silicon Valley and whatnot, but I gotta say, it's kind of true. We only have. Dr. Bill doesn't have millions of users. It will never be. It will never be a ding in the universe in some ways, but it is a significant thing. When, for example, we are approached in say, a coffee shop because we have a doctor Bill sticker on our laptop, we are approached in a coffee shop by a doctor who says, hey, I really love your products and it's saving me a ton of time. And similarly, when we can build a work environment that people really like to work in, to me, there is nothing more rewarding. You're building creating a work environment that people like to spend a third of their life in, and at the same time, you're using that to build a product that is making life better. In some ways, it may not be the most significant part of their life, but it is making their lives better. And these are people who, in our case, they're pretty significant members of society, especially at a time like this. Right. So it's about being able to have an impact and being able to control how you have an impact. I think you can have an impact at a lot of places. Arguably, if you work for an Apple or Google of the world, that is significant impact, but your contribution to it is as an individual is much smaller. The thing that really rewarding for me is being able to really put my stamp on it in a significant way. Even if the company that I'm building is smaller, I'm still okay with that. I wanted to have more of me there. And I think one of the things that was the most rewarding, we actually got acquired a year ago. And just prior to the acquisition, one of our earliest team members started a thread on Slack Talking about what Dr. Bill means to the team. And I think even more than what the positive reviews that we might get from customers, that touched me more than anything before it, because we have a portion of our staff who are medical billing Specialists and typically they work in an industry that is not. Well, at least prior to March of 2020, was not very friendly to remote work. And so we're kind of enabling them to work remotely and therefore enabling them to have certain things in their lives that they really wouldn't be able to get anywhere else. And that is really, really cool to me. And I hope to be able to do things like that all the time, even if I need to do one or two meditation retreats a year.

So it's got like the flip side of you can be part of somebody else's vision, which your team has obviously shown a lot of appreciation and gratitude for being part of that vision. Or in your case, you could be the one with that vision, executing against your own vision. So kind of like be the change that you want to see in the world, right? Yeah. Awesome. Hirad, really appreciate you taking the time today. We're going to close this out with a few questions. The first one that I've been asking everybody is help our audience get exposed to a new app or a tool. What's an app or a tool that you have found indispensable for your founder journey and your career? It could be on a personal level, something that you use in your personal life or something that you used in your professional world, but something that's made your life easier.

So I wasn't going to talk about it so much. We kind of went down this path and I'm. This was kind of my pick for the. For this app or tool which was the meditation retreat. I think. I think this is a. It is a challenging thing and a lot of people are put off by the prospect of sitting in silence for 10 days and a lot of times want to do it for a shorter amount of time or they want to have a gentler introduction. I think you should go for a 10 day silent meditation retreat. That's the thing that for me is really the thing that makes me mentally resilient enough to take on anything else. So it comes first.

So if somebody was to one of our audience wants to look into this, what would you recommend they type into Google or type into Bing. Bing still a thing. Jump on, explore and use Bing to search what.

So you can go to damma.org so it's-a m m a.org so this is the particular kind of school of meditation that I follow. They have a lot of meditation centers all around the world and I haven't actually looked into one since COVID I think there's definitely some in B.C. that are running at lower capacity than usual. But you can go there and wherever you are in the world, you can kind of search for 10 day courses and you can get started there.

That's awesome. Yeah. Our audience is global, international, so it's good to know that this is something that's available all around the world. All right, we're going to wrap it up with one last question here. Hirad, what is your advice for somebody that's trying to start a company today? A brand new founder, seasoned founder, it doesn't matter. Starting a business today is very different, challenging. What would be your advice there?

Yeah, so to be honest, it's kind of hard for me to answer that because I haven't started something new in a good seven years.

That's a good honest answer.

That's true. If I had to pick one thing that has kind of stood out to me recently, it would be that one of the key elements that helps young teams is a support network and a community that they can, they can rely on. And obviously at a time like this, it's kind of hard to have in person communities. You know, Launch Academy kind of served as a community for us where that's where our founding team formed for Dr. Bill.

But there are about 20ft right behind me. Yeah, one of those desks behind me.

But right now that's kind of hard to do. But there are all these online communities that are popping up centered around a variety of interests and I've been joining a few of these recently. One that the audience for this video may be interested in would be acquired. So acquired was a podcast about exits and IPOs and they have their own Slack channel for where you can connect with people who are interested in startups or investing from all over the world. So this is one of the interesting things that is happening is all these communities are popping up where they're no longer geographically constrained, your constraint and how you can interact with them, but not by geography. And so I think people should take advantage of that. I'm trying to take advantage of that as much as possible and use that to connect with people who broaden my perspectives. And yeah, I think that's a good thing to have at the time of COVID Yeah.

And you're right now you're sitting in the UK and building an international. Building a Canadian company from an international destination. Yeah, yeah.

And I've done this multiple times throughout the Dr. Bill journey. So Dr. Bill is really international and our team is pretty international.

So the team is distributed. So you've got people working all over the world.

Yeah, so we have some people in Europe and we also have people all across Canada.

That's awesome. Hirad, really appreciate you taking the time today to give our audiences insight into your founder journey. This is the opportunity now for you to give us your call to action. What is it that our audience can do for you?

I would like to know what I can do for them. So if anyone wants to reach out to me on LinkedIn, I'm always interested in talking to people who are in this journey. Like I said, I haven't started something in seven years, but it always gets me very excited and exhilarated to hear about the things that other people are doing. And if I can help in any way, I'll be happy to. So you can find me on LinkedIn. Feel free to message me if you think it might be useful.

Awesome. Yeah, well, we'll definitely make sure the audience has your LinkedIn profile accessible. Hirad, this has been an awesome conversation. Really appreciate you being open and honest with your answers and really appreciate the insight into this 10 day retreat and the journey of meditation to address mental issues and founder issues that come from building awesome businesses. Thanks for your time. Really appreciate it and best of luck with Dr. Bill as it continues to grow.

Thanks so much for having me, Ray. It's been great.

Launch Ventures is for Entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode of Founder Journey, please share this with your friends, family and other entrepreneurs. If you're ready to start your own entrepreneurial journey and would like some guidance, Please head to LaunchAcademy CA and check out our entrepreneurship course and other online resources like our Launchpad for Virtual Incubation and Metro training.