The bttn. founders set out to build systems that automated and secured supply channels for healthcare providers--tapping into their network of technologist and healthcare experts to build data engines to ingest macroeconomic data, medical supply pricing trends, and buyer habits to predict trends in the medical supply market. The team has worked hard to discover what happens when the power of data is used to benefit buyers. This is allowing customers to optimize their spending and prevent shortages in the future when anomalies in the market occurred. bttn. is bringing long needed transparency to the medical supply purchasing market by-using data from hospitals and doctors office’s to provide benchmarking amongst cohorts to help customers make higher quality decisions.
We want to be the future of medical supply by automating processes for all healthcare buyers. The current industry thrives on the lack of transparency, outdated technology and online E-commerce tooling. Moreover, one major problem is that hospitals and healthcare providers often find themselves in the middle of supply shortages. bttn’s mission is to provide better medical products at lower prices, via technology and integrated supply-chain solutions.
The three AI problems bttn wants to tackle are:
1. Predicting price spikes and executing cost-efficient purchases, e.g. If gloves are predicted to be expensive next month, buy more now.
2. Understanding cohorts of buying behaviour across the different locations, and integrating with ERP and procurement, e.g. Suggesting to order when supplies are low based on past behaviours.
3. Analyzing macroeconomic trends impact the price of goods overtime to create overall transparency and give power back to the buyers.
The pandemic has highlighted inefficiencies in the broken and archaic model held by legacy distributors, and the opportunity to automate medical supplies are now feasible. During shortages, instead of ordering from centralized shops that could not keep up with demand, healthcare providers were forced to switch to a more e-commerce-like process. They want to continue enjoying the conveniences and benefits of e-commerce such as being able to have multiple payment options, changing shipping addresses, and flexibility in general medical procurement.
bttn. is a small but profitable team. Every team member is required to be creative and innovative to keep up with the pace of growth--whether it is the supply-chain manager who needs to quickly implement customer requests for recurring shipments or the customer success manager explaining to a healthcare organization how to automate many facilities in the same geographical area.
We also use Amazon’s memo method (3 pages of notes instead of 6), where each morning a unique team member gets the opportunity to present an idea of what they are seeing in the business and how to improve upon it. For example, our SDR noticed a lack of brand awareness in comparison to an industry incumbent, so together the team spent an hour ideating on PR goals and possible campaigns to amplify bttn.’s voice. And leaving the meeting, every department has an actionable follow-up.
Thus creativity and innovation is embedded in our culture, creating close channels of collaboration, and one of our advantages as a startup. The leadership fosters a venue for constant and thoughtful pivots, and creativity helps us in generating a better range of possible decisions.
We are fond advocates for setting and tracking data milestones from the start. Every single role has individual metrics daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly, in addition to our team-wide goals. Some of the metrics we record include: sales, revenue, partnerships secured, new hires made, product feature milestones. Because of this approach, bttn. are able to adapt goals on a weekly basis, hold everyone accountable, and enable collaborations across silos.
Last week, a brand new set of email campaigns resulted in a dramatic increase in visits, conversion rate, and usage of a particular feature. This prompted our engineering+sales+marketing teams to double down in extending the functionality, messaging, and deeply understanding how customers interact and perceive the feature. bttn. was only able to do this because of the data we collected and their insights.
Cross-functional collaboration and doing tasks outside your traditional role is something we must do as a necessity at the early stage. Everyone needs to have a builders mindset; we cannot afford to be siloed, and one way to ensure this is challenging employees to wear multiple hats.
One example is how the team collaborated in response to a recent product category addition of Surgical Supply. We incorporated supply chain’s information on procurement as well as sales’ angle on competitor feature comparisons in passing onto the engineering and marketing team, in order to implement all the right context into the product.
The company is founded on the problems of thousands of suppliers and buyers. After speaking to our users, common themes became apparent: buyers had to interact with a fax machine or a sales rep to order, supply-chains were often untrustworthy due to shortages, there was a lack of options, and supply exclusivity and its associated hidden fees were frustrating. After aggregating the pain points, bttn. wanted to build something that is the antithesis of the current antiquated solution, so we developed the strengths of bttn. Intentionally with the power of AI/ML.
A useful example of our customer-first culture happened a month ago when we assisted a customer named Nancy, who is a director who wanted 11 of her doctors to be able to purchase supplies in the same shopping cart while having oversight. Through multiple conversations with Nancy, the bttn. engineering team created a super admin view, individual admin controls, dropdown addresses to ship into different facilities, and discounted pricing. Every feature was requested by a real-user. It has always been less of what bttn. had to say or offer, and more about the needs of the customer in implementing any solution. In order words, bttn. love and welcome customer-first collaborations.
We are hiring non-stop at the moment. bttn. is a cashflow positive company that raised a round to pour gas on the fire i.e. invest in expanding our team. There are enough interesting problems to solve, and bttn. would like to invite anyone with brain power, commitment, and hunger to join as an early employee. We expect to be at 12 people by the end of August, and around 15-20 by the end of the year.
For engineering, we would like to hire ~6 by the end of the year. bttn. would like our data hires to be knowledgeable in time-series methods particularly, as well as a vision of how models could help the front-end user-experience, bridging the gap between technical and the operational.
We are looking for cultural fit, how you think, and how you execute under ambiguity.
1.Screening call with a co-founder
2.Analytical exercise in the form of a case study.
-Scenario: a federal agency comes to bttn. to do analysis on what happened to the supply of 3-ply masks during a particular time period, The customer doesn’t understand there are thousands of variations. How would you approach this situation?
-A complete answer would include where plans on sourcing the data, features to analyze and consider (brand, type, shipping rate, etc), and a verbal hypothetical report of contents to present to the customer.
3.Follow-up final call with both co-founders and select advisors.
