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263: Solve the Problem that Really Matters with Sathya Elumalai

Sathya Elumalai, Founder and CEO of Aidar Health, is driven by a mission to solve the problem that really matters: ensuring no one loses a loved one due to lack of access to timely care.

We learn about Sathya’s journey from creating Aidar Health’s flagship product, MouthLab, inspired by his own family’s healthcare challenges, to developing a strategic approach to finding and refining his company’s target market. He explains his “How to Niche Your Business” Framework, which includes five key steps: starting with a shotgun approach, enabling potential customers to self-identify, focusing the message on a hot market, offering free samples to collect data and use cases, and eliminating bottlenecks to refine the product. This framework demonstrates how thoughtful strategy and data-driven insights can help businesses achieve product-market fit and drive impactful growth.

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Solve the Problem that Really Matters with Sathya Elumalai

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest again is Sathya Elumalai, who is the founder and CEO of Aidar Health, the creator of MouthLab, a non-invasive handheld home monitoring device that measures more than 10 vital medical parameters in 30 seconds. Welcome back to the show, Sathya.

Yeah, thanks, Steve, for having me. It’s a pleasure to come back after a couple of years. Nice to be a part of it again and looking forward to chatting more.

Yeah, it’s great to have you back. I think it was three years or something that and your business has evolved. And in fact, during the time you developed another framework that we’re going to be talking about. But let me ask you first this. So what is your personal “Why?” I don’t think we touched upon this in the first episode three years ago. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing in your business to manifest it?

Absolutely. I think my personal “Why” has been very close to my home experience. So I needed some kind of a help to help my mom navigate the complex chronic conditions that she had. She was facing a lot of obstacles in terms of getting timely and accurate health insights. So I poured in everything that I had. I thought, probably it would be a two- to three-year journey, but it took us almost eight, nine years today. Through using technology, we were able to create a more holistic care for my mother and also help improve her quality of life. And more importantly, it helps us to and help me to personally extend her life and have her stay with us for a lot longer. But today, sad to say that I lost both my parents this year within a span of three months to the same condition at the same circumstances, which deepen my “Why” and my mission now is not just to help people with chronic condition, but also starting with technology, how we can use technology to empower people and also the caregivers to stay one step ahead in terms of managing their chronic condition, enabling proactive care, and also helping them to better understand where they are in their care journey. And that’s what really helped me to even start Aidar in the first place.

And I believe creating a world where no one has to lose a loved one because of lack of access to timely care. So that's what has been the company's goal. And it's more than a company mission. It started as a personal mission. Share on X

And I’m hoping to honor my parents’ legacy and turn that loss into more meaningful and help a lasting change in healthcare.

Wow, okay, that is very inspiring. And really, I mean, especially people who are in nursing homes, and we’ll talk about this in a minute, but they really can become cut off from their family and who’s gonna look after them and how are they gonna be looked after and how can you empower the people in the nursing homes to help these people get the best care and elongate their lives. That is pretty cool. So let’s talk about this because I loved how you actually discovered a great way to find the market for your product. And we can actually talk about it as a framework because other people can also apply this methodology. So it’s kind of a framework for business to find their niche. So can you share with us how that came about, how you stumble upon this, and then what are the elements of the framework?

I kind of consider this more a precision pathway. It’s more like a strategic approach designed to help businesses identify, engage, and refine their target market. It’s about starting it more broad and gradually narrowing it down. The framework actually enabled me to actually find a more receptive audience and use a more data-driven approach to develop a more targeted strategy.

So I think the process really starts with casting a wide net, allowing potential customers to identify, self-identify themselves, and also use data and feedback to focus on well-defined niche. Share on X

So ultimately removing all the obstacles to adopt and scale. So some of the elements I look at, maybe around five elements that I looked into, starting with like more a shotgun approach. So the initial phase is more about gaining broad exposure and exploring potential markets without preconceptions. Okay, this is how the market is, especially for a device what we have built, it’s phenomenal, it has a lot of different areas for growth and it can be positioned in different settings.

So Sathya, sorry to interrupt, but how do you actually do that? So what are the mechanics for applying this short-term approach? How do you get in front of people and how do you even get to a position where they can self-identify?

