Best Startup - California
Tell us about yourself?
I’m a socal native, went to Cal where I studied business & public health. My journey into entrepreneurship was unplanned in every sense, triggered by a personal health event that changed my life overnight.
My slow recovery demonstrated the huge gaps in our healthcare system, and that led to my first couple of healthcare startups ranging from patient communities to building a patient-matching algorithm to help patients share treatments that worked anecdotally (N=1).
During that time, I learned to code, built tech teams, and was dismayed by how many founders fail at this crucial step of finding the right tech talent.
Topflight was born out of an obvious problem at first but quickly became something more = it became an opportunity to build a great company for the first time.
Every year has been wildly different in problem-solving in the name of launching and scaling great products while never leaving our niche in healthcare. We currently are a team of 54, spread across the world, with a U.S. core.
We were added to the inc5000 this year after 497% 3-year growth. Our client portfolio has also raised $188 million to date.
This year we’ve launched our own investment fund, which we’ve invested in 2 companies.We’ve also launched our fundraising service to help founders raise seed and venture funding without having to stop focusing on company growth.
What do you think is the single biggest misconception people have when it comes to startups?
By now, everyone knows what to say: “ideas are worth nothing without execution,” but most founders are still too distracted by shiny objects, perfecting the idea, over analyzing features.
Most founders still spend far too little time getting out there and doing the things that don’t scale, like talking to users to truly understand their customers’ needs and pain points without bias. The second biggest misconception is that a great product is enough.
Again, most have the knowledge that this is a myth: “build a better mousetrap and they will come,” but far fewer act accordingly. Too little attention, funding, and expertise are demanded there.
The products that are most successful in our lineup are characterized by 1) starting super small, 2) doing the dirty work of figuring out what your customers really want, and 3) understanding that a great product also needs great marketing and sales.
What lessons has being an entrepreneur taught you?
It’s pretty much been a lesson in stoicism. As an entrepreneur you have to care deeply, which makes me passionate and critical when things aren’t going the way I think they should, but expressing anger to the team simply doesn’t do me or the company any favors.
Taking constant deep breaths and not impulsively typing or deciding things. Also, whatever can go wrong will, at some point, go wrong, so we should expect the unexpected. That isn’t to say every day should be a fire (if every day is bad at year 5, that probably means I’m in the wrong business).
But whether it’s a legal threat, prized employee leaving, or slower sales due to economic climate, I try to treat it as “business as normal,” wherein our energy should be less stress and worry and more about what we do about it.
During the first few years, any one of these events would feel like doomsday for the organization, and I’d feel paralyzed from going about my day.
These days, they’re still just as hard to solve, but I understand that it’s more likely we’ll be ok and that the way we respond to the big problems can be positive turning points for growth.
If you could go back in time to when you first started your business, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
I believe everything in business happens as it should, and that none of past lessons could or should have been short cut. You know what they advise you when you get into a time machine – changing one thing changes something else in unexpected ways.
The only thing I would certainly advise myself to do is to call and see my family more. As entrepreneurs, we’re at such high risk of being consumed with our business as if it’s everything, and it most certainly isn’t.
My family is so core to my happiness, yet with the years that go by in entrepreneurship like a blur, they’re both fleeting and the easiest thing to take for granted.
A lot of entrepreneurs find it difficult to balance their work and personal lives. How have you found that?
Despite entrepreneurship being a big part of my identity and what makes me happy, I’ve known for a long time that it’s a delicate balance between depression (if I go all in) and happiness (if it’s a big part of who I am).
I have to exercise out in nature almost daily, or else I don’t feel right, so I make time for it. I operate as if today might be my last day, and that tends to be a quick adjustment of priority.
If we only have today, then you need to feel joy today and not hope that toiling without it paves the way to eventual joy. My wife has been a grounding force for me, I’d probably be a much less centered person without her.
I know I don’t make things easy for her, but her slow grind to make me think in terms of “we” instead of “I” has made it easier for me to feel at peace, act less competitively (when it doesn’t help anything), and be a more thoughtful team leader.
Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?
Rich Carson is someone most other entrepreneurs have never heard of, but he was an early influence on me.
He runs a supplement company called Prohealth, and has been doing so with a disability. I spoke to him a lot in the early days about tips and tricks, and he was always willing to invest time in mentoring me.
That and his company’s “1% of all proceeds goes to donations” also inspired me to believe early on in giving generously (in whatever form that takes), and what you give will generally come back with compound interest.
Robert Indries is someone I worked with closely during the early years of Topflight. Not only was he a tactical partner for our company, but he always helped me think bigger. I would say he walked the stoicism I wished to have.
