Scaling AI-Powered Medical Education Globally

Eventually I'll have to retire, so this can't keep on chugging on forever. So five to seven years, if I can hand this over to someone and exit out in that place for my retirement, it's a good place to go. And everywhere I hear, even in the US, they said that money on the lower side of the spectrum is kind of, it's just hard. It's just hard. Nobody's betting on it. There was 1 gentleman who was advising me and he said, well look, $100,000, I'll tip in.

But beyond that I said no, we're talking about four, $5,000,000. He says, yeah, that's the spectrum, which is hard in even though you've got revenue to show up, you know that this is not an idea anymore. But that money suddenly has kind of the whole world knew that Oracle had made a lot of people redundant. So any competitor of theirs you go to ask looking for a job would offer you a job with very low salary.

Running a business can feel lonely, especially when the decisions get heavy. Welcome to CEO Risk Pro by Saurabh Jain. Practical insights from the boardroom and the meditation cushion. I'm sorry. I've done 10,000 hours in three major parts of my life. I spent 10,000 hours being a CEO, 10,000 hours being a board member, and 10,000 hours meditating. What we're going to do in each episode is really unpack a real business challenge that a CEO is facing and see if we can work through it together.

Enjoy. Hi, good day guys, welcome to CEO Whispers RP Today I've got Kamalesh from our Med Ed AI. Kamlesh, do you want to tell us a bit about yourself?

Yep, sure. I started a medical education business in 2005 with a friend who was in those days trying medical education and is creating an education programs that used to run on interactive DVD ROMs. So we took that to the world of Internet in 2008 and we launched a platform that gave doctors free access to very good learning content for their continuing medical education points. As a business, I think we've been reasonably successful. I said that because we never had to.

We were never in debt. Everything that we found, it was internal accruals. So we kind of grew steadily over years. Around 2018, we started experimenting with the use of generative AI. Those experiments LED us to something concrete. And in 2024, we hyped off the AI business into a separate entity. And that's the AI startup that kind of tries to solve a problem which is unique to the medical world. Every 73 days, medical education double S itself up, and in the process it's very hard for physicians to keep up with it.

So our AI tries to solve the problem of making that education available just in time and in context where doctors can cope with this massive leap of information.

Yeah, perfect. Sounds good. So the way we run this podcast is we talked through a problem that you're trying to solve. Like what's top of mind? What's causing you some grief right now?

So I'd rather call it a challenge than a grief. So we've got commercial validation of of our AI powered education programs in terms of customers who have signed serious amounts of money as cheques. So the commercial validation in terms of usage, in terms of people willing to pay so on and so forth has been done. And then now I'm the challenge we have now is how do we rapidly grow this into 10X revenue and probably grow out or not probably we will definitely need to grow out of the Australian New Zealand market and make it global.

OK, so if I was to write that down, what could it would it be? You know, how do I go from being a dev company to being a growth company, right? Perfect. Well, tell us a bit more about the use case. Like what do people use these tools for?

So the the underlying, let me call it the underlying backbone of this whole thing is the ability to read a question in in physician speak translated into a focused research based question, interrogate a knowledge base that is validated and come back with a summarized synthesized answer. Now the use cases are different for this backbone. One use case is is a way of learning call a clinical audit where a doctor reviews their own practice, looks up medical literature and say has anything new happened in it and can I change or do I need to change my practice to treat patients better.

So that's a clinical audit. The second is that doctors have very time for today. In the good old days they would do war ward rounds with senior.

And when you say doctors are the specialists or GPS?

Everybody, everybody's time for so they would learn by discussing amongst themselves today they don't get that. They don't get the contrary of what they think about it. Is somebody else opposing it, a senior or a key opinion leader having an opinion on it? So we've created a roundtable which basically allows the doctor to spar with three other colleagues. One's a colleague who will always think differently from you, that was a specialist who knows more than you.

And the third is just a readout from the evidence. So you can spar with three agents and learn from the process. It's a roundtable, it's a way of learning. And the fourth is what we call the Conference Congress Compendium. So every six months there is either a big Congress on the disease in either Europe or in in the US and they release the latest and the greatest treatment options and clinical trials. Yep, you know, for the disease. What we do is we build a compendium based on that release data.

Where?

That's fine. It will get cut out after, yeah.

So where we do release, where we use the release data and we get it into Q&A format where doctors can interrogate the competium that the the longevity of this content is only six months because something new comes after that.

So it, I mean, if you talk with the through, you know, the first use case, you know, we can have the kind of sparring with AI like who's the typical customer? How do they pay for it? How is this funded? How do you commercialize it?

So there there are two different ways to commercialize it. We've chosen the B to B to C model. The life sciences industry sponsors education because there is a need for them to educate doctors. And so we've gone down the path where we get a sponsorship from pharmaceutical companies or life sciences companies and distribute the programs for free to doctors.

So what would be an example? What would be an example of a company that would that? Is it that they paid to get their content onto your platform that you educate doctors with or they just kind of help fund some of the cost that goes to and the product goes to the doctors?

So they fund everything from the content built to distribution and it goes up to doctors.

And if they say no, we don't want to fund it, Does their content not get put into the knowledge base for doctors?

