Ira: 0:04

Welcome to the Accidental Entrepreneur's Podcast. I'm your host. Ira Gordon. Stacee is out this week, so I'm extremely excited to be joined by our guest, Dr. Adam Little. Adam's also a veterinarian and one of the true thought leaders in the world of innovation in animal health. On our last episode we discussed his startup journey and today we'll be diving a little bit deeper to get additional insights and advice from Adam. Really thrilled to have you on the show with me today.

Adam: 0:34

Yeah, thanks, Ira, glad to be here

Ira: 0:38

What have you been up to recently?

Adam: 0:40

Yeah, so came back from the Western Vet Conference not too long ago now. That was a really fun meeting. Obviously, the first bit of any year is kind of filled with a lot of travel, but Dr. Stacee Santi and I were co-hosting this workshop on using AI to build your practice playbook and so trying to get practices not just aware of some of these tools, but actively kind of using them, getting your hands dirty, which is a lot of fun. So that was how we kind of spent our time there.

Ira: 1:12

Right on, right on. Well, at the end of our last conversation, we spun the wheel and have our question to discuss today, which is what is some key advice you would give to a new startup. Do you want to go first?

Adam: 1:26

Yeah, there's a couple that jump out at me because these are things that I think, pieces of advice that we didn't follow and that I think are really important. So I think one of them is being able to, as quickly as you can, de-risk whatever you're building. And so are there ways that you can get feedback earlier from folks, before you spend a lot of time, kind of building something out and investing your time in it, and can you do that without requiring a lot of kind of technical work? Do that without requiring a lot of kind of technical work? Either I'm going to bring on a hired developer or I'm going to, you know, you know, contract a bunch of coders, etc. Um and so for me, that is things like landing page tests, that is things like surveys, that are things like using some of these no code tools to maybe build the first version of what you're considering. Just to understand, is there any interest in this whatsoever? And I think one of the things that sometimes is a little bit of a challenging path that I've seen some startups go down in the veterinary space is very much like hey, if I'm going to build this thing and it's going to work and integrate with these tools and once it's integrated, we're going to get all this value. And what they kind of fail to realize sometimes is that like well, actually getting those integrations and having them work in the way that you would like is maybe really expensive or maybe might not even be possible. And so is there a way that you can create value that doesn't require the permission of other people? And so that's kind of maybe the second one, where the first one is like can you de-risk what you're doing? But the second is can you create value without requiring a bunch of these different people, organizations, to kind of align in this perfect way? And so that can be something like understanding that, hey, you know, if I need to get this entire team to switch out their piece of software and I need like three different groups of leaders and the middle managers and to all agree that this is the thing that we're going to do, the amount of time and energy it takes to kind of get a customer, get a, get a user, can be so significant to the point that all you're doing is in your, all you are is in meetings with people who ultimately won't be the users of your software, and so I think that can be really problematic as well. And I think one of the best examples and this is one of the reasons I'm kind of bullish on some of these applications.

Adam: 3:53

But you look at like the medical dictation apps and I think what people sometimes miss is that it's the first kind of class of applications in the veterinary space in a long time that has been able to solve a problem in a way that you just need one team member. You can do it with one doctor who just agrees to try it one day without requiring the entire team billing. It doesn't require integration with the practice management software systems to create value and they are being able to generate more revenue than almost any other piece of software that veterinarians touch. And so those kind of ingredients where you're able to like sell something to one person in the practice and they're able to use it and get value out of it. It doesn't require these integrations are changing the entire workflow of the team and you're able to get compensated fairly for that. For that that value is is quite unique, so that's kind of another piece there is quite unique, so that's kind of another piece there. I think.

Adam: 4:48

The third thing for me is like hiring too early, so I kind of see this a lot where there's like a particularly difficult job Maybe it's like hey, I don't know how to get into corporate groups and the founders are saying, like we don't know how to do this, and as opposed to figuring it out, they kind of try to sometimes get a shortcut, and that could be in the form of hiring somebody or maybe doing a strategic partnership deal. But I think for a lot of early, early stage companies, these are just things that you have to figure out, and if they're particularly hard for you like hey, I don't know how to get vets to buy my product like hiring another salesperson to then try to take on that responsibility is probably not the right way to approach it, because if they're not going to buy it from the founder, who usually is the most passionate person, who knows the thing better, why are they going to buy it from a rep, right? And so I sometimes think that you know, oftentimes organizations may be higher ahead of where they need to, and the reality is, as a founder, you probably will feel overwhelmed and that you're bursting at the seams, and that's probably the time to hire, as opposed to hiring before that, especially if you don't exactly know what that year will look like and what success looks like in that role. And that maybe leads me to number four, which is that I think that strategic partnerships for early stage companies in the vet space I can't comment on every other space, but like are a huge waste of time. I can't come into another space, but like are a huge waste of time, with the reason being that oftentimes if you are a small company, you again are still figuring stuff out.

