Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Peter MacRobert, Founder of Capable Health, located in New York, NY, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Capable Health (www.capablehealth.com) empowers healthcare innovators to provide affordable, personalized, quality care at scale. Without Capable, it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars (up to two years) to launch a HIPAA-compliant mobile app from scratch, pricing many out of the opportunity. At Capable, we've developed the Operating System for Healthcare enabling providers to launch and scale their own HIPAA-compliant digital health solution — with 80% less time and money. We're initially focused on the rapidly-growing number of venture-backed digital health startups providing better patient experiences across diverse types of care: from allergy care and prenatal care to functional medicine and sleep coaching.

Our long-term vision is to be the ubiquitous Operating System for Healthcare, used by every healthcare builder, including life sciences, payers, hospital systems, and individual practitioners.

Tell us about yourself

The North Star that motivates me every day is seeing the direct impact of the Capable platform on improving patient outcomes. There are 46 million Americans unable to access the high-quality care they need. Our vision is a world where all of these people have quality, empathetic care through services powered by Capable Health.

As a South African-born entrepreneur, my first role in the U.S. was the Chief Technology Officer of Candid – the orthodontics startup based out of NYC. I grew the team and built the tech stack from the ground up, helping to scale Candid into a nationally-recognized brand. This experience surfaced a lot of the cracks in the infrastructure of the U.S. healthcare system, and I learned (often the hard way) the challenges of developing an engaging, patient-centric digital health experience.
Healthcare builders have limited choices when it comes down to it: either using legacy EHRs that act as "walled gardens," taping together point solutions that don't play well together, or reinventing the wheel by building and maintaining a bespoke tech stack. All three options are bad — they take time and resources away from what matters in healthcare: providing better patient experiences.

That's why I founded Capable Health: to democratize access to scalable digital health infrastructure and provide the sparks of the healthcare revolution.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Our number one asset is our team. (Our number two asset is our fantastic customer base.) I'm proud to have built a 35-person strong (and growing) team of passionate experts with backgrounds in healthcare, fitness, SaaS, and enterprise software.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

It's critical for founders to stay focused in the early days. It's so easy to get distracted by market news, competitors, conflicting advice, and existential dread. When you have a bold vision — and ours is very bold! — you have to stay focused and cut out the noise.

Instead of listening to the noise, I choose to listen to my team and our customers. Our early adopters provide fantastic product feedback and act as champions every day. A great friend and mentor of mine, Peter Biddle, once said: "find one customer and make them happy." I think about that every day.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Make it a company-wide habit to share customer learnings and feedback regularly. Every person on your team needs to develop deep empathy for the customer, to build a useful, user-friendly product. At Capable, every member of my team has sat on a call with a customer.
  2. Go to market with your product before even building your product. This sounds counterintuitive, but there are many scrappy ways to test out your hypotheses and create traction with your product — before you even write a line of code. At Capable, we shared a slide deck outlining the vision, product, and value proposition during my earliest conversations with customers. Only after these conversations validated our hypotheses did we go out and build the product. One of our customers even signed up based purely on the deck!
  3. Ignore general advice. There's a lot of bland, non-specific business advice on the Internet. It's a total distraction. Instead, seek out mentors and advisors who have faced your exact problem (scaling a B2B SaaS team from 20 to 50 employees? Building a repeatable acquisition channel for your consumer product?). Give them as much context as possible, and THEN ask for advice.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

If you want to launch a digital healthcare experience but you're stuck, give us a call. We'd love to demo our best-in-class platform. We think you'll like it too! Book a time to chat with us today: www.calendly.com/capable-sales/capable-health-consultation

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://capablehealth.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/capablehealth

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/capable-health/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermacrobert/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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