Nothing that we were dealing with ever seemed too daunting to him, and exponential growth was only one tactic or two away. He was a big influence in adjusting my growth mindset to leap forward aspirationally rather than inch forward.
What do you think is your magic sauce? What sets you apart from the competitors?
Our magic sauce is that it’s not hard for us to fight for entrepreneurs, and that comes from a place of authenticity.
We can’t train technical people on our team to care about a client’s fundraising or traction if the person doesn’t come from an early-stage startup they joined because ‘they can’t help themselves”. The deep care and ownership from people besides me have led to every single service we have besides development.
Layering on new services from a top-down approach doesn’t tend to work for us the same way it might work for a larger company. We are a company with 54 people that has to do what our people genuinely want to do, and we’re fortunate enough to have made decisions that capture the natural DNA of our diverse, global workforce.
The other thing is we’ve been entrenched in healthcare from day 1. I came from healthcare startups, and our first hires were all early-stage healthcare startup folks. Fighting for patient outcomes in a regulatory environment has been a decades-only battle.
We believe in our bones that it’s the bloated and centralized nature of healthcare that makes it so hard and costly for patients to get proper care, and we’re mission-driven to innovate with bleeding edge technologies that will get us out of that stone age.
How have you found sales so far? Do you have any lessons you could pass on to other founders in the same market as you just starting out?
Sales is the majority of whatever growth we’ve had. Doing a better job alone, especially in a crowded field like app development, isn’t enough. We’ve had to be just as innovative with marketing and sales as with products.
I would say to new founders, you have to iterate to figure out which channels work to get you qualified leads at the lowest CAC, and then once you find them, really double down on them. And you have to be willing to invest and continue investing.
Our best growth channel, which also happens to be the oldest playbook (SEO), has driven the vast majority of the meetings we take for the past 2 years.
What do you consider are the main strengths of operating your business in California over other states in the US?
The strength is primarily understanding the local market and thus local customers’ needs. Many hospitals that we work with, for example, are ones that we know inside out. That allows us to create better products.
What (if any) are the weaknesses of operating your business within California?
I would say the high cost of real estate. I really wish we could have a bigger and dynamic team office, as I do believe in the value of more face time, but this would be a 5-digit monthly investment where we are.
The cost of hiring has actually not been a dealbreaker, given that talent costs in our field have become more location-agnostic.
We are currently suffering through a cost of living crisis. With California already being one of the most expensive states to live in, how has this impacted your business?
It has not because we’ve been decisive about not spending on things we don’t need. It’s forced us to be more adaptive than we want to be but has not slowed us down in terms of results.
It is no secret that California is the birthplace of innovation. But that also makes it incredibly competitive. How have you found the competitive environment of California?
More competition also means the pie is bigger. So the way I look at it, leadership’s job is to figure out how to increase our % of the expanding market.
Although I generally try not to pay too much attention to competitors, there are a handful of firms out there that we track that are way better than we are in certain areas, and my team is constantly inspired by these signals and ideas for what we can do better, as long as those are things we actually want to do not for the sake of competition. TLDR: the competition can be tough, but it keeps us on our toes looking north and has not slowed us down.
Have you considered moving your company to another state? If so, which state and why?
Honestly, not really. We were originally in Las Vegas, and I moved down to California to be with my wife (then girlfriend). Despite the lower cost of business up there, I feel this is where our HQ belongs.
We hope to eventually open up a second office for a few potential reasons: be closer to a top technical program so we can recruit top talent, be in an up-and-coming startup ecosystem, or proximity to a large enterprise partner of ours.
Where do you see your business in the next 5 years?
In 5 years, I see us being far more than a service company. We think nocode and rapid prototyping are the future, and we have several initiatives underway relative to that.
Currently, the bulk of our revenue is from 6-7 figure custom software development, but we hope to see a future where we’ve 10xed but half of our revenue is from hundreds of annual 4-5 figure product launches and fundraising as a service, and the other half is from building and scaling products after they raised funds or turned profitable.
It’s going to be a transition with many unknowns, but when we eventually get there, that will represent a far more welcoming startup reality with a lower risk of experimentation and thus more innovators taking the leap. We expect to see the startup economy become the new gig economy.
And finally, if people want to get involved and learn more about your business, how should they do that?
If you’d like to see how we can help, book a meeting here at https://www.topflightapps.com/request-meeting Learn more about our rapid prototyping process here: https://get.topflightapps.com/rapid-prototyping-ebook/ Read our case studies here: https://topflightapps.com/portfolio/ Stay updated with our blog here: https://topflightapps.com/ideas/