So the knowledge base already has the content because it has everybody's content. It is just that the context in which the knowledge gets searched for the program is, is what gets tuned when a, when a module is created. So for example, let me take an example. If you talk about sleep apnea, almost every GP in town, if, if they discover a patient is a potential sleep apnea patient, we'll send them to a sleep clinic and we'll start them on a CPAP machine.

And then, you know, I said, all right, you're on it. You'll be able to breathe better, life will be better. If you look at whether there is a obese patient who's got sleep apnea and the sleep apnea is not created by anything except the obesity, then you can treat the cause of it. You treat the cause of when the sleep apnea goes away. Now that's a new that that's a brand new paradigm that the doctor has to deal with now is talk about obesity. So we've run a program, a clinical audit that says identify patients with sleep apnea and find out the BMI score and then find out what you do with them.

So it's that step one. Step 2 is that then go and review literature which talks about obesity and sleep apnea guidelines of Australia and it does show the correlation. There is evidence. So the doctor suddenly finds out this is a new thing to do.

OK, so it helps them learn that kind of new use case, but I'm trying to understand, it's like, what does the pharma company actually pay for? What if they said look and lash look, we're not going to pay Med Ed, a Med Ed, Med Med Ed AI anything for this service. What less content do they get to give to their doctors if if their research is already in your model?

If the if the research is all, all in our model, then it's a question of, you know, is it being distributed in the right manner? What?

Do you mean by distributed? What does that mean?

So the the everything bodies do not allow farmer to distribute their own content because it becomes marketing. So there we have providers like us who are independent who when they look at the content and look at everything in it, we'll put take the bias out of it. So I'm not going to go and tell the GP that look, the CPAP machine is not the solution. You need to get the guy to wait, lose weight and please give him drug A you'll say that there are very various, various ways by which they can lose weight.

You got to get them the journey of getting them to lose the weight. But the fact that a weight loss drug company is able to put that message out, their market share automatically grows.

And So what are they paying for the?

Paying for the pay the paying for the reach to the doctor plus the content.

And if they choose not to pay, do they get the reach to the doctor anyway? No. OK, so then they'll get. So they'll get. So will they give you like, more content to put in your model? Is that what they pay for?

Or no. So they do say that these are the evidence that supports our goals. We look at the evidence in totality and then we'll create a program around it.

Got it. So that if they didn't pay you any any any fees for this, then their unique data set would not come to you to get better to get put into the model. It'll still be generic data then.

It'll still be generic data, it'll it'll not put the context to it.

OK, got it. OK.

So unless the doctor starts at the context, which is.

Which is always harder and and and tell me about the reach of your of your platform. Like how many GPS? How many?

Specifications. So we get we reach to about 40,000 general practitioners and about close to 15,000 specialists and nurses. Yeah, OK. That's, that's a pretty good.

Sign and how many pharma companies do you have kind of paying to get their contents into these models?

The top 20% of pharma companies who get 80% of PBS revenue, they're all our customers.

OK, got it. OK, brilliant. That kind of makes sense. Oh, I mean it's a brilliant model, right? Because you've only, because it sounds like your core asset base is actually these 40,000 doctors and these 15,000 specialist nurses. And what you're allowing them to do is to reach them in a hopefully an easier way, right? And to educate them and they can learn a bit about their treatments and their drugs. So when, when knowledge changes, they can kind of be up to date. And why do doctors use this? Or how do doctors use this?

So there is a there's a stick and a carrot. The stick is that every year they have to get CME points, otherwise their license goes away, the medical rebates go away. So that's the stick. So we offer all the education programs that go through US, has what's called CPD hours attached to it.

OK, so I see continuous professional development. So then they will get enough points so they can kind of keep their license and get keep getting accredited. OK, that makes a lot of sense. And how does how does a doctor sign up for this platform? Is it because they're, because they're not paying for it Someone else, you know, the pharma companies are paying for it? Yeah, it's, it's how do they, how do they get access?

So they just sign up to it, they get validated with their prior register. If they're a valid practicing Dr. they'll attend. All we have is an e-mail address of theirs and and then their practice post code and.

Name and how practically different is this to them just typing something into ChatGPT or one of those kind of models? Like how different is the results?

Probably similar because the word the likes of ChatGPT has caught up with what we had as a unique data set. Because it's all open source it's probably similar. Only thing is that for a doctor to go and get CPD points.

They can't get a structure.

Of learning, yeah, they can. They can say that I've done a review of this, but they have to go through those steps of doing it, which we've kind of automated.

Got it, Got it, got it. So if they do through your platform, CPD points just automatically happen. Otherwise, we've got to do all this extra work to create this framework and say this is what I learned through another model. OK, brilliant. That kind of makes sense. Tell us the back story. How did you get 40,000 GPS or a total of 55,000 users, right? How did you get 55,000 users on your platform?

We crowd sourced it with pharma companies. Yeah, the pharma reps go and see doctors, talk about their education program that they have sponsored, signed them up. So just imagine if you had 10 pharma companies each having 100 reps, each Rep seeing 5 doctors. That's 50,000.

OK, so they've gone, they've got these people, they've got doctors onto your platform. And how long did it take for you to get to?