Yeah, so basically attending, for example, large conferences and talking to a wide range of people, the goal is to actually send the message across to a wider audience and see how they interact or get that value about a technology. And this has been very helpful for me personally. I spent like going to some big conferences like health and the HEMS and other healthcare related conferences. Although there’s a lot of noise there, but it feels there are some set of population or customer segments who really would be interested and show value. And that’s what was a starting point for us. That’s the first one. The second element is more about self-identification by customers. So specifically for us, we last year, we had one of our long-term care facilities that we’re working with today reached out to us and they told us, hey, we are doing a lot of work in terms of remote patient monitoring and we’re using a lot of data science techniques to help predict and prevent a hospitalization within a nursing home. But then as the phrases say, garbage in and garbage out, mostly they’re getting data from non-validated medical devices and sometimes data that are coming from technologies that are not fully used and or widely used. Even with a single nursing home, there’s tons of different data streams coming from different devices. So, we actually received specific feedback from this customer where they felt like a device like this could be phenomenal because it can not only just provide a wide range of data, but also coming from the same source, so that it’s much more reliable. That’s the self-identification process. The third one is more a rightful approach. It’s a narrow focused approach.

So first, you can cast this large net, and then see who responds, and then you had these nursing homes who realized that this is exactly very helpful to them because then they can do all the examinations very quickly by the nursing home staff. So they said, hey, we want to learn more. We’re going to do this. And then the rifle approach was drilling down in that niche. Was that or was it something else?

Perfect. There’s a great segue into the third one where this is more about addressing what’s their current challenges. Going into there is an interest. There’s a need for a data, but I think there’s more than that. There’s underlying problems within long-term care or nursing facilities. So with targeted messaging and tailored interactions, we were able to engage in a more meaningful way within a well-defined market. We know this is a market and sort of going in different direction. Then the shift was more towards smaller niche conferences that align specifically with our target audience. So we started focusing on nursing home related conferences. So for example, most of our customers are in Florida and as you know, there’s a lot more, a lot of people wanted to retire there. So we identified conferences that are very specific, going to 20,000-30,000 member conferences to now narrowing it down to 100-200 people was very specific. So we were able to directly talk to the decision makers and one conference could lead to at least 30 or 40 customers in a way, versus a larger conference, although it gave feedback, but the decision makers were not present in most of these conferences or hard to find. That’s where we took the fourth step or more a data driven distribution. So as soon as we got this product market fit and understanding, the next big question is okay, where’s the data. I mean, there’s a problem. Just understanding that there is a problem is not going to be helpful for us to one, do any meaningful impact. And also investors, if they really wanted to invest, they want more data. So that’s why we started to do some pilots where we were giving out free devices and technology platform, and then use it as an additional thing. So we actually help provide it to our potential customers where they were able to use the technology, the processes, and see how this end-to-end system works. And that data was very helpful for us because sometimes some of the facilities were saying, hey, this is great, it reduced the time by half in some of the cases, and in some cases, they talk about errors. Most of the time, nurses, they don’t have time to monitor and also take notes and input it into an electronic medical record, where a lot of things were actually managed better, so now there’s no need for them to actually manually put anything from a paper to an electronic medical record, our device sends the data directly to the EMRs. So that was very helpful.

So how did you do that? How do you actually get to from this point of finding a market, they self-identified, you kind of drill down, you investigate what they really want and what the needs are, and you reach them and they said, hey, let’s get some data of how you would use that or what you would get out of that. How would you actually get the data? What was the mechanism for you to connect the dots there?

I think the biggest thing was there is no specific change in the workflow of what nurses are doing today in terms of collecting data. Share on X So they use multiple devices to collect data. So what was our initial selling point is hey, you don’t need all these different devices. Here is one device and it takes these 10 parameters, right? So first-

And can you show the device? Do you have one handy?

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So this is our device, yeah. So it’s more a breathalyzer. You actually place it in the mouth, breathe through normally for 30 seconds. At the end of 30 seconds, you perform lung function test. So you take a deep inhale and forceful exhale. And the only thing that was it also helped us, we instead of building hundreds of devices, we can just build a handful of devices for nursing homes and give each patient a unique mouthpiece. So as soon as they put it in, we actually know which patient is using the device. So it was far more easier from that perspective instead of dealing with multiple devices.

