How Fruitstreet CEO Laurence Girard grew Fruitstreet to $58.7M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Jose Aila he is a 17-year-old that doesn't want to go to college and he wants to start his own business for your chance to win a 100 bucks just like Jose every Monday morning simply subscribe to this podcast on iTunes right now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it top tribe you know I don't have a lot of time to waste that's why I use fresh books to send out invoices and make sure I'm collecting my money to get your free month go to Nathan lad /f freshbooks and enter the top in the how did You Hear About Us section Nathan ladka here this is episode 575 good morning everybody hope your jog is going well or your ride in is going smoothly and you have something to look forward to tomorrow we've got road luar coming up I simply asked will this mobile payment startup survive it's really on the edge we'll see top tribe good morning Nathan lka here our guest today is Lawrence Gerard he is the CEO and founder of fruit street.com he was a pre-med student in the undergraduate degree program at the Harvard University extension school for 2 years before he decided to pursue Fruit Street full-time and moved to San Francisco in high school he played soccer for the New York Red Bulls Academy as a goalkeeper which sparked his initial interest in health later he decided to pursue a career focused on social impact and spent a year volunteering in an emergency room at Huntington Hospital in Northshore Long Island Jewish Health System he's grown obviously since then now focused exclusively on Fruit Street Lawrence are you ready to take us to the top yes thanks for having me on the show yeah thanks for coming on man so tell us first what does Fruit Street do and how do you generate Revenue uh Fruit Street is a hippoc compliant tele medicine software product that's licensed to Health Care Professionals and it allows the healthc care professional to do hippoc compliant video consultations with their patients but also monitor their patients Health diet and lifestyle with medical devices wearable devices and mobile applications for example each patient that uses the software has a personal health record that integrates with Fitbit products to track physical activity and sleep Wireless bathroom scales FDA approved blood pressure costs and glucometers and then our mobile application which allows the patients to take pictures of their food get feedback from a register dietitian for example and so we use the software as a service business model where the healthc care professional will pay us a monthly licensing fee to use the software with the patients in their medical practice and then walk us through uh so it's obviously SAS company um fairly new but break down some of the numbers for us you were telling me before the show where do you guys at in terms of monthly recurring Revenue to date so we're at 15,000 a month in uh monthly recurring revenue and um you know the company started in May of 2014 and you know we've raised about $6 million of funding from 180 Physicians that have invested in the company as well so I want to talk about that in a second so you said 6 million from how many 180 correct yeah so I want to talk about that in a second uh but first breakdown that 15 grand and month they're curring revenue for us on average what's the customer paying you per month uh yeah so it's typically about $200 a month for the software uh and right now it's been mostly small medical practices but we're starting to do um institutional Pilots with larger institutions where if the pilots go well we could have sixf figure Enterprise contracts um as well and so the typical price for the software is $200 a month and how many current customers are you working with right now there's around 100 um customers in some cases we've given discounts which is kind of how it comes out to about 15,000 a month of Revenue but there's about 100 practices using the software right now and what is the uh just fill out the picture here a bit more in 2016 what was total revenue um so yeah I mean I don't have that number off the top of my head we're at about 100K annual um R what run rate right now we've generated about $130,000 of total revenue y um and so you know most of it came in 2016 there might have been a little a little bit in 2015 but most of it was in 2016 anyone that has started paying you have they anyone left what's your what's your gross customer turn per month uh yeah so I mean definitely the answer is yes um but I mean I would say we only lose about like 10% of our customers I mean when people sign up there annually or per month um it's on a I would say on an annual basis I mean we're we're still kind of getting into that phase where we're like tracking those metrics a little better we've been more focused on like kind of learning about like product features people want to build and now you know 2016 was about like let's build a minimum viable product that people are willing to pay for and now 2017 is about you know how do we scale from 15K a month of Revenue up to you know 100K a month of Revenue and like reduce the turn rate increase the lifetime value of the customers get more referrals from our existing customers and so now that we have the product we have we're going to be more focused on metrics like turn rate lifetime value the customer acquisition cost in 2017 you said you wanted to increase LTV do you know what that is now what's current lifetime value um yeah so it's I think it's about um we're using a software called bare metrics actually to track this um so actually I don't have a perfect answer for you so I think I'm going to hold off on that answer for now but um hopefully if you interview me again next year we'll have a better answer for you that's okay it's early I mean any lifetime value calculation now would be based off extrapolated data you know taking the arpo Divide you know times the number of months they're paying that arpo which is a Rel you know function of the churn right which you guys are still trying to finalize so it makes good sense um you launched in 2014 what's the team size to date yes so we have uh nine full-time employees on the sales side uh but we actually have an interesting joint venture agreement with another company called VC which is v.com they're the world's market leader in hippoc compliant tele medicine software they have about 52 full-time employees and about 10 of them uh work on Fruit Street on the design and Engineering side and so they own a portion of our company and develop our product through a joint venture agreement which would make the team size in total you know around 20 people um yeah do it does and where are you guys based uh so fruit streets in New York City in the financial district we're at a a Wei work location down here and then uh VC is in San Francisco Okay cool so let's let's break down I think an interesting thing you did here so you raised six million bucks from 180 folks walk us through the thinking behind that yeah so we really wanted the company to be funded by um Physicians instead of venture capital firms for multiple uh reasons so we feel that since we're developing a a medical product that we would have very valuable input from Physicians that could actually use the product with patients in their practice and give us feedback from their patients and their Healthcare Providers on how we can you know improve the software which is one reason why Physicians more valuable in many cases than a venture capitalist also the Physicians act as a sales network introducing us to potential um customers as well and then we also felt that the Physicians were more interested in not only getting a financial return on investment but having a social impact and so fruit Street's actually a public benefit corporation which means we are for-profit but we also write our social Mission into the bylaws of our company which is to prevent and treat lifestyle related disease using tele medicine wearable devices and mobile applications and the final point on this is that you know we like to think of it as if we needed to raise $25 million why not have 500 Physicians invest an average of $50,000 each and make this more of a Grassroots movement of Physicians that want to improve health care with technology uh rather than going down the traditional Venture Capital route best investor is your customer right right what are there any tax benefits to being a public benefit Corporation so there's no tax benefits um I mean the legal structure was started to give Founders and and well really board of directors members the option to make decisions that are not necessarily the most profitable but might take um societal impact into account the reason why we did it was because we wanted to attract investors and employees and partners that were primarily motivated by the social impact um and not primarily motivated by the uh Financial outcome and so we feel like that helped us attract uh you know those team members that were interested in a social Mission talk about dynamics of raising around financing it's hard enough if you have to get five investors to sign way more difficult 180 structurally how did you manage that process yeah so we reach all the Physicians through Linkedin advertising actually uh because about 75% of the Physicians are on...