So the first year we started in 2008, which is the non AI business that I started, got 6000 registrations in the first year with three sponsors and then at one point of time we had 12 sponsors the same year. That kind of catapulted everything up.

OK. And how many doctors aren't on your platform? Like how many other GPS are there? If there's you've got 40,000.

Look, there is the vocational medical officers which is about the same size as the GP population of this world, which is an untapped area. They do prescribe, they do see patients, but that's probably another 40,000 out there. GPS, GPS there are. So there are of the 40,000 that we have, I think there's about 8000 of them who are retired.

Oh, OK, so.

We are missing about 8000 of them.

So there's about 8000. So you've got like 80% of the market kind of thing. OK, that, that that's a fantastic stat to get to. How did how did you come up with this? Like what is what is your what is your skill set? Are you more of a developer, more of a commercialization person like, but what's your?

I'm a mixed breed. In my previous life I used to sell software. I was a pre sales consultant so I should do demos and I was.

Tell me a bit more about your previous life. What did you do before 2005?

I was at Oracle. They had an e-learning platform, so I was a business development.

Manager, So you were into learning, Yep. And e-learning platforms, Yep.

So I was a business development manager for them and then the platform got integrated with the HR management systems. So I kind of caught to the consulting side of the business, sales consulting side of the business as a principal consultant, so.

What does that mean? Sales consulting. So sales implement the software or they help? No.

No. So they help the buying process. OK, so.

You're one of the technical pre sales person that will understand the product and send the clients.

Correct. OK, Yeah, and the account director would normally smooch the deal.

Yeah, yeah. Then how did you make a decision to move from that to doing your own thing? I.

Didn't my position at Oracle was made redundant?

Every three years those large companies have redundancies, so.

My position at Oracle was made redundant. They said here's the money or there's another job we can look within Oracle. The money looked good. I said I'll never see so much money in my life. So I took a plunge and then.

In terms of like how many years income did they give you as part of their redundancy back then?

I was there only for three years, so they gave me what, a good eight months.

OK, fantastic. So. So you took the money and ran?

How did the money? No. The other advantage is is taxed at 15%.

Not, of course, right as redundancy, right. Yeah, Yeah. So it's actually almost worth like a year's worth of income. Really. Yeah. Why did you go do your own thing? Why not just go find another sales job or a pre sales job?

So I did. I did when so they, so I had actually this this friend of mine who I got introduced to my boss at Oracle, I looked at his business. He was already running this business and he was doing content on DVD ROMs. So I said we can put this on the Internet. He says, where's the money? So I kind of drew a learning marketplace model.

But it's very different to be someone that works at a large corporate with 100,000 people around you.

To support everything.

To support everything, yeah. It's very hard for that kind of person to want to go do something with one other person. How did you do? How did you make that decision?

So I always wanted to do something on my own, but I said it'll be after I'm 40. This happened when I was 37.

And and why did you say that? What did you say after 40 before? Was it just life expenses?

Yeah, life expenses. I would have learnt enough to do something on my own, but 37 when I was made in London and I had the cushion and I had the opportunity to do it, I did it. OK, so actually the take was how?

Did you explain that to your wife? Because that's often one of the major decision makers and these kind of things.

Yeah, so my wife, well, we just had a baby. She was born in 2004.

OK, so you just had a baby.

Just had a baby got.

You got all these expenses, got major in London, you've got no more income coming through, no more income coming. Your wife you want to go not get another steady job. You want to do this super high risk start up with another person.

Great, So what I did tell her was that, look, I have a certification that allows me to teach a particular tech stack. So 15 days of the month I'll teach that. That'll be more than enough for promo.

So your hedge it both ways, OK. Yeah, yeah.

Which I did for a few months, not not forever, but we started in March 2005. By May 2005 we had our first real customer, so it wasn't a long wait.

How did you? I mean, it sounds like you were very easy. It was easy for you to reconcile that risk in your mind. What?

Made easy. So the reconciliation I had in my mind was that I'll give it a shot for six months. If it doesn't work, I'll find a job.

Because often when people get made redundant, they think the opposite. They're like, Oh my God, I'm never thinking another job again. I'm unemployed. I've just had this baby, I've got this mortgage I've got. I've got a panic even though I've got this cushion of money, but I've got to panic and go get another full time job straight away. How come that didn't happen to you?

That it's not that it didn't happen to me, it did happen to me. I I was job hunting. But what had happened at that point of time that the whole world knew that Oracle had made a lot of people redundant. So any competitor of theirs you go to ask looking for a job would offer you a job with very low salaries.

That's right, because there's sudden suddenly this huge supply of ex Oracle employees.

Right, correct. So when I would look well, why it's it's still a risk joining someone.

They can make you redundant, yeah. I mean, a full time job is no more safer than. No, I mean.

You don't realize that till you get hit for the first time and then OK that it can happen with a piece of paper.

If you didn't get married redundant, would you even have the insight to do this yourself? Would you have went another threes, hit 40 and then quit and done something yourself?

I would have probably, OK, waited for three years to do something and yeah, but then we would have lost time because when we started talking over this idea in 2005, we still have to do piece meal projects to keep the business alive. But the platform happened in 2008, OK.

