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Launching a Start Up Business During a Pandemic (!)…and While in Residency (!!) with Greg Hanson, MD

Residency was hard enough…can you imagine launching a startup as well? Well my podcast guest did exactly that! Dr. Greg Hanson is a 3rd year interventional radiology resident in Philadelphia, spent months looking for side gig opportunities himself, and felt there could be a better way of doing so. This led to the launch of FlipMD, a web platform for physicians focused on getting side jobs outside of their main clinical practice as a source of extra income, that now attracts hundreds of doctors each month. You’ll learn how this young entrepreneur is able to successfully juggle everything from his clinical day job, family, and a pandemic, while still managing investors and new clients for his internet startup. If you say you don’t have time to start a business, you may think twice after listening to his inspiring story!

LINKS MENTIONED: FlipMD – online marketplace for physicians to offer their knowledge and experience to clients seeking medical expertise https://www.flip-md.com Contact Info: Greg Hanson, MD – greg@flip-md.com

Transcript:

Dr. Mike: I know it’s been a crazy year and it’s certainly been a lot of stress for many of us, but how many of you would want to start up a business? I know many of you do, but want to start a business and probably the craziest year in existence of mankind.

Just so happens. I happen to have a gentleman who did just that and get this guys. Not only is he starting up a startup during a pandemic. He’s also a third year resident. Dr. Greg Hanson is an interventional radiology resident in Philadelphia. He graduated from UCLA. With a bachelor’s of atmospheric and oceanic sciences before moving to New York city, you obtained his master’s of public health and epidemiology.

Some of them I’d have with advanced certificate and applied by statistics that his medical degree at Dartmouth and in June of 2018 started a surgical internship. And then the next year, when it’s to becoming interventional radiology, he has stood up eight. A company called flippant deal. We’re going to find out more about what that is, why he decided to launch it, but without further ado, Dr. Greg Hanson, thank you for joining me on the program today.

Greg Hanson: Thanks so much for having me excited to chat a little bit. Yeah.

Dr. Mike: And  what’s funny is we just found out that we actually went to the same high school of all things. This is probably a first on, on this call. We went to Jesuit High School up in the Carmichael’s or Sacramento, California.

I graduated in many years. Prior to him, but it’s very cool. How, there was something in the water at at Jesuit that led to this entrepreneurship physician thing. I don’t know. But again it, and you also went to my Alma mater for a few years, UC San Diego. Do you ever have plans to going back to the west coast?

Greg Hanson: I was gonna say, that’s a great question. It’s really a lot of it’s up to my wife where she wants to go, but we’re like in Philadelphia, but I’ve been on the east coast now for 10 years this month. And wouldn’t mind getting back to the west coast somewhere, whether that’s California or Oregon or Washington, it would be be nice to be back on the west coast.

So we’ll see. I don’t end it until 2024, but yeah.

Dr. Mike: I do see if you’re watching on the YouTube video, you have, you do have this UCLA blazoned on your on your clothing right there, but I’m not going to do what most obnoxious Californians do. And just telling you about, how’s the weather on the east coast.

We’re not getting you. Any of that, do you let you know, it is gloomy and rainy here. So if the guys have any constellation, but what I want to talk about is, I have, I’ve had a number of physician entrepreneurs on the program. And many of them have started their businesses, prior to 2020.

And I know there’s a lot of stress involved, certainly. Going into medical school, getting, going into residency, being a resident which you are now a PGY-3 , I believe. Wait, does it go four years? Or how far in your training is it?

Greg Hanson: Yes, I’m done a surgical intern year. And then I’m about one and a half years into the diagnostic portion, which is three years total. And then you go to two years of interventional radiology.

Dr. Mike: I’m such an old guy. I don’t even remember the residency. So you got to forgive me but as I always say, a lot of stress being a resident, a lot of stress, being married, a lot of stress, having a kid and a lot of stress on starting a business, you decided to do all of this and you’re currently balancing and juggling all of that.

So what kind of led you to deciding to start a business during your residency, as opposed to after residency?

Greg Hanson: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I can give you a little background on who I am and why we did this. So starting off in my surgical intern year, you work between 80 hours and what you want to put on, basically your hours for him.

And we worked a lot of hours and then I roughly transitioned over to diagnostic radiology, where I got half of my life back. So I was working 45 hours instead of 80 to 90, depending on what rotation I was in. But like you said, at the same time I have a wife. I had a two year old at the time who was just starting school.

And we also bought a house down in south Philadelphia and we needed to figure out a way to make some extra money. And I couldn’t Moonlight yet because I was a PGY-2 two. And so another stressor buying a house… life stresses. So I couldn’t move. And I was like I have an MPH and I have my MD.

Let’s see if I can do anything with it. And that’s what I did. I basically threw myself out there and said, I will help with data analysis. I’ll ghost, write a paper for you. I’ll help with FDA stuff, I’ll help with IRB. So I really did a lot of different, weird, interesting things to make a little bit of extra income and ended up making quite a bit.

So working between 5 and 10 hours, I made $30,000 in six months doing that and really built up a reputation of being able to get things done quickly. And that’s how we thought of this business, to be honest. So towards the end of last year in June, we. We’re actually coming back from a vacation on a cabin that was very isolated because of COVID when we were supposed to be in Paris.

And we said, why can’t we do this for other physicians that are looking to get outside of clinical medicine and do something else completely. And so that was the idea for flip MDA. And then from there we just sprinted and we launched and we figured it out and we’ve been figuring it out now for five months.

I definitely want to talk about flip MD, but  I know you breezed through a lot of these things because. I hope you know, what you’re doing is quite unusual. Now you said you have a reputation for either productivity or organization. Did that start back, in medical school or, what kind of things that led you to be more productive and maybe have this reputation?

That was definitely a surgical intern year. So going through that and knowing that you can basically work 24 to 28 hours, depending on the shift in a row and still be productive and get things done that you need to it was really the surgical intern year. So waking up at four 30 in the morning and.

Stand at the hospital until 8. If you’re on vascular surgery and you have cases that are going long, it’s a, you learn what hard work is. And then when you transition over to something, that’s a little bit less heavy. I tried to keep that and I would still wake up at 4:30 in the morning and do other things, whether that was going to the gym or whether that was doing a little bit of work on the side or studying.

But yeah, it was definitely the surgical intern year medical school. I definitely worked hard, but not as hard as anywhere near that intern year. That was that was the hardest year I’ve ever had to do. And it was also a lot of fun though.

Dr. Mike: So did you have to learn to give up things? And also is your wife also working?

Greg Hanson: I’m sure. There’s a lot of things, especially when raising a child that you can, you’re gonna have to make some sacrifices here. Yeah, luckily she was doing some consulting work. So she’s her entire history is in ebook publishing. So in that world, she worked at a Harper Collins and Kaplan test prep.

And then when we moved to Philadelphia, she had basically a consulting gig with Barnes and noble. And so she was doing that from home when she could. But yeah, we had a seven month old at the time when we basically started internship. So it was definitely hard. Definitely some some sleepless nights and it was hard on everybody.

A surgical intern. You’re not just, I give a lot of props to anybody that can go through an entire surgical residency. It’s a lot of hard work. And there is a lot of sacrifices that you make. And even as an intern, you make those same sacrifices and hopefully you come out a better physician at the end of it.

Dr. Mike: So you knew that you got this house, you knew that you needed to make extra money. You found a way of getting a side gig, during your residency, what made you decide to say, Hey, you know what? I can start a business to help other doctors do this.

Greg Hanson: Honestly, it’s never been part of me to ever want to do anything business-related or entrepreneurial.

And we honestly thought we saw something in the market that hadn’t really been tapped into yet, and we decided to give it a shot. Basically. And we said it’s a good enough market to go into without having any experience at all. And we’ve learned a lot through it. It’s a very odd thing that I really never thought I’d be doing and never thought I would be doing a startup or doing anything like this.

It is a lot of fun though. Using something, using a side of my brain that I’ve never used before. In order to figure out how to make it work. But yeah, it’s never saw this coming whatsoever.

Dr. Mike: So what were the kinds of obstacles when you were looking for jobs that FlipMD hopes to

Greg Hanson: address?

It’s sourcing them. That’s the hardest part is figuring out where do you find these people that need physicians? Because there are a lot of different industries that need physician expertise. It’s just, where do you actually find that people without having to spend your entire time actually trying to find those actual jobs?

And so that’s what we’re doing now. On the platform. We work with startups. We work with VCs that are looking for due diligence. We work with pharma device lawyers, medical education companies. Really, it runs the gambit of what we’re trying to do. And those are the same things that I was doing last year, just at a smaller scale.

But yeah, honestly the hardest part is figuring out where to find those people that currently need physicians. And that’s the market we saw was a centralized platform to do that.

Dr. Mike: Greg, I’ve still tried to get on you cause I want to know why you said, I want to start a business during my residency because what you mentioned. For example, the jobs that you had, how did you find those jobs? If you want to give some examples and what kind of difficulties did you have?

Greg Hanson: Yeah,  we use basically another platform that is not meant for physicians. And I posted my profile up and said, Hey, I’m a physician.

If you guys are interested in basically work with, to work with physician and that’s. How I started out doing it, and then basically created a little bit of a client list that had repeat projects to do a lot of it was data analysis. So using that MPH degree one of the odd ones that I had to come by was a, another physician that was starting another company related to PPE during COVID.

And he just didn’t have time to find really good credible links for COVID resources. And so he tasked me with doing that and that ended up being a $2,000 job that took. 10 to 15 hours. So it’s those kinds of things that we’re looking for that are really honestly difficult to find. And unless you have something like this that can draw people in, then it’s a little bit easier.

Dr. Mike: Now I have to ask does your residency know? And how have they took it where it was?

Greg Hanson: Yeah. A few people k now. So most of my co-residents know what I’m doing. And then my program director knows what I’m doing. I told him way back early in kind of July when we were just starting out that I was going to try something and see what happens.

So yeah, he knows. And then a few of my other attendings know as well just from having conversations with them, but I’m not not blasted out into the world at my own hospital that I’m doing this. I’m mostly trying to stay a little bit under the radar as a resident.

Dr. Mike: Yeah, because you definitely, someone who’s had.

Other doctors, not necessarily being a resident, there’s always someone who especially, knock on wood, kind of takes off and goes crazy. Then they’ll be coming for, their piece of the price. You always wanted to make sure that the people who are.

Should know, do know

Greg Hanson: It’s exactly what my program director said too.

Dr. Mike: So you got this idea. Did you have a tech background or did you hire a programmer to put together a website for you?

Greg Hanson: Yeah, I have no technical background at all. It was really, we needed to find somebody that could do it. And we found a development team that was able to.

Do it and do it relatively quickly and put together the website and it functions well. It is not the most beautiful website you’ll ever see and that’s something we’re working on to change. But it does function and it works and yeah, no, me and my wife, both of us do not have a coding background or anything like that. So we needed to find a solution and we were able to find one, luckily.

Dr. Mike: And where’s your wife? Was she a proponent to starting this app?

Greg Hanson: Yeah. She’s a big part of it. So she’s the CEO of the company.  She runs the day to day and she does basically everything. So it’s not just me.

That’s doing this is very much not just me is very much a split of work. And we’re both working pretty hard and putting in the hours to build this, but it’s a lot of the credit has to go to her because she’s worked your butt off to do this.

Dr. Mike: So you’ve got a website and you’ve got this. And what I like to do is just digging in, in the mind of the entrepreneur how you get there and how you move past this. Because a lot of people who are listening, who, I call them more entrepreneurs than entrepreneurs and they know how to get a website.

They may not how to get a programmer for what was the biggest hurdle for you. Was it getting the attraction of these other companies? It’s to show us that you don’t really have a track record, I assume. Was that difficult? Was there something else?

Greg Hanson: Yeah, that’s honestly, the hardest part is figuring out how to balance.

So it’s a two-sided marketplace. So you have clients that are like the startups, the pharma, the device companies, and then you have the consultants. So the physicians balancing out how to attack. Both of those has been the hardest thing because you have to be able to balance it a little bit. So if you have a ton of jobs, but you have no physicians to fill them, then it’s completely useless.

And if you have a ton of physicians without jobs. And it’s completely useless also. So figuring out that balance and striking the balance correctly is extremely hard and we’re still working on it and trying to figure out exactly which side of the platform we need to work on at the moment. But we figured out a pretty good way of growing relatively organically and figuring out a way to get both to grow at the same time. But that is easily the hardest part.

Dr. Mike:  So tell me about this and then let’s give the URL right now. It’s a flip-md.conflict-md.com. How did how did you get your initial physicians? I assume maybe your other co-residents. Our friends, physician, friends?

Greg Hanson: Yeah, a little bit a little bit of, yeah, that, but truthfully we went out and we brewed, forced a lot of this.

So we would go on LinkedIn and message people and say…Hey, we’re starting this thing. Are you interested in joining? Or going on Facebook groups, so saying, Hey, we’re doing this. Anybody interested in joining? And we have nothing right now. So it’s really just putting up a profile with the hope that we’re able to sell this to somebody that is interested in posting a job on there.

And maybe you’ll make some money. That was really how we started back in July and it’s grown pretty quickly. So we started literally with nobody on the platform, July 27th. And today we have about 1400 physicians on it right now. And we’re trying to aggressively grow at this point, but yeah, that’s how we started was.

Just talking to people. We’ve spent no money on marketing to either side. So yeah, that’s that’s how we started and we’re going to continue to grow that way, but hopefully we can also throw some money at it. Some of the marketing stuff as well, eventually, but yeah.

Dr. Mike: It doesn’t cost a physician to put a profile on it right now, right?

