In this conversation, Osama Hyder, founder of Duniya Health, discusses the intersection of technology and healthcare, particularly in the realm of cancer care. He shares insights on how Duniya Health aims to simplify the treatment process for cancer patients through an AI-enabled platform. The discussion covers various aspects of running a startup, including business strategy, customer acquisition, the importance of AI, and the challenges of marketing in the healthcare sector. Osama emphasizes the need for robust privacy measures and the importance of understanding customer needs in order to drive growth and improve patient outcomes.
Takeaways
- Duniya Health aims to unify multiple healthcare apps into one platform.
- AI and ML are crucial for managing cancer treatment effectively.
- Understanding customer needs is vital for business success.
- Establishing a willingness to pay is essential for startups.
- Privacy and data management are critical in healthcare.
- Meeting patients where they are enhances user experience.
- Marketing strategies must adapt to different audiences.
- Long hours should be paired with effective strategy for success.
- Building trust with users is key in healthcare applications.
- Continuous learning from user feedback is important for growth.
Show Notes
BeyondSaaS Transcript
Jason Niedle (00:00)
Today we’re talking with Osama Hyder, founder of Duniya Health, about how his passion for technology drives business growth and makes cancer suck less.
Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos. We are a growth agency and we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy, branding, lead gen, and conversions for the last 20 years. I have a brand new report that we just posted on tethos.com/podcast and I’m pretty excited about it and it is compiled from interviews with tech executives like Osama here. Or easier yet, you can also just drop the word growth in the comments and I will DM that to you. Today, I’m excited to explore tech company growth with Osama. He’s the founder of Duniya Health
which is uplifting the quality of life for cancer patients. This is a pioneering AI-enabled health platform that brings hope and support to cancer patients and their families by using AI and ML to manage all aspects of the treatments from meds to health tracking and appointment management, symptom guidance, nutrition advice. It sounds kind of amazing. Thankfully, I’m not in a place where I need to use it, but I definitely would take a look at it if I needed to. Sam is using innovation and technology to drive growth and ultimately, as we mentioned,
and he is making cancer suck less. So thank you Osama.
Osama Hyder (01:11)
Thank you for having me, Jason. I appreciate it.
Jason Niedle (01:13)
Yeah. Hey, before I forget, do you have a quick tip for our listeners?
Osama Hyder (01:16)
Yeah, I would say one tool that we’ve been using quite a lot from the moment we started is an app called Replit. You can use it on your computer, you can use it on your phone. It’s probably the best prototyping application that I’ve come across in my kind of 10 to 12 years working in IT and software development. Any kind of idea you have, you can give your idea to its artificial intelligence kind of chat interface.
and it will basically create your application for you. Obviously, it’s not something that you can just kind of give it a prompt and then go out and release it to the internet. You still have to work on it a little bit here and there, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool. And if you just need to validate an idea or present a concept really quick to your team, it’s a really good and really powerful tool to use and it’s pretty affordable.
Jason Niedle (02:00)
Very cool. And for our listeners out there, how do you spell that?
Osama Hyder (02:03)
Our Replit is R-E-P-L-I-T and I believe it’s .app is their kind of appendage.
Jason Niedle (02:11)
awesome. I am going to check that out. Cool. So tell me about Duniya health.
Osama Hyder (02:14)
Absolutely. So this organization was founded because of my own personal experiences as a caregiver to a loved one with cancer. And one of the things that we went through, my sister was the patient in this case, where right now cancer patients have to use four to five different applications to manage their care. They’re already in such a vulnerable and exposed state. And that’s just an additional thing for them to have to worry about. So
with the improvements in AI that came out over the past three to four years, I thought, what if we can unify all four or five of those apps into a single cohesive platform where patients can again manage every aspect of their treatment journey and not have to constantly juggle between three to four or even five apps and just have a singular place where they can have everything related to their treatment available to them. And they can also get evidence-based advice on managing certain things related to their healthcare.
whether it’s a symptom that’s come up, a side effect they’re experiencing from their chemo treatment or radiation, and it just gives them a spot to basically receive all the support they could possibly need outside of the clinic.
