I’m building 4 things right now.

I figured I’d keep newsletter subscribers in the loop, since I understand that it can be hard to keep track of what I am getting done across all my various channels, from LinkedIn to Twitter, to Instagram, to even GitHub if anybody ever checks that.

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So here it is, August Edition:

JANUS

Going through a rebrand. I am transitioning from deliverables to outcome oriented sales. What this means is that until now many of my clients treated JANUS as a vendor for videos. I do not like that. You cannot grow a business to internet power-law scales being a widget-merchant. So, I’m re-orienting us towards more outcome-oriented-sales. This means we will diagnose a problem in our prospect’s business, and we will effectively guarantee to solve that fundamental problem. We will work with the prospect to determine how much that problem is costing them right now. Once we have a dollar amount on the prospect’s inaction (how much not doing something is costing them) as well as a dollar amount for taking action (how much they can save or generate by fixing the problem), we will get paid by a percentage of that outsized return that we provide them.

So, for example, recently I had a prospective client who has a health-tech software business, that let’s patients directly text the medical practice to do everything from scheduling to answers from the doctor. No clunky interface, no nonsense, just, easy, simple texting. At the early stages, I’ve noticed a lot of business owners are price-minded, which is not the right way to think about it. It’s a very consumerist perspective to look at the price first. As a business, the price means very little relative to the more important metric: expected return.

So for this prospective client, their signature product is a $99/month subscription. If we estimate my prospective client’s clients stay on for around 12 months, thats an expected lifetime value (LTV) of $1,188. That means one singular client is worth $1,188 to my prospective client. So from there capturing the value upside becomes relatively trivial. If we can realistically expect that the work JANUS will do for this business will generate them at least ONE client that they wouldn’t have otherwise signed, then JANUS will have generated them $1,188 at a minimum as soon as we get them one client (even if the client is on a monthly plan, we use LTV to project future earnings.) With this the math simple comes out to: how many users can I expect JANUS to get for this business? I expect around 5. Why? Because we’ve gotten past clients way more. So that means I expect JANUS to generate this person $5,940 in LTV. Of that, we will charge 5%. Which comes out to a pretty low $297. Realistically speaking, that’s not worth my time. So, I probably wouldn’t accept this prospective client’s request for work unless I think there is some other intangible upside like brand growth, network growth, case-study potential.

That's pretty much it for updates on JANUS and how I’m thinking about pricing right now.

Let me know how you like the new website (though its not fully done): https://www.janusny.com/

BRASK

Brask Group is something I’m fairly excited about but I talk about with restraint because its a longer term play. The core problem I wanted to address with Brask is that in my work building JANUS and growing my own network, I constantly came across amazingly talented people in different areas, who would benefit significantly from knowing each other. I always try to make connections between them and do warm introductions to get things going, but I wanted to systematize, and accelerate this. That’s the idea behind Brask. It’s a curated community of talented, bright minds, collectively committed to thinking big, and doing things that will change the world. Most of us will probably fail, but we won’t care, because we’ll just keep going at it until we win. I’ve come to learn, for entrepreneurs, its somewhat easier to accept this reality of our personality than to try and deny and hide it. We are relentless psychopaths. Brask is a group chat for those kind of people, inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Club.

You can join for free right now: https://www.braskgroup.com/

Sitr

Oh boy, Sitr.

I made the first version of this literally in a couple weekends, sitting in a Starbucks in Farmington, Connecticut. I made it because I noticed that the folks trying to put on our 1st year medical school formal were using a really clunky bonze-age process of Google Forms, messy spreadsheets, and paper. I figured it had to be a mess, and I confirmed this when I spoke with them. So, I made Sitr quickly as a way to address that immediate local need. In all honesty, I was *extremely* anxious about everything leading up to its official “launch”. I had never built something that was actually used by many people at once. I barely knew what I was doing, I had no clue if the random Heroku server I deployed the project on would be able to sustain the load, I overpaid for the server out of pocket because I just wanted this to work and didn’t want to take any risks and cause a headache for the event organizers I was trying to help. Shoutout to them for being so nice about it all, and also, thankfully, it all worked with no issues at all.

It was an absolutely surreal feeling to walk into class the following day and see my web application open on everybody’s screen as they clicked around to find out what seats and tables their friends had selected for the upcoming formal.

Today, around 5 months later, I built in all the things I didn’t have the time to do back then. I built a proper dashboard, a cohesive design style, a functioning log-in/log-out system, the ability for the user to create infinite events and edit them as need arises. It has gone from being “okay dude text me what you guys need and I’ll edit the code on the backend to make that happen” to complete DIY, “you want to remove that attendee? cool, just click the delete button on their name!” This was much harder than it may seem, as I’ve recently learned most people have absolutely no idea how complicated websites are behind-the-scenes. People have used things like Wix, and Squarespace and think that that is how these things are made. They have no idea that quite literally every micro-interaction from the way a button’s color changes, to where on the page text shows up all needs to be manually coded into a website.

I digress. The point is, Sitr is pretty damn cool now, and its fully-functional, and it solves an immediate very specific problem for event planners: seating charts.

You can sign up for it here before I put up a Stripe paywall and start charging for it: https://usesitr.com

Med Atlas

Not a lot about this right now but basically it’s going to be a one-place for all the needs of anybody who is in healthcare as a physician or physician-to-be. It’ll have tools and resources to help premeds, med students, residents, and even physicians. It has its own private community you can join to chat with any of these people as well, and collaborate on anything you might want. It has crowdsourced reviews of various medical schools, residency programs, and yes, even jobs at hospitals and private practices as an attending. It has tools to help premeds build their class schedule, guides for med students to find research, negotiating tips for residents and more.

One-stop-shop for all physician or physician-to-be needs + community.

All of this for a one-time payment of $29 until we hit 100 members. Then the price will go up to $99. It’ll always be a one-time-payment, that is: no monthly subscription. Pay once, join the community, benefit forever.

Right now it’s not quite ready, but you can get a sense of it as I build it out at: https://medatlas-omega.vercel.app/

Okay, that’s it for now.

This was quite fun to write, and quite nice because it gave me, myself, a cohesive overview of the different moving parts right now as well. The other thing I didn’t mention is that of course, from now until March I am focused also on dedicating 6hrs per day towards studying for the USMLE Step 1 exam. I am in medical school training to be a physician because I deeply believe we need more physicians who understand systems, technology, and business; these are the forces that shape our patient’s lives before they get to the clinic. My hypothesis is fairly simple: the best doctor is he who understands his patient the most. That’s it. Everything I do is geared towards comprehensively understanding my patients. It just so happens that I firmly believe that learning by doing is the only real learning.

Let me know if you have any ideas or thoughts on anything I’ve mentioned here. I genuinely welcome any and all communication that comes my way. I would love to hear questions, criticism, and all.

Thinking in Public is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.