Greg Hanson: Correct. Yeah. There’s no. So there’s no cost. There is that it’s completely free to join as a physician and actually it’s completely free to join as a client as well. So we want to basically eliminate any barriers of entry for both the physician and the client. The way that we’re monetizing the platform is we take basically a 20% cut of the first thousand dollars of a project.

That’s with one particular client, and then it goes down to 10% after that. Which is pretty similar on a lot of the other freelancing platforms out there. So it’s the same kind of monetization, but it’s completely free to join. It’s completely free for people to post jobs. So we’ve actually had some physicians, post jobs as well to other physicians.

So yeah that’s how we monetize it and that’s, we’re trying to keep it that way for a long time. So that. There really aren’t hopefully going to be any barriers between a physician working with a startup that is doing something really interesting. That’s the whole, that’s the whole point of this.

Dr. Mike: So give me an examples of some type of jobs that you hope to have on the site.

Greg Hanson: Yeah. So we’ve actually had a fair amount of the jobs that I was really hoping to have already, which is great. So we working with a couple of AI companies that are working in different spaces, one example is a couple of weeks ago, we had the startup founder of a AI company that’s within kind of psychiatric mental health that’s operating in stealth mode.

So they don’t want to tell too much about what they’re doing, but he was looking for a grant writer that has a grant writing experience within psychiatry for NIH and NIH grants. So that was a $18,000 job that was posted. And it’s basically 20 to 40 hours of work. We’ve had other jobs. So we had a BC firm that needed to talk to five precision medical oncologists about a new platform that was coming out, that they were thinking about investing in.

That was $1,500 an hour. We’ve had PR and marketing firms. I needed to talk to orthopedic surgeons. So that was a $600 an hour job. And then we’ve had medical education companies that need help writing their Q banks or reviewing their articles that they have on their website. That’s a really good resident job that was 30 to $45 an hour.

So it’s really, it runs the gambit on types of jobs and then also compensation. And we have opened up the medical expert witness portion of the website as well. So we’ve had a couple of jobs posted for looking for physicians for expert witness.

Dr. Mike: But generally these are nonclinical.

Greg Hanson: Yeah. Completely nonclinical. We do not want to get into telemedicine or anything like that. That is not the goal of flipMD. I also don’t want that liability. So yeah, we’re a completely nonclinical kind of project based jobs now.

Dr. Mike: You’ve already have gotten a lot of interest in what I’ve run into coaching with.

Like my consulting work, I coach physicians and I’m sure you’ve run into this too, where a physician says, you know what? I just, all I need to do is become a physician. Is there any advice you could give as someone who is young and you’re in your medical career and was successful at getting other jobs, what they can do to expand there?

And I know it’s self-deprecating when they say just a physician, but they feel that they can’t do anything. Past that what advice would you give for someone who wants to expand monster, who’s attracted to some of these jobs? What can we do to make them an, a much more attractive job candidate?

Greg Hanson: I think that physicians need to realize that they’re much more than just a physician. Like you said, there’s so much thing is there’s so many things that a physician can do. They’re usually extremely smart. They’re very driven. And they’re curious, that’s what we’ve seen on the platform so far.

And that’s my own, like my own history. Like I’ve I know that if I put my head down and work at something hard enough and can figure out ways to make it work, then we’ll see what happens. But for physicians that are saying, they’re just physicians, there are so many industries out there that are.

Interested in dying to work with you because of your domain expertise that you have that no one else has. So that’s one of the issues that I see on the platform too, is that people undervalue themselves, people think, oh, that jobs posted at… $20,000.  I’ll bid on it at 5,000, because I don’t think I have the expertise, but you do, you have the expertise, you went through four years of college, you went through four years of med school, plus potentially a PhD or an MPH, whatever it is, you will then went through residency.

You’re a practicing physician. Like you have expertise that no one else has, and you should not be scared to go out and use that.

Dr. Mike: Yeah. And I think, just simple things too, even just like learning how to create a resume that attracts, clients is one thing. And for many of us, we don’t, we either…

forget how to do a resume or it’s all clinically based. Some of the skills that you have, you may not necessarily have had a bunch of expert witness expertise, but you’ve had a lot of clinical. You may have had a lot of clinical decisions that you’ve had to make. Having that translate that into a resume or into a profile that can be com attractive is a strength that, I think you just need to learn. Would you agree?

Greg Hanson: I definitely agree. And one of the other aspects of, why we wanted to do this also was because there’s a ton of people that are interested in potentially switching to a nonclinical career. Full time. And this is hopefully a way that they can get their feet wet a little bit and maybe meet that company that they do a project with.

And they’re like now we want to hire you as X, either as COO or chief medical officer or medical affairs professional. So that’s another reason that we wanted to do it because we saw so many people, especially on Facebook groups that are interested in doing something completely different outside of clinical medicine, especially after going through COVID.

Put yourself out there, like you said, remember how to reword your CV or your resume. Write a cover letter and go out and try something new if that’s what you’re interested in doing.

Dr. Mike: And I know one thing about … Putting yourself out there, getting yourself on the job boards.

A lot of them are not looking to, replace their clinical job. So of course there’s some that are, but they may also be, more private that it’s out there. And it sounds like FlipMD is. Is the solution to that, that you’re not necessarily blasting out your resume to Google or to the social media, correct. You’ve got some privacy filters involved.

Greg Hanson: Exactly. Yeah. And actually that’s something that we’ve done from pretty early on is we basically take your last name and turn it into a letter. And then really the only people that can find you are people that are actually posting jobs. So there’s, it’s not publicly available information that you’re interested in doing anything outside of medicine, if that’s what you want.

So yeah it’s pretty anonymous. You don’t have to put up a picture or anything like that if you don’t want to. And yeah, it’s pretty nice to be able to just put yourself out there and see if you can find something that’s a little bit different outside of medicine that. You may have never known you wanted to do that’s what a lot of the physicians have told us too, is that, working with, especially the startups that are really trying to change. Medicine and healthcare for the better is one of the more interesting things for them to do because they’re so fresh and have great ideas. And it’s great that hopefully practicing physicians can come help guide them to the decisions and build their companies in a way that’s going to change medicine for the better.

Dr. Mike: Now, I know you said that, right now, you’re doing this for free on both sides with the revenue model hopes to be acquired. By some type of big company. But what are the plans for flipping D I’m sure you’ve got some things that you got considering or adding anything you want to share right now.

Greg Hanson: Yeah, we have quite a few plans for the future. Some of those we won’t discuss today just because they’re in the works and figuring out how to make them work and have pretty big plans for the platform. I’ll tell you one of the things that we’re doing and we’re currently, I’m actually starting to do it is actually we’re jumping into your world a little bit. So we’re creating a podcast. And this podcast is specifically for, we’ve had a lot of people interested in basically investing whether it’s in our company or in startups in general.

And so that’s one of the things that we hope to do is bring, it’s basically going to be a pitch event for startups that we’ve seen and met along the way that are doing really interesting and innovative things to come onto a podcast for 20 or 30 minutes, talk about their company and really.

Pitch physician investors that are interested in potentially investing. And we’re also going to use it as a vehicle to teach physicians what it means to actually angel invest because I, myself never knew anything about investing. I didn’t know anything about safes or convertible notes or priced equity rounds.

All of this is learned information. That took five months, six months to actually learn. So that’s going to be another big piece of it is this educational piece. So we have one of our physician investors actually going to come on as the first podcast episode guest, and really talk about his journey into angel investing and then go through some of the more common terms you’re going to hear throughout the podcast and throughout these pitches.

So that’s something that we’re bringing up right now. It’s going to be called White Coat Capital and… we’ll we’ll see how it goes, but hopefully launch it in February. And actually one of my co-residents is going to be actually doing the podcast, not myself. I I don’t really have time to do that and not really super interested in hearing my voice all the time.

But  that’s one thing that’s coming down the pipe for us, and then we’re really just going to try to continue growing the platform. And then we have a couple other ideas for how to make this a little bit bigger and more scalable.

Dr. Mike: I’m sure your residency director is just loving hearing this! This has been great. So  let’s give the URL again for your company.

Greg Hanson: https://www.flip-md.com/ And that’ll get you right to the website. And there’s also a way if you don’t want to sign up right away, there’s a way to get job alerts.

So there’s a little tab up in the right-hand corner. It says get job alerts. We’ve had a lot of people do that so that you can at least stay tuned into what types of jobs are being posted. So if one kind of strikes your eye and you’re interested in applying that you can sign up then.

Dr. Mike: So right guys, so it’s flipped-md.com. It costs nothing for you to set up a profile. You could get job alerts. This is really good. And I think it really addresses an area where physicians just need to be more aware. When I was looking for side gigs, the short time that I was doing, I didn’t even know really where to go to.

And now you’ve got you got flip, empty there’s other places where you can go. And so it just helps more physicians. We didn’t talk about burnout, but certainly it’s something that It’s very prevalent as physicians. We don’t talk, we don’t want to let the residents know about every it’s all, it’s all peaches and cream right now, as you get older, there are some physicians who suffered again, not to not to trivialize that.

But it definitely is where they’re looking for different opportunities. They’re looking for different things in different ways to explore. So again, that the website is flipped-md.com. This has been Dr. Greg Hanson. And yeah. Thank you effort for coming on the program. Any last words that you want to share with the audience today?

Greg Hanson: Thanks for having me. If you guys do have any questions or thoughts or how we can make the platform better or whatever it is, just send me an email. It’s greg@flip-md.com. We’re very open to hearing from people. So we’re really trying to make something that is actually valuable to you. So feel free to reach out and let us know what we’re missing or what we should add.

Dr. Mike: Thank you again. And guys just like, as a Greg, don’t let anything stop you. Whether it’s a residency, whether it’s buying a house, even at a pandemic, it’s all about keep moving forward.

By

How This Doctor Semi-Retired at 45 with David Yeh, MD

Obviously, I’m a big proponent of physicians supporting other physician-owned businesses, especially when it comes to education-based companies. 

Usually because they often develop the business simply for the love of teaching others, rather than just another profit vehicle.

I once had the opportunity to witness my guest, Dr. David Yeh, speak for nearly 2 hours at a breakout session patiently answering questions from young physicians, on issues of financial literacy and investments.  Dr. Yeh did so, completely unpaid, enjoying teaching others who were hungry for information, all while doing so with a smile on his face, seeming to have the time of his life!

Outside of his work as a nuclear physician and radiologist, Dr. Yeh was able to develop a financial system using his diagnostic skills he learned as a medical doctor that allowed him to semi-retire at age 45.  On this episode, you’ll learned his trial and tribulations of investing in the stock market as a medical resident,  why he became a financial investment advisor, and his thoughts on the stock market today (and yes, we do discuss Gamestop!).  Learn more about this journey of this extraordinary doctor on this must-listen episode!


Wealthy Doctor Institute –  specializing in providing education and portfolio management services to individuals, families and small businesses.
https://wealthydoctorinstitute.com

The Busy Doctor’s Investment Guide: How One Adjustment Per Month Can Save and Maintain Your Portfolio’s Health
https://www.amazon.com/Busy-Doctors-Investment-Guide-Adjustment/dp/1599325527/

Transcript:

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 0:10
Hey guys it’s Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another episode of BootstrapMD. I’m really excited about this interview. This is someone that I’ve been wanting to get in touch with for quite a while. I first learned about him through Peter Kim’s Leverage and Growth Summit, and he was kind enough to give us an interview. I’m always curious about meeting other doctors who retire or semi retire before our typical retirement age. And on the call today, we have Dr. David Yeh. He’s a nuclear medicine specialist in Chicago, who got his degree from NYU School of Medicine and he actually became someone who retired at 45 when he started a financial investment system that allowed him to retire at 45 years old. And it’s great to hear someone who actually practice what he preaches. And he is now the founder of The Wealthy Doctor Institute, and he’s also the author of a book that you guys need to pick up called The Busy Doctors Investment Guide: How One Adjustment Per Month Can Save and Maintain Your Portfolio’s Health . David, welcome to the BootstrapMD podcast.

Dr. David Yeh 1:30
Thank you, that’s an amazing intro. The respect is mutual. I was looking at your talk last year, and I was amazed by this whole community of physician entrepreneurs. I wish I had that years ago.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 1:43
I know, you’re introverted, you’ve mentioned the past, I’m introverted as well. So I’m glad that we were finally able to come together and have this interview. I’m curious how someone who is a nuclear medicine doctor, and I also believe you’re a radiologist, how the heck do you get involved in investing, in an intern year?

Dr. David Yeh 2:08
The short answer is for radiology, it’s all pattern recognition, quantitative analysis, I just applied similar skills to the markets. But the long answer is, you’re right. I started in intern year, for good reason. And that’s because right off med school, I had my first paycheck and I was financially naive. So I quickly learned that real life could be really rough. And I got to that point where I had credit card debt, sleepless nights, knots in my stomach, and finally hit this proverbial rock bottom where I said, never again I have to get this part of my life handled its ridiculous. So that’s when I really started to just push aside my fears around money and just start studying. I started with the Dummies books course, Personal Finance for Dummies, Investing for Dummies, and all these other beginning books. But then, as I started reading, and digging myself out of my hole, when it finally came to getting my financial life in order, I came across a options investing course. And at that time, I was sold. I thought oh my god, you make so much money, so quickly. I didn’t realize at the time, there was a difference between investing and trading. But that was okay, because there were concepts in that course that I just applied to my investing. And eventually, I developed systems that I only had to watch once a month. Because let’s face it residency was really tough, you don’t really have time to watch the mortgage all day. So eventually, I developed systems that I didn’t have to watch so often. And I just continued on, even in private practice.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 3:45
Just to have an idea, and again, I don’t want to date you but I have to figure it out in my head, because you do look young. So what timeline are we talking about just so I can get an idea of where the stock market was at the time

Dr. David Yeh 3:59
Sure, my intern year I started 1994, rock bottom was 1995. And, by the time I dug myself out and started really investing, besides just dollar cost averaging, actually doing options trading was 1996. And remember, the 1990s was a big bull market, right? And the worst thing that could happen to any beginning investor, and this could be for gambling as well, isn’t that you lose money. The worst thing that could happen is that you could you are wildly successful. And that’s exactly what happened to me. Within two trades I doubled my money and I thought I was king or God or something. And of course, you get cocky and then within five trades, I blew up my account. So I learned something valuable because even within a raging bull market, the dot com bubble, I could still lose money. So, again you get this rock bottom point in life when you learn something valuable and one thing I learned was money management, risk management is so important in investing.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 5:02
Now, that’s interesting. So I went to residency probably a few years after you. And that’s actually is when I got involved in the stock market. And when I say involved, it was basically a resident saying, hey, there’s this new biotech company, we you need to invest in it. And being a dumb resident, I did and nothing really came about. And then of course, later on with dot com boom, that certainly got crazy. But were you buying stocks? Or were you buying calls or puts? What was the extent of your options trading or your portfolio at the time?