Jason Niedle (03:09)
you
Wow, super cool. How long has that been live?
Osama Hyder (03:21)
So far we have launched our beta version out to users for about two months now. And yeah, so we’re pretty new on the scene. I started this company really about a year and probably a few weeks ago. In the middle, had to step away, got married, not the best luck to be working on your startup or on your honeymoon. But once I was back, it was kind of full speed ahead, getting this thing off the ground, getting a design developed.
Jason Niedle (03:33)
Well.
Osama Hyder (03:46)
getting the evidence base you need because again, working with cancer patients, working with healthcare in general, it’s really, really important that you’re giving people accurate, evidence-based, clinically-backed advice because we never want to cause harm. We never want to interrupt their treatment or cause issues with their treatment. So we’ve been running for about two months so far.
Jason Niedle (04:06)
Wow, amazing. What do you see at the heart of your role as a business founder and leader? What’s the most important thing that you have to do every day there?
Osama Hyder (04:14)
I would say being a founder is something that really encapsulates multiple roles, right? At times you are a kind of you’re a very technical person, but then you also have to think about marketing strategy. You have to think about overall business strategy. In addition to that, you have to think about, okay, how do I grow? How do I communicate with different kind of communities that may be interacting with my app, whether it’s potential investors.
Whether it’s the chief medical innovation officer at a hospital or whether it’s just a patient and the way that we communicate, the way you interact with all those different levels can vary at times. So as a founder, you basically have to wear about a dozen hats or more at the same time. And that’s especially at the beginning, right? As a team grows and as it expands, you can start to shed some of those hats and then your primary job is really just bringing unity within your team.
Making sure that the values and the culture you want in your organization is properly communicated to everybody in your team and that they feel empowered to do the work and that they continuously maintain that belief in the mission you have. And in our case, our mission is really simple. We want to make cancer suck less.
Jason Niedle (05:22)
Yeah, so the only way to do that is to get this out to a million people or however large your target audience is. So what are your key growth stats and what’s your revenue model?
Osama Hyder (05:27)
Yeah. Yeah.
So our revenue model at present, because we’re a brand new company, we’re kind of exploring different revenue models in different markets. In North America, where you have 2.2 million new cancer patients diagnosed every single year, unfortunately, it’s a number that’s too high. But luckily, people are getting diagnosed and it’s not kind of falling under their radar, which is also equally as important.
But so far of those 2.2 million cancer patients, we are really aiming to attract and have effectively everyone that is diagnosed sign up for our application, right? The way to do that is a mixture of strategies that we’re exploring at the moment, right? One is going direct to consumer, direct to patient, business to consumer, you know? And through that, you have your kind of traditional marketing strategies where you are running
geologically based ads. So one of the things we do is we run our social media and our online advertising within 20 to 30 kilometers of every major cancer hospital in North America. So where a cancer patient is going in for treatment, a lot of the times while they’re receiving chemotherapy, they may be browsing on their phone, right? And that’s an opportunity for us to appeal to them, to show them, hey, we’re here to help you and we’re trying to support you throughout your treatment.
In other markets, for example, the Middle East, because you have a smaller population size, what we’re aiming to do is we’re aiming to partner directly with the hospitals and have us be their official companion application. So any patients that come through their door, the cancer hospital is responsible for encouraging that sign up onto the app. And as a result, we integrate with the hospital systems too. So the patient is receiving all the support they need.
So those are kind of the two main core focuses, focuses of our strategy at the moment. But again, being a startup, being kind of a company that’s a year old, we’re always kind of ready to pivot. So we’re also exploring that strategy we’re using in the Middle East, in North America as well, where if we can partner with major cancer institutions like MD Anderson, Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Sloan Kettering, UCLA Johnson, with those, we want to
offer ourselves as the official companion application for those hospitals oncology clinics.
Jason Niedle (07:40)
For sure.
So you could look at your most important KPIs in several different ways. You could see KPI as pure revenue. You could see a KPI as partner hospitals. You could see a KPI as actual users, user hours. How do you look at that?
