Brianna Socci is an emerging industry leader in digital healthcare. She founded UBERDOC as a direct-to-doctor platform for individuals to get immediate access to doctors without insurance obstacles. She merged marketing expertise and technology innovation to transform the bureaucracy of healthcare. She successfully supported customers through digital marketing, platform development, and business growth initiatives. Brianna led multi-million dollar investment rounds, making UBERDOC one of the few female-founded companies to receive venture capital funding in 2019.
Brianna has been featured in several business and technology initiatives, including BossBabe, HealthTech, and was a TiE NY Pitch finalist. She has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and leadership from Binghamton University’s School of Management. Brianna lives in Boston with her daughter and enjoys traveling and exploring new restaurants.
What is UBERDOC all about?
UBERDOC is a healthcare platform where patients can schedule priority appointments with a specialist. Patients pay a single, transparent price, to bypass referrals, delays and insurance authorizations. By paying cash, and going outside insurance for the initial consultation, we are able to provide patients with an appointment within 12 hours, versus the average wait time of about 24 days. With UBERDOC, individuals take back control of their own healthcare away from bureaucratic policies and processes. We believe everyone should have access to the healthcare they want from the doctors they choose whenever they choose. UBERDOC connects the patient directly to the doctor, and nobody can stand in their way.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I founded UBERDOC with Dr. Paula Muto, who is a general and vascular surgeon. She has been in solo-private practice for over 25 years, and has seen firsthand how difficult it is for patients to access the care they need. We wanted to develop a simple solution that involved the only two stakeholders that matter in healthcare, the doctor and patient.
Prior to UBERDOC, I went to business school and studied marketing and leadership. I previously worked in advertising and was a digital marketing strategist. Throughout my work in engineering, advertising, and business, I found I had a knack for organizational leadership, marketing, building networks, and connecting value. Dr. Muto and I came together and built UBERDOC from the ground up – to connect doctor value to impatient patients.
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
Access to financing has been a big challenge. VCs invest in entrepreneurs they know and feel safe and comfortable with. Paula and I are not only first-time founders, but also both women, and female founders have historically secured very little VC capital.
This challenge has been bitter-sweet because although it has constricted our ability to achieve sustainable revenue and scale, we have done amazing things on small budgets. We have learned to consider every dollar we spend, and only invest money in the strategies and initiatives that will move the needle of growth for us.
A business can only grow at the pace of its tightest constraint, whether that be leadership, product or service, resources, customers, or any other critical element of your business. For UBERDOC, our constraint has been cashflow, and we found some creative ways to work with that constraint.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I think all entrepreneurs do. But I’ve learned so much from them.
Be careful not to spread your focus too thin on multiple objectives. When you juggle too many projects at once, you’re not executing any of them really well. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t continue to network and research partnerships, but be aware of what you and your team have the bandwidth for at any given time.
Another mistake we have made is pivoting to ideas or suggestions without assessing their credibility and importance. Whether you’re talking to an advisor, an investor or even a customer, they may have recommendations for how you should run your business. You should always listen to feedback and advice, but be mindful. We’ve spent a lot of time going down various paths, implementing new features and ideas that just weren’t the right thing to do at that time. We made it a point to monitor and assess these as we went, then adapt or kill the initiative if necessary. Fail quickly, and get back on track.
But I think the biggest mistake many entrepreneurs make is being unwilling to make a mistake. You have to dare greatly to achieve greatly. Entrepreneurs go where others are unwilling to venture. Think about that. Every great entrepreneur you know refused to shy away from the risk of making mistakes. There is a famous story of the founder of FedEx, Frederick Smith, who wrote an economics paper at Yale outlining his idea for an overnight delivery service. The professor didn’t see the value in it, so Smith built FedEx and proved it. If you believe in it, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. They have a right to be wrong, and you have to risk failure to succeed.
You can recover from any failure or mistake. Pick yourself up, learn from it, pay the price, and move on. But you won’t recover from never taking the chance, or quitting when it gets hard – because that’s when you choose to give up on your dream. And once you stop dreaming, it’s over.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
I make it a priority to stay in touch with business news. I am constantly watching trends in the industry and observing what other companies are doing. I have a few favorite podcasts and newsletters that make it really easy. As an entrepreneur, you need to follow where the money is going.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
- Pitch Anything – This book provides some great practices for selling your idea within your organization and throughout your industry.