Dr. David Yeh 5:38
At the time, I was trying out various different systems. I was trying covered calls, Benson’s, but I always had some kind of exit strategy. So even with a covered call, I would have a stop where I said, it’s lost too much already, let me get out. I was doing spreads, straddles, eventually I was doing condors. But yeah, just sculpting this risk graph was key to options trading.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 6:01
You talk about it in your book, and we all got to have to get your book, but how did your investment strategy evolve over time? I think we all lose money, that’s our first education. We all we all get very confident, we all think it’s always gonna be a bull market, and then things happen. So how did it evolve over time, was it just a gradual process? Or just learning from your mistakes, and just seeing what works and what didn’t?

Dr. David Yeh 6:29
In the beginning, it was just straight dollar cost averaging. Just through a certain amount each month, at first, I could only afford $50 per month. So that’s what I started with. I eventually opened up an account, which was like $500, to start trading options. I was following along this course, where at that time, they had something new called the web, where we can log in and see the live trades that we’re doing. And I would look at those trades, and I would wonder, okay, how do they figure out how to get in? And what I’ve done the same thing? And many times, I thought I probably wouldn’t have taken that trade, but then I follow along anyway, and it turns out many of those trades, I wouldn’t have gone in, blow up anyway. So at least at that time, even though the class wasn’t great, I thought I still learned something. So I figured, okay, I think I learned enough to actually construct my own trades and place them. Let me see if I can track them now. So for instance, if I had one or two covered calls, I would trace a copy of that. And I would track it, maybe paper trade and track it as if I placed a trade live. Maybe some momentum trades, maybe some stochastic trades, something like that. And every week, I would update all by live and paper trades and just follow along in Excel and see which ones had which ones had strengths and weaknesses. And whether or not the weaknesses were because the system was wrong or because I just couldn’t do it. Because sometimes you can have the best system by just doesn’t fit you as a personality. So for a while, I was tracking up to 20 different strategies. And I found out when there were big market upsets, like in 2000, the crash of 2000, crash of 2007, I found out that the most robust strategies happened to be the ones that I didn’t have to watch that often. The ones that didn’t involve options at all. Ones that all I had to do was, once a month rotate, just use the same criteria, calculate out the numbers and if numbers say buy, I buy. If the numbers say sell, I sell.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 8:36
I was listening to another interview you were on, and you said that you being a physician and radiologist had an impact in creating your investment system. Can you elaborate?

Dr. David Yeh 8:47
Yeah for, radiology anytime we look at scanners, scanner data, CT scan, ultrasound, MRI, nuclear medicine, the raw data that comes out of the scanners is an interpretable to the human eye. We’re used to using our own filters to sculpt the data into something that’s interpretable. So we know how to modify these filters to optimize these images. And I just use the same form of technology on the stock market data. The most people when they try to invest, if they don’t just blindly follow some guru, they would at least analyze some markets. But what most people do is they will analyze fundamentals. For instance, they might analyze interest rates or news or Trump tweets or something or wars. But these are indirect data that have very little correlation with the actual market direction. I look at the actual markets because every single trade every single buy and sell is recorded in the stock market chart. The stock market chart does not lie. The CEO can lie. Their pundits can lie. Talking Heads can lie. Even the financial statements can lie, because there are ways to hide certain numbers so that it looks like you’re doing well when you’re not. But every single buying trade has a truth in the market. So if we can just take that raw data of the markets and analyze that, then it’s easy to at least tell whether or not we’re relatively safe or dangerous.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 10:14
So it sounds like you’re not watching Fox Business or CNBC all day with your system?

Dr. David Yeh 10:20
I watch it for entertainment. I watch how other people react to the news. I used to be very triggered by many of the news items, because I used to think, oh my God, this news item made the stock rise or something. But in actually that didn’t happen. So once I had my own systems, I could just rest easy and just be entertained.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 10:46
So also during that time, and again, my stock knowledge was probably influenced by a lot of senior residents at the time. And I remember this one doctor, and he was always on his, I guess, laptop at the time, and I was asking what he was doing and he said, hold on, I gotta buy this. He was day trading. And so what is your feeling on day trading, and physicians? I think I have an idea, but I’d like to hear from you.

Dr. David Yeh 11:12
I actually know a physician that was actually good at day trading, he happened to be a cardiologist. Which makes sense, if you’re in the ICU watching these EKG monitors all the time, you probably can react like a day trader. But other than that, day trading is difficult. And that’s because when you make a decision, you have to have the information that you need to make a decision and make that trade in a timely manner. And then, more often than not, the trade would go against you. And you have to decide on when to decide when you’re wrong and get out. Most traders, when they start out, they don’t realize that most of the trades are probably going to go against you. And if you don’t have a systematic exit strategy, you’ll get crushed. Because the markets are pure emotion. So it’s been said that, if you want enlightment you can either sit on a mountain top and meditate for seven years, or trade for seven days. And that’s because when you trade, all your emotions just bubble up to the surface. All that fear and greed and anxiety just come up. All your limiting stories about money and your self worth and your self identity, just all comes up. And unless you can control your emotions, you’re not going to be good at trading, especially day trading.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 12:35
Yeah, although I can tell you I’m a real prognosticator with day trading, because I can tell you in hindsight, that usually when I get in on a trade, is usually when it goes down. So I think it’s a good indicator that that’s when it’s going to go down. So let’s first actually talk about your system because from what I understand, you don’t work with individual stocks, you worked with ETFs and funds. Can you talk more about that?

Dr. David Yeh 13:08
Exactly. I don’t work with individual stocks, at least not much right now, just because individual stocks carry idiosyncratic risk. In other words, news really does influence individual stocks. If there’s a BP oil spill, for instance, that one stock may tank even though the rest may still be doing well. If scandals come out, if something negative about a single stock comes out, it’s very hard to protect against that type of risk. Whereas with ETFs, sectors generally have momentum that is not as volatile and carries usually through a whole month. So when I make a calculation, the likelihood that’s going to change mid month, beginning month, and ruin my system is decreased. So that’s another take on diversification, but not quite.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 13:59
So what I was getting at, I got involved in the stock markets, probably during the pandemic. And I got involved in options trading and I’m not a millennial, but like many of us, we certainly have seen a phenomenon for the Robin Hood traders. My son wants to do it. And I’m talking on the forum groups, so we’re talking about Tesla, and we’re talking about Neo and all of these other stocks. And then of course earlier this year GameStop, everybody knows about it. What is your take on all of this? I’m sure you’ve heard about this Reddit group, the WallStreetbets, the idea that there can be a group of traders that can somehow influence the direction of a stock. Which as we know, the GameStop company is not growing, it’s pure speculation and drive. I’m curious, as someone who’s involved in this industry, what is your take on all of this?

Dr. David Yeh 14:55
Remember that markets are pure emotion. Warren Buffett says in the short term, the market is a voting machine, the long term is a waiting machine. And that’s because long and short term there will be ups and downs. Now, having said that GameStop is a very specific situation, because somehow they were short shares. You know what shorting is? Let me just explain it for the audience. When a stock or a company is unlikely to survive in the near future, and there are people who have bet that this stock is gonna go down, how do we make money? Well, they can’t buy because the stock price will go down. So what they do is, they borrow money, or they borrow shares rather, then they sell the shares, keep the money, when the share price goes down, they buy back at a lower price. So sell high buy low. That’s what shorting means. A lot of people don’t understand that. So when you have a company that has a number of shares outstanding, that’s all you can trade. So if someone said buy stock, and there’s nine of shares, the stock price has to keep going up and until it entices someone to finally sell their stock. When you have something like GameStop, where most people agree is probably gonna go bankrupt, just a matter of when, then a lot of these hedge funds start to bet that the price will go down. So the short the stock. And when they short, someone else buys that borrowed stock, and then they short that. So that’s why for GameStop it’s very unusual, because the total number of short shares was larger than the float, the actual number of shares that’s available to trade. That wasn’t so much that the internet could rally an army that could buy enough stock to raise the price. It was just that it was this perfect storm, that this particular group of companies had a situation where there weren’t enough shares to support the trade. It’s a relatively small company, relatively small amount of shares. So that’s why they were able to at least short term, boost the price up sky high. Now here’s the problem, it wasn’t just because the traders were at war with each other. Traders have been at war for centuries, institution versus individual traders. It’s the fact that, when you have shorts, there’s something called a short squeeze. For instance, when you buy a stock, and it goes down, people tend to sell. So when more people sell, stock prices fall even faster. For a short squeeze, when you’ve sold a stock, and you must buy to cover, and the stock price keeps going up to a point where you’re losing money, then you’re forced to buy, then thevforced buying pushes the stock even higher up. That’s called a short squeeze. This is a hypothetical problem called an infinity squeeze. Which has been talked about but never really experienced yet. And here’s the danger of an infinity squeeze, when the stock price goes up too high, then it’s not just the fact that the individual hedge fund accounts don’t have enough money to cover, it’s not just a margin call. It’s the fact that the clearing houses that back the brokerages, they don’t have capital to cover those. It’s not just the shares of stock that they have to cover too. It’s the fact that you have all these call options, that are now with tremendous amounts that they cannot cover. It’s the fact that you have these short put options, that now it just becomes a real mess, trying to sort it all out. Because now you have the very existence of the clearing houses in trouble. So had the stock price gone up to $1000. The very survival of the markets would have been severely in danger. People don’t realize this. But that’s why the trading was harder to buy only, and people were thinking they just colluding with the hedge funds. No, actually, they were in survival mode. Trying to survive for their very existence.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 19:24
Have you seen a change in what you do with these apps now, like Robin Hood and not having fees? Used to be just Etrade and Ameritrade and now they’ve all gone to no fees and then more and more people are getting into the stock market. And again, I don’t want to age myself for these millennials, they’re putting in their money and we’ll see what happens kind of thing. Have you seen an effect on this? What could be the ramifications of this?

Dr. David Yeh 19:57
Actually remember, stock market is pure emotion. So no matter what kind of technological advances we have, it still underlies emotion. So for instance, if you look backwards in stock market history, back in the 1980s, when we had a crash of 1987 people going, Oh my god, it was crashing because of program trading. Because one program was selling the other program detected that it sold, and then they said, back in the 1990s, we had the high frequency trading, and that was affecting markets. But actually, if you take a look in 1929, the same patterns were happening. If you take a look at the patterns, they just erased the timeline. And look at the actual patterns, they don’t change much over time. And that’s because human psychology underlies all of the market. The market actually is all just same animal, just different technology advances. And we just use it, but it’s still the same pattern.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 20:55
In your company, The Wealthy Doctor Institute, do you work primarily with physicians?

Dr. David Yeh 21:03
Because I’m a physician, because my books full of all these analogies to physicians, because I have so much rapport with other physicians, most of my clients are physicians. In the beginning, when I was building my business from scratch, I was going to these business classes and seminars and things like that. So I have non physician clients as well.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 21:26
Now I have a friend who’s a financial advisor, she’s not a physician. And she can’t stand her physician investors because she says she tries to recommend something that’s conservative, and they want to buy the next alternative Bitcoin. What is your opinion of the physician investor, and I don’t want to get you in trouble with any of your clients, But what has been your experience?

Dr. David Yeh 21:54
Alright, my experience, again, I’ve only had like maybe five years of really talking to physicians about their investments. And there are some, even private practice, there are some cowboys who want to buy the next hot stock. And I gave a couple of these examples in my book. Where colleagues wanted to buy this hot stock. But when I bought in, I had a set exit strategy. I told my colleagues, I have this exit strategy. They told me, okay, tell us when you exit. When I exit, I told them, and they said, well, I think it’s just a small dip, right? Now it’s gonna come back, I’m just gonna hold on. And lo and behold, they lose 80% of the money. And they don’t position size. So we actually lose a whole account instead of just a small percentage. So a lot of these rookie mistakes based on emotion exists in even us relatively well educated physicians. Because, again, markets are emotional. That’s why I use algorithms, to plan out everything from position sizing to signals to get anything out. So that’s one group, the Cowboys. Then you have the other group, and this is the group I started helping out the most. Because originally, I was trying to teach the Cowboys how to invest, here’s a systematic way of looking at things so that you don’t get burned in the markets. But then we had, the really fearful physicians who got out during the crash in 2008 and didn’t dare get back into markets. I showed them the system that I use, and instead of learning how to trade or how to invest, he asked me what can you invest for me? And that was a group of physicians that I my heart really reached out to, because they were so scared of something that was unfamiliar to them. And they really needed this help. And I used to really look down on financial advisors because when I was a cowboy, I tried to learn this myself, I got burned by financial advisors before charging high fees. But now I realized I can be the financial advisor that I wish I had when I was a poor broke intern. And so now, I have physician colleagues who are just afraid of investing, who trust me and this is why I went to med school to begin with. I envisioned myself just helping people, helping patients. But I went to radiology because I liked the tech, I liked the you know, toys. And I didn’t really get that physician patient interaction unless I was doing barium or something. So now, as an investment advisor, I get to talk to clients one on one again, and it’s beautiful. I just feel like I’ve come full circle this way.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 24:39
So when you talk with your client or your prospective client, what do you what information do you get from them? And do you structure your system based upon, let’s say, the resident who just graduated who may have 200 or 300k in medical student loans? Versus the the new parents and they just their first house? Versus the soon to be retired doctor?