Osama Hyder (07:53)
We look at it as a mixture of both, right? Obviously focusing on just one indicator isn’t always representative of the whole picture. So when it comes to customer acquisition, right, we’re looking at the ads that we’re running, how many people are clicking on our website, we’re tracking kind of their activity on the website, and then how many people are actually registering. Initially when we started out, we found that, hey,
we’re getting a decent amount of visits to our website, but they’re not translating to signups for our beta early access program. And so then we kind of had to readjust how we reach patients, the messaging and the communications we use, the channels we use to attract to them. But aside from that kind of the core business indicators for us are being a new company, are the customer acquisition. So how much does it cost us to acquire a customer?
And because we’re still relatively new and the user journey for a cancer patient is usually between 12 to about 28 to 32 months if they’re receiving treatment. And so with that, we’re still in the early stages to be able to measure how many users we’re keeping. But obviously if a patient has signed up for our platform and they’re leaving within the first two, three weeks of using the app, that’s a concern for us, right? That’s a user where
Jason Niedle (09:05)
you
Osama Hyder (09:06)
If they’re comfortable, we’ll reach out to them and we’ll say, what went wrong or where were we not able to meet you? Because in any organization, I think, it’s always important to meet your users where they’re
Jason Niedle (09:18)
Well it’s actually an interesting business challenge where your churn is built in, right? Because so many people say all the time, manage churn, and you’re like, hey I want churn, I want these people getting better, you know? ⁓
Osama Hyder (09:25)
This is.
Yes, absolutely. And
we built that into our early kind of revenue forecasting that we did way back when when we were just building our pitch decks where we know that users are going to leave our application. We want them to leave our application at the end of the day, right? if anything, we don’t want them to download our, we know, we hope no one ever has to use our application, but the way the world is there are cancer patients out there that are being diagnosed.
The one thing we have going in our sort of favor I say is that there are always new users or patients entering the market, right? With 2.2 million new diagnoses every year, you always have new people entering the market just as you have people leaving.
Jason Niedle (10:07)
And that’s just in the US, right? 2.2 in the US. North America. Wow.
Osama Hyder (10:09)
Yeah, that’s just in North America, US and Canada, the way.
Yeah. Globally, you’re at about 17 million. So as you kind of expand more and more, there is kind of that strong in startup world, that’s kind of your total addressable market. There is that strong total addressable market globally. But at present, our focus is really on North America and the Middle East.
Jason Niedle (10:28)
Is revenue patient side or hospital side or ads or all of the above? ⁓
Osama Hyder (10:34)
It is primarily in North America patient side. So we offer our solution for $100 a year. We tried to price it as aggressively low as we possibly could because we want to appeal to the widest variety of widest levels of income that we possibly could. And we felt that $100 price point is accessible, especially when you consider the services we offer and the competitors that I mentioned earlier, where you have patients using four to five different apps.
Collectively, if you sign up for the subscription model on all of those apps, you’re looking at spending about $200 to $250 a year. So we cut them down by almost 50 % while still being able to kind of maintain strong margins to keep the company.
Jason Niedle (11:18)
So you have some really, really kind of radically different ICPs. You have some administrator at a hospital who might take a year to make a decision on something and then you have someone who has to make a decision tomorrow because they have treatment to handle. And one’s a consumer who’s worried about a lot of other stuff and the other’s an administrator, right? What are you doing to reach you to those people and to bring them into your funnel?
Osama Hyder (11:26)
Thank you.
So for cancer patients, we primarily target through social media, through patient advocacy groups, and through places like Reddit in conjunction with running ads as well. For the kind of healthcare administrators, the decision makers, LinkedIn has been a strong source for us in addition to conferences, right? There are some conferences that, you know, all of the kind of executives that
all the major hospitals, always attend no matter what, right? One of them is the health conference that happens in Vegas. And that’s where you have all the big names, all the big pairs, providers. And there you can really kind of make some solid connections and at least lay the foundation to set up a meeting.