Adam: 6:34

And I'll give you a specific example that we kind of went through. Right, so we would work with, you know, pharma, nutrition partners around rewards, and so we have this rewards program, and so they would say, hey, we have all these clinics, we can talk to these clinics and mention this program, and that will be good for both of us. I have never seen significant growth and I haven't really heard of significant growth from other companies kind of going through that process, and I don't think it's because these partners are bad partners, but because a little bit of like a misaligned expectation. So one of the things, just practically speaking, is that these clients are really busy, right, and so they might represent that we have really strong relationships with these practices. But the reality is mostly these clinics are saying look, I am just trying to focus on my work and you're just like more people may be distracting me from doing that.

Adam: 7:16

The second part is now you're trying to somehow get this middle person to translate your offering to this customer. So not only are they maybe distorting, changing it around then you have to go to correct but you're actually missing an opportunity to speak to that customer. And then the other reason is where they kind of place you in the hierarchy of things that they want to talk about is not the first thing that they're talking about. They're talking about the stuff that matters to them. And so you end up in this situation where you end up relying on these partners.

Adam: 7:46

That, you think, gives you a false sense of product market fit, because the partner is saying this is really interesting and they have access to a lot of clinics. But just because they have access to them and their legacy kind of brands and products does not mean that that customer is going to translate to you and in some cases their sales reps or their field might not feel the same way about your product or might not be the target customer, and you're not getting that feedback then directly from the practices. And so I see a lot of early stage companies that spend a lot of time on partnerships and I'm like, look, unless you have really clear definition on like, what makes them successful, you have some minimums, you have some ability to enforce this, you have some leverage. You are going to spend a lot only to find out that, hey, that just wasn't a successful channel for us and, if anything, we've maybe missed a bunch of time and opportunity to grow our business in other ways.

Ira: 8:53

So those are a few. Yeah, no, that's great, I mean, I think I agree. Well, they're all good advice. Great, I mean, I think, um, I agree, well, they're all good advice. Um, the last one, I think I might sort of modify it and maybe just having really good clarity on what, what your expectations are from from a partnership, and that those expectations are aligned with you know what the business really needs right now. Um, I definitely did not make the mistake of hiring too early. We actually had to eventually be convinced that you can hire people.

Speaker 3: 9:21

There's a way to find people.

Ira: 9:23

If you don't know them, you could put an ad up. We didn't know that, but we definitely did make the mistake of building a pretty robust initial product. So we thought that we couldn't put something on the market that was kind of a half-baked test prep product, and I don't think that was. I don't think it was true, but that's what we thought. And so we thought we had to kind of reach this threshold of having, like, this needs to be comprehensive enough that, like almost any user should find a lot of value in it and it can help with their goal. Almost any user should find a lot of value in it and it can help them with their goal. And the only reason that worked is because we just guessed right on product market fit. Like everybody needed this product, and I think the key advice that I would take from that is not that you need to guess right, although you do.

Ira: 10:31

It's not that you need to guess right, although you do, but the reason that we had a better chance of guessing right is that we set out to and we knew that there has to be something, that other people are using better tools to do this than what we have available to us, and everybody complains about what we have and wishes there was something better, and that gave us a lot of confidence to say, if we can build that, people will pay for it.

Ira: 10:56

And I think it is a much tougher ask to sort of set out from the sort of perspective of well, yeah, I want to create something of value and I don't know what that exact problem is that I'm looking to solve and I'm going to try to figure that out. I think that that leads you on sort of this much more challenging path of trying to find the right value proposition for your customers, and at least my perspective is it's also a lot less fun and less rewarding to sort of be maybe a bit detached from the problem that your business is setting to conquer, and so I think, although it may not always be practical, my advice would be to set out to solve a problem that you know intimately well, and I think that will give you a really big leg up on a lot of other would-be competitors. What do you think about that?