Dr. David Yeh 25:05
Yeah, so there are so many stages of life. And once I semi retired, I actually started part time work at the local university hospital. So I was actually teaching residents. So, at first, because I was in private practice, I never gathered interesting cases to show during residency conference. So I decided to just give my give a little lecture on investing and personal finance and it went over well. The residents really loved that. So now I have a series of lectures that I give to residents. Their situation is very unique, because nowadays, they have mortgage size, student debt, which was unheard of when I was a resident. Back when I was a resident, if you have $100,000 worth of debt, that was huge. Now $300,000 is normal. So that to me, it’s just incredible. So trying to help them deal with the debt, trying to help them deal with what all these other investment advisors are trying to sell them. And what do you actually have to look for in terms of insurance, disability, whole life or whatever, and how to invest. What to look for. That, at least is an educational tool that I can add value to the residents. When there are younger physicians who are establishing themselves and gaining the income to at least start attacking that debt, and they want guidance in terms of investing. I have a whole different system of helping that particular group of physicians. And then there are people my age who tried to invest, maybe got scared, maybe got burned, maybe got something but they know that they’re not where they need to be. And then I can really help with my investment system with what they have so far.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 26:52
And what do you say to some of those colleagues, your physician colleagues who say, doctors shouldn’t even be involved in the stock market? What is your take on that?

Dr. David Yeh 26:59
We shouldn’t be involved, why? Because we don’t understand the markets? Because oftentimes, by the time we get information, it’s too late. By the time we get a stock tip, it’s too late. So that’s why we shouldn’t even trade or anything, we should just invest blindly in index mutual funds, and just let go. My take is, if you have a system, and there are many systems out there, systems are a dime a dozen. But if you learn a system, and then the key is to apply the system with discipline, that’s the key. And us physicians, we have discipline. We round on our patients religiously, we go through charts systematically, we can definitely do something like stock market investing. If we have a system, most people don’t realize systems are extremely important. The fact that we can take our emotions out of investing, that’s key. So when people say we have no business investing, if we don’t overcome our emotions, and then have a system, that’s true, we shouldn’t be investing. But we need education.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 28:12
Yeah, that is so true. And almost every book that I read, books on stock trading and and then I really enjoyed the ones on the psychology of it. Everyone says it’s all about the emotion. But that FOMO is also very strong, too. So it’s always good to have a system that you can always fall back on. And that’s what we do as doctors. We follow checklists in the emergency room to make sure that when we have situations that are pretty emotional, we can take a deep breath and move forward. So I want to change the pace a little bit, recently I’ve been introducing something here on the podcast called Five Unexpected Questions With My Guest. So I did warn you a little bit, but Dr. David Yeh, are you up for the challenge for these five unexpected questions? Okay. All right. Okay, so number one is you went to NYU, and now you live in Chicago, or close to Chicago, right? Which has the best pizza?

Dr. David Yeh 29:19
I grew up around New York. Obviously, I’m very biased towards New York pizza. When I came to Chicago, and I see pizza that’s slice into graph paper, into squares. To me, that’s insane. Because pizza, you’re supposed to eat as a sector, you hold the crust and you eat it. But with squares, you get your fingers all messy and things like that. And then they have these deep distributions, okay, that’s fine, but still cut it in sectors. So… my bias is still in New York. I lived maybe 21 years in Chicago, but I lived the rest of my life New York and and I still feel like a New Yorker. Over here in Chicago, I still walk faster than most people, talk faster than most people I’m still an east coaster.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 30:08
You’re right. New York pizza is better. Number two, what was the last TV show you binge watched?

Dr. David Yeh 30:16
Oh my god…

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 30:17
These are tough questions.

Dr. David Yeh 30:19
Yeah, it’s been a while since I watched TV. It’s like, ever since I started my business, I’ve just been more concentrated on it. I remember for a time I was watching Doctor Who when I was on a treadmill, just because I wanted to watch something on the treadmill. I used to watch it as a kid and now we have this new series. So that’s probably the last one I binge watched. But that was five years ago.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 30:45
All right. So speaking about science fiction, there’s an interview with you with William Shatner. So I want to know, there’s been a number of captains, but the most famous four are Shatner, Picard, Janeway and Cisco. Which one was the best captain?

Dr. David Yeh 31:01
They all embody different aspects of strength and leadership. And frankly, sometimes when I think about leadership, I think about those qualities of each. Having said that, Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard, he embodies the more straightforward diplomatic yet purposeful leader, that a starship captian or any leader an emulate, so he’s the one I look up to most.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 31:36
Okay, so you’re gonna have to get an interview with John Luke, on your website then.

Dr. David Yeh 31:41
Yes.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 31:43
I’ve learned you’re a ballroom dancer, very good ballroom dancer. And he’s gonna, kill me, so I’ve got a son who’s about 23-24. He’s at the age where he’s trying out dating and he wants to become a better dancer. What’s the best type of dance that he should learn if he wants to woo the ladies so to speak.

Dr. David Yeh 32:06
One of the most useful ones right now, if you go to any parties or clubs or whatever, they play mostly blue music. So what I call blue music, are music that you can dance, swing, cha-cha or hustle to. So if he learns any one of those. Or nowadays, latin dancing like salsa. That’s very useful that can be applied to many different types of music. In terms of versatility, those are most useful. In terms of personality, if he ever learns other dances, he’ll naturally gravitate towards one dance versus another. Just because we’re all a little bit different personally.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 32:43
I had a friend who actually met I think it was his fiance. But he started to go to salsa dancing, because they were more girls than guys. And so that’s what he learned and it helped him out. And then number five, three books that you would recommend, actually three books that that that changed your life?

Dr. David Yeh 33:06
Well, so many holy cow. Now, many of these books after a while, they repeat similar concepts. So depending on which order you read these books, they may affect you differently. So one book that definitely changed me was Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Now, back when I was a poor intern and felt powerless, just knowing that choices were within my control, and I could actually structure the effectiveness of my own life towards myself, as well as whatever else I can control, that was huge. The second book that hugely impacted me, was hate to say, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. The only reason I say, I hate to say, because it has a lot of great information in it, a lot of mindset, changing information in it. I also happen to have taken courses with the real life Rich Dad, Keith Cunningham. Cunningham and Kiyosaki. They both used to give seminars together. And I won’t go into the story, but I got the information from the hay before it goes to the horse. So even though I know what the hay is before going to the horse, the book itself was mind changing to anyone who’s not familiar with the material.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 34:35
Yeah, Cashflow Quadrant is the one I like. But yeah, there is some controversy between whether whatever was involved in terms of who was involved. Yeah, that’s another part of the story.

Dr. David Yeh 34:47
The third book would be, Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 34:51
All right.

Dr. David Yeh 34:53
Just because it just takes time and hard work and tries to order in a way that just eliminates the old way and that was huge.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 35:01
Those are classic books and I love that you read your first book in medical school or residency?

Dr. David Yeh 35:11
No, it was in internship. That’s a book I discovered audiobooks with. Because I had that book sitting on my shelf for years. I was a poor broke intern, I got this ad to get the audiobook version for $59. I was going, holy heck, how am I gonna afford that? But I did it anyway. And because I had so much skin in the game, I just listened to it, and listen to it, and listened to it, and just changed my life.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 35:33
Yeah, I hear you. And I’m sure you agree we need some type of financial literacy, or some financial education if not in residence, something in medical school, because I think it can impact a lot of our future doctors. I know we only have a few more minutes left, let’s talk about your company, The Wealthy Doctor Institute. For a doctor who’s interested in this, how do they find out more information? They go to your website, and then what happens next?

Dr. David Yeh 36:00
They can go to my website, wealthydoctorinstitute.com, and there’s a contact me button or schedule me button. And what they can do is they can either send me a question, or they can just schedule themselves. And there’s a calendly link where if you want to just talk to me, you don’t have to play phone tag with an assistant or anything, just pick a time that works for you and we just hop on a zoom call, ask any questions you want. Trust me, no matter how stupid you think that question is, I used to ask even more stupid questions, because I know but it feels like to be a beginner.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming 36:39
That’s awesome. So guys, if you want to get involved investing in the stock market, and you want to hear from a physician, and I really think more physicians need to be hearing it from physicians, check out his website The Wealthy Doctor Institute at wealthydoctorinstitute.com. Set up a call and just check it out. Also check out his book, The Busy Doctors Investment Guide, also available on Amazon. David, it was a pleasure to finally get to talk to you and having you share your advice with us. Thank you, and thanks, guys. As you learned with David, he was a poor broke intern, as he mentioned. But he took the information and just used the knowledge. With knowledge is power and then implemented this power to create his system. And it can work for all of us. Some people think that money is bad or evil, but if you know it and know how to leverage it, it can be used for a lot of good things and investing in yourself, I think is the best investment of all. So with that is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming and as always, keep moving forward.

By

Achieving Success in the World of Medical Devices as a Physician Inventor with Swarna Balasubramaniam, MD

Shark Tank makes it look so easy!  But coming up with something new isn’t like it is on the TV show, especially if you are a physician inventor and looking to enter the landscape of medical devices.  Filing for patents and writing business plans, pitching potential investors, while at the same time seeing a full waiting room for patients can take its toll. 

But for surgeon Dr. Swarna Balasubramaniam,  it has all been worth it.  After countless abdominal surgeries, she created a device that could shorten hospital stays and improve patient outcomes.   Now the CEO and founder of Noleus Technologies,  Dr. Swarna Balasubramaniam has now dedicated her life to bringing this cost-saving medical device to the marketplace. All potential and active inventors need to listen to her inspiring story on this episode!

https://www.noleustechnologies.com – Noleus Technologies

Contact Information for Swarna Balasubramaniam, MD

swarna@noleustechnologies.com

Transcript:

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey it’s Dr. Mike, welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD . This is the podcast for physician entrepreneurs , I love spotlighting physicians, medical doctors, who are in the trenches, who are starting their own businesses and really putting themselves out there.

Because as it’s not one of the most easiest things out there to do. And. We’ve got a great guest today. I think we actually met we were both speaking in Texas with our mutual friend, Dr. Michelle Mudge, Riley. She has a conference called physician helping physicians, and I got to know her a little bit more.

We were on  a session virtual session this summer. And eventually we got, I said, I’m wanting to interview you. Eventually. We got our schedules together. She’s a very busy, female physician and being a physician entrepreneur. So I’m so excited to have her on Swarna. I’ve just got to quickly read your bio and then we’ll get right to it!

She is  Dr. Swarna Balasubramaniam  a surgeon inventor and a full-time medical device entrepreneur. She actually recently left her practice last year. She’s the founder of Noleus Technologies. It’s a Houston based medical device company, focused on developing and commercializing innovative technologies.

Intended to accelerate, recover and to improve outcomes after surgery. She’s a board-certified colorectal and general surgeon by training as 20 years of experience as a practicing surgeon and surgical practice owner in Sugarland, Texas raised in Boston, completed medical school and general surgery training at an institution I’m familiar with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

She actually came out here to the west coast as a general surgeon at Kaiser Permanente for two years prior to completing a colon and rectal surgery fellowship at USC, she was experiencing basic science research in the areas of radiologic imaging, cardio, renal physiology, molecular oncology, and clinical translational surgical research.

And. Dr. Balasubramaniam, I am so excited to have you on the program today. Thank you for coming on Bootstrap MD.

Swarna: Mike, it’s my pleasure. And you did a great job there not only saying my name, but with my background, it was a lot of different things going on there. It’s been a long ride and it’s not over yet.

And I’m having a great time doing what I’m doing and, part of what I love doing in addition to this new career I’m in. Is letting physicians know that this is a possibility with a medical degree. And so I’m excited to come on your show and share that passion with your listeners to see if they might get a Pearl or two that helps them on their journey.

Mike Woo-Ming: Again, it’s a pleasure to having you on. And when I interviewed physician entrepreneurs, I’m always curious about their background how it got started. So when you first were deciding to start your own company, was that something that. You initially did prior to applying for medical school or how did this all come about?

Swarna: Life is just a, sometimes a long walk and then you take the opportunities when they come. My story begins that I actually was never going to go to medical school. So I actually was a chemistry major in college and I was going to go to graduate school in chemistry. And I was really good at research and everyone pretty much had slotted me for that and myself as well.

Yeah. The problem was, I didn’t really enjoy any of the summer internships. I had doing that. And suddenly in my third year of college, I decided I want to go to medical school because the only thing that seemed interesting in this research job I had at the national Institute of health was the doctor who was doing research.

And I said, I’m going to do medical research and be a doctor. My parents were like, what. What’s his big change, but I just decided, so I’m just that person. And then after I did that, I basically did more research and I thought I was going to have an academic career. And then I something bad happened in my residency.

My mom actually died. And life throws all kinds of roadblocks in your way. And at that point I was exhausted. I, Push myself through a surgical residency, which was not so easy. I was doing all kinds of things. And I decided at that point, instead of doing a fellowship right away, I would go ahead and work, of course, that didn’t please any of my academic attendings at all, but nonetheless, it was what was needed.