Jason Niedle (12:17)
Yeah, that makes sense. So what is the constraint to growth? obviously it’s gonna be funding and external circumstances and all these other things, but if you could fix or adjust something to speed up growth, what would that be?
Osama Hyder (12:28)
I would say one of the biggest constraints to our growth is just the number of individuals that are knowledgeable and have lived experience in this space that are also willing to give time to a company like ours, right? One of the kind of core tenets or one of the things that when I’m hiring or I’m interviewing, it’s really valuable to me and the means a lot to me,
It’s someone that has lived experience as a caregiver to someone with cancer, right? if you’ve been through that and you’ve seen everything that a cancer patient goes through, I know that you can come into this organization and really help us with innovation and bring us fresh ideas because you’ve walked the walk to a certain extent. You know what a patient goes through and you know, even through maybe you had some unique experiences that others didn’t have,
that we haven’t considered so far. And so we like to think about how we can integrate those.
Jason Niedle (13:19)
Yeah, 100%. Any strategies that have been surprising for you, things you thought would work and didn’t work, or things that are working better than you thought they would?
Osama Hyder (13:30)
I would say one of the things that way back before we kind of started doing our marketing, everyone was like, yeah, go on Reddit, post about your company there. What we found and it was a valuable learning experience for us, right? It was really, really important information we got out of it. But what we found was a that the community on Reddit is a little bit anti outsider in the sense that,
Not a lot of people are comfortable with giving their private health information to a private company at the end of the day, right? So initially when we posted on Reddit, a lot of the feedback we got was, I’m not, just not going to give you my information, right? It’s, not something that we’re comfortable with. There’s a lot of work that needs to go in into educating the user that, Hey, this is our privacy policy. You know, we are committed to never selling data to third parties. It’s listed right on our website.
Jason Niedle (13:58)
Right.
Osama Hyder (14:18)
And so as a result, we found that Reddit may not necessarily be the best place for us to be advertising. And so we kind of kind of reduced our ad spend on Reddit accordingly. One of the best places that we saw a lot of success, and this is again, for the specific customer profile of hospital and healthcare administrators is running ads on LinkedIn, right? if we can run ads on LinkedIn that will kind of
we target them and we set them up to really focus on healthcare administrators. That goes a long way and at least getting our company in front of their eyes. And it’s a lot different than kind of me finding their email on the hospital’s website and writing them an email versus them kind of scrolling LinkedIn. And maybe they saw our ad and there’s that little bit of brand recognition for later on when I do email them, they’re like, okay, I’ve seen this company before. I know, you know, at least I have that brand recognition.
and they’re a little bit more comfortable interacting with us then as well.
Jason Niedle (15:15)
Yeah, the marketing people will say, and it’s hard to verify all this all the time, but it’s been pretty clear in my experience as well that you need those eight touches before someone’s going to buy something, right? So maybe they see you and then hear about you and see a user using you and then you’ve reached out and then you reach out again and finally they cave, right? Or they get on the phone with you and then, you know, or whatever and then they move through it.
Osama Hyder (15:33)
Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, honestly, I
find it varies individual to individual sometimes, right? Sometimes two touches are enough. And sometimes 20 touches aren’t enough at all. So it can kind of depend on that person’s individual constraints, personal and professional, on whether or not they can kind of bring your solution to their executive and their advisory board, whether they’re in that position to innovate and things like that. So.
Jason Niedle (15:43)
Right.
Osama Hyder (15:57)
I’m always one for as many touches as it takes until I just know it’s a blank.
Jason Niedle (16:03)
Yeah, 100%. So what are some of the biggest learnings you’ve had over the startup journey? You know, it’s not an easy thing to get a company off the ground and market to these radically different audiences. And you’re also dealing with a tough subject. Most people find it really difficult to go in and talk about cancer regularly, and especially when you’re quote unquote, selling to cancer patients, right? You know, what are some of the things you’ve learned?
