In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books that I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate.
I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those.
👉 A Founder’s Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your First 1,000 Community Members (First Round Review)
➡️ Great article about how to build a community, to test your assumptions, where to focus. Some details on the craft of copywriting are really worth reading.
A community of CPOs:
Spun up a community aimed at helping Chief People Officers navigate the COVID crisis. It was a simple offering with a very small membership: just 25 HR leaders who convened to share the best resources on pandemic response, shifting to remote work, and all the other emerging challenges their companies would face in 2020.
A Chief People Officer needs to have more than data and metrics on their own company — they need to know what’s happening outside of their four walls. What are the top companies in our industry doing? What’s best practice? Who’s built the best playbook for this? Those are questions you can only answer by bringing experts together. That’s where community comes in.
Over the course of the next 12 months, that kernel of an idea evolved into the world’s largest network for hyper-growth Chief People Officers (now called CPOHQ), counting over 1,000 people executives from companies like Roblox, Glossier, and Figma as members.
➡️ I think it could be an inspiration to us at Alan. We have great interactions with HRs but have not built a community yet.
Raising its Series A in under 2 weeks, bringing over 100 Chief People Officers onto their cap table.
➡️ Great idea.
How they started with a very simple MVP:
Run the cheapest test of all: an email campaign.
A quick test to validate a few different ideas for the direction in which to pivot. “We queued up several outbound email campaigns targeting CHROs advertising different ideas we were considering building: A tool to help analyse the impact of layoffs, a remote work productivity suite, and an exclusive community for CPOs and CHROs. We hadn’t built any of those things yet, but we knew we could build any of them within a month.
The email campaign advertising our community idea got higher engagement than any email I’ve ever written in my life.
➡️ Great email.
For everyone who responded to our initial advertising email and expressed interest in the community, we put them on a waiting list.
We built the first version of the product in one weekend.
The first version of the product left a lot to be desired. “It was a really bad MVP. You didn’t even have the ability to communicate with other members. It was just a static, single-page of resources. I was personally curating the best resources about COVID that were helpful to CPOs and posting them on the forum page.
We manually updated content with fresh articles on a daily basis. We wanted this to be the hub where, instead of going to CNN or wherever you get your news, we create the habit of spending 5-10 minutes on our CPO community to get COVID news as it relates to the people leader’s job.
➡️ We could start very small.
Who is the community for?
Define who your community is for and, even more importantly, who it’s not for.
You start with a community exclusively for C-level executives, and they’re pouring their hearts out, sharing their most personal challenges.
Knowledge management:
Make it easy for members to find the insights they need. “I noticed in my community discovery that countless Chief People Officers mentioned how frustrated they were with the ‘knowledge management’ of their existing networks. They kept seeing the same questions being asked over and over again, which discouraged them from sharing their wisdom.
➡️ Knowledge management has been a key driver in Alan since the beginning.
Where to build it?
Bet big on a standalone app, rather than a Slack or email group.
Some folks wanted to start by creating a Slack or email group, citing how low friction they are to join.
They are easy to join, but equally easy to forget.
We decided to create a standalone experience, building an entire web-app for our community from the beginning.
Momentum:
We also nudged logins with regular email reminders. “We would send 2-3 emails a week alerting folks of new content updates or new members that were joining the community. We were constantly building momentum.
Building an enduring community takes time. Be patient. A community has the same cold start problem as a marketplace.
➡️ Important and good idea.
I would ping the CPOs we had identified as power users and ask them to post an article or a resource I had found — even going as far as to draft their posts for them to make their lives easier. When you finally get to a dozen engaged members who are posting over and over again, it actually ends up organically spurring that behaviour from the rest of the community.
Co-create your roadmap with the community.
The team started experimenting with small roundtables: “I would facilitate with a notetaker on the call, and we’d bring together top-notch CPOs or CHROs to brainstorm their return to office timelines, their compensation philosophy, their analytics strategy, or whatever else was top of mind.