And so I went to work. As you pointed out at Kaiser, in Southern California. And after a couple of years, I did a lot of things there. We implemented some new technologies Localized breast cancer surgery instead of having mastectomy did some other things. And then I decided, you know what, I need to go back and see if I still want to be an academic surgeon.

So I went back to USC was really lucky. Dr. Bob Barrett was head of the program there and he took me into his program and. It was just great. I just liked what I was doing. And I think part of it was an ability to focus more on something. And along the way, he ran a really robust clinical research program where he did a lot of work with industry.

And that seemed interesting to me. And then I tried an academic job working in New York with one of the Montefiore, with the Montefiore system. Tim at one of their hospitals, but ultimately there were a lot of issues, which I won’t even get into. And I decided to take a job in Texas. And that’s how I ran to Texas as fast as I could.

And I worked for a large multi-specialty group practice. And then basically after I did that, I decided I would be better off working for myself. I wanted that control of my schedule, which I really wasn’t getting. And so I opened practice here in suburban Houston. Then, which is a super, it was a super growing area, even as little as 10, 12 years ago and practiced.

And I had a great practice. I really enjoy taking care of my patients, but I think it happens to a lot of people, as they progress in their career, Practice of medicine is great, but if you’re not an academic or in a large institution, there’s only so much so far, you can go with it.

And there’s a certain certain kinds of biases against women still. And people certainly have minority status. And I just saw that, I thought to myself I turned 45 one day and I said, what am I going to do with the rest of my career? I got another 20 years of this and, am I going to keep doing the same thing?

And I dabbled in doing other things. I thought about, doing opening a surgery center, doing all kinds of things. And I just kept thinking I got to do something else. Cause this was just not stimulating enough. And along the way, I basically had an idea and the backstory is about 15 years before that I had an idea for a medical device because when we operate, we have all kinds of technical problems.

And we, at that time, it was a technical problem with taking gallstones out. We doing a lot of laparoscopic gallbladder surgery and we had to manually crushed the gallstones before we remove the gallbladder, which sounds crazy. And I was like, hey, there must be a little device. We can , invent to do this.

To make this go faster. So I drew a picture and then basically talked to a bunch of engineers. Everyone said it was done. There was nothing out there. And I didn’t do anything else because back in 2000, what did I know? I just kept operating. And then when I moved to Houston, a rep walked in my office with a device.

That basically was my idea from that many years ago, from 10 years before that, I was like, Hey, I was sad and I was. Glad all at the same time. So this time when I had an idea back in 2015, I was like, Oh, remember that time when your idea was pretty good, maybe this is a good one. And so I just started following it and basically found patent attorney to try and see whether anyone else had thought of it.

And, having a little bit of experience from my previous dive into devices and then. I got a lot of encouragement. The patent attorneys were really excited and they knew more about it. I didn’t really understand it, but with their guidance, I just kept following it. And then basically it just it started to consume me this device to help patients recover faster after abdominal surgery.

I think your physician audience will understand that every time people have abdominal surgery, they have this period where their intestines don’t work and they’re stuck in the hospital waiting basically to pass gas, eat and go home. And that’s, pretty long stay. It can be anywhere from five days to two weeks, depending on the patient and the surgery and all kinds of other comorbidities.

And so I was just got more and more obsessed with this idea and I knew it would work. Because it’s basically a translation of an existing technology. So I just kept following it along. And then basically, one time, one day what happened was basically at the end of 2018, it was swallowing up so much of my time to do this.

And I realized I was having so much more fun following my device than I was practicing, which was great because surgeons always say, what’s the best thing you can do. What’s the most fun you can have with them. Your clothes on and that’s operating, but, that’s the thing about it that it just became so enticing to think of helping so many people at once instead of one belly or one hemorrhoid at a time, I was like, okay, this is the thing to do that in 2019, I basically stopped practicing and have been working on this full-time ever since.

And so I think, one of the things I hear from a lot of physicians who are thinking about, leaving medicine is they don’t like practice. And I hear that because, and I feel that because one of the things about practices it’s become really administratively difficult. And I think also, you get to mid career and really not, everyone has an opportunity to keep doing different things.

I think, if you’re an academic institution or you have a lot of Kind of administrative roles for a medical society. You have some different things to do, but not everyone is either drawn to those or has those opportunities. And I was in the same boat, but I think it’s really important to find something else that you get excited about.

It becomes a lot easier to leave medicine. I think it’s harder to leave. Because it is a risk. You make a good salary as a physician and it’s difficult to leave all of that, unless you have something else that’s, exciting and worth taking that risk for. So I’ll stop there and see, what kind of feedback you have about that?

I totally agree. As someone who has coached and worked with doctors in the past, many of them have been burnt out and they look to entrepreneurship as a way. Of going there. But I think the thing that you bring up is you have to be passionate about whatever you’re going to be doing. If, whether you’ve inventing something or you’re starting a business, because I see people who, yeah, I want to start a business, but I can tell they really don’t have the passion for it, or they don’t feel like they don’t have the experience to do.

Mike Woo-Ming:  And I said there were other things that you can do. You can go in and do some non-clinical work or something that’s a bit different. Maybe taking away from the patients. So business is not necessarily. The answer, but I think what you brought up is that you did have a passion for it. You did have, you had a problem.

You knew that there was a problem. You had a solution that can reduce the amount of time that you’re spending in the hospital, saving, thousands, perhaps millions of dollars, multi-millions of dollars. And,

Swarna: But I want to bring up one point what you said there. My, I didn’t really have a lot of experience in business, so I think, no one really has any experience.

I think the big thing is that, you have to, you have to spend some time figuring out if what you want to do besides practice is exciting to you. So I think that’s the big thing. So I think, there’s a lot of different things you can do. And I basically, worked on this for three and a half years while I was still practicing.

Now I cut my practice back a little bit, but I made sure that this was exciting and viable before I left. And so I think, it’s not really about experience cause I think it’s tough to have experience because medical training is. So all consuming, but I do think, definitely whatever you try out, you can do on the side, because that’s a great thing about medicine.

You can maybe even if you don’t own your own practice, you can try and negotiate some shifts or something. So many physicians are employed. Now you can work your schedule. So you have a little bit of free time every week to work on your side project and see if it’s viable. And it has holding power for you.

Mike Woo-Ming: And just as an, as in medical school, no one had any experience, but they threw us in front of patients in third year medical school. So we learned from mentors, we learned from attendings. So in your. In your entrepreneur journey. Did you have mentors? Did you have family members who were entrepreneurs that you could ask for advice?

Swarna: Oh, heck no, the thing about it is that the entrepreneurial community is very giving. So the one thing about it is in entrepreneurship, people help each other, and so there are these, all these resources out there where you basically, go and ask people for a little bit of help at a time, and then you get feedback and development help.

And, those exist at universities and different cities and then accelerators. And so they’re in different business verticals. So if you wanna. I’m in medical devices and life sciences, you go seek out help in those kinds of situations. So there are a lot of resources out there.

I think it’s difficult. To say that anyone would have entrepreneurship because when an entrepreneurship, if someone has A different kind of businessing, like owning golf courses or owning different kinds of business. It really is very different than what I’m doing. And so I think it’s difficult to find it so close, but there is a plenty of resources out there to find that stuff you just have to start looking and, with the internet these days, you just can surf the web and get a lot of information about what to do.

And if you are interested, if people are interested in. Learning about, device entrepreneurship or life science, entrepreneurship, you can simply go to the web and look up like Y Combinator is a great accelerator and they talk. And so accelerators are places where ideas and small companies become big companies and they grow ideas and develop.

Them and, commercialize them. And so you could simply go to that website and see what they have to say and all the components, and then, start working on something. They even have a free it’s called startups school, where you can learn about the different components of doing stuff like that.

Now, I didn’t know about that before I started, but I think he’s a great resource, entrepreneurship has really come a long way with the internet. And especially, I would say in the past few years, it’s there’s a lot more resources. And this year in particular, because of the pandemic, there’s an enormous amount of resources that have been put onto the web.

So I think I would tell your listeners if they’re interested at all to check out those few resources and then, you can learn more by. Contacting people are going around, but the number one thing, if you really want to leave medicine and do something else is you got to get a LinkedIn profile going.

I see so many doctors that are not on LinkedIn and the business world revolves around LinkedIn. And if you’re not on LinkedIn, it’s really hard to connect with other people.

Mike Woo-Ming: Well, a lot of information there, a lot of great how to information that you just gave. So let’s say a physician is listening to this call right now.

They have this idea. They’ve had it for the last six months a year. They found us some they’re invented something it’s worked in their own clinic and now they want to take it and they want to see where they can go. Your recommendation was to be a fine incubators in their

Swarna: community. Yeah, I think that would be reasonable.

Or you could go to a Y Combinator. The first thing you need to know is that, something needs a patent. You, you need to need to assess there’s two parts to every medical invention. There’s the medical part of it, which doctors are great at knowing if something is actually gonna sell.

Solve a problem. And then there’s the business side of it, which is a great mystery to most doctors. And so the business side of it is how do you make money with the thing? And that is quite specific. And it’s also quite different based on each type of thing, whether it’s a test or a drug or, a diagnostic test or a device.

And so it’s really variable. Now doctors have some advantages because they understand insurance, at least some doctors do, but so the business part of it is where most doctors need lots of help. And so that’s where, going to accelerators or going to your local university business school and see if someone will help you.

To make an idea of understanding a business plan is really important. And I would say that the very best thing to do is to just start reaching out. There’s no course, that’s going to make you an expert at this, but you just have to start reaching out for help. But I will tell doctors that if you have an idea don’t go and publish it on the internet or go blabbing to a lot of people, because then it becomes difficult to patent that idea.

And a patent is important in, making sure that you protect your idea so that it can make money.

Mike Woo-Ming: Okay, so then the next step would be one of the steps you do is find a patent is that the time where you should start considering. Having an attorney on board to considering doing NDAs and things like that.

Swarna: Oh, I think, you can find a PA a patent attorney and you don’t need any huge names. You need someone with obviously, some experience in the field and you file. What’s called a non-provisional one-year patent. Just protect your idea. Yeah. And then you have anyone you tell, you have them sign a non-disclosure agreement, and then you start feeling out whether your idea has any business legs.

And I think, doctors are pretty good at knowing whether their idea has a real medical legs, in the sense that it’ll solve a problem and it’s needed. But really the business part of it is where I see doctors are a little bit weak and. I think it’s normal because we don’t get any business training.

Now, on the other hand, there’s a ton of these business guys and engineers who have ideas, especially in the medical device world, but they have no idea whether it’s going to solve a medical problem because medicine is very complex and unique with the workflow and stuff. So I think, from from the standpoint of not understanding the business side of it versus not understanding the medical side of it, we’re at a huge advantage.

Mike Woo-Ming: Now let’s talk about it. Your situation. So you had. You started you had your device, how did you start spreading it? Did you have colleagues that you wanted to, for them to test these? How did, how did it start for you?

Swarna: Yeah, so that’s great. So I started off wondering if it, my idea, I felt like someone must’ve thought of it. I was just like, God, it’s like technology. That’s already out there. It’s negative pressure therapy and someone must’ve thought of this utility. And so I was just, basically, that was why my first step was to go to a patent attorney and say, I’m sure someone thought of this.

And they were shockingly no one’s thought of it. And I was like, really that’s crazy. So then we filed the patent and then I was like I think it’s a great idea, but does anyone else think it’s a great idea? Sorry. Say that again. How long did the process take? Because I know God that takes forever or so basically once you file a patent, you won’t hear anything back from the patent office for three years, and then you can go through the whole process of, getting a patent issued.

That’s a process. And so a lot of times, When something starts off patenting, it’s like in a research lab and there’s no idea of forming a company. So it you can do a patent independent of forming a company and commercializing something you need. So that’s often universities patent stuff with no idea that they’re actually going to develop it into something that’s just a way of protecting your idea.

So no one else steals it basically. And so that takes a while. And then after you have, I had the Penn, that was like does anyone else think it’s a good idea? So then what we did was basically I started talking to other surgeons I knew and showing them the idea, and if I thought there were people who would actually steal the idea, I made them sign a non-disclosure agreement.

And then, cause. Most doctors won’t do anything because, they don’t a don’t know and B they’re not, but there are people who will like, we all know from our training, who would be like that. So that’s diverse. And so basically once I got a whole bunch of surgeons who were like, immediately Oh my, my goodness, this would be so awesome.

And yeah, I get it. Then, it was like, what’s the next step? I needed to build that business plan. And so I’m in Houston. And rice university has a business school here and through the graduate students there, I was able to build a rudimentary business plan, doing some market research on understanding how much money we could make with this, because let me tell ya, no investor going to give you any money unless you show them that there’s a big.

A business opportunity. And then once we did that, we were able to start, talking about it in a pitch competition. So that’s like a big thing with the startup world. And so we entered a pitch competition in 2017 and I basically won. And so I was just like, Hey, that’s I wasn’t ready for that.

I was just like, I didn’t, it was my first pitch competition. And I was just like, okay, let’s see what this is all about. And then we won and I was like, Hey, I like this, just kidding. It was a kind of like the way you communicate your idea to people and you do it in a way, so you don’t give away the state secrets.

And then once we did that, people started to be like, Oh, maybe this is something serious. And then, you keep refining, and then you learn all the steps involved in commercializing something. And from that point forward in 2017, we have a prototype. Now we’ve developed an, a large animal model to test it in.

So the DA requires you to test your device in animals before you go into humans. And now we’re at a point where we have to get some feedback from the FDA and then proceed forward. So then we can file for FDA clearance and then go into humans and et cetera, et cetera.