Osama Hyder (16:24)
One of the biggest things that we learned was that, and I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but there’s nothing more important than meeting your customers, your clients, in our case, your patients where they’re at, right? If we can make our solution as easily accessible and as frictionless as we can, given how already overwhelmed cancer patients are, we have a much higher chance of having them on board and join our.
In addition to that, I would say just in general, right being a startup founder, like you said, it’s not easy to get a company off the ground or build a company. And so with that, it kind of takes that dedication. It takes those long hours at the end of the day. But I will say that with one caveat where long hours on their own aren’t enough, but long hours with strategy and recognizing when a strategy is working versus not working.
Can go a lot longer, right? I might be able to work 18 hours just grinding away at something or I can spend 12 hours working with the strategy and get much further than I would have by just kind of putting my Nose to the ground and doing as much as I can to kind of force something I found it’s a little bit hard to force things and you know working with other customers working with patients working with hospitals everything needs to be a
conversation first and then a sell later.
Jason Niedle (17:42)
Yeah, 100%. So you have AI built into your project, you have machine learning built into it. What should people know out there about AI and ML?
Osama Hyder (17:53)
I would say that while it might seem scary to some, it is not going away. There’s always these kind of fads every few years. The latest one was virtual reality. But the biggest problem with virtual reality was that it was difficult to implement at scale. That’s not really a problem with AI.
At this point in time, anybody can really start going and start building with AI. You can talk to AI for free. You don’t have to spend 400 bucks at Best Buy. And so with that, I would say, be conscious that it’s not going away and start doing the work now if you haven’t already to make yourself AI aware. One of the biggest e-commerce companies in the world, Shopify, which originally started here in Canada.
Their CEO put out a notice like an all persons noticed all of their employees just a few days ago. Where he indicated that if you are not AI aware and you are not using AI in your everyday service to this organization. You will very quickly be left behind. Shopify is kind of known especially internally for being very direct
And so he was very, very clear with his employees that you need to start using this every day because at the end of the day, the efficiencies that it unlocks are massive, And I can give you an example from even what we’re doing where right now a cancer patient, when they come back from their chemotherapy appointment and they’re experiencing a strong side effect.
right? Let’s say nausea is a very common one, right? Let’s say it’s a very extreme level of nausea. They have to pick up the phone and they have to call into a hotline at the hospital where a nurse is sitting there and that nurse is looking at a big book and she or they look at that big book and they see, this is your cancer type. This is your stage. This is the symptom you had. This is the chemotherapy you had. This is what you need to do, right? that is an inefficient process, especially with the introduction of AI.
And so what we do is we train our artificial intelligence on that big book that the nurse is sitting there with anyway. And the patient just has to go in and they have to input in their symptom, the severity of that symptom, answer two follow-up questions. And then within five to six seconds, they effectively have an outline of what they can do to address that symptom or set.
So we break it down into three categories for them. We give them health and wellness recommendations, we give them lifestyle adjustments, and we give them diet and nutrition adjustments. Because collectively, those three can often make us address a symptom might not make it go away, but it can address the severity of the symptom. We do always say at the end of every advice that’s generated and all over our website that
we are not a replacement for your oncologist, nor are we trying to be, right? We’re just trying to be there for you before you need to pick up the phone and call your oncologist or before you feel like you need to go to the emergency room for something that’s not necessarily emergent. And that’s one of our biggest sells to hospital administrators as well, where we can reduce the ER admission rate for non-emergent cases if patients start using our application.
Because more often than not, that nurse, when they pick up the phone and call, will say, you just come to the ER. And that can, for a cancer patient that’s already exhausted, having a really tough symptom, that can be a lot to sit in an ER for eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours. So if we can reduce the need for an ER admission and reduce the time to their first ER admission, that’s a valuable metric.
for hospital administrators, hospital executives.
Jason Niedle (21:21)
Plus, I mean, just for the patients, who wants to pick up the phone and call someone when you feel nauseous? Right? That’s like the last thing you want to do. Like, yeah, I want to go talk to someone, I’m going to wait online, I’m going to, you know, they’re going to try to find the right person to do this. Yeah, it’s kind of the worst thing.