We’d condense the notes into a playbook that gets shared with each person in the community.
Onboarding:
The onboarding experience was high-touch in the early days. “I personally onboarded the first 50 members. We would hop on a call for 30 minutes and I would walk them through every single feature in the community and how to use it.
We still have someone on the community team onboard each person manually so we’re connecting with new members and providing that white-glove, concierge service from day one. It’s been instrumental to our success.
Founding principles & communication:
🏯 Building a company
👉 Carlos Brito - Creating an Ownership Culture (Join Colossus)
Non-working dollars is everything you spend in the company and you need some of those expenses that consumers don't care, are not willing to pay a premium for. Working dollars are everything that supports what you're doing that consumers value.
➡️ Super interesting way to split how you invest.
And what we do is, the micro loans to those families at subsidised rates so they can get connection to the grid. And believe it or not, after many, many campaigns of Stella Artois throughout its history, a campaign that was the most successful was the one that connected Stella Artois to the Water.org's purpose, which is to bring water to families that have no access. And it was very simple. It was, you buy this chalice we give a family five years of access to water.
➡️ Inspirational campaign.
A lot of consumers sometimes they want to do some things to help others, but they don't know how to start.
➡️ Finding ways for members to help each other and help the healthcare system would be a very powerful idea.
👉 “Airbnb's Brian Chesky: ‘We died and were reborn.’” (Master of Scale)
And that's what we did, but we didn't try to make a decision that we thought people would agree with or to get applauded.
One of the other things I've learned in a crisis is you got to make principle decisions, not business decisions.
A business decision is, "I'm going to do this thing and then people are going to applaud me for it. And the business is going to go up."
The problem with that is you're trying to predict the outcome. And in a crisis, you can't predict the outcome.
So I said, "We're going to make principle decisions." Meaning if all is lost, how do we want to be remembered? So let go of the outcome. Anchor on first principles.
🗞 In the news
📱Technology
👉 Amazon More Than Doubles Base Salaries Amid Battle for Talent (GeekWire)
Amazon will double its maximum base salaries for corporate and tech workers to $350,000 as the company battles with competitors to retain and attract talent.
People who have MetaMask wallets (which just passed 10 million).
Roughly 100 million people worldwide own BTC. 56 million people use Coinbase.
➡️ The numbers are huge!!!
New project that looks incredibly simple but points to one of the ways that wallet-first interfaces might work: Playground.
I’d never been to the site before, but as soon as I connected my MetaMask, it knew which NFTs I owned, and gave me access to chats with other people who own those NFTs.
➡️ Could we automatically connect similar members in our communities? I think it is very smart.
👉 Henry Schuck - ZoomInfo: The Go-To-Market Platform (Join Colossus)
A really robust data foundation of businesses and people at those businesses who make decisions, contact information for those people, and then software to actually engage with them, and signals that come through that tell sellers and marketers when the right time is to engage with those buyers.
➡️ Do you use ZoomInfo in Europe?
👉 Scale: Rational in the Fullness of Time(NotBoring)
Scale highlights that companies like Brex and Flexport use its Document product, which it launched in April 2020 -- Brex for invoices, and Flexport for logistics paperwork. Document is significant because Scale not only labels data, but works with customers to build custom models. Brex doesn’t have an AI team working on the model; they outsource it to Scale.
Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras told me that they use Scale to build a one-click bill pay product that takes an invoice, extracts the data, and lets the recipient pay in one click.
“Not only was the extraction rate of the ML model better,” he said, “the integration between the ML models and humans was special. You need accuracy for a one-click invoice pay, and putting humans in the loop helped us trust the accuracy.” With specifically-built invoice extraction solutions, the accuracy was in the 70% range, but using Scale, “with humans, we get very close to 100%.”
Automate: Scale released Document in April 2020. Document uses Scale-built machine learning models to process and extract data from documents. It’s Scale’s first product that gives customers the output -- trained models -- rather than just the input -- labeled data -- and could replace the need for AI/ML teams entirely in some cases.
