🩻 What we learned from Scan.com’s Charlie Bullock
Founders Factory Startup Bulletin #43
This is the Startup Bulletin—written for founders, by founders. Each month we bring you a round-up of startup and investment stories, key learnings from founders, and insights from the Founders Factory team.
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In little over a decade, fintech has plotted its path to world domination.
Not content with revolutionising the financial services industry—through neo-banking, payment technology, cryptocurrencies, and much more—fintech has come to shape just about every industry. Healthcare is front and centre of this, an industry that has historically struggled joining up the dots between the patient, the provider, and the payer (usually an insurer).
One such company is Scan.com, one of our Fintech investments with Aviva, who in a few years have transformed access to diagnostic imaging (MRIs, CTs, ultrasounds, etc) through building an infrastructure that connects patients, clinicians, imaging centres, and insurers. They’re already one of Europe’s fastest growing companies.
This month, we caught up with Scan’s co-founder & CEO Charlie Bullock, who shared some his most valuable lessons from his journey so far. Also in this month’s Startup Bulletin:
Our reading list (feat. The New Yorker, a16z, Sequoia, and more)
Highlights from our global portfolio
Opportunities this month in tech
💡 5 things we learned from Scan.com CEO Charlie Bullock
Since launching in 2017, Scan.com has become one of Europe’s fastest growing healthtech companies. At its helm, CEO and co-founder Charlie Bullock, who shares insights into some of his most valuable learnings along the way
1. Shake off the sunk cost fallacy
Early days in a startup is all about running different experiments, taking certain risks, and seeing what works. Early on for us, we made several bold decisions about global expansion, including launching in the US. It was risky, ran against a lot of the advice we received (we’d not even raised a Series A yet): but a few years on, I can now say that has been one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
At the same time, you have to be hyper conscious of when to cut off an experiment—crucially, not procrastinating a hard decision. Our expansion to the German market did not see the same success as the US, largely because we just couldn’t make the margins work. Very quickly, we realised there wasn’t a big business to build there and we pulled the plug.
I think you can overemphasise the time and investment you’ve already put into a certain project, hire, product line, etc. But really, in a startup, you can’t make those decisions fast enough. So ditch the sunk cost fallacy and consider quickly if it’s worth your time.
2. Consider: can you survive without consumer spend?
Scan.com was initially meant to be a consumer marketplace that would connect patients to available appointments at imaging centres. With quite little effort, we saw exciting traction for that proposition.
But one great piece of advice came from one of our advisors, Treatwell founder Lopo Champalimaud, who had his own insights from building with Europe’s biggest consumer wellness marketplaces.
In short, he asked us to consider a business model in which we had absolutely zero consumer spend. Essentially, if we cut off all marketing channels, our business would still survive.
It was a radical proposition, but made me realise the scope of building in B2C. Consumer is attractive, but it’s often more obvious, meaning it’s saturated. Sometimes the bigger opportunities lie in the complex, less glamorous areas. This advice fundamentally pivoted our approach, seeing us adopt a B2B2C model in which we targeted doctors, insurers, and other telehealth companies with existing cohorts of patients—bringing in customers without needing to spend heavily on consumer advertising.
3. Be clear about the employee traits you value
As we’ve grown quickly as a team, it’s been tremendously valuable to us to have clearly defined characteristics that we look for in new hires. This is has been particularly important given we’re navigating a complex space (healthcare) and constantly expanding into new markets.
If I had to single out one trait I value, it would be curiosity. I really can’t stress enough how important it is to have people with an insatiable desire to learn and discover. Healthcare has this complex lattice of incentives, mechanisms, providers, and regulation, and requires people to be able inquire enough to deeply understand it.
4. Love the problem, not the solution
As we expanded into the US, it became abundantly clear to us that we can’t just copy and paste our UK business model into this new market. In order to really capitalise on the opportunity, we had to really spend the time to speak to all our different stakeholders, from patients to clinicians to insurers, to sketch out a new product stack that would work in this market.
It would have been a huge mistake at this stage to stick to our guns with what we were doing already. Our success comes down to being problem-minded rather than solution-minded.
5. Stepping back is often the best thing you can do as a leader
As we’ve grown to over 150 people, spread over two continents, my role as CEO has changed immensely. I’ve found it particularly challenging letting go of the day-to-day tasks. But I have to be mindful of where I can add the most value as a CEO. And often that requires stopping what you’re doing, stepping back, sticking your head above the parapet, and thinking about the future.
This is excerpted from a Founder Profile of Charlie Bullock on our website.
We invested in Scan.com in 2021 as part of our Aviva Fintech Accelerator. Applications for our Fintech Accelerator H2 2024 intake are now open, find out more and apply here.
📚 What we’ve been reading
Why AI isn’t going to make art (New Yorker)
Top 100 Gen AI consumer apps (a16z)
Why Edtech startups don’t scale (Gian Segato)
The Future 100: 2024 (VML)
The AI Supply Chain Tug of War (Sequoia)
🚀 Highlights from Founders Factory and our portfolio
Founders Factory Africa relaunched as 54 Collective. Their new identity, representing the 54 countries in Africa, represents their ambition to back founders across the continent agnostic of sector
DRIFT Energy closed their £5M Series A, led by Octopus Ventures. They’re building a fleet of high performance sailing vessels (see above) to capture wind energy, generate green hydrogen, and distribute it to coastal and island communities
Endolith emerged from stealth, announcing a $5.1M seed round backed by Collaborative Fund and Overture. They are enhancing copper recovery from mining ores
Our team in the media…
Head of Investments Olivia Brooks wrote in Mining Magazine about the opportunity to decarbonise the mining industry
Investor Edo Gentili spoke to UKTN about the current AI investment landscape
Head of Data Science Bianca Furtuna spoke to Tech Funding News on AI, machine learning, and her experience as a woman in tech
📍 Opportunities, events, jobs
Events
Ocean Tech Breakfast (October 15th, London)—welcoming founders, investors, and enthusiasts in the ocean space. Apply to attend here
Jobs
We’re hiring for a number of Entrepreneur-in-Residence roles for the latest projects in our venture studio:
Founder & CEO @ MietMagie—rental rewards platform, backed by Vonovia
CTO/Tech Co-Founder @ Regeno—financing the transition towards regenerative farming, backed by Nesta
Founder & CEO @ Virtuals—gen AI social universe, backed by Pico
See you next month 👋
Interested in reading more of the same insights? Check out the Founders Factory blog, and previous newsletters.