Osama Hyder (21:35)
And one of the biggest things I experienced when I was a caregiver was that the hospital will never talk to you as the caregiver. They will say, even if, you know, your loved one is vomiting over the side of the couch uncontrollably or something like that, right? They will still say, give the patient the phone. They won’t talk to the caregiver about the kind of patient’s needs whatsoever. And we built our application in fact, for both patients and caregivers.
So we’ve set in, set up privacy and data controls in there where you can give access to a loved one, whether it’s a spouse, whether it’s a parent, whether it’s a friend. And they can basically enter in that, this person is experiencing this level of extreme, symptom or side effect. And they will then get the response right in. And that response is connected to that patient’s profile. Well, obviously data privacy is really, really important in that.
Jason Niedle (22:23)
That’s it.
Osama Hyder (22:26)
And one of the things that we did that we felt was pretty innovative was where patients can control the level of access they give to a caregiver. So let’s say, for example, the information that I want my spouse knowing or my parent knowing, right? I may want them to know more than I want my aunt that I haven’t seen in 20 years knowing, right?
Jason Niedle (22:49)
Mm-hmm.
Osama Hyder (22:50)
So when I
Jason Niedle (22:50)
⁓
Osama Hyder (22:51)
give an access code to a caregiver, I can assign a certain level of data that’s shared with that caregiver as well. And that kind of reduces the burden on the patient as well because that nurse that you haven’t seen in 20 years is probably going to be picking up the phone because now they’re worried about you and they want to hear about how you’re doing. And that’s just, you know, it’s well intentioned by your loved one, but that is a burden mentally and emotionally on the cancer patient as well to constantly having to be able to share those updates.
Jason Niedle (22:57)
Very cool. ⁓
If you could go back two years ago, a year and a half ago, what would you tell slightly younger Osama about what to do differently in this journey?
Osama Hyder (23:25)
I would say that establish willingness to pay as soon as you possibly can. That was one of the advices that an MD out of Techstars Maryland gave me. And they worked with the John Hopkins medicine out of Baltimore as well. And he said that, you might be able to get to 10,000 patients that will sign up for free, but until you can establish
how much those patients are willing to pay to use your application. It’s all effectively worthless as a business model. So figure out, even if you get 10,000 survey results, not even users, but 10,000 survey results with patients willing to say, yeah, I’ll pay 50 bucks a year for this. I’ll pay a hundred bucks a year for this. That’s incredibly valuable information to investors because a couple of years ago, there’s kind of that saying, you can go to a VC with a
Jason Niedle (23:55)
you
Osama Hyder (24:15)
pitch deck and an MVP and you’ll get funded. Sadly, that’s not the case anymore, right? The funding landscape has shifted quite dramatically in just the past 18 months. And so, but now if you can go to a, you know, an incubator and accelerator, whether it’s Y Combinator, Techstars or a VC, and you can say, hey, we’ve established and proved that there’s a willingness to pay for this by users, you’ll find that conversations can happen a lot more easily with funding vehicles like those.
Jason Niedle (24:43)
Yeah, for sure. So globally there is turbulence, you know, the stock market as we record this went down 10 % in two days, up 10 % in one day, nobody knows what’s going to be ahead. How are you looking ahead to plan to grow your company? How are you navigating kind of uncertainty?
Osama Hyder (24:59)
Yeah, it is one of those things because I’m a Canadian citizen myself. But our kind of initial market is based in the United States, right? Canada has 200,000 new diagnoses, the United States has 2 million. And it’s one of those things where even applying for visas, you now kind of think twice. And in the past, whether I’m attending a conference or anything like that,
I can kind of tell the customs and borders officer that, I’m going for a conference and it’s never been a problem so far. Now I’m thinking I have a conference coming up in a couple of months. I’m curious and a little bit apprehensive. Will that conversation go the same now? So that’s kind of one of those things that is again, lending to an apprehension with conducting business internationally. But beyond that, I think, things like fluctuation and movements in the
stock market, I would say if it doesn’t directly impact your ability to run your organization and lead your organization, it’s not something the founders should be overly worried about. Yes, there are, you you might have visa issues, you might have licensing issues and things like that. But there are very, very talented lawyers who have been doing this across multiple administrations that have been in charge in both the US and Canada.
