jonathan-adly

Do you know what NPS is? That's how the comment started. Patients like it. Because the alternative is to stay on hold for 20+ minutes, and then get it wrong. (Or have no pharmacies except Optum's and Express Scripts).

Good for you - I want in the ICU delivering care during COVID as a frontline clinician. You don't get to pull this line.

NPS typically improves because no one stays on hold for 20+ mins anymore.

People have no ideas have pharmacies work. Pharmacies don't control how much they pay for drug, or how much they get paid. The margins are terrible and you can't hire enough techs to answer the phone at peak call volume. So - most people experience are terrible as they wait on hold for a really long time.

EVEN if the AI is a little rough around the edges with relational calls, just solving for transactional calls with no hold is a massive win.

So - I run a company that does AI agents for pharmacy. We are at Series B now and growing well - series C in 9-12 months given growth. We just acquired a competitor of that vendor so very much an insider.

First, The technology works, and it scales, but the whole bottleneck is domain expertise and implementation. These are expensive, and hard to scale. We hire pharmacists as project managers, that's how important domain expertise and implementations are.

Second, the amount of noise of "Voice AI for <industry>" is incredible. Most of them are completely clueless about the industry & basically "YC-striver" type who can only sell to other yc companies. They fail hard the moment they touch critical functions of the real world.

We have hundreds of pharmacies with us now and they mostly successful and happy. Our biggest friction is customers being burned by vendors like this and writing off AI altogether as "not ready".

I can’t believe this has 1 point, and buried.

This is great find, very juicy, and would kill a few hot startups.

Basically- the same math as modern automated manufacturing. Super expensive and complex build-out - then a money printer once running and optimized.

I know there is lots of bearish sentiments here. Lots of people correctly point out that this is not the same math as FAANG products - then they make the jump that it must be bad.

But - my guess is these companies end up with margins better than Tesla (modern manufacturer), but less than 80%-90% of "pure" software. Somewhere in the middle, which is still pretty good.

Also - once the Nvidia monopoly gets broken, the initial build out becomes a lot cheaper as well.

We have been running this playbook for the last 2 years in healthcare, and we have been super successful. Doubling every quarter over the last year. 70%+ profitability, almost 7 figures of revenue. 100% bootstrapped.

People are still mentally locked in to the world where code was expensive. Code now is extremely cheap. And if it is cheap, then it makes sense that every customer gets their own.

Before - we built factories to give people heavy machinery. Now, we run a 3d printer.

Everyday I thank SV product-led growth cargo cults for telling, sometimes even forcing our competition to not go there.

Lots of YC companies copy each other process and selection criteria. Basically- they all have the same blind spots and look for the same type of engineer.

So, super easy to scam all of them with the same skillset and mannerism.

I send this article as part of onboarding for all new devs we hire. It is super great to keep a fast growing team from falling into the typical cycle of more people, more complexity.

Great work! Honestly it helps so much just explaining these metrics for folks.

Early on RAG was an art, now when things are stabilized a bit, it’s more of a science - and vendors should at a minimum have some benchmarks.