Mike Woo-Ming: When was the day where you decided I need to focus on my business and close my practice? What was the thing? What was the catalyst for that?

Swarna: That’s a great point. I think the day came, so that was hard because, I like operating, I loved it. And when you spend so much, not only you, my whole identity. I think this is really true for a lot of physicians. Your identity becomes wrapped up with being a physician because, we spend enormous amounts of time, mental energy, physical energy doing that.

And everyone calls you a doctor all the time. And so it’s tough to give that up, that’s how you’re known. I live in a. And a suburb where if I go anywhere, chances are even as a subspecialist. People like have seen me as a patient or they know me cause there’s their family member saw me.

And so I’m always doctor to everyone. And that’s a little bit of a weird public persona that you have. There are bad downsides to it, when you spend your whole life working, 60, 80 hours a week doing stuff, it’s just becomes like part of your nature. But I think what happened was one day, like basically.

I think I had a case scheduled and then I had something else that was going on and the case got delayed and I got super irritated because it meant that like my other business thing would totally have to be rescheduled because of the, or, and, that happens in the, or, All surgeons have cases rescheduled because of surgical emergencies.

And we understand cause some other patient has needs the, or more, but I was just pissed because I was just like, God, cause I’d waited a long time to talk to this other person and yeah. That’s just really hard. It meant it pushing it back so much. And at that point I realized, because at that point I was only practicing about one third time and it was the minimum viable amount I could practice to make it economically worth it.

And at that point I realized if I’m this irritated about a case being rescheduled, maybe it’s time to just quit. And I could spend, and I wasn’t having enough time to focus on my business to begin with. And I was just like, okay, you don’t have enough time to really manage this business and grow it the way you need to grow.

Cause you know, I was already working like a dog constantly and then the other, 10 hours a week I was spending so practicing, I could totally like. Put it into the business and I was mad about the or thing and, we all get mad sometimes, but I was just unreasonably mad and I was just like, forget it. Okay. It’s time to stop practice.

Mike Woo-Ming: So I’m always curious when doctors are in the trenches like yourself, they’re out of practice just to get a bit of a flavor. So you’re out of practice. Now what’s a typical day look like for you.

Swarna: Oh, so different. It took me awhile to get used to like what, how it’s different.

Because I think as physicians, we just are used to pushing ourselves through no matter how we feel, because the schedule is largely dictated by other people, whether it’s your office scheduler or the Orr or your patients calling you and yakking about whatever, your time is never your own.

And then when your time becomes your own, it’s very different. There’s still a lot of focus you have to do, but Stuff is not so automatic for me now, partially because I’m doing something I’ve never done before, so that I have to focus a lot more. And I have to spend a lot of time learning, which is different, once you get good at practice of medicine, you still learn.

And of course we do CME, but 90% of what you do is like autopilot, right? I could practically close my eyes and still do an appendectomy or do a colon resection because basically I’ve done so many of them, it doesn’t go away. Yeah, not literally, but so that’s the thing about it.

It’s very different. So I get up and then, especially with the pandemic, it’s really weird. So last year, I did a lot of traveling. I probably went on 20 business trips. Cause you know, you have to go meet investors and pitch and stuff, but the pandemic has really changed things for business. And I think it’s probably some of it’s going to stick around because it’s been so long.

That, we do so much on zoom now. I get up and then basically I start work at eight o’clock and then I work for a period of whatever, like three hours really intensely. And then, I structure my work. So I do some like projects, like things I have to focus on. And then I do what I call the.

The busy work, like the answering emails and then, doing all the little administrative things and then take a break for lunch and you have to really structure your day in a very different way than you would when you were, in practice. So it’s very different, but there’s a lot of work to do, nonetheless.

I still have what I call three shifts of work. So I do work in the morning, take a break for lunch, do a little bit of busy work, work a little bit more intensely. Take a break in the evening, maybe do some exercise and then have a period of, two or three hours in the evening where I do intense work again.

So it’s it’s a long day, but that’s just, it takes a while to get used to working differently. Think work versus, Running around work. That’s what I call it.

Mike Woo-Ming: Control of your schedule for the most part, right?

Swarna: It is a joy though. I have to say, being in control of your schedule is like phenomenal feeling. And I was like, most people live this way, their whole lives. That’s just crazy.

Mike Woo-Ming: And your team is a virtual then I assume when you work from home.

Swarna: Yeah. I think in general, I think. When you do like medical entrepreneurship, if you’re in certain areas like maybe Silicon Valley or you’re in, even in San Diego or in Boston, there’s other people right in the area with the expertise you need. But in Houston, there’s not really so many people. And so our team has been distributed to from the get-go

Mike Woo-Ming: wonderful, but this has been a great. Snapshot at what you do. What advice would you give? Someone who’s considering getting into medical devices. You’ve, we’ve talked about it before, but just some of my words of advice or encouragement you’d want to give to someone out that’s out there.

Swarna: I would say that, I had zero business training. So I think that’s important to realize because a lot of people, I’ve talked to who come to me specifically for advice are always just should I get an MBA or is there a course to do this? And the answer is not really. And I don’t think an MBA is really useful. It’s not for this purpose. It can be useful if you want to do consulting or certain kinds of things, but not for the medical administrator.

That’s a certain kind of healthcare MBA, but I think if you want to do something like this, the first thing to do is to see just start, you can do a little bit at a time and check out your idea.

And basically by using some of the resources I mentioned earlier, going to those websites and then just start seeing if your idea’s any good. If your idea is good, then you can start working on it. And it’s not something that you have to quit your job to start working on. This can be a night and weekends kind of thing, and you can put in a little elbow grease and just see how it goes, because a lot of it is done virtually and over the internet through emails and conversations, and every doctor can find a little bit of time at lunch breaks and, at five o’clock to have a phone call or two and then figure out what’s going on.

But I would just say start instead of just daydreaming about it for another year, just try and put some, just. Try and put it into action and, make yourself a small goal. Oh, I’m going to talk to, two people this week to vet the idea. And then, even if it’s as small as, Hey, find that doctor on that podcast who became an entrepreneur and ask her, some specific questions, everything you do is a little step in knowledge.

Mike Woo-Ming: There’s a lot to learn, have fun with it. Along the way. I truly enjoyed our talks and where can they go to find out more information about yourself or your device? Where can a, we’re going to go and find it?

Swarna: My website doesn’t have much because we can’t say too much until we have approval, but you can go to noleustechnologies.com to learn a little bit, but if you’re interested in learning more about how to do some entrepreneurship, I’d be happy to talk to anyone for sure. A 15, 20 minute conversation to give them a little direction and they, people could just email me.

And it’s my first name. swarna@nolinastechnologies.com. And I think that is the easiest way to get started because it’s really tough. I totally understand that when you’re working as a physician and this world is very nebulous and the resources are out there, but there’s too many and there’s no direction. Sometimes it helps to have a little bit of specific direction to get started.

Mike Woo-Ming: I love it. Thank you again, Swarna, I know you’ve been busy. I know it took us some time to get it, but I can definitely feel that people are going to get a lot from this call today. So thank you so much

Swarna: excited. And I thank you for doing this and helping doctors have an outlet and some ideas, and I’m, podcasts are great. That’s been my pandemic hobby to start listening to podcasts when I go on my daily walks. So I’m all about them. Thank you again, Mike.

Mike Woo-Ming: Thank you again, everybody. Thank you for listing. And just as Dr. Swarna said. Don’t wait for another year. If you have an idea, just start. It’s all about keep moving forward.

All right. Thank you. Thanks again. I’ll let you know when this call is up. Thanks again.

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Get Access to Stu McLaren’s Membership Site Training

RAW TRANSCRIPT
Hey guys is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of bootstrap MD. This is the podcast for physician entrepreneurs. And I’m so excited a special treat. I’ve actually had two people on my bucket list for the last year to get on my podcast one was Dr. Fauci. And he’s kind of a little bit busy. So I understand. I mean, that’s why is this gentleman I’ve known him for such a long time. And if you have a few are currently subscribed to a membership site, most likely the creator of that membership site, probably learned from this gentleman. He’s been working intimately with 10s of 1000s of authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, and business owners, transforming what they know, love and do into recurring revenue for the past 12-15 years to how long have you been doing this?

Stu McLaren
Since 2008. So yeah, quite a while.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming

  1. He’s the founder of TRIBE, which is a once a year course that teaches anyone how to build membership sites to secure recurring revenues in their business. It’s happening right now. And we’re going to talk more about tribe and and how to get on a special webinar that’s coming up. But first of all, Stu McLaren, thank you for joining me on this program.

Stu McLaren
Dude, it’s so great to see you, man. I’m thrilled to be here and grant glad that we could reconnect.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Awesome, awesome. And I know right now, you’re going through a lot, I’m going through a launch by myself. And one of them is a membership site. So I said, why not go to the master himself, the one who pretty much I think, created this term membership sites. And I was actually looking back I mentioned just before we got on the call that I was looking back, when we first corresponded, it was around that 2007 when you were working with a guy named Russell Brunson, I don’t know, whatever happened to that guy, but Well, what, wherever he is, I hope he’s doing well. But you have been tremendous. I’ve heard from a lot of my I work with a lot of physician entrepreneurs, they’ve learned from you about building their membership sites. And you know, there’s so much to talk about, you know, you’re also one of the most giving people I know, in terms of your charities that you’ve done with village impact. And how many schools have you been building in Kenya? What are you up to? Now? I’m just curious. Yeah,

Stu McLaren
I, you know, I gotta give the credit to my wife, you know, she’s the the visionary on that, you know, for sure. But, you know, we’ve now built 14 schools educating more than 5000 plus kids over in Kenya, and it’s just, this is why we do what we do you know, what I mean? It’s like, the more money we make, the more impact we can have. And the more good we can do. So this is why I love entrepreneurship, this is why I love you know, being able to make money, because, you know, again, we’re just stewards of it, you know, when we make it, we can give it and, and we can have a far greater impact.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Well, against you, I’ve known you for so long, I don’t even know where to begin. But I guess we’ll start from the beginning for the, you know, for so my, my podcast goes to physician entrepreneurs, healthcare entrepreneurs, they don’t really know what a membership site is all about. Maybe you can first explain to us what is the membership site?

Stu McLaren
Yeah, well, for me, back in the days, when, you know, you and I met, I had a very successful, you know, consulting business, I was providing, you know, consulting for many high level clients. And it was a great business. But the problem with it was that the only way to grow it was to give more of my time. And, and quite frankly, I just didn’t have any more time to give. And I had just gotten married to my lovely wife, Amy. And we were thinking of starting a family and, and what I realized was that if I wanted to be a present husband and father, like something had to change in the business, because I was working, you know, burning the candle at both ends, and there was no room to grow from that beat up from that point. So that’s when our, you know, mutual friend Armand Morin, one of my mentors, he said to me, he’s like, still, you should create a membership. And I was like, Whoa, what’s a membership? And he said, Well, basically, you take what you’re teaching, you know, your clients and helping your clients with, and instead you teach it once, and now you can serve and help hundreds 1000s and there’s no limits on the number of people that you can help. And I was like, Huh, so that’s for me where it all began. And long story short, like I, you know, struggled with the tech and trying to figure all that out. I’m not, you know, too technical and, and then I was on the, on the phone with another friend of ours, Tracy Childers. And he said to me, he’s like, Well, why don’t you just create your own solution? And I was like, Dude, are you hearing anything that I’m saying, like, I am not good with tech, like, I’m not gonna be able to program something. And he said, Well, why don’t we team up and create something? He said, I have a program that I’ve been working with for years. He’s really great. And we did. And we ended up creating the world’s number one membership platform for WordPress. And we went on to power of 10s of 1000s of online communities and memberships. In fact, when I sold my shares in the company, we were powering over 70,000 online communities and memberships and being behind the scenes on that Where I saw what the sites that were doing that were growing year over year, what they were doing differently than everybody else. And that’s who I paid attention to. And ultimately, those best practices, I applied to my own memberships, launching six and seven figure memberships. And that’s when people started asking, like, how are you doing this. And that’s when I started teaching. And we’ve now helped literally 10s of 1000s of business owners in all kinds of markets from photography and calligraphy, to fitness and finance and music and art and health and parenting and doctors and, and so many different markets and niches, niches, that it’s been absolutely amazing. And the reality of it is, is a membership is whereby people are paying you on a monthly basis to receive access to something and or to receive advice about something, and or to, to get something sent to them. So Case in point like whether we realize it or not, their memberships are all around us like Amazon Prime, that’s a membership, we pay an annual fee for that, and we get certain, you know, you know, benefits to that Netflix, that’s a membership we pay every month for that. And we get the benefit of accessing all of these TVs and movies, TV shows and movies, Spotify, we pay a monthly fee, we get access to music peloton, we pay a monthly fee, we get access to all the classes like we can go on and on Disney plus is another big one, right? Like they shifted away from, you know, just selling movies off. And now they sell a subscription to all the movies and shows. And so we can do the same thing. And there are different types of memberships, there’s a product based membership, where we pay on a monthly basis and we get something in return, like Dollar Shave Club would be a great example of that. There are service based memberships whereby people pay on a monthly basis, they get access to a service, I think of Mary Claire, for that she’s a massage therapist, instead of hoping the clients come back and do business with her, she sold a membership. And now she gets paid every single month with the certainty of knowing that she’s going to get paid by those customers and clients. And then they get access to you know, however many massages, there’s a knowledge base membership, where we take what we know love and do and we’re sharing it with others, and people are paying for access to that. And then there’s community based memberships where we bring in people who have a shared interest together, and they’re paying for access to be able to belong to that community. So lots of different ways to do it. And it really doesn’t matter what type of business that you have. It’s just about shifting your thinking away from the old way of doing business, which is one time transaction and hoping that people come back and shifting towards a more stable, predictable business where we know with certainty that they’re coming back.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Well, just so tremendous. And it’s funny, we talked about, you know, a friend Tracy Childers, if I remember your email, it used to be known as the idea guy. Just imagine, you know, I think a good guy, you need to fake out. So there’s a lot of misconceptions, I think about membership sites. And I’m just thinking back, you know, way back when we were just young kids how difficult it was to actually have a membership with things. What do you think has changed in terms of memberships in terms of like, maybe the ease of being on a membership site? Because even before you and Tracy had that platform, it was pretty difficult to actually have a membership site?

