With this second season of For Starters flying by—we’re now on Episode 9 of 10—host Anil Chawla continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. This week (with the help of sponsor Robinson Bradshaw), Chawla introduces us to Jenny Maze, the Co-Founder and COO of Chapel Hill-based healthtech startup Quinsite. The data analytics platform has already managed to count 40 of the top 100 radiological practices in the country among its customers. (We first profiled Quinsite in June, 2021, and later wrote about its $2.5M funding round in March 2022.)
Quinsite gives medical practices visibility that helps to increase staff productivity, improve administrative workflows and optimize bill collection and expenses, all while improving the effectiveness of health care.
This episode walks the listeners though Maze’s journey—she began her professional career as a nurse—and her eventual founding of Quinsite with her husband, Jeff.
Some highlights:
- Like a lot of beginning entrepreneurs, Maze said that it took her a while to feel like she was prepared for the role. She hopes that others can learn from her experience and see that it is O.K. to feel unqualified at first. “Around Year 3 or 4 was when I really started feeling like I am the right person for this job,” she said. “I am the right person to be called the Co-Founder of Quinsite, I am the right person to be speaking to investors and pitching to prospects.” (6:17)
- After learning from their first customer and using a data hosting site with implemented security measures, Maze said they began to realize that customers were coming to them without them having to go out and find many: “We didn’t have to go to market, our customers then told their friends, ‘We’re doing this really cool thing with Quinsite, and you got to check it out. Let me set up a call for you to talk with Jeff,’ and that’s how we gained our traction the first few years,” she said. (18:08)
- Maze said that although she knows they are catering to the correct market for their product, she cannot pinpoint the exact time they realized they reached product-market fit: “I don’t know that there ever was this one exact moment where Jeff and I just went ‘Yup, this is it, we’ve got it.’ We just continued to focus on solving a problem and trying to do it in a way that was sustainable as a business and we just went with that momentum,” she said. (34:35)
- Being a caretaker, Maze said she talks about a lot of things using the context of family. By using these analogies, it helps show how their company is like their child: “It’s kind of like we had a third kid, it’s name’s Quinsite,” she said. “And there was that point of no return, like, ‘We had it, we can’t put it back, it’s gaining its momentum and we’ve got to go along for the ride.’” (39:21)
You can listen to the full episode below, and be sure to subscribe so that you’ll never miss an episode. Thanks as always to our sponsor Robinson Bradshaw!