Collect: Scale’s homepage currently has a waitlist for a new product that will help companies collect data. It highlights the ability for companies to gather text and audio data in 50+ languages from 70+ countries.
“The APIs are so good, they have open source data sets, the documentation is clean.
🏥 Healthcare
👉 Oviva grabs $80M for app-deliverer healthy eating programs (Techcrunch)
It’s built a blended support offering that combines personalized care (provided by healthcare professionals) with digital tools for patients that help them do things like track what they’re eating, access support and chart their progress toward individual health goals.
It can point to 23 peer-reviewed publications to back up its approach — saying key results show an average of 6.8% weight loss at six months for those living with obesity;
➡️ Very interesting use of peer-reviewed publications.
Asked about competition, Oviva names Liva Healthcare and Second Nature as its closest competitors in the region.
Noom competes as a solution for self-paying consumers in Europe, as many other apps.
AWS launched AWS for Health, an aggregation of services and partnerships designed to streamline cloud migration for health systems and payers.
Microsoft unveiled Azure Healthcare API, a consolidation of APIs and ETL services designed to ingest healthcare data and transform it into FHIR.
Google announced Healthcare Data Engine, an end-to-end data platform for healthcare analytics and interoperability. The company says its ingestion engine has a 90% success rate when transforming health data to FHIR.
Goodbye, Health. Google is dismantling its 3-year-old health division, and its chief executive — Dr. David Feinberg — is leaving the company. Google Health’s staff will be transferred to other divisions across the company. Business Insider.
👉 YuLife nabs $70M at a $346M valuation for its gamified, wellness-oriented approach to life insurance (TechCrunch)
The app — built by veterans of the gaming industry — is designed around the concept of different environments, currently covering forest, ocean, desert and mountains, which YuLife collectively terms its “Yuniverse.” (This incidentally also became a template for the company’s HQ design in London.)
Within each of these environments, users are encouraged to walk, cycle, meditate and do other activities to get around their environments in a healthy way, while at the same time being able to compare their progress against other co-workers. There is a degree of personalization in everyone’s experience, in that one person leaning into one activity over another seems to produce different subsequent scenarios.
👉 An update from Healthily (formerly Your.MD) (livehealthily)
Ads in healthcare:
The Live Healthily website is attracting high quality (always medically vetted) healthcare advertisers, who are seeking relevant users looking for the appropriate product or service.
We developed a purpose-built Ad Stack (case study here) and top notch Ad Ops and Sales Teams with the result that revenue has grown ten-fold since June! Gross margins of 80%-90%.
AI Triage:
Our AI triage platform has now reached accuracy comparable with that of a doctor and provides safe triage 97.8% of the times (extrapolated from a totally independent study by Imperial College London and the Royal College of General Practitioners - pre-print available here). We are licensing the AI on a SaaS model with a number of national health services and major retailers in our pipeline. Gross margins of 80%-90%.
💚 Alan
👉 🎉 Alan celebrated its 6 year anniversary on 10th February 2022
We are proud to celebrate our 6-year Alanniversary! We are thankful to Alaners for being part of this very unique journey. We are incredibly grateful to all our members and partners for their trust and support. It is only the beginning!
We are very happy where we are today and we are excited for our journey ahead. Our mission is to give everyone access to a healthy & productive life, empowering the body and the mind.
We are proud of the culture we are building at Alan and we intend to keep innovating in the way we work. Our values allow us to resonate with the best talent in the world, who are joining us in the journey to build the all-in-one health partner for our members.
We launched our new business unit Alan-as-a-Service (AaaS).
Alan as a Service is a solution where other insurance companies can use our platform for their members. Our platform spans our apps, web interface, claim processing engine, our care experts, and our healthcare services.
Lamie Mutuelle, a health insurance company that currently covers 85,000 people has placed their faith in us, as our first customer for the service.
It’s already over! Please share JC’s Newsletter with your friends, and subscribe👇
Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!
