How Light-it Builds 7-Figures Healthcare Software: Q/A with CEO Alan Brande

Website Planet had the chance to interview Alan Brande, Co-founder, and CEO of Light-it, a digital product agency that specializes in healthcare, and Puppeteer, a platform that enables healthcare organizations to create AI bots with surpassing human-like capabilities.

We looked at how they solve the unique technology challenges of the healthcare industry, their key growth strategies, and how they plan to keep growing along the shifts in their niche.

What we will learn in this interview:

• How disruptive IT solutions and technologies such as AI and Generative AI, will transform the healthcare industry
• How Light-it helps healthcare companies generate ideas, design, and develop revolutionary solutions that have a positive impact on people’s health and lives.
• How this company, founded by three friends in their early 20s, has managed to grow to the point of hitting seven-digit figures every quarter.

Introduce yourself and your company

I’m Alan, Co-founder, and CEO at Light-it, a digital product agency that specializes in healthcare product development and consultancy, and Puppeteer, a platform that enables healthcare organizations to leverage generative AI in a seamless, safe, and compliant way.

My career is a reflection of my deep passion for both technology and healthcare, driving me towards a focus on healthcare innovation and digital transformation. I find immense satisfaction in discovering and creating disruptive solutions that positively impact people’s lives, and that’s how Light-it and Puppeteer came up.

At Light-it, we help healthcare companies ideate, design, and develop revolutionary solutions that improve the healthcare experience. We have created various products ranging from medical devices, to telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, or clinical operations tools, among others, all of them focusing on improving healthcare from a patient or a provider viewpoint.

We founded the company as three childhood friends in our early 20s studying software engineering right before finishing college. We started working in one of my partner’s mom’s garages.

Fast forward to today, almost five years later, Light-it has nearly 100 employees, offices in three countries (Uruguay, Argentina, and the USA), and is hitting seven-digit figures every quarter. All of this is a self-funded project carried out by friends driven by technology and making an impact.

Last year, we launched our first spin-off company, Puppeteer, which is allowing companies in the space to leverage Generative AI for their operations.

What problems are you solving for your customers and audience?

In the dynamic landscape of the healthcare industry, the pace of innovation and positive impact on lives is undeniable. However, the sector has inherent challenges – slow innovation, stringent regulations, outdated practices, and a lack of agility. While the industry is filled with individuals striving to enhance accessibility and quality, systemic issues and economic motives cast a shadow on its potential.

Compared to the rapid evolution witnessed in other sectors, healthcare lags behind due to outdated technologies, prolonged approval processes, and regulatory hurdles. Our approach is to introduce agility into this environment, leveraging our technological expertise, product-oriented mindset, and deep industry insights to craft strategic, scalable, and intelligently designed software.

Essentially, our focus is on addressing the competence gap in developing healthcare software, considering factors such as strategy, budget, compliance, user experience, and industry standards. Failing to tackle these challenges carries significant consequences – potential legal repercussions that translate into million-dollar fines, diminished user adoption, escalating healthcare costs, and mismanagement of critical aspects like interoperability.

Overall, the problem we’re solving is the lack of competency when it comes to building healthcare software with an awareness of strategy, budget, compliance, and user experience.

Common but inadequate solutions involve opting for cheaper online providers lacking industry knowledge, resulting in short-term gains but compromising long-term scalability and support. At Light-it, we take a distinctive approach. We adhere to best practices, deploying scalable models across various technologies, and offer end-to-end product development services with comprehensive support and consultancy and a big focus on user experience.

Which types of companies benefit the most from what you offer?

Our bread and butter are startups, as they share our agile mindset. Still, we’ve been having great experiences with health systems as well. Given their accustomed bureaucratic and slower approaches, our introduction of an agile vision and innovative mindset has proven immensely beneficial in these contexts.

It’s usually hard for a healthcare company to find a partner they can trust, but even more so to find someone who can provide not only good code lines but also strategic guidance. That’s what sets us apart.

What makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?

Our product mindset is something that is recurrently acknowledged by our clients; we’re well aware of how challenging it can be to turn a concept into a working product. In the initial stages of every process, we dedicate ourselves to deeply understanding our client’s needs, vision, and priorities. We usually start with Product Discovery workshops to fully immerse ourselves into the project and set a solid foundation.

In the Product Discovery phase, we employ Design Thinking and UX Strategies to thoroughly explore the project and its user base. This involves creating a roadmap, determining the appropriate tech stack, defining the architecture, establishing a build vs. buy strategy, and validating the product with real users, among other activities.

Our Healthcare Innovation Lab is another big differentiator. It serves as our in-house research and development hub, focused on exploring and building Proof of Concepts (POCs). Here, we stay ahead of the curve, experimenting with disruptive technologies such as Virtual Reality and Generative AI. This accelerated learning process ensures that we gain expertise in the latest industry advancements, ultimately enhancing the quality of our services and the capabilities of our team to the benefit of our clients.