- Influence; The Psychology of Persuasion – This is a soon-to-be classic on influencing people through clever and borderline-manipulative tactics.
- Radical Focus – The book was really helpful in teaching me how to prioritize the flood of demands going on every day in my business.
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
My best friend Hannah and I had a babysitting business when we were about 12 years old. It was called the “Tag Team Babysitters Club” and we had the cutest little business cards that we created on a word document. We would go door-to-door in our neighborhood to offer our services. Within a few months we had a good clientele. We were childcare moguls in our neighborhood.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
I am learning about effective agile product development because we need to advance our product faster. Agile development is all about making fast, continuously improving, targeted iterations of your product rather than developing the perfect product right from the start. You rank all the features you want, then take the most important features, build them into the product, and push it out to your consumers. Then you start building the next highest-ranking features while you gain feedback from the market. That feedback may identify new features that are more important than the others on the waiting list, so they push forward in the ranking and get into the next iteration. That way, you are always building your product to align with what the customer demands.
As a small business on a shoestring budget, we needed to focus on building a minimum viable product while developing an evolving strategy for where we need to go next. With agile development, we are able to get new features out quickly, so we can learn from customer feedback and adjust the sails as we go. We need to prioritize pace over perfection, and we need to make every dollar count.
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
How critical investors are! For a while we thought maybe we could be a unicorn without any investors. All we need to do is be profitable, but there is a very large difference between small business efforts and big business vision. Growth plans are constrained by people and funding. I wish I understood the importance of cash flow from the very beginning. We are living on a startup budget but trying to do national initiatives, which makes investors critical in order to scale.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Our large network of specialists is one of our biggest assets as a company. The more physicians we have listed on our platform, the closer we are to meeting patient demand. A strategy that has helped us achieve our physician network is robust marketing automation. I remember a time when I was literally sending individual emails to physicians. With marketing automation, our sales team doesn’t have to remember to follow-up with every customer. With a few email templates and some criteria, we are able to reach thousands of people at once.
You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you can’t cultivate a customer to use it, your business will go nowhere. We have worked hard to cultivate both doctor and patient networks to build our business.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new startup, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
One hundred percent of the money would go towards customer acquisition. I would ignore all the fancy bells and whistles, like flyers and brochures. Without a customer, the rest doesn’t matter. What does it take for you to get your first customer? Is it a meeting? Is it a product demo? Is it a proposal? Do whatever it takes to get your first customer. Once you get a customer, you can get your next $1,000.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
There are very few constants in entrepreneurship. From emotions, to partnerships, and even team members, things are constantly changing in a startup. You have to be flexible and adaptable. There is a lot of value in the ability to switch gears quickly. Don’t let the tough times discourage you and your progress, but also don’t let the successes go to your head. Adapt and overcome.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
My favorite productivity tip that I swear by is something I call “Inbox Zero”. By the end of the day, ideally by the middle of the day, I have zero unread emails in my inbox. It is so easy to get buried in emails, but take the time and go through them, and unsubscribe when appropriate. You never know what surprises are sitting right in front of you.
What is your favorite quote?
“Here’s to strong women, may we know them, may we be them, may we raise them.”
- We use Slack for all internal company communication. By having all conversations in one place, it’s SO much easier to find what you’re looking for. My favorite feature is being able to send my team members funny GIFs.
- Gsuite is a big hit at our organization. All of Gsuite’s tools make it super simple to share and collaborate all of our team’s projects.
- The most important tool we utilize to grow our business is HubSpot. We use it to manage our customer development and onboarding, as well as automate our standard coordination processes. As I mentioned earlier, marketing automation enables us to scale our breadth and depth of customer engagement. Our networks are the life of our business, so a customer relationship management tool like HubSpot is critical.
How is running a company different than what you thought it would be?
In a startup, everyone wears multiple hats and there isn’t one team member whose bandwidth isn’t stretched pretty thin. Serving so many roles in the organization is not something I expected. We are always busy and need to prioritize tasks. As a leader, I am often pulled away from the tasks I wanted to get done today to resolve higher priority issues.
I also didn’t realize how much time would be spent managing people, versus getting my own individual tasks done. You grow up practicing how to manage yourself and get your responsibilities done. When you run a company, you have to learn to manage operations and get everything done through all the people executing on your team. You have to delegate more so that you can focus on leading.
How can readers get in touch with you?
I would love to meet your readers. They can contact me directly at brianna@uber-docs.com for any further questions or discussions.
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