Adam: 11:52

Yeah, I 100% agree. I have a follow-up question for you. Did you have people that thought or told you, like, hey, this isn't needed because some of those other solutions exist? Like you it sounds like you had really spent time with quote-unquote the competitors but like other tools, that might have been options, and you're saying, hey, like these are suitable or they aren't working for me, but maybe from more of a layman's perspective, somebody who's more distant from it, they might be. Look, it seems like this is already a solved problem. I'm just curious what was kind of the reaction for people who didn't know the space as well or maybe weren't as familiar with that problem.

Ira: 12:30

So I think there certainly were test prep books that were out there and schools typically did they probably still do have board review sessions where they have professors come in and sort of like a you know who do you guys think you are that you're going to do a better job than these experts? And we certainly weren't experts. So I think we did get a little bit of that. But and maybe the biggest surprise when we launched the product was we got like a little bit of weird backlash initially, like in the first two or three years, from the vet schools and we didn't really get it.

Ira: 13:08

But it was sort of like uh, you know, it's our job to prepare students, uh, you know, um past their boards and it's not like your job.

Ira: 13:17

Like, why, like, why should we help you get this message out that you're here to help our students pass forward? Like well, because we're here to help your students pass boards and um, and weirdly and I think this is maybe more of just a, a sign of it being different times than sort of, uh, an ongoing learning but um, this was sort of relatively not like the early days of the internet, but sort of somewhat early in terms of the way people were using the internet and about a year and a half prior to us launching our test prep tool, there was actually a scandal that people were sharing board questions online and that's a big no-no. That's breaking a lot of rules and you get in a lot of trouble. And if a school was involved in any of that, then they're going to be in a lot of trouble. And somehow the fact that, like, we had kind of created this online repository of board study information got a little bit conflated with this idea that like, oh, like they can't do this Right.

Ira: 14:21

Like, yeah, like this is, this is unethical for them to be putting this information online, when of course it wasn't. But we did get like a weird bit of backlash about that aspect of what we were doing initially and, you know, we overcame it and ultimately had great partnerships with many of the schools. But yeah, that was what I remember hearing about that yeah, I know that that's super interesting.

Adam: 14:44

I guess the the point. So I I agree what you were just was saying wholeheartedly. I think the other thing too is that when you are really close to a problem and you develop a very specific solution to it, maybe on, like, at a high level, it might look very similar to other competitors or what have you, but, like, when you actually use the product, it's a completely different experience. And and I think that speaks to the fact that, like, even in those spaces where there is an existing solution, the way that you actually solve that problem might look completely different than the way that this company did, this company did, did, and there's always kind of an opportunity, I think, to make something better.

Adam: 15:22

And so I kind of hear that sometimes where, well, you know, I don't know if there's a place that we can focus on because it looks like it's pretty competitive, but like, are the people that are using those products like happy? Like, do they use them to their full effect? Like, practice management software can do a lot of things, but if 50% of the users are only using 20% of the functionality, like, there's probably an opportunity there. So I do think that, like, the knowledge and the depth of how you can explore a problem and how does that problem manifest itself for different people at different times and different roles can really drive a level of kind of specificity in the solution that can make all the difference Right and and so that's, that's really fascinating, it's really fascinating.

Ira: 16:11

Thanks. I wanted to follow up with you on something that we talked about on the previous episode and I just didn't have time to kind of dive deep on. But on a prior episode I was talking to have time to kind of dive deep on. But, uh, on a prior episode I was talking to Stacy about, um, the challenges of having to fire somebody and um, and then you brought up during your experience that you actually had to go through two rounds of laying off you know 50 or so business and I mean I think there's there's a difference between having to terminate an employee because of cause, if you will or even maybe because you're shutting down a part of the business or shifting directions and having to lay people off.

Ira: 16:54

And when we had this conversation I sort of reflected that almost everybody I've ever talked to that has been laid off has sort of reflected and said it wasn't so much that I was laid off, but it was the way I was laid off that, just you know, really kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Ira: 17:15

And I am I'm sympathetic to both lot of sympathy for the way people and their lives are impacted when these decisions get made by businesses, and also have sympathy for the leaders at companies that have to do this. Because it's not. I imagine when you started a business, you never thought in your wildest dreams that you'd have to be letting go of like a big group of your team and then all of a sudden, that's that's the reality that you're faced with. And then all of a sudden, that's that's the reality that you're faced with. And so, um, I mean I may be too many questions rolled into one, but sort of sort of curious about how you, how you, went through that process, how you think it was received, as well as anything you learned from it um, I've maybe a quick question and then I can respond.