And what part did you play and what part did the original owner play in in this?

Country, so the original owner actually had inroads into pharma company. So he had the contacts, he had the master services agreement.

And is he still in the business thing?

No. So he retired in 2015. I bought him out OK.

Fair enough. So, so he had the ability to sell the product to the right people and you had the e-learning understanding as to what needs to be built correct. And that was like the partnership that kind of came together.

Absolutely.

OK. When he left in 2015, like how big was the company, how many other people were were in there?

So we restructured in 2012 to make it lean. So we were already preparing for his departure. He had this thing saying I need to go away in three years time, find another investor, take this on. We didn't find any suitable investors, so that's how I ended up.

This is so funded, the purchase, was it? Yeah. OK, that makes sense. OK. And do you have another partner today or?

So we have with the AI business, we have Co founders. So there's a medical director, Doctor Paul Bennett, who's been our medical director and a good friend since 2017.

What does the medical director do in a company like this?

So he's the one who holds The Who has the gates to the medical content because I'm not a doctor.

So he understands what?

He understands.

Needs to be in these models and whether it's good or not, whether it says the right stuff, says the wrong thing, Correct. And does he work full time with yourself? Is he still a mother?

No, no, he doesn't work full time with us.

And he's still a doctor, doing his own practice. But he does.

He's a doctor doing his own practice. He works in clinical trials. So he's he's kept himself that OK. We've recently got on board medical Director for oncology and hematology because that's a very special need then we have.

One and so these medical directors as so they do you tend to then give them script in the company or you just pay them like a monthly retainer to help you add as the model.

No. So they get a percentage of the profits from the projects. Yeah, yeah, OK. And then when there is during the, when the projects happen, there is work to be done. They get paid.

Got it. And so over time, you might get medical directors for every speciality or every segment that you need some unique understanding, I'm guessing.

Correct. Where, where is the unique need for understanding? Yeah, we also have commercial Co founders, people who have invested in it and can help U.S. Open doors. Yeah, there's there's one gentleman in Europe and one in the US.

Why did you take investment into this company? Because I've not thought it needs a lot of investment because you've got all the content for the AI stuff kind of already exists. Well, why take external investment?

So the initial invest, the investments that we took when we started Open AI, which was the only game in town, did not have suitable large language models for medical science. So we actually started building small language models. OK, You, you pop a small language model to be doing that, do the right thing, it takes over $35,000 of development. Yeah. So if you look at 10 disease states, that's $350,000.

And I assume that's all gone now that you're using the the large frontier models now, is it?

Yes. So what we ended up doing is with those small tier models, we created an algorithm to understand the question, OK, which none of the LSMS still do. So when you when you use chat GPD, it understands your language of the question and interprets it front to back and back to front, but it doesn't understand where you're coming from. So it doesn't understand the intent of the question that when you say how's the weather, you're just being polite or you really wanted to know what the weather was. Sure, sure. Yeah. So that's what we have kind of got as a secret juice that powers the engine.

OK, fair enough. But but your engine is still, it's now one of the public models isn't that you've just hyper tuned with your data set? So do you, do you have your own LLM that you've built?

No, we haven't built our own LLM, so we're using the and it doesn't matter which LLM we use, the LLM's become the disposable part of the.

That's the that's the utility these days anyway. It's yeah, OK, fair enough. And so where have you gotten to today with this kind of chat bot education product?

So the chat bot gets embedded into the education product and it gets into the workflow of education.

So it gets embedded into like the web version of the 2005 product, but this is like a new module that gets added in.

Yes. OK, so let's say you watched a video. It's a recorded webinar. You really wanted to ask a question or spar with somebody on what you've watched. So you had the round table to it. So the round table basically is is a set of three agents that against par with. So you watch the video, have a question, anything. I'm going to do this like this, like this, like what do you think? So the three agents respond back. One's your peer who has a contribute to what you have. One's a specialist or key opinion leader, and one's just the evidence.

So one of the things with these AI tools is, I mean, they do fantastic stuff, but they're not super difficult to build. It's not like, you know, back in 2005 if you had to build like an app and put onto ACD ROM, right, you'd probably need a lot of developers have been quite a complex thing to do. Now they're all no code, just a couple of people. You prompt, you prompt, you prompt something into existence. What's the barrier to like an EMR system having just a competitive product to yours?

So the EMR systems will never do education.

Are they into education? Do they they they only do the patient management? What do they not do? Education? Is that just not their space?

It's not their space. So they're they they've got enough on the plate managing patient records. So our literature review tool that the the backbone that they probably have it, but it's used in the context of the patient consult at that point of time, not as a learning interface.

Because it's at the point of patient interaction. It's not that you know in May when they're going to get their CBD points. It's not stopping then when they use that tool.

No, so we we're kind of on the non sexy end of town with DA.

OK, kind of makes sense. So there is no question was you know around the commercial validation, right. How do I get from a dev company to a growth company? So you said you've got commercial validation. Now explain to me like, what does that mean in your?

World so, so this is how I look at commercial validation. What so we've got this thing that we've built we've you've gone to a pharma company and saying, why don't you do a pilot and let's do it with just 300 doctors and you pay us some money. Well, it's a paid pilot. I don't like giving three things away for free. So they paid us and we ran a three month program at the end of it, they see the results of it and then we're discussing do you think this has better value for you?

