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Name: Leo Rosenbaum
Company: HeartUSery
What are you building, and who benefits most from it?
We are building an app to manage blood pressure. It is the first comprehensive solution to blood pressure management, not just a tracker. It includes lifestyle assistants, medical adherence, monitoring, and awareness. People who suffer from high blood pressure (hypertension) will benefit most from this app. That is one in three adults worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
What is one of your startup’s most impressive accomplishments?
We have developed Google AI-powered lifestyle assistants in the four areas critical to blood pressure: sleep, stress, exercise, and nutrition. Several thousand users have already tried it at sleepBPdeep.com, stressBPless.com, exerciseBPwise.com, and foodforBP.com. These assistants provide assessments of a user’s current sleep and food patterns and stress and exercise levels, and they generate personalized plans for sound sleep, stress management plans (instant stress relief, daily stress management, changes in life attitudes), exercise plans (outdoors, gym, flexibility) with safety tips, and meal plans with recipes and grocery lists.
What has been the biggest challenge so far, and how did you overcome it?
Prompt engineering took quite a lot of joint effort by the team doctor and developers. For example, we needed to come up with a comprehensive definition of blood pressure-friendly food without a single example to avoid the quantitative bias towards ingredients in the examples. Our three scientific advisors helped a lot here.
What tool or app could you not live without and why?
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I live in Denmark, where virtually everything revolves around MitId, the app to confirm identity. Also, we have a rather well-developed healthtech environment, with several apps that ensure access to the healthcare system. For years, we haven’t had medical recipes as such—the doctor sends a permit to the database of pharmacies to allow the sale of a particular drug. It is all app-based, so I renew recipes with an app and communicate with the doctor via an app. All these apps are co-produced with and approved by Danish National Healthcare.
What marketing strategies have worked for you?
We launched a LinkedIn-based newsletter, Blood Pressure Digest, with news on the latest blood pressure-related research and studies, treatments, medications, lifestyle, and nutrition. We got a lot of contacts this way with healthcare professionals and researchers involved with blood pressure management.
We have also launched free versions of our web tools and advertised them in Facebook groups on blood pressure. It has also worked well, bringing users to our web tools.
Can you share any financial data about your startup?
We are in the pre-seed phase and have been bootstrapping so far (I sold my summer house in Sweden to fund the startup). We started with free web tools and are now deploying paid versions. I hope I will be able to share some numbers within a few months. (Reported on October 02, 2023)
What has been your biggest business failure to date? What did you learn from it?
We could not find a proper designer for the app design for quite some time. We tried two, and it took time, but the results were not satisfactory. We managed to invite a top U.S. designer with experience in healthtech from Merck and Sanofi. It’s going much better now. I learned not to compromise on design.
What’s the best specific piece of advice you have for other entrepreneurs?
When they tell you it may not work due to this and that, do pay attention, but look first at possibilities and opportunities.
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