We strive to nurture a company culture where team members collaborate seamlessly, all driven towards a common goal. The dynamic is not just collaborative but also warm, fostering incredible synergies that translate into remarkable results. We prioritize constant growth, offering internal training tailored to each team member’s passions creating an environment where all ideas are welcomed and valued. This people-centric approach has fueled Light-it’s growth and success in delivering high-quality projects. Beyond work, we invest in team bonding through initiatives like company trips, post-work gatherings, hackathons, creative team meetings, and engaging team-building activities, with plans to continue expanding these efforts. At the end of the day, it’s all about people.

Since you started, what helped you grow and retain your audience?

When we first started, we were really enthusiastic about creating digital products that added real value and followed a product and user-centric approach. By that point, we were working with companies from all industries, from finance to retail, food, entertainment, marketing, agronomy, and real estate, among others. Although we’ve created amazing products and learned a lot from those experiences, we felt like some things were missing: focus and mission.

Having already worked on healthcare projects and finding them both challenging and rewarding, we saw a real differentiator and a clear value proposition. Specializing in healthcare became our strategic decision, allowing us to immerse ourselves fully in the sector and develop niche expertise. This shift not only provided a focused direction but also a compelling purpose for our entire team. I mean, who wouldn’t find fulfillment in participating in projects for an industry that ultimately saves lives?

Another key strategy to grow and retain our audience was always to prioritize communication. In today’s fast-paced world, one might assume that the human connection has become secondary. However, that’s not the case for us. For us, people come first, and everything else follows. As a healthtech company, we understand that trust and effective communication are paramount. Therefore, we’ve made substantial investments in communicating our vision, our values, and our position within the industry, as well as in making real connections with our clients and other members of the healthtech community.

To achieve this, we’ve implemented various strategies. Firstly, we’ve placed significant emphasis on attending and hosting networking events, meetups, roundtables, and world-class conferences. We carefully select them to make sure they’re relevant to our niche and interests and to invest our time and resources accordingly.We also have very strong communication with our clients. Our approach is really transparent. They can join our daily meetings, see each sprint’s status, and access anyone from their team.

Additionally, to effectively communicate our vision and position ourselves appropriately, we’ve invested a lot in our content. Our website, blog, and social media presence keep us close to the community and genuinely add value to our ecosystem. We even have a weekly newsletter, Digital Health Insider, that lets us stay close to our health tech enthusiasts.

What perspective do you have about where your industry is headed?

The healthtech industry has a significant journey ahead regarding technological advancements. Luckily, in the past years, especially after the pandemic, we’ve witnessed a transformative shift where technology has become central to reshaping patient care and medical treatments.

Looking ahead, the future of healthcare is an exciting journey characterized by cutting-edge technologies that revolutionize our approach to medical treatments and patient care. Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands at the forefront of this transformation, with algorithms analyzing medical images precisely and accelerating diagnoses. I’m particularly confident about the impact of Generative AI, which has the potential to enhance workflows, engage patients, and create smoother experiences for all healthcare users, among other benefits. Generative AI is disrupting all industries, and Healthcare is not an exception – Thus, we created puppeteer.

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are reshaping medical training and patient experiences. Surgeons can practice complex procedures in a risk-free virtual environment, and patients benefit from immersive therapies that alleviate pain and anxiety.

Predictive Analytics, fueled by huge amounts of healthcare data, empower clinicians to anticipate outbreaks, track epidemics, and even predict health-specific risks that allow proactive interventions.

However, these innovations don’t happen overnight. They are the result of relentless research, experimentation, and exploration.

If these trends continue to thrive in the healthcare ecosystem and technology reaches its full potential, supported by an industry structure that embraces this change along with the corresponding regulations, we could achieve a stage in healthcare where accessibility, interoperability, efficiency, and safety are at the forefront. This would result in a significant improvement in the overall healthcare experience.

What’s in the roadmap for your future?

We’ve been working with startups, helping them from product discovery to launch and assisting them while they scale. We have now started working with Health Systems and have experienced an incredible impact, so our roadmap is to keep on working with these big players.As per the team, we want to maintain our boutique approach, so we´re not planning to scale the team unrealistically. We’re hoping to maintain our team between 100-200 people.

Regarding new project ideas… They are always around. Personally, I find Generative AI as one of the biggest promises in Health Tech. 2023 was the year of generative AI, and we knew we had to embrace it or die, and Puppeteer is the response to that. We’re currently raising our first round and have big expectations for its development this year.

As for our long-term future, embracing new technologies and paths will always be part of Light-it’s DNA, so who knows what else might come up. The pace of innovation is relentless; there’s that mantra “You win, or you learn”, that resonates with me. Whether successful or not, each new project and experiment contributes to our growth and resilience. I look forward to cultivating a healthy culture that looks out for the well-being of our team and values fearlessness, curiosity, ownership, and commitment to continuous improvement.