A commercial validation happens when they write the second check, not the pilot. So they said, yeah, this is great. Just.

Help me out. So what is that? What would that first pilot have given them? Like a chat bot hypertune with their data, the doctors can ask questions.

The first part we did was run a clinical audit. So clinical audit is a learning process by which a doctor reviews their own practice. Embedded into the clinical audit is a Chatwood for literature review. But what it does do is put a structure in place saying that this is how I currently treat my patient. Let me see what is the new evidence and what changes do I need?

To make to my.

Practice. So that's that's the structure that we've given, Yeah. So once we've done a pilot and we have given the results, if they come back and write a second check, that's where commercial validation happens that they're willing to pay more.

Money. And what do they pay for the next product? What's the next?

Thing. So they then come back and say what more can we do? So we create a comprehensive year long program which has many things to do. So from a $30,000 pilot, we can end up with a $400,000 annual.

OK, so then they've got an annual program which gives doctors a whole bunch of training material. They'll give you some content you'll put into your learning modules, have some chat board, have some videos, those kind of things.

That's right. So we structure it up into learning modules and there those learning modules get CPD points. So to the doctor they are still engaged with learning, but that there is an AI sitting behind it is is transparent to them. They're doing it as a part of thing so that that in a nutshell, is commercial validation for us. So we've done repeats.

And so you've got the vast majority of doctors on your platform, let's say 80%. What percentage of the pharma companies do you have on your platform now?

So the top 20% of pharma companies who kind of totally their revenue totals up to 80% of PBS.

So they're the guys who can spend the money on education? Yep. So you got the top 20% of pharma. OK, that kind of makes sense.

So we chase pharma companies that have new emerging products because the need to educate them is higher. Anything new that comes out, the sooner the doctor learns, the better the treatment is. So that's that's the market segment we trenches.

Yeah. And So what what are your current plans for growth?

So having lived this business for so long, this this market segment for so long, Australia as a market is not huge. I mean, we are a vast country with very little people.

OK. How big would the total adjustable market in Australia be for this product?

Total addressable market for this whole product could be around 20 million to $24 million, not more than that and they're fragmented players.

Yeah.

So the best of the players, and I'm not including the publishing houses. If you include the publishing houses, it's another twenty, $20 million.

OK. So some of it in 20 to $40 million would be like your total addressable market, your Tam in Australia.

The best of the players will not do more than $3,000,000 in education.

OK, but there's only like $3,000,000 worth of actual. OK, so it's actually not very big. Yeah. So what's your OK, so I get now if if your actual tab for your product is only three mil, it's not big enough to be meaningful here in Australia. So you kind of have two options, right. Option one is you go overseas. That's what everyone always thinks, they see the bright lights of America or Europe or those kind of things. You can have that. That's option A or option B is educate more people on things.

I know educate accountants, educate other people have CPD requirements. Why did you decide? Why you deciding to go global not just educate more people in Australia?

All right, So in education you need to be domain expert to educate. So I could, I could possibly provide my tools to someone who's a domain expert and they can use it. It's a question of switching the data set to accounting laws, switching the latest set of migration laws, so on and so forth. I don't know what that market looks like and who pays for it.

I guess you, you don't have 20 years of experience in selling to that market, right. So that kind of makes sense. Yeah. With previous product, did you get many overseas clients?

We never focused overseas, so we were pretty happy doing what we were doing in.

Australia. I was kind of working here in Australia.

Yeah, and plus it was baseball content, so you'd create content for Australia, so.

So why focus on overseas now? I mean a couple $1,000,000, that's a fantastic business if you have a low cost base.

So if you grow, let's just take the Asia Pacific market. If you take this out to Asia Pacific and you just look at forget China, you wrote Japan, Korea, India. I'm thinking maybe Philippines, but Philippines is not a lot of money. But if it was Japan, Korea, India, your revenue could be 4 times of Australia.

Sure. So you could be a $12 million companies that are like a like a $3,000,000 company. Yeah. But it sounds like your core asset base is your 55,000 doctors that are on your platform. If you went overseas, how would you build that? Because that that took you 20 years, right, To build. Yeah. How do you build that? Let's just say, I know, let's just pick up, you know, Japan for example, so great, we've got Med, Med Ed AI in Japan. How are you going to get that asset base?

You can't get your SMS base overnight, so that the check would probably be to partner with somebody who doesn't have the kind of offering we have and that adds to the revenue chain.

So what would be an example of that?

Let's so existing existing containing medical education platform that has good membership but they're still doing just videos.

OK. So you'll be the AI add in for them.

And add it to them and just by adding an AI with no cost added, they suddenly can see three times more revenue. Yeah. And that three times revenue to them is also three times revenue to.

US OK, got it. So, so your current plan now to just find partners in each of these various regions around the world?

So the the ideal scenario would be to pick up somebody who's already globally there, but it's 5 or 8 years behind us.

Is it? Is it a global place? In this space there are OK.