Stu McLaren
Dude, that’s the thing that almost stalled me, you know, like I was dealing with things like ht access files and server settings. And I’m like, What the heck is this? Like, I this is not, but the technology itself. 100% has improved tenfold, you know, and it’s certainly made it so much easier. But you know, one of the things that I always like to talk about here, Dr. Mike is just really, it’s about a mindset to because we can make it as complex or as simple as we want. And my recommendation is in the beginning, I err on the side of simplicity first, because that’s the thing that’s going to create momentum. I’ll give you an example. So Cheryl hatch is somebody in our community who was completely freaked out by the technology, and it was the thing that was stopping her and preventing her from moving forward with her membership idea. So she asked herself a powerful question. This is what I encourage everybody to write down. She asked herself, how can I keep this super simple? How can I keep this super simple. Now for her, she knew that she was comfortable with like a Facebook group, and she was comfortable with email. So her membership consisted of a Facebook group. And then she delivered the content for the membership via email each week. And she did this for two years, and welcome more than 600 paying members with just a simple Facebook group and delivering it via email. So she did this for two years before she ever thought about creating a members area. And my point of the matter is, is that we can make it as complex or as simple as we choose. And my recommendation is keep it simple in the beginning. That’s the thing that’s going to help you get going and most importantly gain momentum and when you’ve got momentum, then you can add things later. Ron down the road, but keep it simple in the beginning and get the momentum rolling.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Now, you mentioned complexity is probably a big misconception people have about membership sites. What are the things that you studied all these different membership sites? What are the other bigger misconceptions that we may not know about? I know for one example, most people who I’ve heard the rumor that you have to have three or six months of content before you can even launch a membership site. I’m sure you’ve heard that too. But the other misconceptions that you may, you’ve learned,

Stu McLaren
Well, certainly definitely around content, like as your as you said, you know, the misconception is, you gotta have a whole bunch of content for Yes, sir, not true. You know, we teach a process called the founding member launch, where you don’t actually even need to have anything created yet. And the benefit of this is that you’re engaging with your audience, and you’re, you know, seeing whether the interest is there before you go and spend a whole lot of time energy and money and creating anything. And the reality of it is, is in that you are able to get out of the gates right from the get go. And I think of like anastasiya, so she’s in the infertility market. And she didn’t have a big audience of 10s of 1000s, or 1000s, she had 326 people, infertility practitioners that she was helping and serving. And so she did a Facebook post following this process that we talked about with the founding member launch, and essentially invites people to come and join the membership, without it being created. So you’re managing expectation, saying, it’s just an idea. But you know, here’s where I see it going. And if you want to come join as a founding member, I’ll extend to you the founding member price, which is going to be way lower than what it will be when we launch to the general public. So people, you know, they want to be part of it to get in as that founding member, they get in at the ground floor. And they also help shape the direction that that membership goes. So she did this, she made this offer, she generated $5,024, in the first over 24 hours. Again, she didn’t have a huge audience for this, or I think of like, Faye Cornell, who’s over in the UK, same thing. She didn’t have a huge audience, she had 77 people, Dr. Mike 77, not like 10s of 1000s or 1000s, not even hundreds, 77 people, and 10 of them, you know, said yes, at 500 pounds, they paid for the year in full. And that was 5000 pounds right out of the gate to be able to begin gaining momentum, or I think of Kelly Kelly cans. She has she’s helped people with WordPress, that was her market didn’t have a huge audience 5959 people in her audience, five, nine, and 29 of those people said yes to becoming founding members. And here’s the thing, in the beginning, we often underestimate how much value we have with what it is that we know. And with a smaller audience, you have a unique advantage that people with a big audience don’t have they have separate advantages, but you with a smaller audience, you have the unique advantage of building a more intimate relationship with that audience. And as a result, you’re gonna see much higher conversion rates. So bottom line is you can 100% get started without creating a whole bunch of content. Another big misconception is that you got to provide a ton of content ongoing, and oh my gosh, I’m gonna be stuck on this content treadmill, and oh, it’s gonna be like another job, and wrong. Bottom line is that the number one reason that people cancel from a membership is overwhelm, it’s not that they don’t value the information or don’t value, it’s that they’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. So this is the key to the success in the membership is not about the value doesn’t come from the volume of information we provide. The value comes from the people, your members ability to implement what it is that we provide. And so less is actually best when it comes to a membership, and most importantly, helping your members make progress. And if they make progress, and they’re happy, they’re gonna stay. And that’s when the profitability of a membership soars.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
You’ve seen so many different membership sites. So I got to know what was the most surprising niche and I know we have I know there’s a translation here issue a little spoiler, he is Canadian, so it needs your niche with that that’s like, you know, potato potahto surprising if you’ve seen it with a membership site that was successful making money

Stu McLaren
on all kinds, it’s absolutely unbelievable. Like I was just talking to Tamra Bennett. Okay, so Tamra, she launched her membership site, she Welcome 400 monthly paying members right from the get go. She teaches people how to paint decorative door hangers. And I was like, Tamra I’m like what what is the deck is that like, you know, at the hotel room when you put the sign on the outside says you know, she’s like, oh, no suit, she said here down in the south. She said instead of putting like a wreath on the door, we have like a decorative door hanger and I was like Oh wow. And now she’s grown that membership last three years from 400 to nearly 2000 monthly payments, a decorative door hanger. Last year, it was awesome. I got to meet a Holly George and Holly George. She helps people with balloon, you know, balloon animals creating balloon like, you know, balloon animals, I don’t blows. And anyway, she launches her membership site and she’s a mom with two young kids. And she was just looking for something to do, you know, on the side, her husband’s in the Air Force. So, you know, he’s away a lot. So she was just looking for something to do on the side while she could still be a mom, you know, to the kids. Well, long story short, this membership takes off, she’s generating over 70 $500 a month teaching people how to make balloon animals. And then this year, I’m not. Now I’m I just, you know, I’ve just marvel at all these different markets. But this year, I met Courtney Lim, and Courtney, she got a new puppy. And the breeder said, Can you send us some pictures as the puppy grows up, and she said, You know what, I’ll do one better, I’ll create an Instagram account just for the dog so you can follow it. So she did. And then you know, friends and family follow, and then all of a sudden, like hundreds of people are following and then 1000s of people. And then next thing, you know, she’s got more than 10,000 plus people following this Instagram account for her dog. And then she had like brands reaching out who wanted to do brand deals and and then she had people asking her like, how are you growing this Instagram account for your dog? And the idea was planted, this should be a membership. And so she created a membership. She’s got hundreds of people in the membership, learning how to be pet influencers, pet influencers? What the heck, I have no idea. But anyway, she was generating enough that she left her full time job as a school counselor to focus 100% on growing this business. So whether it’s decorative door hangers or you know, animal balloons, or you know, becoming a pet influencer, it’s unbelievable. The markets that can be served. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Don’t Don’t disregard these pet influencers are only two. That’s my stuff that you know, I spend a lot of money on that. So who knows? That could be a nine figure business. I think I showed about a time left, you got a webinar coming up and tell us about tribe? What What is it all about? And maybe once they can learn to the webinar? And about your your course?

Stu McLaren
Yeah, well, I’d encourage you, for sure, for everybody to come and join us for the webinar. The bottom line is that like, over the past, you know, 1213 years, I’ve literally been in the trenches working with 10s of 1000s of people in all kinds of markets. And what I’ve identified are those characteristics that have the sites that are growing year over year over year. And what we’ve done is we’ve taken that, and we boiled it down into five key areas. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about, you know, during the webinar, what are those areas, you’ll be equipped to know exactly what they are and how to move forward with a membership. And the bottom line is that the tribe experience is where it’s an immersive experience where we take you through the process. If you’re in the early stages, and don’t really have an audience yet, no problem. Because you don’t need to grow a big audience, as we said, just a couple 100 people, and that’ll happen much faster than you may think, when you follow what we’re teaching. And so or if you’ve already got an audience, amazing, or if you’ve got a membership, and it’s flatlined, and now you’re looking to take it to the next level, we’ll show you these best practices, how to apply them, and most importantly, how to gain momentum with your membership. And I’m passionate about this, Dr. Mike now more than ever, because the last year, I mean, it’s the it’s just shown that we just never know what’s going to happen. And my heart is heavy for all entrepreneurs whose worlds have been turned upside down. But what I know for sure is that those who had recurring revenue in their business did not experience anywhere near the stress or uncertainty than those who did not. This is why I’m passionate about this because I know the blood, sweat and tears to get poured into growing a business. And this is why I want to bring this information to as many business owners as possible because of the difference it can make. It’s not about the membership. It’s about what the membership makes possible. That’s what we’re going to show you how to do during the webinar. And I hope everybody comes and joins us.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Still again, I know you got to go. Thank you for sharing your time with us. We’ll have the link here to go to the webinar and know more about it. Thank you again, Stu McLaren, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Stu McLaren
Dr. Mike, you’re a gem as always, buddy.

Dr. Mike Woo-Ming
Thanks. All right.

By

Taking Physician Real Estate Investing to the Next Level with Kirsten Limmer, MD

Meet Dr. Kirsten Limmer, a board-certified pediatrician, PhD in molecular biology, and also an incredibly savvy real estate investor.  She learned that she could save lots of time and money, by designating herself as a Real Estate Professional.  Most doctors are attracted to real estate investing because they hear about the potential tax deductions they can receive.  However if you do not have Real Estate Professional Status,  any losses that are involved in real estate activities are considered passive, and are limited by how much can you deduct on your tax return.

So why don’t more doctors opt for Real Estate Professional Status?  Mainly because you have to keep onerous and detailed logs each year as evidence you are involved in material real estate activities as a Real Estate Professional.   Not able to find an appropriate solution, Kirsten create one on her own.  Now available on iOS and Android, REPStracker is a portable solution to help you streamline the way you document hours for Real Estate Professional Status.  This could be a huge breakthrough in your real estate investing.

Kirsten also happens to be one of my students, and we discuss the obstacles she faced on her journey from turning her app into reality.  Prepare to be inspired!

REPStracker – a better way to document your REPS hours.  The next generation app that will streamline the way you document hours for Real Estate Professional Status. 

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Woo-Ming: Hey guys this is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD. Well, I’m really excited on my next guest. And she really is an example of how as entrepreneurs we find problems,  we are in front of problems that we know is hurting us either through time or money. And we come up with solutions to address these problems.

And this doctor did exactly that. Her name is Dr. Kirsten Limmer. She is a Pediatrician completing her residency at Harvard Medical School earned her medical degree at my Alma mater UCSD. She was at the UCSD School of Medicine, actually has a PhD in molecular biology at UCSD  as well. And as mentioned, she’s board certified in general pediatrics, but…

Probably even more important to you, especially if you’re a real estate investor. And I know many of you are, who are listening to this program. She has created a very cool app that can save you a lot of time and money. It’s called REPStracker. She can talk all about it. Welcome to the show Dr. Kirsten Limmer, Kirsten, how you doing today?

Kirsten Limmer: Thanks Mike. I’m happy to be here. 

Mike Woo-Ming: Well, I gave it this intro, you know, we got the Harvard, we got the UC San Diego here. Molecular biology. What kind of led you to creating this app known as 

Kirsten Limmer: REPStracker? 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. Like you said, I’m an, I’m a real estate investor. I’ve also always had an entrepreneurial spirit.

In second grade, I started a business selling,  earrings that I made out of tiny little origami cranes and started a little side business inside of my second grade class. So always kind of looking for problems and solutions and  , in trying to make innovations out of that.

And you know, being a real estate investor , over the last several years have kind of been more of a hobby investor, kind of dabbled in real estate. But over the last year or so, I’ve become a lot more systematic, a lot more serious about investing and concurrently with the pandemic. I have three little kids who who started homeschooling at home, like a lot of people.

So I had to, to cut down my clinical time, pretty significantly in order to be at home for them. . So kind of, it was, it was kind of a clash of, of two worlds. I was both more serious about real estate investing and I had cut down my clinical time. And what  led me to start to go down the road of was something called real estate professional status, because I knew since I was not working…

As much in the hospital anymore. And I was doing more real estate that I could potentially apply or become a real estate professional in the eyes of the IRS for the, for tax purposes. Now I’m gonna give you a little high level overview of real estate professional status because it’s not like becoming a real estate agent or anything.

It’s, it’s really just a tax designation. And so basically, normally as a real estate investor, when you have profits and losses from your real estate those can only be used against each other. So that’s considered passive income. And so to give you kind of a real world example I have a house in Palm Springs that I use as a vacation rental.

And I put on solar panels a few years ago for, I mean upwards of $80,000 or something like that. So a really decent expense, but because those passive losses can only be claimed against other passive losses. I wasn’t able to deduct the whole thing off of my taxes that year. So that’s kind of a step-wise deduction off of my taxes.

Now what real estate professional status does is it takes that basically that bucket of… passive profits and losses and combines it with active profits and losses. And that could be something like a W2 or a 1099 income. So for, for myself and my husband, who is also a physician it’s that’s considered active income.

