Wednesday, March 22nd we hosted another Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup with guest Christy Brown. We dove into her background in the startup space, her 5th company experience as CEO of Dr. Noze Best, and some of the journey and lessons learned.
The goal of these meetups is to facilitate connections, hear from industry professionals, and truly dig deeper into Healthcare problems that Atlanta entrepreneurs can help solve. We would love to have you join!
About the Event
Christy Brown began her journey in the startup world in a variety of different fields; working with e-commerce, engineering, and venture capitalism. Starting her first company around vision and strategy, she organically came to understand the landscape of the startup world.
As her fifth company, Dr. Noze Best is a baby-tech brand, focused on creating the modern nursery for modern parents. They focus on products inside the nursery that can create a profound impact on an infant’s health, such as respiratory tracking. Dr. Noze Best is a fantastic example of a binding new technological advances to real life problems to create a product that proactively helps parents.
“It’s about making those early decisions. What do I need to find? Where do I have the expertise?”— Christy Brown, CEO of Dr. Noze Best
The Importance of Customer Discovery
Never stop doing customer discovery!!! It’s important to continually talk to your product users. Christy focused strongly on ensuring that what her product was doing was what the customer really needed. Even during the event, she invited anyone using the NozeBot to reach out for a conversation. Christy also emphasized the importance of letting a product go—if it isn’t what the customer wants, then it’s not going to help.
Building Your Team in an Early Startup
For Christy, building an effective, long-lasting team is the most critical stage in early startups. In the Dr. Noze Best team, Christy looks for A-players, who are intuitive with their performance, problem-solvers, and understand the customer. Because of this, Dr. Noze Best hires people who experience the problem they solve and who have the experience on the issues faced.
Spending the time to build the best possible team has long-lasting impacts, as mistakes can be fatal for early startups. Being patient and kind as an organization, and establishing the culture they want is the best way to achieve greatness.
“We have no room for brilliant jerks.”— Christy Brown, CEO of Dr. Noze Best
Compliance & Lessons Learned
Learning the compliance standards of healthcare and making sure that Dr. Noze Best was strict around it was a crucial lesson to learn. Having the right resources on the outside to help her was essential. She encouraged entrepreneurs to be smart about what they can do in-house vs. externally.
Another lesson learned was understanding that quarterly meetings give you a reset button. Through creating well-made goals and metrics and reviewing them each quarter, the Dr. Noze Best team was able bring the team together and evaluate what they were doing well, what they needed to improve on, and where to go next.
STAY INVOLVED. JOIN THE MEETUP.