There are so the the best possibly bet would be somebody who's well funded and globally available, but then their economics of whether they will buy us or partner with us that will never fit because for some reason they think 5 million U.S. dollar is the lowest benchmark, 5 million U.S. dollars, seven and a half million Australian dollars. That'll mean three of three companies here. So that's that's a part that you know, we are basically it's not the value of the business, but the value of the IP that we have is where.

Well, wouldn't you? I mean, I would have just assumed the very large guys would just think we'll build this ourselves.

Yes.

Whether they'll succeed or not, I don't know, but that's but that's often the first thing they think you mean.

To reach here, it took us three years. It'll take them a lot of three years. Wow.

But it often, I've often found the larger companies don't want to partner for small modules. They they have the hubris to think they can build it themselves. And often they don't, right. They just, they're busy doing their day jobs. Is that the same in your kind of space?

Yes and no. There there's always somebody in some corner innovating and it'll it'll get stuck onto the website and it'll suddenly be surprised one day. No, because they initiate the change is always there in large companies. But if you find someone who's got a good membership base but is growing fast and they have the pains of growth, it would be a good fit at least. At least if they have a good spread between the US and Europe.

So is it a quite a a trivial problem to solve? You just got to find these 10 companies that exist around the world and you've got to find which ones are going to want to work with.

You it's not a trivial problem because even if you found them, all of these work on relationships. It's a very incentious industry, so till you don't find the right guy with the right.

Thing. But I'll say it's trivial that the solution sounds trivial. The implementation will be complex, you need to go find and spend time with them. But is the solution quite trivial that we just got to find these 10 companies? No.

It isn't because what happens is let's let, so we did explore with one company in the US and eventually I came to the conclusion that even if he signed the dotted line with them, I will have to place two pre sales guys in there at my expense even before I can see a single dollar because these guys just don't have the capacity to sell what we have got. So they'll not be able to articulate it. If they can't articulate it, then you know.

You won't generate revenue.

Headphones sell. They'll sell what they can. They can explain easily. Yeah, so, so it's a chicken and egg, but in that.

Scenario like what stopped you from putting a one or two pre salespeople into it's?

Expense, we are not here.

It'll be add to your cost base, yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's an add to the cost base and then it's a 12 to 18 month wait before.

Before you return, yeah, but would that always be the case because this is something different that companies are selling. I mean, if there's standard video content, you got a chat bot. Well, they don't have a chat bot so they don't have expertise in selling this so.

Being able to articulate that the fact that, so it's very easy to say I've got this great Doctor Who's going to speak to camera and he's going to say the following messages and doctors will learn this ABCD because that's the only thing that says it's very hard to say that the doctor will actually explore things beyond what the program was. And you might get birds of wisdom or you might not, right. And then obviously there are fears around how does this technology behave? Is it going to keep on continuously telling everything about my competitor does or, or is this me? So the usual stuff.

But but isn't every company that would want to partner with you not have the expertise in selling this?

That is true.

The sudden every company is going to probably rely on you to help with pre sales, right? Either with a person there or you do pre sales education software or something. But I think they're always going to rely on you, aren't they say. Isn't that always going to exist?

That's always going to be the case. So the the, the, the challenge now I have is where do I find the money? How do I find the money to put in two pre sales guys in the US and one in Europe and that is close to $1,000,000 of cost a year and if you put yourself in that shoes for 24 months that's $2,000,000 that you've got to be ready before the 20 million comes.

I mean, the other part of it is, is how do you just make sure you don't spend 10 years chasing this global expansion, spend all your profits. You know, scenario one is you just do Australia, great lifestyle business. You generate a couple $1,000,000 a year profits over 10 years. You've got twenty $30 million. I mean, government will take it all away in tax anyway, but at least you've generated a company with real profit. Or do you actually double down and try to grow this and kind of forgo the next decade of profits?

Because there's going to be AUS person this year, there'll be a Europe person the year after, there'll be an Asia person the year after.

But Asia is not a problem because you can service it from Australia OK easily. But Europe and US and the US also, not just one. You'll need to one invest and one in East.

So the cost will really start adding up, yes, so.

So unless you can see you're staring down a barrel that says we've got a contract in place that gives us 3,000,000 a year or you caught saying that, look, let's bet on this. I'm going to put in some money and there's $3,000,000 of money here and we'll see at the end of it the value of it. It'll be hard for me just by myself to do that.

Because I mean it. Also, you got to then think about is is it actually worth doing?

So I'll tell you where it becomes worth doing. Yeah, eventually I'll have to retire, so this can't keep on chugging on forever.

How many more years do you reckon you have?

I'm going to turn 60 next year, so I'd like to enjoy some benefits of my.

Life. So like, how many years? Is it five years? Is it 10? Is it 20?

Five to seven years. So five to seven years, if I can hand this over to someone and exit out in the place for my retirement, it's a good place to.

Because you've got two ways to do that, right? One way is you don't take any profits out of the Business Today. You double down on growth and you know, you grow in all these different regions and get all these pre salespeople and there's a hope, you know, some percentage chance, I don't know, 50% chance that in seven years you'll have, you know, business with 10 or $20 million worth of revenue. Or the very safe, low risk option is you do none of that.

You just build an Australian business. You have a great lifestyle business, you get it managed professionally by somebody else, and you try to pull dividends out of it during retirement.

