How Emedicalfusion CEO Andre Etherly grew Emedicalfusion to $318.8K revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is andre etherly he is the founder of emedical fusion llc he holds a masters of science information systems technology from george washington university seeing the unmet needs of direct pay medical practices he founded the company to design and build solutions that enable direct pay practices to succeed and excel both clinically and financially andre are you ready to take us to the top absolutely sir thank you all right e-medical fusion so first thing what's the revenue model here is it is it a sas company it is a sas company yes we have a couple of other revenue streams as well but principally we're a sas company okay that's great to understand and then take us back to the product so give me an example of a customer that's using you guys and how they use you so a customer that's using us would typically be some form of a direct pay practice it might be a concierge practice or it might be an integrative medical practice or functional medical practices these are all sort of synonymous but they all exist out there in the industry um to the tune of some about 12 of the medical practices are direct pay meaning that they do not accept insurance so that's our first criteria if you want to use the medical fusion we don't support an insurance type practice at all all of our practices are purely direct pay meaning that the customer the patient is paying them directly for services we don't have the interference of insurance okay interesting and who's actually paying you the consumer or the hospital or the or the service person the consumer well in terms of who's providing who's paying medical fusion no it's of course the service provider the physician so our clients are either mostly smaller physician practices sometimes larger physician practices or physician group practices even that have you know locations around the country so okay but it's always basically a medical professional typically physicians but also other allied providers in other words other non-physician medical service providers as well i see and what do they pay on average per month would you say um average if it's just a single practitioner they're going to pay somewhere around you know 500 a month 475 is the actual starting point and is that like per location that well that that's for a single practitioner if we add additional locations it's another 150 per location okay interesting and and how many locations practitioners and additional practitioners are also 150 per additional practitioner okay so if you look at the average kind of company that joins you how many locations and practitioners on average like what's what's the company pay you per month on average all together yeah two to two to three so you know maybe 700 or so two to three practitioners is fairly typical for us i see so each kind of we don't get the really large ones um we do have a few of the large group practices where they might have multiple locations things like men's clinics that have multiple locations around the country or women's clinics so we do have some of those that have multiple locations around the country they might have 20 25 30 locations in different places around the country and we have some of those as clients as well i got it okay and when did you launch company what year uh 2011 2011 and then fast forward today have you raised capital or bootstrapped mostly bootstrap we had one small investor back uh in 2012 and 13 uh but since then it's mostly been bootstrapped okay and how much did you raise in 2013 about a million bucks okay a million and uh do you still work closely with that investor or no they they're kind of a silent partner not actually no they they kind of we divested with them about 2013. uh okay okay very good and then um again over the past what is that i guess it's been seven years over the past seven years how many customers have you grown to yeah we've grown to i mean we don't exactly talk about the exact number of customers but i mean we've got uh because it depends on how you're counting if you're counting the one customer with 30 locations there's 30 customers or one customer but i just call it around you know a couple hundred customers okay and no no i i yes so sorry i don't want to know the number of locations i just want to know like parent kind of companies right so so you're working it sounds like about a hundred kind of groups of physicians and locations right right it might be some of them might be just single docs some of them might have two or three docs some of them might have like i said we have a couple that have you know 25 30 locations yeah some one physician one location some three physicians four locations it just depends right okay very very good and then look i mean i can kind of multiply that 100 number times that 700 price point earlier you guys are doing about a million bucks per year right now on run rate uh we can call it that okay well just correct me if i'm wrong though i'm just multiplying those two numbers you're doing about 70 grand a month right now that's close enough okay and then in terms of growth so if you go back a year ago today how much were you doing then uh about three-fourths of that we've grown quite a bit in the last year oh wow that's incredible so teach us i mean how'd you grow that fast um we just you know for one hitting the big groups really helps you know as opposed to hitting one by ones if we you know when we get a hit uh where we get a client with 25 30 locations that typically really pushes the revenue up otherwise you know it's just word of mouth and difficult things we don't have a big staff so we don't have a big sales presence how many folks uh about ten all together ten and where's everyone based um they're based around the country and we have a few employees out of the country that on the development side okay both on show and offshore mostly remote that is correct yeah that's great i love that okay it's a remote uh all around and what's the breakdown so you have engineers you said offshore what are the rest of the employees what are they doing uh support i mean basically we do two things really right we develop software and uh test it and promote it into production and we gotta support it so really everybody else is doing support if you're not developing you're pretty much doing support sales marketing or sales sales marketing support okay how many folks sales marketing uh sales and marketing is just two okay including you including me i just say you gotta be the rainmaker you're the man you're the founder right that's right you'll get it you gotta go get it man i hear you very good and then look in any kind of sas company churn is really critical uh what is your churn today and how do you make sure to keep it low well i mean that's you know that's tough um i think in terms when you talk about charlie you talking about employees are you talking about customers what are you talking about i'm talking about customers churning yeah i mean what what tends to keep the customers from churning too much is that you know we have um in our in our model we give them a pretty steep discount if they sign into a three-year contract as opposed to a month-to-month so that's kind of what that's what kind of keeps the customer base pretty steady so they get a pretty significant pretty material discount to do a month to do a three-year contract okay so what do you know what your churn is annually right now it's less than five percent okay less than five percent revenue return per year yep okay that's look that's pretty healthy and then help us understand why it's so sticky i mean do you literally become basically their payment processor we are their payment processors so we're everything we're their everything solution everything from lead management all the way through to the ehr so we're documenting the all the charts and all the documentation of the charts all the e-commerce revenue we've got a lot of unique features that you know that that direct-pay practices need that they can't really find another tool set so we've got a few competitors out there but there's still a couple years behind us and we just keep adding new features literally every 45 days we have a new release that brings out new features so i think one of the things that makes it sticky is that we actively listen to our our customers so when they ask us for things we actually do it i know a lot of companies will say that but it might take three years before they ever bring it out we actually a customer might ask us for something and we'll take a look at it it might end up in the software in the next release so we're pretty responsive and i think that's what helps us to uh to be pretty sticky because you know the tool set some people feel like the software was almost built directly for them because it's it you know we've got so many as i call them switches that allows the software to kind of be used in many different ways by many different types of practices um and that's what i think helps to keep it sticky and the fact that we keep bringing out new features and how do you land new customers are you just traveling the country and selling one to one no it's all it's all done i mean sometimes we go to conferences where we know that our customers are aggregated so that's one way otherwise we don't really do much traveling the only time we'll travel is if it's a really large customer otherwise everything is done over the internet we use zoom meeting as our meeting tool and we uh we conduct you know demos and meetings and things of that nature over zoom meeting very good but we don't we...