Self Health Begins
Self Health friends and insiders,
I’m so excited to share our first update since excursing on this new venture.
Our Mission
Putting life on pause to painfully navigate healthcare for a loved one — or oneself — affects tens of millions of Americans every year. We’re building the tools for patient advocacy and care navigation to help people take back their lives from the burden of US healthcare.
Health care is something every human will need at some point in their lives. Coming from a decade of experience in AI research and building tech for doctors, I’m excited to now focus on the richness of what technology can do for the health of individuals. It’s about time patients have the implements to stand up to health systems and insurers in this many-trillion dollar problem.
Asks
We’re first looking to serve those who have paused their careers for caregiving — for themselves, their parents, or children. If you know anyone inundated with fighting insurance, coordinating with clinicians, or researching difficult chronic conditions, we’d love to hear your story.
And please share our message with anyone who might be interested.
Highlights
We’ve been focusing on solid product foundations and understanding the full scope of patient pain:
Our first experiment, SelfDDx AI Symptom Checker, ran for 5 weeks. Despite getting 5,000+ sessions with high engagement (average duration 10+ minutes), low user retention & unclear differentiation have us thinking that AI Diagnostics might be good for capturing attention, but unlikely a great initial core value driver for our patient advocacy toolkit.
Said another way, we currently don’t see a world where AI symptom-checking is differentiated enough from Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT to justify value-based pricing.
We found a great channel for acquiring users, but not keeping them.
In August, we took care of distractions — funding/fundraising, housing/habitation/working situations, and incorporation with the final founding team (Victor and I).
At the same time, we also public launched:
Reaching top 5 on ProductHunt got us more feedback than we could handle.
This September, we’re diving deep on the patient journey with hands-on caregiving every day. I’ve flown to NYC to support a friend with MCAS & TBI to consolidate his health records, organize clinic schedules, and do whatever it takes to fight for his recovery. A small sampling of the problems we faced:
negotiating bills and benefits
selecting an insurance plan and care team
coordinating care (schedule management, care planning, provider communication, medical record management)
preparing for visits and taking notes from the doctor
emotionally supporting over long chronic care journeys
spending hours per day dealing with forms and phone menus
filtering dozens of notifications and appointment reminder calls
Improperly-drawn labs — one of many rage-inducing problems patients deal with.
Challenges
Victor and I have been lucky to grow up without needing to handle the care of a parent or grandparent, so the patient side of healthcare pain is not immediately familiar to us. Yet, this distance lends us fresh eyes — unjaded by years of frustration, jumping into patient problems hits our engineering instincts in a way that gets us hungry to build.
We’re tunneling deep on individual care journeys, so we’ll have to zoom out soon to make sure we’re solving strategically.
With the dozens of pain points uncovered so far, our top priority question is: what problem to solve first?
We’re continuing to follow users closely while building prototypes and researching existing market solutions — to chart a course for the problem permutations ahead.
Gratitude
I wouldn’t have autumn start any other way than deep in the trenches with our first users.
It’s been due to the efforts of many dozens of friends and supporters that we’ve been able to get where we are today:
Mike, Farbod, Qiming, and Janelle for world-class startup advice and pressure-testing our early ideas
Bushra for showing us what A-player product work looks like in the consumer space
Dima for hosting me for many weeks in Williamsburg
Conor for providing me an office in Chelsea at the Owl’s Nest
Morgan for hacking with me for 48+ hours straight across real estate, finance, nightclub, and federal contracting ideas
Joshua for mapping out Japanese dating apps and social networking
Daniel for giving us the insider scoop on healthcare patent litigation
Vaughn for demonstrating what it takes to be a personal trainer at Equinox
Dan for teaching us about what it takes to launch a top Steam game
Mika, Gatsby, and Victoria for hashing through opportunities in language learning EdTech
Shield for a masterclass on how to do early stage customer discovery in B2C
Rose for her seasoned insights on effective elder care
Sarah for the executive rundown on Canadian healthcare dynamics
The wonderful team at Bella Health for what it takes to run a primary care office
Charlie, Austin, Priscilla, Adi and countless others for sharing their intimate journeys in healthcare
Bryce for pushing us to go all-in with healthcare
Brian for venture advisory and expert touring of patient pain
… and many, many more
I’m looking forward to our next update where we’ll share more roadmap & prototypes as our team fills in the details on our convictions.
Best,
Josh Dong