That’s awesome. So you’re basically, your device is the data collection mechanism that you give out and then you can identify the individual patients because they have the unique mouthpiece that goes to them. And then how do you use that data? So how is it helping you to expand your business by getting access to this kind of data?

I think the biggest challenge that nursing homes are facing today is access to good quality data. So for us, our device is designed in such a way that it can collect all these data and push that data to the nursing homes EMR. But more importantly, the biggest value add that we are looking and then into and we are presenting to our customers is how this data can help predict or prevent an adverse event. Because even a single resident leaves a facility, they are losing a lot of money, close to eight to ten thousand dollars. So the approach was to okay, provide data and insights to see, okay, here is how the time it’s taking to take all these vitals instead of multiple devices. Here is a time and then costly human error that could occur if they are using like manual method, instead the data sent directly to our system. And more importantly, this data can be used to actually predict worsening of health. So today the physicians can actually see what was the baseline of the patient and what happened with the changes in health over a period of time. And we more importantly work with physician network who oversee the data 24/7. So they are actually getting alerts when a clinician set threshold is changed. So in that way, we’ve already called the nursing homes a couple of times and we were able to at least inform them about an upcoming hospitalization for this patient. So which is where these calls helped the director of nursing in these facilities to actually take appropriate actions and also the medical directors. They probably spend rounds a couple of times a week. So they don’t really look into each and every patient in a more granular way, but our platform can give them that level of access so they can look at the data anytime, anywhere, so they can provide more targeted intervention to patients.

It’s almost a security monitoring system where the cameras in the house and then when you see that someone with a ski mask coming through the window, then you can call the owner and say hey, you don’t belong here, make sure you pay attention.

Exactly. It’s more an ADT monitoring system for Health.

Yeah, that’s awesome. So I’m just wondering how this approach can work for other entrepreneurs who may be, and they’re not in the healthcare, they are in other industries. So I love this idea that, hey, we have an idea. We know that we can help people, in your case, it was healthcare. At end conferences, talk to a bunch of people. It’s essentially you’re testing the market as to whether your message resonates and it helps you refine your message. And then you might find a particular niche that will be super interested to take this on because it’s a really good fit for them. And then you work on drilling down and working more intensively with that niche. And then you find a mechanism to collect data. Maybe you give out the sample in return for the data. In your case, it was even better because you provided a great service. So both you and the customer was benefiting from them giving you the data. So it’s an ideal situation. Then how do you use that data to refine your product and to make it better and more powerful?

Yeah, I can give you one of the examples. So we built this mouthpiece. It’s more one size fits all. We had just one mouthpiece version, but then I think working with these nursing facilities, before, we were distributing it to patients’ home, they use it, even if they had challenges, they often talk about those challenges, but it’s not really something that’s preventing them from the use. But with the nursing home, we saw different level of acuity with patients. So some people were not able to use these mouthpieces because it was a little bit bigger for them. So we were able to get that data. We were able to see okay, what kind of patients can actually use it versus not use it. We don’t want to eliminate anyone just because the mouthpiece is bigger. So we ended up designing a new version of the mouthpiece and we were able to see a smaller version. Our initial data suggested that it could actually compromise the quality of the data, but actually it did not. We were able to use it on a different users, tried it, tested, and they were able to clearly show that there is no compromise in data quality. So that’s one example. But also in terms of when we went in, we thought okay, the process of collecting this data and process of putting it in and then showing that value from the disease prediction or hospitalization prediction perspective. But I think all these nursing homes go through a lot of surveys. There’s a lot of need for, I would say, infection control and how it is better managed. So we were able to show through this data, there’s more proactive approach. People are coming in, the nurses or CNAs, they come in, they clean the device, then they provide it. So there is a process, which even the surveyors actually look at it and feel confident that it’s far more comprehensive than just picking up some devices randomly and using it without a procedure or policy in place. So that’s why these kind of data further helped us to solidify our, I would say product market fit and also deliver a clear value proposition for our customers.

That is awesome. That’s a great process. So, that allows you to kind of keep refining, eliminating bottlenecks so people cannot use the product well and redesign it and keep iterating. That’s awesome. So I’d like to switch gears here a little bit and ask you about another aspect of being an entrepreneur. So Aidar Health is a startup company and you raise money in order to develop your product and then distribute and reach your market, how do you balance your energy between how much energy you’re putting in raising funds and then developing a team and growing your market? How do you know where to put the emphasis and how best to manage your time?