They know how to navigate these waters with a little bit of experience, with a little bit of finesse that can help you in those cases. So that would be kind of my primary advice to other founders where if it doesn’t directly impact you, don’t really let it deter you from pursuing international business development.
Jason Niedle (26:26)
And sadly in some way you’re relatively immune to it’s not it’s not an economic decision it’s a health decision right so very interesting.
Osama Hyder (26:33)
Right. Right. Yeah. And I would
also say that, you know, if you’re importing, luckily we’re a software company, right? That’s initially at least for the time being we’re a primarily software company. I do have plans in the future, one day hopefully to kind of integrate wearables into our offering, but that’s way down the line. But while we’re a software company, we don’t really have to worry about, importing parts from China, importing parts from Taiwan.
And having to worry about the impacts that those might have, at least on us directly. If we’re hosting on servers that are built by Nvidia in Taiwan and they’re being imported here, yes, the kind of infrastructure costs may go up a little bit, but the effects of that, I think it’s still early to see. But I would anticipate that for founders that are considering infrastructure heavy, and by that I mean…
server storage processing requirements. If your idea is infrastructure heavy, I would integrate the increase in tariffs for your hosting provider. If AWS is importing new servers that are more powerful, they’re paying a tariff on those now, obviously. And so as a result, as every company will do, those tariffs are going to be passed on to you as the consumer.
I say this to kind of everyone that ever asks me about infrastructure or hosting or things like that. The AWS bill or the Azure bill will always come to you, right? You always have to pay because if you don’t pay it, you know, you don’t really have a company, you don’t have a website, you don’t have an organization anymore. So that’s one thing that we always try to do. We pay our AWS bill first before we pay any other bills.
Jason Niedle (28:06)
Any final thoughts? Anything you wanted to share?
Osama Hyder (28:09)
One kind of final bit that I will mention is, especially for anybody considering, founding a company or building a company in the healthcare space, is that navigating the intricacies around privacy, around data management, around
meeting your users where they’re at, whether it’s the way that you market to them, the way you communicate to them, or kind of how you build their profile is incredibly important. Before I founded this company, I worked in the privacy area of software development for maternal health. And with that, we found that A, and we found this even within your health, private citizens don’t want to give their personal health data to a private company.
Jason Niedle (28:43)
Hmm.
Osama Hyder (28:53)
and building in incredibly robust privacy controls. While it may seem like good idea to you, the time and energy you’ll spend on doing it won’t necessarily translate to the user. It’s still absolutely important you do it no matter what. But those privacy controls are really for your own organization’s compliance so you don’t get sued into oblivion. But aside from that,
Communicating that to users is a little bit difficult and you’ll find that it may be easier to go downstream going direct to consumer in any kind of patient facing application is incredibly, incredibly tough. So that’s just one piece of advice I’d give to them that if you can try and enter downstream, try and partner with hospitals or try and even partner even more downstream where you meet with medical software providers that already have relationships.
hospitals. Those can go a long way and at least getting your foot in the door and then you can build
Jason Niedle (29:48)
Awesome. Where can our audience find you?
Osama Hyder (29:50)
They can find me on LinkedIn primarily if they want to find, you know, me myself. Other than that, Duniya Health is on LinkedIn, we’re on Facebook, we’re on Instagram. They can also go to our website, www.duniya.health. And if they ever have any questions, you know, feel free to always reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on
Jason Niedle (30:08)
Awesome. And for our listeners out there, Duniya, spelled D-U-N-I-Y-A.health is the website Duniya.health. Osama Hyder, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, we drop episodes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And you can find me, Jason Niedle, at tethos.com. That’s T-E-T-H-O-S.com.
Also grab our free report on hypergrowth at tethos.com/podcast. So if you have any questions for me or for future guests and comments and feedback. And if you found some value today, please share the episode. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.