And unless I can say that I’m a real estate professional then that would be considered passive income. So now I’m putting both of those in the same bucket and now anything, any deductions or anything like that from our real estate investments, we can use against our W2 income. And that is you know, becomes a really.

Powerful tax reduction strategy when you have a lot of real estate and especially as you know, a dual physician couple so what I found when I was going down this road and, and I should kind of back up and say the most important thing about claiming real estate professional status on your taxes is documentation.

So I’ll, back up even more on that. And say, you know,  with any great power comes great responsibility. So the IRS is not just going to like, swallow that you’re just a real estate professional. And just here I am. And, and that’s it. And, and give me a tax refund of a hundred thousand dollars, please. No. So there, there’s a lot of hoops that you have to jump through and it’s a little outside of the scope of this podcast, but essentially what you have to do is show that you have… spent several hundreds of thousands, not sorry, excuse me. Not hundreds of thousands, several hundreds of hours on your real estate throughout the year.

And that, and that has to happen every year. And not only do you have to have the time logs to prove it but you also have to have the evidence. And so, for example, if you, if you say that you spent half an hour with your tenant on the phone on March 21st, not only do you have to have that, but you sh if, if you get audited, you better be able to bring up that call log and be able to show that you spent half an hour on the phone with your tenant.

So you know, as you can imagine, these, these time logs really add up and you have to be really on the ball to, to, to stay updated and, and keep you protected. And in the case of an IRS audit and what I looked around and what I saw was that most investors were actually using like Excel spreadsheets, Google Calendar, some would like, you know, just like a pen and paper note, pad type thing.

 And like, you know, keeping a little  shoe box full of  their receipts or their, their pictures of all of their evidence. And, and to me being you know, a little bit more on the OCD spectrum, I was like, wow, I can’t do that. Like, first of all, I know that I need a system.

If I’m going to be super meticulous and up to date amount, my hours, I need a system that is easy. I can do on the go. I don’t have to wait to come home and like, sit in front of the desktop. And because I just know I won’t do it if, if day after day with having such a busy life, I know that that I won’t be able to keep track of my hours that way.

So I looked around for an app because, you know, there’s gotta be an app for that. Right. And couldn’t find anything. So there’s, there’s kind of generic time tracking apps, but none of them really fit the needs that I was looking for. So hence, was born REPS tracker.

Mike Woo-Ming:  So, a lot to cover there. And then I’m curious to know, and probably you don’t have the the numbers on this, but…

It sounds like, you know, real estate investors that could save thousands of dollars, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars , you know, becoming a real estate professional or having a real estate professional status. But most of them don’t do it. What’s the reason for that? 

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. And I think that that’s a good question.

And I think that it’s something that even I kind of took pause about, and that is the fact that it, it is an auditable thing to declare on your taxes. And you know, in the eyes of the IRS, you are guilty until proven innocent. And so nobody wants to leave themselves open for an audit. So… that was really what gave me pause.

And finally, I kind of, you know, that was kind of a limiting belief that I, that I had going into it. And when, how I got over that limiting belief was that I was like, there’s gotta be a system. Like if that’s my only reason why I’m not doing this,  then let’s create a system that will kind of keep me, you know, water tight from, from that, that type of problem.

Mike Woo-Ming: It’s almost like when you thought about like these hours and like just having them on Excel sheets, it kind of reminded me of like doctors who are like tracking CME. Yeah. You can’t just like, okay, well I did a hundred hours of CME and I wrote it down on this piece of paper.  

Kirsten Limmer: So you, 

Mike Woo-Ming: you, you, you found out that there wasn’t any. Solution to this. And you said, you know what, I’m just going to create it myself. What  is the thought process that goes with it? 

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that’s a great question. And so as you can imagine, it wasn’t quite as just easy as, “Hey, I’m just going to like create it myself.”

There was, there was some.  Forks in the road, some bumps in the road. And I do have to back up and say that this is not my first app idea. This is not my first  kind of venture down the app world. I actually had an app idea, you know, right before COVID and it was just to give you like a really quick it’s it was matching carpools of parents who I would see them . At school, then I would see them at soccer. Then I would see them at a gymnastics. And I was like, okay, I can, I, I should be able to just create an algorithm where everybody, all of these parents have essentially like a GPS tracker and it matches your carpool and then spits it out. Hey, you need to like talk to Susan over there because she’s going to soccer at 3:45  so anyways, I, you know, being very naive, I was like, this is going to be easy. I mean, we have Uber, we have, we have all these apps out there that have GPS it’s super easy. So, you know, that very naive thought actually. So I went and I I talked to an app developer about that app idea and I was just like, wow, blown away by the quotes that I was getting for.

For definitely not the idea that I was coming up with for real scaled down version. It was along the order of like $40,000. Upstarting bare minimum app. So, so I knew kind of going into REPStracker that like anything that you have, that’s like, you know, kind of a grandiose idea, both needs to be scaled down in the beginning.

And also  it’s gonna cost a lot of money. So  I should say with, with that, that last app, I ended up going to a venture capital fund. It kind of went a couple of steps further and then COVID hit. So it was actually a pretty good thing that it didn’t, didn’t go all the way, but so I knew going into REPStracker that…

there was some issues with, with hiring software developers. It was hard to kind of translate your idea to somebody who is a software developer and, and often it’s because it’s hard to find software developers that kind of have the same vision as you and  there’s a cost versus quality versus money type  situation that you get into.

And so if you’re, if you’re hiring a developer, let’s say in like, India, it’s going to be really hard to kind of translate this idea that is,  very americanized idea to,  a software developer who really thinks in code and Java script. And  so it, it becomes a big hurdle to find somebody like that.

 I knew that it was also going to be quite costly off the bat. So you know, I kind of had this epiphany and said, you know, if all these guys can be software developers, I mean, I went to medical school. Like, it can’t be that hard. I’ve got to just, I can, I can create this app on myself.

So then I started watching YouTube videos and and like really trying to like school myself on app development and went down a couple rabbit holes and found actually like this app development, essentially school. So it was like going to med school, but for app development. And they worked on a platform that did not use coding language, just coding logic.

So it was able to kind of take the learning JavaScript part of my whole timeline out of the equation, which was great. And and, and then I, you know took it from there. I enrolled in this school, it’s called Coaching No Code Apps. If you ever want to look it up,  it’s an awesome program.

And I just learned this skillset kind of day by day, step-by-step. 

Mike Woo-Ming: And so what was the timeline from initial, you know, idea to actually deciding to, start developing it, start paying money to, to develop it, to actually then launch it. And how much time did you devote each week or month to this?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I started it… So it’s. March now. So I started it in November and I had my minimum viable product, my MVP, out by January 15th, I think. So it took less, it was actually less than less than two months that it, that it took for me to have a minimum viable product that had beta users.

And after that I had beta users use it and, and tried and iterated different versions of it until I was able to get it to a version I felt pretty confident in, launching into the app stores. 

Mike Woo-Ming: what do you think was the biggest challenge in developing REPS tracker?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. So for me personally, the biggest challenge was  thinking in coding logic, which I actually, I love thinking in coding logic.

But having three kids at home for most of that was you know, having to go down these. Like long pathways, or if anybody interrupts you, you have to go back to the beginning. So, so having my kids home during this, so actually adjusted my schedule.  I started waking up at like two or three in the morning so that I could just have these few hours of uninterrupted time, so I can really, really nail down my app.

But yeah, I think that that . And also  I spend a lot of mental energy in the beginning. Almost keeping it like secret. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs kind of struggle with this.  “I’ve got this great idea and but I can’t tell anybody cause the people are gonna steal my idea.”

And   if I were to go back and do it over again, I don’t think I would keep it secret. I think that, you know, what I’ve realized is that number one, it takes a lot of time and effort to, to create an app. So, you know, you’re not going to like, tell Joe Schmo about it and then have them just like create the app right away.

 It’s pretty unlikely that somebody’s going to steal your idea. And also when you, when you are a really open and honest and,  excited about something, people will give you ideas that you might not have thought about. And I think it kind of adds to your own excitement and your own momentum.

So, really I think with any kind of future endeavors that I do, I’m going to kind of take that and go with it and really just  try to be open and gauge other people’s ideas on these things. 

Mike Woo-Ming: So a few weeks ago we had on the program Dr. Daniel Erichsen, who also developed an app and is  someone that I know you had a chance to talk to and, and he had his own ideas about apps and whether a physician should get into apps. What do you recommend say as someone who’s now,  been there done that.

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. And interestingly, since I launched this I’ve had a lot of physicians reach out to me asking me how to, to launch their own apps and, and bouncing ideas off of me.

So definitely those physicians are out there wanting to create their own apps and wanting to go down the entrepreneurial route.  I kind of hear the same thing over and over again, like, wow, it’s so hard. How could you have done that by yourself? And my response is, Oh my goodness, you guys, we went, we all went to medical school.

We all, well, you know, so in college I was a total dumb ass and maybe I’m just speaking for myself. And sorry  you have to edit that out of your podcast. But like, you know, like five years later I was doing central lines. I was intubating for premature babies. So, you know, we can do hard things and, medical school is a hard thing  and residency is a hard thing.

This is not that hard. This is a skill that you can learn and, and you can do it. And if you have an idea that you’re just going to keep on going back to and being regretful, if you didn’t do it, just do it, just do it. It’s not that bad.

Mike Woo-Ming: Awesome. Awesome. So REPS tracker is launched at the time of this recording. Available on iOS.

Kirsten Limmer: Yep. And Google Play now. Yes.  

Mike Woo-Ming: And so just to find it, if you’re a real estate investor, why should they… to get REPStracker, what can they expect after they download it?  Tell us the process. What can they expect to receive?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Good question. So do you mean talking you through the app, going through the app?

Mike Woo-Ming: Yeah for people who are interested and they want real estate professional status? What is the app? What do they expect to receive? 

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Yeah. So the thing about REPStracker is  it’s very.. You can essentially individualize it for your own investing. So a real estate agent would log all of their properties and then.. After that every time entry,  the investors will add time entries and tag it onto that particular property that they’re talking about upload as much evidence as they want.

So for example I’m constantly messaging and text messaging, my real estate agent and also my property managers and stuff. And so, you know, I’ll just log like five minutes of texts and I’ll take a screenshot of my texts and upload it onto my little description and it takes me 10 seconds to, to log that time entry.

And so the, and those little things add up. Right? So so  I’m going on my, my own app. Like several, several times a day to log my own entries. And  so people can both log their time entries and also attach all of the evidence that they need in case they’re ever audited against against this, by the IRS, they can attach all of that.

And then REPStracker also keeps it. Keeps track of how much time you have left until you can reasonably claim real estate professional status. So you don’t have to go adding it up or anything by yourself. You just have a little cute little screen that will tell you exactly how much time you have left and how much time you’ve submitted.

And then at the end, if you want to just print out a spreadsheet and keep it in a shoe box, we want to go back to the shoe box method print out a spreadsheet… . Just export everything into Excel or CSV and, and keep it for the rest of eternity, if you want.

Mike Woo-Ming: Well, I’m so ecstatic that REPS tracker is now live and in the world and all the public can use it. And just to give some transparency, I was honored to join you on this journey. To getting this app launched and I had a pleasure working with you, so I’m curious, what’s next for you, Kirsten?

Kirsten Limmer: Hahaha! Okay. Yeah, a couple of, well, a couple of things. So number one, I’m going to start using my own app and really scaling up my real estate! Which I’ve kind of done concurrently. And there’s a lot of other ideas that I can kind of offshoot off of this. So, for one, going along my lines of just being totally transparent and open with my ideas a lot of people are getting really excited about short-term rentals. And short-term rentals has, has a pretty similar kind of tax structure for material participation.

And so starting to kind of build upon these different offshoots of these. These tax structures and being able to use my app for that. And yeah. And I’ve had such a great time working with you too, Mike, it’s been awesome! 

Mike Woo-Ming: So, where can they go if they want to reach out to you? I don’t know if you offer any.. You said a lot of physicians asking you about apps or maybe about real estate investing are you available for to hear from some of these listeners or doctors or… ? 

Kirsten Limmer: No, absolutely. I’m I actually am really happy to talk to people. I think it’s so exciting that there’s so many people out there that want to share their ideas and want to bounce things off of me. And I’m more than happy to talk to anybody who has anything.

That they want to ask about creating an app, about a REPStracker, about real estate professionals status, really anything. So they can go to my website actually that is probably the best way to do it. 

So REPS tracker.com. So R E P S T R A C K E R. Reps, tracker.com. And there’s a little thing that says contact me there.

And it goes straight to my email. Or else you can email support @ reps tracker.com, and that just goes straight to me. 

Wonderful. 

Mike Woo-Ming: It’s been a pleasure working with you and I am so excited again about REPS tracker, any like last minute advice or best advice you could give to listeners out there?

Maybe a doctor who wants to start up an app, or maybe someone who is just getting started in real estate investing and is not sure about that? You know doesn’t really know too much about real estate professional status and is considering it, any words of advice you have for those folks?

Kirsten Limmer: Yeah. Yeah, you can do hard things. Remember that? Remember you probably did a really hard thing yesterday in your job. Believe me, you can start real estate investing. You can start making an app, you can do whatever you want. And you know, if you don’t have an answer for something it’s out there, so just go find it and just start.

Mike Woo-Ming:  Awesome. Thanks for this again, reps track you’re good REPS tracker.com to download an app. So you get a lot of time and money as a real estate investor. And again, thank you, Kirsten Limmer for joining us today. And you’re a perfect example of just, just finding that there’s a problem out there.

Figuring out that their solution, if you can’t find that a solution to it, why not create yourself, but it’s not just about reading about it. It’s not about just like, you know, going into direction. If you have something that you believe it can be a value to a world, nothing better to do, and to just keep moving forward.

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