Julia Cheek left Deloitte to start EverlyWell, a direct-to-consumer at-home lab testing company now selling 35 tests through Amazon, Target, CVS, and Kroger. The company hit $40 million in sales by year three and raised over $50 million in venture funding.
And so for people listening who are like, okay, great, who's this person? Why are they joining the show? Give us the like 30 seconds about what's interesting about you.
Yes. So I'm Julia Cheek. I'm the founder and CEO of EverlyWell. We are based in Austin. We are about to celebrate our 5-year anniversary, which is hard to believe. But probably the most interesting thing about me starting this company is I started a company in the blood testing space in in the direct-to-consumer space coming with no entrepreneurial background or healthcare background whatsoever, right? Um, and had every kind of X in the box of why you were right.
You were a consultant, right?
I was a management consultant, and I went at Deloitte, went and got my MBA, had a really traditional Harvard, had a really traditional corporate—
Sam's all about the pedigrees. Yeah, I hate it. I don't care. Sam's like, Harvard? Okay, I'm in.
Yeah, there's definitely some interesting interesting ties, I think, that turned me on to being an entrepreneur when I was there, but certainly, like, I was really on the corporate path, and then had this idea when I was working at MoneyGram, and left my job to do it, and I can confidently say 100% of people who know me was like, "This is definitely gonna fail." Yeah. "There's no way it's gonna work." So what's the company do? Yeah, so, when I was, 5 years ago, when I was working at MoneyGram, I had a bunch of all these unexplained health symptoms. This is super common, which you hear from women in their late 20s and their 30s, as they have chronic fatigue, aches and pains. They're not taken seriously at doctors. And so I went to 5 or 6 different doctors on good health insurance, and each of them ran different blood tests. I never got my results. I paid over $2,500 out of pocket. Nothing material showed up or was communicated to me.
What do you mean you never got your results? Like, you personally didn't receive it?
I personally— the doctor looks at it, even if they called me like, I missed the call. Nobody ever called. They said, well, I'll call you if anything's abnormal. Well, like, what does that mean? You tested 100 different things. Like, just because something's not totally out of whack doesn't mean there's not interesting or useful information there. So I sat down and I looked at the health insurance landscape, and I thought, man, people are gonna have to start paying for all this in a more meaningful way than we are today. And I'm at least confident that my cohort of women between like 20 25 and 45 can't get the testing that they need.
Right.
And I think I can solve that. So it really started out, honestly, not that it wasn't a big vision, but it was a little bit like if you, if you think about the first group you're solving a problem for, that's what we launched for. So today we have 35 different tests on EverlyWell.com, on Amazon, Target, CVS, Kroger. We work with Humana and we offer consumer-initiated testing for everything from STI testing, heart health, food sensitivity, etc.
Basically, is it every test?
It's like 90% of common test coverage. Did you raise money from the doctor? I've raised over $50 million from—
5-0, you said?
5-0, from West and East Coast VCs. That was after, obviously, having like 3 rounds of clawing my way through funding, and then suddenly things did get easier, and we actually grew from zero to See, we did $40 million in sales last year. Yeah. In our third year in operation.
Is that okay?
No coronavirus, but fist pound for the $40 million.
Especially for the healthcare entrepreneur in me. I have to learn not to do that.
We were just talking about coronavirus. Do you guys sell coronavirus tests?
Yeah, you know, if we did, I think I wouldn't be here right now.
Right, yeah, you would be busy.
Doing something else, but I'm hopeful. There's progress, as we learned today from Gilead and a couple other companies. I'm hopeful someone's close on it.
On it.
But no, we don't do that, unfortunately.
Are those one-time purchases, the $40 million?
No, it's, I mean, it's a combination of new customer acquisition and repeat. We have a really healthy repeat business because a lot of our tests are things like cholesterol.
It's not recurring is what I mean.
It's not recurring. We do have enterprise contracts that are recurring for Medicare.
Right.
But it's a mix of what I would call one-time repeat and then actual recurring contracts, which is, there's challenges, there's good and bad. I think when you have a one-time heavy business up front. You have to build a good set of unit economics from the get-go so that you're not just optimizing on this like promise of payback.
Right.
Right, so that's been good for us. On the other hand, we've had to be super, super disciplined in a way that I think some consumer brands haven't been.
Right. And so you're based out of Austin. You do this D2C at-home test that then gets sent to a lab, a partner lab. They analyze it. You get the full report. It's like, Here's everything. Here's what's interesting about this. You can share it. It's like the way that it should be. Like, if you didn't even— you didn't have to like invent this. If you just asked a layperson, you're like, how should this work? That's the description. And then you just made that like happen in real life.