Adam: 17:53

Sure, for the people that say it was how I did, it did they describe how they wish it would have been done?

Ira: 18:00

I think the most common thing that I hear is that, um, you know, they were sort of blindsided by it, right? Um, and I think that can be a little bit more of a necessity in a layoff situation than a determination for an employee that's not doing well, and and I think in other cases it could be related to, you know, the fact that they, you know, maybe felt entitled to more severance or compensation than the company was able to provide, or maybe how you know.

Ira: 18:32

Yeah, I think. I think those are the main things that I've heard. Yeah, go ahead.

Adam: 18:38

Yeah, no. So yeah, I think it is a very to your point. I think it's really challenging when you kind of realize, as a founder, that this kind of drastic action is needed, because you know lots of things go through your head. Be one of the points to address is like people had no idea it was coming. I think that starts with, like, do people understand what success looks like, and are the goals that you're setting for the team, um, aligned with the progress that you need to make to be successful, right? And so what you don't want is a situation where people are like I'm hitting this out of the park, but you're like, oh, like, the park that we're actually in is way bigger than you think, and so these hits don't make a difference whatsoever, and so I think that could be really challenging. Like, obviously, if everybody thinks it's really great and then all of a sudden, like they lose their jobs, like that is there's something that's misaligned there. So I think in our cases, it was still pretty surprising to some people, even if there maybe was evidence that, hey, these things aren't going as well.

Adam: 19:47

I think preparation is actually a particularly important aspect, and a lot of that's like logistics, so like having what is ready for them, being able to collect information should they wish for you to make contacts to other employers or push that on LinkedIn or what have you. Because this is, you know, my business partner, mike. He had kind of more experience in this and he was like, look, you know, we're going to get in this meeting and we're going to tell them, and like they're not going to hear a lot more after that, right, like it's going to be really. And so he was kind of like deliver the bad news quickly, which I think was actually the right decision in part, because if you're having like, like if you're having a half an hour meeting with somebody and you wait 15 minutes to tell them that the actual point of this conversation is x, right, that's not going to be a good feeling, and so for us it was quite direct, but it was fought, it was followed with like very clearly, like this is what this? And then also following up with kind of written confirmation of all of that and being able to be as prepared as possible for the questions that people would answer and the information that they would need. You know, we've had people that were kind of going through divorces or had medical needs or whatever, and so things like you know when your benefits will, and those sorts of pieces of information I think are really, are really critical, because for different people, different pieces of information will mean, mean everything.

Adam: 21:13

And so that was kind of how we went about it, where when we did it, we we kind of came in, it was fairly direct, it was fairly, you know, fairly short, but trying to support them with the resources around it and then also giving them an opportunity to kind of come back. Should they come back with more questions, should they, should they wish. But I think a large part of it is like what is the? So that's kind of that process.

Adam: 21:41

But you have to also really think about the other team, the other side of the team, right, because now you're in a situation like I'm not sure someone who's not getting like let go, like my confidence in this business, am I next? What does this mean? And so you need to be able to ensure that those layoffs are for a purpose that can help, I think, somehow breed confidence and clarity for the remaining team, because otherwise it just looks like complete dysfunction. And so that was something that for us was really important as well where it's like okay, like we want you to hear from us what this plan is, and so what that actually means is like for for us.

Adam: 22:26

You know, we had those series of one-on-one conversations. We talked to managers or people that were responsible for those reports, and then, um, and include them if they wanted to be included, uh, but also being able to then meet as a team, uh, the remainder of the team and say like, look, these are the decisions that we had to take, and and and while. This was necessary and how we think that we can be kind of stronger moving forward, and I think that that was also important.

Ira: 22:55

Yeah, yeah, I think that a lot of good points there related to sort of handling those situations and I've kind of resolved that maybe the best that you can sort of hope for as a leader is that the, the people that you're impacting, that they you know, that they know that you do sort of care about them and that you can communicate that not only in words but in sort of the actions that you have sort of leading into and following those, those conversations you alluded to, like trying to help them find their next position and the like. But what's a little tricky is, I think I mean I often say businesses don't care about people, but when a business decides to lay somebody off, like the likely reaction from somebody is going to be like I'm kind of mad at that business, right, and and when you are the leader of that business, like how to like, how do you like?

