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This week, I sit down with Sehreen Noor Ali the co-founder of Sleuth, a pediatric health platform that answers the question "is this normal?" that parents ask all the time. Sehreen started her career shipping tech products for the government and soon after moved to various startups until founding Sleuth in September 2019.
In our conversation, she shares:
The creation of EdTechWomen, a community of 2,500 women
How she met her co-founder at Antler
Her personal motivation behind Sleuth
Meeting with Gary Vee and securing an investment
Pitching to president Joe Biden
The challenges of developing a health tech app
The impact of COVID on her startup
The fundraising hurdles she faced
The pivot to telehealth that led to closing the company
Listen now on 🟢Spotify or 🟣Apple Podcast.
Some key takeaways:
Personal stories can be powerful in pitching a startup. Sehreen’s product addressed a problem she faced as a mother struggling to find reliable health information for her child. She used this argument as part of her pitch to investor. While some investors view her project as "cute" rather than as a serious business opportunity. Others found it convincing and could relate. Overtime, she found the right balance between personal story and business fundamentals that made a strong case for her startup. She also learned that making the pitch personal works better with people she knew for a long time. On a first cold call with a potential investors, it didn’t yield the expected results.
The perception that children's health should be a nonprofit highlighted a market gap. Sehreen’s friends asked her if her company should be a non-profit. And she saw this as an indication that the market had not adequately addressed these needs. She saw it as whitespace for technology in this sector. My take on this is that people couldn’t think about any competitor in the space. However, people spend thousands of dollars in their health and insurance each year. Hence, the opportunity was there. This can be applied more broadly: areas traditionally seen as nonprofit territories may actually represent untapped opportunities for innovative, socially responsible ventures.
Running out of cash is real but it doesn’t always show up in the way you think. Sehreen was doing well - she secured $1.1M seed funding from leading VCs, including Gary Vaynerchuk, she had 5k monthly downloads, 70% download-to-install rates and 40%+ share rate. However, she saw the next steps for her business as a telehealth company, she couldn’t stop the progression there, it wouldn’t have worked, especially for a VC-backed startup. However, the next step meant pivoting to a more capital-intensive business model, in her case, to a telehealth company. This required huge amount of funding, but markets are evolving, and her next round would have been almost impossible in this new environment. Couple of thing I learned from this:
Carefully considering the capital requirements of potential pivots.
Maintain communication with investors about the company's needs.
Have contingency plans for various funding scenarios.
Startups fail, this is normal. Sehreen’s story also highlights that sometimes, despite best efforts and initial traction, the responsible decision might be to wind down the company if the funding environment doesn't support the necessary next steps. 90% of startup fail. But closing a startup doesn’t mean that you failed. Look at all the success she had, this is a life changing experience, with tremendous learnings. One of the best qualities of an entrepreneur is to be able to take the right decisions even if it hurts. Plus, she is already bouncing back up. Sehreen, if you are reading this, thank you for your transparency and honesty. We need more entrepreneurs like you.
Where to find Sehreen Noor Ali:
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sehreennoorali/
Where to find me:
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugorauch/
🔗 Newsletter: https://explorepodcast.substack.com/
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:00 Creating the EdTechWomen Community
07:14 Addressing the Need for Technology in Pediatric Health
14:35 Challenges and Opportunities in Building a Health Startup for Kids
23:10 Redefining Children's Health: From Nonprofit to For-Profit
26:41 Pivoting During COVID-19: Collecting Data through Gamification
30:47 Securing Famous Investors
44:02 The Difficult Decision to Close
50:54 Future Plans: B2B Consulting
The rollercoaster of a startup life, receiving investment from Gary Vee, pitching to Joe Biden, and closing the company - Sehreen Noor Ali (Sleuth) - S2 Ep19