Starting a Tech Company With No Tech
I was at a dinner party when a friend asked me to help him with his health insurance. He couldn't figure out why he was paying so much while none of his doctors or meds were covered.
Curious and eager to help, I started to pull data off of insurance websites, manually entering it into Microsoft Access.
Next, I sat down to write out the logic to figure out what the total costs would be over a year. This needed to include costs for specific doctors they visited, meds each family member took, deductibles, copays, coinsurance, etc.
Then I filtered out the insurers who did not cover his doctors or meds. Now I could rank the plans.
In a week I had built a manual recommendation engine that saved my friend $9k.
I left the business I was running to turn this little Access database into something everyone could use.
Everything was manual in the beginning with no code:
Squarespace landing page with a form users filled out.
I received an email with what the user had filled in (current insurance, what they were paying, family members, doctors they visited, etc).
They received an automatic reply with, "Thanks - we are running the analysis for you. Will get back to you shortly."
I manually ran the analysis using the Access database to figure out which was the best insurance for them.
The results were sent in an email with a link on how to buy it.
I reached out to everyone I knew asking if I could analyze their health insurance. People were blown away at how much we were saving them. After a few months, I hired a cofounder, an engineer and started to actually build the product we were selling.