So I haven't seen the second option work in our kind of business.

Yeah, well, why is that? Why does that not work in your world?

So the reason it I think it doesn't work is if somebody's running a $3,000,000 a year business, they're running it pretty much themselves.

You kind of have a lot of stuff for IG, yeah.

So you run it yourself and then if you say that I want to put in some profession to run it on my behalf, then that 3,000,000 has to look 6,000,000.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yep, Yep, Yep. OK, Fair enough. So it's really the only way to to fund enough money to make this worthwhile is to like, you kind of have to grow. Have to grow, yeah.

The other option is to pick up some right players and just license what you have and make it as license revenue.

Yep.

That's another possibility.

So you lost this off to the same kind of people and they pay you like, you know, half $1,000,000 a year, whatever the figure is, and you integrate your tech into their tech and they sell it off to their clients and make a profit out of that. Yeah. What's what's your risk appetite like in terms of taking more investment on to fund this kind of sales growth?

So at this point of time, in my head, I'm thinking another 12%. So we've got 7% of, you know, friends and family already in there. I could take another 10% now that the value of the business is higher from where we started. I could take another 10%, give out equity and to use that money to grow.

And and how come you haven't done that? Well, what stopped you from doing that today?

I'm trying. You haven't worked.

Out, Yeah, as in you haven't been able to raise the money or haven't been able to get how to effectively spend it?

No, I haven't been able to raise the money. There's a plan in place of how to effectively chase spend it that the plan is I'll get put a pre sales guy in there and we will cost sell as opposed to being partners where the platform gets money for it's reach. Yeah, the US partner or the European partner?

Because it's it's it's rare for a company in Australia to succeed the first or second or fifth time around. Overseas. It often takes a lot of iterations, right? Yeah. The first time you recruit a pre sales guy would just be wrong. They won't be able to sell or they won't get you right. Then you've got to try again. Then you've got to travel back and forth a lot to kind of educate them. Have you thought about skipping that and maybe make you the pre sales guy in some of these regions?

So that's what is happening right now is that work with them so that I'm the pre sales guy and get the first deals on the table because once you get the first deals on the table and the cycle is wrong then it's easy to tell the next guy.

Because then what do you do? Plus then when you have a deals on on the table, you've kind of re jigged the power dynamics between you and the other company as well. So you can maybe ask them to help Co fund it or then at least you've got some revenues so you can actually fund this person yourself. Yeah. Is that a reasonable enough approach?

Yeah, so that's what I'm trying right now.

How effective is is that being?

No, I think what I did was I've just started OK doing that. I haven't yet got any runs on board. We would like to. So the commercial validation that I've talked about another second check being written has been written once it goes through that. The sponsor of that, he's actually won the President's Award. So he's a good voice inside the company and he's kind of spread the word that this is what we're doing with this Australian company and they've said we need an American or a British company to do this with us.

So there is a door that's slightly open. That's the question of getting that American and the British company to come along.

OK. Got it. Makes sense. OK. When you focus your minds based on the US, growing there in Europe or what not as well how much of your time you still needed in the Australian business?

So the the sales cycle is kind of you kind of have coffees all around the year to stay in touch top of mind. But then by around August is where people sponsors start looking for ideas.

That's when their budget's going to get allocated.

That's where they're doing the planning. So if you get into the planning cycle, then the budgets get allocated by November, December and the P OS start coming in in January, OK.

But so, but the Australian business still kind of takes your time. So you can't, you know, go overseas for six months if you had to, to, to America.

No, I need to keep on coming back.

OK, so you still got work to do.

Here. So that's the other problem. We are far away from everywhere, Yeah. And everything is a 20 hour flight, yeah.

Everything's hard. Yeah. So what? What? So what's the current plan? Like, what are you going to do right now? Are you going to still try to raise money to do this? Are you going to try to do this yourself?

So I have got kind of exhausted trying to raise money.

Yeah.

And everywhere I hear, even in the US, they said that money on the lower side of the spectrum is kind of no, it's.

Just hard.

It's just hard. Nobody's betting on it. There was 1 gentleman who was advising me and he said well look, $100,000, I'll tip in. But beyond that I said now we're talking about four, $5,000,000. He says, yeah, that's the spectrum, which is hard in, even though you've got revenue to show, you know, that this is not an idea anymore, but that money suddenly has kind of. All right, yeah. There's this uncertainty about geopolitics.

Whatever there's uncertainty, people just don't invest in software and the problem is going to be is you're a small business, not a lot of revenue. So it's just it's still very high risk, right? This is very high risk for an investor might be a great return, but it's it's very high risk and probably in your world as well. Like it's not the total just for market, it's not huge, right? This might be a billion dollar company.

The global market is actually $32 billion.

Into medical, OK. And how much of that global market right now gets spent on products like yours?

So the closest competitor to us who kind of pivot, the main pivot is at the bedside and secondary pivot is education there. But I think last quarter they did $25 million in the US but.

In terms of people that do medical education chat bots like how big is that market?

There is nobody who does medical education with chat bots.

OK. So it's, it's it's all very new. What about general, General Medical education? How big is that market?

That is $32 billion.

