On June 26th Atlanta Ventures hosted Greg Benoit, Founder & CEO of QGenda, at an Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup. Greg sat down with A.T. Gimbel to talk about the QGenda story, including vetting the idea, taking it from excel sheets to a working product, the ins and outs of his fundraising, and what Atlanta can do to better support healthcare entrepreneurs!
Benoit came up with the idea for QGenda starting back to when he was fifteen. A doctor in his neighborhood had shared how it was extremely hard to schedule everyone in his department with all of their nuances in requests for certain shifts. He offered Benoit a thousand dollars to do the scheduling for him. After lots of excel crunching, testing, and customer discovery, he thought the scheduling problems could be solved with software. Healthcare scheduling has complexities that other employee scheduling programs don’t face, and he knew he needed a unique solution.
Prioritizing Is Key
When it comes to prioritizing product development, it’s important to stay focused.
“I feel like those rabbit holes are really easy to go down…and we went down them…but since we were one hundred percent bootstrapped and every penny was the company’s money, we were extremely thoughtful and disciplined in every line of code we wrote.”— Greg Benoit, Founder & CEO of QGenda
Characteristics of a Co-Founder
When looking for a co-founder to go the journey with, Benoit shared:
“I think the right mix is somebody that’s a little bit more introverted, technical, able to execute and then having a complementary co-founder that is more sales/marketing, able to get out in front of folks and speak and start to get the vision going. That’s a perfect dynamic and mix.”— Greg Benoit
Finding the Right Partner
At the point Benoit began to consider raising money, he had already bootstrapped QGenda to a $20 million recurring revenue company. They ended up partnering with Francisco Partners, a private equity firm, and have been able to scale to $70M ARR.
“They weren’t the highest bidder, they didn’t give us the greatest value, but for us, it didn’t matter. It was more about the long-term goal.”— Greg Benoit
Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurship
When it comes to Atlanta growing its HealthIT presence, Benoit said events like this are helpful and important. He also recommends everyone find a healthcare mentor here.
“We already have a good healthcare community here. I think having a specific healthcare investment firm (or arm) from local money could make a huge improvement. It’s more impactful with someone focused on Healthcare specifically.”— Greg Benoit
STAY INVOLVED. JOIN THE MEETUP.