How Get Well CEO Todd Johnson grew Get Well to $47M revenue and 70 customers in 2025.

he sold his first company for 15 million bucks a nice Financial exit for him now plunging back into the world this time deciding to raise capital for the idea instead of bootstrapping they've raised $21 million for health Loop which is really playing in the patient engagement space and the communication between patient and doctors a very special relationship founded and well he joined in 2013 again they're based up there in San Francisco currently serving about 70 doctors and organizations that pay on average call 120 Grand per year this is 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 to 56 million he help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka this is episode 741 coming up tomorrow morning we're going to learn from Amanda Newman she crowns real estate agents as Mayors in cities and she's grown from 700k to 6.4 million in ARR in Under 12 months how does she do it hello everybody my guest today is Todd Johnson he's a Serial healthc care Information Technology entrepr are committed to building a great product team and Company he's a proven track record in cultivating great ideas in a great businesses while striving to build great company cultures and Brands before his current company Health Loop Todd was the founder and CEO of salar Inc a Baltimore Maryland based provider of acute care physician charge capture and documentation Solutions Todd are you ready to take us to the top I sure am why how do you get excited about Healthcare man I would be beating my head against the wall I'd give up in like two seconds and I'd run the other direction ah look you know healthc care makes up a sixth of our economy it is an insanely complex convoluted and unbelievable industry um but at the core of it everyone is a healthcare Seeker right every needs the healthcare delivery system at some point in their life and also at the core of it the healthcare delivery system has attracted people that really want to do good Physicians nurses and so you can find a lot of good opportunities to introduce change in the system that I think um desperately needs it yeah so okay so before we talk about health Loop tell me about your your first gig here is it it's pronounced salar right SAR correct SAR okay what was that obviously what did that company do and how did you exit that yeah so I think the simple example is it was a a company that began to replace some of the really mundane sort of paper processes inside of hospitals um at the point of service with tablet OS if you can remember what that was and then ultimately of iPad and iPhone based solutions they capture information at the bedside between the physician and the patient and automate a bunch of business backend processes that are necessary to keep a hospital and a Physician Group running and I guess the second part of your question how do you exit um you know the the the race to digitize medicine is dominated by electronic medical record vendors and the medical transcription vendors and we sold that company to the nation's second largest medical transcription firm in 2011 for how much yeah it was a a $15 million exit that was a company that had no Venture Capital so it was me and my partners and U and our employees it was a it was a actually a nice exit that was your that was that was your first kind of big financial event and it was enough for you to really be good for life if you spent your money carefully yeah yeah depending if I can keep my spending and my life spending habits in check what's the most you spend money on personally per month right now you know we live in Silicon Valley so rent baby yeah it's it's a pretty astonishing Market I wish I was in commercial real estate in silon Valley or do you own your place or do you rent no we're renting why not just why not buy it so it you know builds Equity well I think there's a couple of things you know I'm an East coaster and uh after we sold our first company my wife and I moved the family to Silicon Valley and um the transition there was rapid so we didn't have time to really understand the market and so we started renting and I guess over time you get comfortable with where you are and our kids were in school and it just seems like it's the right answer for us and I guess the second thing is the the real for those that live in Silicon Valley they understand the The Madness of that market um it's just hard to get right with the price escalations there yeah makes makes good sense so let's fast forward now so that exit you said was in what year again uh 2011 2011 $15 million exit there good financial event for everyone no Venture Capital what your Jalan Health Loop in so Health Loop was actually initiated in 2009 by a physician in San Francisco he's the founder um for a few years it was more or less an idea on a piece of paper and a dream the board found me um and I joined in early 2013 to turn it from idea into company um the founder is a brilliant guy just a creative individual who um who had a really simple um Revelation which is he had a patient that uh was otherwise pretty healthy she was in her mid-60s had pneumonia he put her on an antibiotic assumed everything would be fine because it usually is and then he got a call from the Intensive Care Unit at Cal Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco seven days later and this woman was almost dead and she was on a ventilator in respiratory failure and its first question is why the hell didn't she call me right if if she wasn't getting better and if this medicine wasn't working she should have reached out and then the second really obvious sort of observation the shame on me why didn't I call her as her doctor I should have been touching base and checking in to see how she was doing and and that was really the Genesis of Health Loop and when I met Jordan schlain um in late 2012 he's the guy who originally had the idea yeah he's just yeah the physician founder and he's still active and a board member and a wonderful friend um you know this basic concept that we can um do more with patients and check in to make sure that get better health I think is a universally good thing nobody sort disagrees with that but secondly the market timing and our transition of the economy um the healthcare economy from a transactional system to a value based system and we can talk a little bit more about that if you'd like um make makes for good timing for innovations that can help achieve better quality Health Care at lower cost how do you make money though yeah so you know it's it's been an interesting Evolution at Health lo you know just to back up on the technology what it is is you know Health Loop is a a platform that automatically sends push notifications to patients after a new diagnosis or before and after a surgery to continuously sort of check in and give you a daily dose of here's what you need to know do and expect today and then Health Loop assesses hey how are you doing today and asks you a series of questions to identify do you have an issue and um you know if you have an issue we notify your doctor that doctor follows up we get you better health care I think if you if you roll back the clock five years ago um there's really not a great business model around improving the quality of care yeah who pays for the patient or the doctor right and and so you know in in that world in fact um failure was rewarded like if if you were admitted to the emergency room and they patched you up and then you come back a week later that's just more Revenue yeah and this is a fairly cynical approach there's plenty of true though listen if people want admit it or not the world runs on incentive structure so if you if you have a backwards incentive structure the thing's not going to work work yes so when when you think about layering this kind of capability that elevates sort of higher quality care and reduces cost there's multiple parties that benefit right patients benefit they get better health care they get better outcom as a business we've decided that we don't think the right strategy is to monetize this through patience while I think there's there's precedent for it there's other companies that do um we sort of believe every patient deserves this physicians in their teams benefit by having improved po greater patient satisfaction greater reputation in the community and increasingly there are strong economic incentives many of which were sort of spurred by the Affordable Care Act and also sort of the unaffordability of of Commercial Insurance um to make doctors accountable that is the business Lane we've chosen before we kind of dig in on on on how we do that you know other parties that benefit are people like insurance carriers right um and so we believe that in order to earn and retain the trust of a patient that's sick and going through one of these episodes you have to you have to channel their doctor that's the relationship of trust in healthcare and if you can tie into that you actually get the level of participation from patients that's truly meaningful so again tell me how you short show so tell me how you make money yeah so we have an Enterprise subscription sales model we sell to healthc care Delivery Systems so Health Systems and doctors we sell in buckets of cases a year patient cases so up to 2,000 cases up to 10,000 patients per year typical first year...