BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneur Feature — Bot M.D.
In this week’s Entrepreneur Feature, we speak to the founders of Bot M.D, a startup that’s building an assistive AI for doctors.
Who are you and what do you do?
D: Hi my name is Dorothea
Y: And I’m Yan Chuan
D: And we’re the founders of Bot MD.
What is Bot M.D.?
Bot MD is building an AI Assistant for doctors. Our AI provides instantaneous responses to doctors’ questions so doctors can ask questions about drugs, diseases, treatments. We also do automatic voice to text transcriptions, so that a doctor who wants to transcribe a patient case note can do it through voice and Bot MD will automatically convert that to text.
What is Bot M.D.’s secret sauce?
Bot MD’s secret sauce is our Team. We are a small team of 5 right now. It’s a very committed team and we are all very motivated to achieve our mission to Empower doctors around the world.
What’s next for Bot M.D.?
What we’re working on at the moment is releasing the next build of our application. We’re really excited about that because right now we have doctors from 60 countries all over the world who are using the application. Our goal is to grow our user base and continue to focus on building something that doctors find useful.
What has been the greatest challenge in your entrepreneurial journey?
One of our greatest challenges is building something that Doctors want. A lot of times you have a hypothesis about what you think your users are going to want but it doesn’t pan out the way that you think. We spend a lot of time traveling to different markets. I was in Indonesia three weeks ago meeting with doctors, like really understanding what their needs on the ground are. Through that process of failing fast and iteratively, we improved the application altogether.
Another one of Bot MD’s big challenges is around hiring. We’re a very early stage start-up. It’s not easy for a potential hire to have the same motivation to believe in us the same way we do. With that said, our team is really small, each team member is very important to us. Hiring is something we spend a lot of time on. It’s a lot of deliberate thinking and planning to get the best fit for our team. A lot of the hiring challenges we’ve overcome through tapping into networks of talent from all around the world. One great thing about Singapore and BLOCK71, in particular, is that we are open to talent from all over. We don’t limit ourselves to the shores of Singapore, I think there’s a lot of opportunities to find people from all around.
What’s your best memory of BLOCK71 Singapore?
We were part of the Y Combinator program this summer and we hot-desked out of the BLOCK71 from San Francisco. When we were going to move back to Singapore, Qian Hui (BLOCK71 SF’s community manager) linked us up with BLOCK71 Singapore. We had a really great time in BLOCK71 San Francisco so we decided to come back and camp out here.
One of the more random memories that I had, we were two days into being in BLOCK71 Singapore and randomly, the only other Southeast Asian YC start-up, Ajaib, the CTO Kevin sat right across me and I didn’t even realize till I looked up and was like “Hey wait a minute, that’s Kevin from YC”. The great thing about BLOCK71 is that you get to meet people from all over with random connections but it’s a very fun environment to be in.
I think BLOCK71 also has a couple of interesting lectures that are going on, but the most important thing is that they always come with free food, so that’s always a plus.
How can we help?
Bot MD is always on the lookout for great talent!
We’re looking for software engineers, iOS developers, Pharmacists and Clinicians, and anybody that is interested to impact healthcare and our mission of Empowering doctors around the world. You can contact us at hiring@botmd.io.
Watch the full video interview with the Bot M.D. here:
For entrepreneur inspiration straight to your inbox, subscribe to our weekly entrepreneur feature here.
If you are inspired by this story and have a start-up idea of your own, you can also apply to join the BLOCK71 ecosystem at http://bit.ly/BLOCK71SGApply !
