Nutrition-Based Health Care Platform

Startup Costs: $10,000 - $50,000
Part Time: Can be operated part-time.
Franchises Available? No
Online Operation? No

There are many entry points for tech entrepreneurs in the health care industry.

Ask the Expert: Olya Osokina, Co-Founder of iO Body

What is the first step to getting started as a health care platform operator?

Let’s start that in any wellness startup you should test hypotheses. 

There are 7 free steps that might help you to build a successful startup. 

1. Leverage social media: Twitter, Instagram, Clubhouse — anywhere. It is simple and fast. Publish important health content, check what percentage of your topics reached the audience, check the audience trends and see which topics people in your area are most interested in. (I created a blog and did write a lot of our content myself. But over time, I delegated most of it to my team). 

2. Then start targeting through tools such as reels on Instagram. This is free and organic traffic that can bring the first pull of clients. 

3. You can make a questionnaire as a pre-register via Google form. Let your clients talk about their pain. 

4. Unite several nutritionists (health coaches) and sell their consultations online through a landing page by organizing zoom meetings between clients and their health coach. 

5. Once the metrics are finalized, proceed to develop the platform and marketplace

6. You do not have to develop an application right away, because thanks to the Adalo service you will be able to create an application on your own without developing skills in a week and for $20.

7. And finally, try to experiment and fail as much as you can early on so you know what works and what doesn’t.

If you have the burning desire to create value, sooner or later you’ll make it happen, regardless of the exact path you take.

Is the industry growing?

The healthcare industry is one of the most developed industries in the USA. On average, its share of the GDP was 17.5%. Many analysts expect that in the coming years (from 2024 to 2029) healthcare will already account for 20% of GDP.

Related: Want to Be Your Own Boss? Learn How to Launch Your Side Hustle Fast.

What type of person is a great fit to try this?

iO focuses on making micro adjustments that lead to macro behavior change. The platform relationship-driven, meal-by-meal approach is paired with nutrition diary-sharing—a simple but powerful tool that helps coaches identify opportunities to make nutrition recommendations while helping clients stay accountable to their new habits and track progress over time.

How much money can a person expect to make in the first year and in five years when running a health care platform?

We are a high-margin project. We needed to prescribe all the programs once, shoot video content of fitness, make audio recordings of lectures and meditations. We have already written all the programming code for video and audio communication on the consultation platform. And now all our funds will go to attract clients and health coaches, growing our customer base.

You need to invest $25,000 in MVP and you will be able to attract investments, on the other hand, you will be able to generate cash flows with MVP already. 

Another important notion here is that we want to offer so much value to our customers that they would be happy to pay us in return. This acts as a never-ending reality check that keeps us on our toes. If people wouldn’t see the results from our programs, they would stop paying. So far, I can see our customers telling us we are doing a good job. We receive hundreds of grateful messages and success stories, which for me is still a very humbling experience and frankly the best part of it all.

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What kind of experience/training do you need to have?

For us it became like a mission, to create tools for people to find their ideal state of body and mind. Founded with the goal to help others achieve the balance of a healthy body as well as a healthy mind, with a strong focus on self-love, our platform is designed to meet you where you are and understand any personal struggles since Olya went through a lot of those issues herself – she gets it.

So our path to MVP was quick, but not reckless. As our products target the mass market, we had to consider how the functionality would be perceived by people who never exercised or meditated before. Which, conveniently, was nearly everyone on our small team at the time.
So we hired professionals and gurus to design our workout, weight loss and relaxation programs, and then tested them ourselves, meditating and measuring our fitness progress on a daily basis. That shaped the platform essential features and also made obvious which ones we could do without. So we hired professionals and gurus to design our workout, weight loss and relaxation programs, and then tested them ourselves, meditating and measuring our fitness progress on a daily basis. That shaped the apps’ essential features and also made obvious which ones we could do without.

What do you wish you knew when you were just starting out?

Fail fast, and fail cheap! We wanted to make a full-fledged health ecosystem right away, including all nine areas of biohacking, but after testing, we realized that clients are initially ready to entrust the solution of a certain survey, for example, to bring glucose back to normal or learn to live with type 2 diabetes, to understand the issue of overweight. Therefore, we left our focus on what we already had deep expertise in and the focus distribution of the advertising budget allows us to grow faster, but in the future, we will have the opportunity to grow it from a focus project to becoming a super app or an ecosystem in the field of health.

Tone of voice also proved to be important. For example, in our meditation platform, we didn’t even use the word “meditation,” choosing more widely recognized phrases like “reduce stress” instead.

The technical side of the platform was much more straightforward. We budgeted about three months to build MVPs for each of our ideas — all progressive non-code apps. So we made prototypes and quickly tested our hypotheses by leveraging the traffic we had on our customer base from the restaurants. Since then, we have been continuously tweaking our products to achieve better performance.

Related: Get the No.1 Guide to Starting Your Own Business

Where do you find new customers?

In fact, we started attracting users even before we had a product at all — just with the desire of making somethingwellnes-related in hand, we launched a blog and wrote content for our customers, relying on social media to drive traffic. We have more than 50K followers on Instagram.

Then we have already got our email marketing base of100K clients from our health tech lab ecosystem.

Now we use different channels to attract customers. The most powerful is Tik Tok Ads. We got 6K followers on 20 cent per user during 1 night. We know how we will grow fast enough to hit one million MAU in a few years. Cascade model on Instagram through a free test with a generated program, Chatbot community through mental awareness programs for problems with jamming. Targeted ads in the Meta ( INSTAGRAM, FB, WHATSAPP) Chatbot platforms - our unique funnel. Lead magnet through contextual advertising and autowebinar funnels. Collaborations with brands and restaurants. Corporate programs for companies and universities

What type of growth can be realistically expected year over year?

There are different types of revenue streams. Let’s discuss: How do or will you make money? How much could you make?

1. Subscription model for the program
2. Commission from consultations with a nutritionist and health coaches
3. Community challenges
4. Sale of separate lectures and meditations

Are there any resources you recommend that were extremely valuable to get your business off the ground?

Besides, managing a fast-growing company, you are always catching up, whether it’s hiring new team members or doing some way past-due paperwork. Sometimes it feels like you need to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same spot. But then you sit down and take time to think of new ways of doing something, and hope that it’s going to work out. And it usually does.

Setting flexible goals that require me to jump over my head has always been a good motivator. I look at the top 10 companies by market cap and I ask myself whether I can create something similar? Can I create a truly global company within my lifetime?

Remember that there is more money in the world than people who can grow it. If you can show that you can make something useful, that you can be trusted, that you have the necessary grit, you’ll do well.