I think it’s probably a billion-dollar question, I would say. I mean, it’s a continuous and intentional process. So, and in each area is deeply interconnected. So, I developed a mindset for treating them as part of the same mission rather than separate tasks. Let’s take, for example, fundraising. It's about not just about securing the capital, it's about sharing the vision of Aidar Health and forming that strategic partnership that can help us accelerate our growth. Share on X When I’m with investors, I’m actually looking to attract those who believe in our mission and who can add value beyond just financial backing. This ensures that the funding processes directly fuel the team and our marketing efforts. And when it comes to building the teams, that’s where I focus a lot of attention at this time, because, ultimately, the team is the backbone of everything what we do, right? I mean, knowing and seeing what people are doing on a daily basis is what really pushes me and also everyone. So I look for really individuals who are not only skilled but also do they have a similar “Why?” I mean, do they have any value? What would Aidar do to them personally or to their families? So that’s another area I look into. So I keep the team motivated, align them towards their “Why” so that the product innovation and market development and overall company is in the same direction. It’s about the race. And then we all have to be in sync. So even when we face challenges, the team shares a purpose. It keeps us going, having a clear mindset. And then lastly, from a market side. I’m sure it helps, it kind of helps me to connect with our customers and partners, gain insights from them. Because as I was talking about from the approach, a lot of things come out of customer conversation. So it’s always exciting to know that somebody is actually talking, thinking about your technology. So what it really helps me is to adapt our technology quickly to a situation or a product or a customer need so that we can build a more real world impact with our technology. So to answer the question, it needs a lot of energy and focus. So I keep a clear sense of purpose and prioritize activities that directly pushes our mission forward, allowing to have a more balanced approach overall.

Yeah, so what I’m hearing is that really by focusing on your mission and proselytizing it to different groups, essentially, it’s a multi-directional approach where you are learning from them and then you’re also sharing the vision and then let them, empowering them to do their part in for your customers to raise their hands for the team, how they can manifest your vision, and then raising funds is basically the same thing. So as an entrepreneur, what do you think is the most important question that an entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

So the biggest question that I think is, am I solving the problem that truly matters? So it’s very easy to caught up in great, exciting ideas. And today there’s tons of new technologies, gadgets that are coming up in the market. But at the end of the day, what’s the impact that you’re making in this world? So I just look into that, how meaningful the problem is. So asking that question really helps you stay grounded in the purpose. So if you focus on examining your solution, is it going to create a lasting value, resonate with people’s life and make the world a better place? So this question also brings clarity and resilience because when challenges inevitably arises, which is part of every single entrepreneur’s life, having a deep commitment to that problem that matters to you, that drives you forward, regardless of the situation, is very critical. So for me, the answer to this question literally kept Aidar Health focused on transforming how we are managing chronic condition for seven, eight years. So that’s the most important thing, I feel.

So I heard this quote somewhere that, “Fall in love with the problem, not your product.” So it’s the idea of focusing on, don’t fall in love with your product and think how wonderful it is because of those features or whatever, its unique design, but is it solving the problem and is it really serving its purpose? I love that. That’s great. We’ll probably use this as the title of the episode. So any famous last words before we wrap up?

I think for me, it was nice to actually see that journey, even for you, to personally see a journey coming from a pre-FDA cleared device, a company with no product market fit, a couple of years ago, to actually now having a product that is FDA cleared, having an entire ecosystem, the device, technology, integration, and the people behind it, and a clear product market fit. So I feel really excited about sharing this today with you. And it was also nice to really focus on the business strategy. So we’re not just talking about our company, but also giving examples of how these strategies can work. So thanks for giving me this opportunity. It was phenomenal to reconnect with you.

That’s awesome. So, Sathya Elumalai, the founder and CEO of Aidar Health, the creator of MouthLab. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your framework for finding the niche and exploiting a niche in the market. And if those of you listening enjoyed this episode, stay tuned every Monday and Friday, we publish new episodes and please give us a review on Apple Podcasts and follow us on YouTube. Thanks for coming, Sathya, and thanks for listening.

 

 

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