How Empoweryu CEO Laura Mcintosh grew Empoweryu to $15.4K revenue and 25 customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is laura mcintosh she's a phd and ceo of empower you a silicon valley care management platform that improves elder care with continuous risk assessment in the home her background includes three startups training from john hopkins in stanford manager at a scientific consulting company and caring for her own parents at home laura are you ready to take us to the top all right let's go all right empower you what's the company doing what's your business model how do you make money so we are a care management platform that places sensors into the home of a high medical risk person in order that we can then describe to their caregivers how they're doing on a daily basis so we make money by partnering with a company like a home care provider or a health company health provider who gets a return from knowing that that person is okay bef or having problems before they end up in the emergency room interesting and um a lot of people like there's like necklaces where if someone falls like an alarm goes off describe to me actually what does your physical piece of hardware look like how does it act so we buy hardware off the shelf we repurpose home security type equipment because what you've just described is like a necklace and sometimes there are um watches that do the same thing but a lot of older people aren't interested in wearing those things and in fact even with fitbit only about 10 to 15 percent of people will wear one of those devices for longer than a couple of months so if you're looking for a chronic care situation like a person who is you know 75 has diabetes and hypertension and wants to live in their own home you want to have data from them for more than a couple of months so what we do is have sensors on the wall so that we can have that person go about their normal life without having to do anything there's nothing to wear nothing to charge there's no cameras all we do is event sensing so we understand if the front door opens and closes if the tv turns on and off if there's motion in a room and then we use advanced mathematics on our background to derive the activity pattern of that person and to describe then mathematically eating sleeping moving around the house and use of devices so am i your favorite soaps or grandpa always watches the tv news at five o'clock that becomes an event in the day that we can count on to know if they're on their normal schedule or not got it yeah this is so this is like usually you know uh grandpa gets home from his afternoon jog at 3 30 p.m today it's four and we haven't seen that door open yet something might be wrong so what you've just said is very interesting because we believe that our target market is for high medical risk people in fact there's a paper out of berkeley that shows that the only people who are willing to be monitored in their own home for a reason like this is somebody who's at high medical risk so grandpa's not likely to go out for a jog you know if he was then he would really need to be monitored sorry is the example though accurate the tv didn't come on at the usual time correct so in fact we have what we call fall and stroke detection because let's say the grandpa's home and we know that because his front door or his exit door hasn't opened and closed and so suddenly at two o'clock the house gets quiet right and at five o'clock he would normally turn on the tv and he didn't at 605 he would normally turn off the tv or start dinner and he didn't so suddenly these normally reliable events go missing that tells us that there's a problem that we need to alert a caregiver so laura i hate to be so pessimistic but these signals are an hour two through i mean aren't they dead by then well it depends what the problem is there are many people who fall and are on the floor for a couple of days in fact one of our test users very definitely was um willing to be a test user because one of her friends fell and was on the floor for two days before she was discovered and at that point she was in bad enough shape that she'll never return home and my test user says i don't want that to be me and the thing about an emergency detection that will know within a minute if somebody's fallen is that it has to be a camera or a wearable device whereas what we're doing is by inference and so an inference takes time to develop so i would describe us as a backup for an emergency button yeah i was going to say so why is it better why doesn't everyone just buy the necklace because the older folks aren't willing to wear it if you'll recall 10 to 15 of people will wear these things beyond about three months and so that 85 percent of people who just says look i can't be bothered anymore those are the people that we are actually helping got it and so how do you make money is it a sas platform yes it's a sas platform at the moment we are supplying the hardware like i say we buy off the shelf so we don't have to do the manufacturing but our value add is in the analytics and in the mathematical derivation of a pattern so that we would be able to report to a health care provider in the future about things like grandma's slowing down you know she used to be able to walk between the bedroom and the kitchen in seven seconds and now it's taking her 14 seconds maybe you should bring her in before she falls so who's paying the health care provider or grandma or grandma's daughter who's taking care of her so we believe that the payer should be the health care provider because what we're doing for them is providing a return on investment that in this world of medicare advantage and other payment programs where it's a capped payment those are the folks that get their profit by preventing problems rather than by treating problems okay it used to be that somebody go to the hospital and they would get reimbursed for whatever the expenses are these days a lot of healthcare programs are now saying we'll pay you three thousand dollars a month and you take care of grandma so in order to get profits they have to provide care that prevents three thousand dollars worth of costs in that month and so what does the average customer pay per month would you say that's a good question um we have an upfront cost and then a subscription fee and if you look at us and our competitors the average for a subscription cost ranges from about 30 a month to somewhere north of dollars a month but that seems to be the sweets is that also where you're at yes you fall okay and just be clear that's the health care provider paying 30 bucks a month for grandma uh that's like one one patient right yes plus the equipment plus the equipment okay but but i'm just talking the sas fee is between 30 and 60 bucks sure okay okay makes sense and when did you launch company what year so we actually have been in testing for the last three years and we are currently in launch because we are moving from a direct to consumer testing situation into this b to b to c that we've been describing now yep okay so 2015 you start kind of coding developing 2018 you've just now launched how many customers have you scaled to today in a very short amount of time so uh we are looking at about 25 homes at the moment so we're not big but we have been applying to the accelerator programs in order to reach that healthcare provider who's looking for a company that will help take them to that level remote patient monitoring is where the terminology is and that's where we can scale is with a healthcare provider so laura just to be clear you're about to hit a big metric it sounds like 25 homes 30 bucks a home it's about 750 bucks a month so is that about right yeah okay yeah but of course we can't run a company on that so we have to worry about you have to start somewhere you have to start somewhere though right absolutely have you bootstrapped or raised uh we've been bootstrapping we have a couple of uh the friends family and fool type investors um but we are now looking to raise a much larger round to pay company operations how much are you hoping to raise an ideal world in the ideal world we're looking for two million dollars which will fund our operations for 18 months plus be able to do some pilots for us there's a lot of healthcare providers who are interested but they also want the startup company who doesn't have any money to help provide the costs of the pilot so we have to be able to not only show traction to our investors but we have to show investors that the healthcare companies are interested so it becomes this chicken and egg argument of course um about how to get going but that includes having to get money for a pilot raising 2 million and what valuation do you hope to raise that up we're looking at convertible notes so there's no valuation what cap so we are looking for a um 10 million cap okay okay and so what do you i mean how's it going have you found a lead yet so i've been talking uh to a number of groups and no we do not have a lead yet uh i have um well no we don't have the lead yet is the answer okay and how are you walking through you got these first 25 homes how are you getting these customers um they've all been by referral by word of mouth um we've been to various resources fairs we've talked with various friends of ours and it's pretty amazing the number of people if you start...