Adam: 23:51

Can you even sort of separate, you know, you the person from you the business, right, like I, I don't know yeah, I, I think that we were actually able to to do that pretty well in our case, right like I, I I'm not going to say that we're best friends with everybody that we kind of let go um, but I, we had people that were like this is the most fair that I've ever had in a situation like this, right, um, and they I think the other thing too is like a degree of authenticity can kind of go a long way, like, yeah, they, they knew that.

Adam: 24:24

I'm not going to say it was like we felt the same, but they, they knew that it it hurt, um, for, for this situation, I think the other thing too is, to your point, like what you give them in terms of severance, like makes a big difference. Like those are numbers that they can attribute to, and so I I think there was a grief, humanity to it. Like I, I like to think that, despite us having some really challenging times, like our team always felt like we were good people that were trying our best, and that, I think, helped.

Ira: 25:07

At the end of every show, we like to recognize an important tool book mentor quote, something that you found really helpful in your time, so why don't you go first?

Adam: 25:21

Yeah, I spent a lot of time on Loom as a remote kind of first worker and with a remote team. I found that Loom, which is like a screen capture tool, is like the best way for me to articulate concepts, ask for feedback, and I do that human element. So whenever I'm finding myself having conversations about things where I need feedback, that's what I kind of go to. Conversations about things where I need feedback, that that's what I kind of go to. Um, um. In terms of books, the heart, uh, I would say that there's kind of a couple that I really like. Um, the lead startup for me has always been like one that I revisit a lot. Um, in part because you take you take different things from books if you reread them at different points in your life, and that's one that, like, I think, for me, the, the lessons of experimentation and how to do that in a data-driven way, certainly hit differently after coming through it.

Adam: 26:12

And then maybe I'll give a shout out to Mark Stephenson, who was my first boss at LifeLearn and he was the first person who he always kind of been in my corner. We did a lot of work together, but at some point he was like look, you know I think I've kind of taught you and impressed upon you like everything that I know, and for you to kind of get some of this other experience from different people, like I think you need to kind of maybe learn at the feet of others, is kind of how he uh made me feel about point. But it was just like this degree of like humility and like really a boss that like really wants what's best for you, even if it means it's going to be challenging for them or it means that they're going to have to go on a different part of the journey, and I think that that for me always kind of stuck out. So, yeah, that's great.

Ira: 27:04

Well, I am going to give give a shout out to a doctor named Guillermo Couto, and he is a medical oncologist that I actually only worked with for about a year when I was an intern at the Ohio State University, and what I remember about him the most was that he was just brilliant, kind, was just brilliant, um, kind of bartered in life personality, great communicator. And I remember we had this case where, you know, this dog came in and and it had a biopsy. That just kind of like it seemed weird and um, and unexpectedly to me, like he said let's walk over and talk to the pathologist, um and um, and went over and talked to the pathologist and he kind of was explaining how he got the biopsy. He said, let me look at the biopsy with you, so we'd go look at like one of these multi-headed microscopes. We started looking at the biopsy and Koda starts saying, well, what about this thing over here? What about this thing over there?

Ira: 28:00

And he's like, well, I think that this is, you know, actually suggestive of of a different disease process and through that conversation, like actually basically he convinced the pathologist that like what he thought he saw was not what he saw, and um, and we're walking back over to the clinic, I was kind of like shaken because, yeah, I'd sort of been brought up at that point to kind of believe like, yeah, like the gold standard of like the diagnosis is the biopsy.

Ira: 28:24

Like you can run all these other tests and they tell you like well, it's probably this or it's probably that, but like no, the biopsy, like that's the answer, that's the answer key, right, and like you can't question the answer key.

Ira: 28:36

And and I then I remember him saying something along the lines of he says Ira, if you have a piece of data telling you one thing but your patient is telling you something else, always believe your patient, or at least spend more time being critical of the data than you are a patient, right, um, and and I think that lesson had a tremendous impact on sort of high practice medicine, but it also like has an impact about like how I think about business too right. Is you know, sometimes you know you actually need to not only sort of question you know the business self, but question sort of the data that's informing that business that you otherwise might think of as like well, this is infallible data, but all data is valuable. And so he was probably the person that had the biggest impact on kind of changing the way I think about that, and so, even though we didn't work together for a long time, I think about him a lot.

Adam: 29:37

That's cool. Yeah, that's awesome.

Ira: 29:39

Right. Well, I really appreciate you being on the show with me, Adam, and look forward to connecting with you soon.

Adam: 29:46

Yeah, thanks, ira.

Ira: 29:46

Cheers Take care.