30 million, OK, fair enough. OK. So that there is there is kind of growth there potentially. OK. So I guess the decision you got to make is if it's kind of getting hard to raise money and you don't have enough profits to fund this yourself to get, you know, $1,000,000 to have two reps, it sounds like you actually don't really have a choice. You've either got to redo the commercial model with these partners so you don't need to put in cash or you got to do the work yourself.

Is option a possible? Can you redo the commercials with with these guys? Is it is it like a master slave relationship because you're a much smaller player, or can you actually get them to help fund some of this stuff?

So the ones who would come to party, in my opinion, would come to party with us are the ones who probably don't have the money to spend, but they're hungry to grow. So it's so I'm leveraging on the hunger for growth because for them, every time they create a new program, it is as expensive as the last one. So the bottom line doesn't shift, whereas with us the bottom line shifts dramatically.

If I was to re say that, so you're selling to people that actually don't have a lot of money to spend.

Yes.

That's hard.

I'm not selling to people I'm partnering with.

You're partnering with people, they don't have a lot of cash to spend.

Correct. But they're hungry too, because they're in the growth part, The ones who have the cash in hand, inertia has taken them on, so they're chugging along with that because they're.

Profitable. They don't need to change. It's kind of working as is. OK, Yeah.

Because the moment we add in something new into your mix, you have to have your sales guys ready for it and that's the hardest you are.

And do you think you have the ability to to convince those cash rich partners?

The the only way to convince the cash rich partners is to actually bring a deal to their table by myself.

Is that possible in this kind of scenario? Is that very difficult to do?

No, it is not difficult to do. It's only that whether they will participate in the sales process when I get the deal. Yeah, it's a paper with that comes with the deal.

OK, fair enough. But it sounds like it's, it's quite a difficult one to solve because what we're saying is we've got partners that, that, that don't have a lot of money to spend. You've got, you don't have a lot of money to spend yourself, even though you've got so much profit, you've still got to build your product here, You still got to invest in the Australian market, yet you actually still want to grow and you're not able to get investment to, to fund that growth, right. So it might just be a go slow model.

It I think it'll eventually be a go slow model, yeah.

Closer model, it's probably just your time and then when you get some runs on the board, if they generate some revenue and that can kind of help fund it.

Yeah. Then everybody else will come to a party. Yeah.

Yeah, it it's a sad story, but it perhaps it's the only way that this model will work right now for you.

Yes, that's that's the only way unless somebody comes along with deep pockets and that's all right. We'll pick you, we'll pick you, we'll pick you. And we are a part of the buying lot. Yeah, that's a different story. But.

The problem is even now, like you probably don't have enough of revenue to have a meaningful exit right now. No, you need another 3-4, five years of growth to get big enough so then they can actually exit and.

So the problem with with us being acquired by overseas business is that they don't understand that $3,000,000 is actually good money in Australia because the size is small. Yeah, they're thinking, well, 3,000,000 is like 3,000,000. I could do 2 million in Singapore, for instance.

And they'll probably spend half $1,000,000 on all the due diligence and the cost and the transaction costs. So it's actually the better of buying a $30 million company or $100 million company. Yeah, yeah, OK, fair enough. So what does that leave us? So the question I originally had was, you know, how do I go from a dev company to a growth company? What's the what's the current thinking based on what we've spoken about?

Based on what we have spoken about, it'll be a growth slow, but it can be really, really slow. So we will have to leverage our Australian connections to get those American deals and then once we get an American deal, everybody else will. It just is. What The first deal, yeah.

And that's your expertise, right? You're a, you're a salesperson in learning and development, right. So if anyone can get this deal, it's probably you. Yeah. OK, brilliant. Well, one thing I always kind of finish off with all the all the podcasts is a question I ask everybody. What's something you've always known to be true that later on you found out actually wasn't true?

So I always thought price is a function of value perceived.

Yeah, and it's not.

And for many years, I used to kind of believe in it, but then the definition of perception in my head was wrong. Yeah.

Explain that.

So I always used to think if I can propose a value of what the education program can do, then the price doesn't really matter. If they have to budget, they'll buy. But often then then I got in. And then this happened during COVID, but everything suddenly became cheap. If it is digital, it's almost free. And I had this call at 9:00 at night with the client. He said send me a proposal tomorrow. I sent him a proposal. He said he didn't reply back. And then eventually I called him up and I said, what is that?

He says, look, I put something for $5000. If you sell yours to me for $5000, I'll buy. Mine was $14,000. I said good luck with that. And actually I'd like to meet the guy who does the $5000 because I might use him. You know, that's still, I mean, $9000 of profit. Yeah, if he does it. But the fact is he went with the $5000. You know, he whether he compared apples and oranges is a different story, but that's the way the deal went. Yeah. So in his head, perception of value was that it's it's you're doing X.

How X gets delivered is not my problem.

Sure, he thought. It's almost like commodity, right? They're all.

The same. It's commodity, Yeah. Whether it reaches 300 doctors or 5000 doctors, I really don't care because to him he was justifying cost.

Yeah, OK, awesome. Great. Thanks for very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you very much. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you don't want to be a guest, make sure you hit me up and do follow me on socials and make sure you check out future episodes. Thanks guys.