3188: How Numan is Bridging Healthcare Gaps with Technology and Data

[00:00:04] Welcome back to the Tech Talks Daily podcast. It's not every day you get to sit down with a founder who's not just building a business, but attempting to reshape an entire industry. And my guest today is the CEO of a company called Numan. They're one of the fastest growing digital healthcare companies here in the UK. And since launching in 2018, it's taken Numan from a men's health startup to a full scale digital healthcare provider.

[00:00:33] And today's episode, we'll discuss Numan's incredible growth journey, the strategic innovations driving its success and the future of health tech. And with healthcare facing a critical gap in delivering continuous tailored solutions, he's going to explain why technology is not just treatment, but could hold the keys to bridging that divide. So how is technology transforming digital healthcare?

[00:00:59] What role does the future hold for personalized, scalable and ethical health tech? Let's find out right now by getting my guest on. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Kelly told everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do. Thank you for having me. My name is Socrates Papafloratos. I am the founder and CEO of Numan. Thank you, man. Fantastic. And it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. We talk about everything on the show and the role of technology on our life, our work and indeed world.

[00:01:29] And Numan started as a men's health startup, focusing on erectile dysfunction solutions, but has since grown into full scale digital healthcare providers. So it seems like it's a big story here. So what was the key decisions and strategies that drove this remarkable transformation that you've been on over the last few years? Oh, sure. Let us start by saying that that wasn't, it was something that we set out to do from pretty early on. But of course, we've also had to adapt to the world around us.

[00:01:59] Numan is, let me also give a bit of a background to people that maybe don't know what Numan is, who we are and what we do. So Numan is a personalized digital health partner for you. The mission of the business is to help you lead a happier, healthier, longer life. And to do that by bringing together access to expert care, to doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, dietitians,

[00:02:25] to medication where that is appropriate, to diagnostics, but then also to digital tools that can help you uncover healthy behaviors, build healthy habits, understand your health better. So we stitch together a very personalized, integrated journey across all those different aspects of your health that you need to be paying attention to. And we help you achieve outcomes and achieve results for areas of your health,

[00:02:53] such as obesity care that we now help tens of thousands of men and women every month in the UK. We do that for a general diagnostics product that we have around prevention for people that want to understand their health better. We also do that for men who suffer from hair loss and men who need support with their sexual health. So we started the business almost seven years ago. It will be seven years this summer.

[00:03:22] It was the summer of 2018. I started the business by that vision being quite central there from the beginning. So bring together that integrated care journey, a delightful experience, a consumer brand, and create this vertically integrated holistic approach to your health and a partner that will help you on a daily basis. But building everything that you need to build to deliver that takes time.

[00:03:51] Also getting to a point where the patients that we serve and the customers that we serve also resonate with an experience like that. We have to wait a little bit because the world has changed massively over the last years. So we started from something very small, very simple, that was men's health for a problem that was quite widespread, but not many men were taking action about at the time. But everything we built from day one had that bigger vision in mind,

[00:04:20] and that dictated all of the decisions that we made along the way. And the world has changed a lot in the last five or six years, but you've enjoyed so much success. I mean, with more than 500,000 patients served and 30 million in turnover last year, I've got to ask, what do you think was the biggest factor behind Newman's rapid growth? It's such a competitive health tech market as well, because anyone that went near CES

[00:04:46] or was following the footage at CES this year, it's a hugely competitive industry, but you seem to be going from strength to strength. What is driving that, would you say? Thank you. And one correction that I'd like to make, not to be sure enough about our revenue or anything like that, but 30 million was our revenue in 2023, but the business has more than doubled in 2024 and during that time. And I'm very appreciative of everything we've done and very proud,

[00:05:15] but at the same time, I'm fully aware of how difficult a journey is, how big the challenges ahead are, and how little we've done during that time, and how much more we have to do. And it's one of the challenges that I have, and one, if you like, of the development areas, and one of the things that are really difficult is the appreciating everything you've done a little bit more, because as founders, sometimes we are the ones that are hypercritical

[00:05:43] of what we could have done, the mistakes we've made along the way, the further along we could have been, the wrong turns that we took, and all the things that we want to do in the future. But I do have to remind myself sometimes about how lucky we are, to be honest, to be here today, because most businesses that set out on that kind of journey don't get it, don't make it this far. So to go back to the answer, I think you can answer that in different ways,

[00:06:09] according to the different part of the journey that the business was in, but also in the way that some of the decisions that we made early on put us in a position to make the most of the opportunities that presented themselves along the way. So what I mean by that, we started the business, and I started the business by ensuring that we would have enough capital, raising enough money at the start,

[00:06:35] to be able to give us a long enough runway to experiment, to build, to make mistakes, to stick around. That was the beginning. I hired some people that turned out to be excellent people at the beginning, and again, I can say that we followed a great process, great at hiring people. The reality is that also we were just very lucky at the start.

[00:07:02] Some of the initial hires that we made played a massive, massive role on the journey that the business took after that, and it paid off. We stayed focused. We made the right investments from the start. We reinvested in our brand. We invested in building our own technology platform. When COVID hit, we held our nerve, and that was... It's hard to speak of COVID as a catalyst or as something.

[00:07:30] Think of it in a positive way, given how devastating it was for everybody. But that was a catalyst for digital health. That was a turning point. It accelerated innovation. It accelerated acceptance from a regulation. It changed consumer behavior. And then we were able to just keep building, staying focused. And then over the last few years, we've seen some big changes and big opportunities with

[00:07:55] things like the arrival, for example, of GLP-1s and obesity care that were huge. But even before that, the business was on a very healthy growth trajectory. And I think the fundamentals behind all of that are some big secular trends that are this need that we have now and this desire and this thirst to have real agency when it comes to our health. We are now much more aware of our health.

[00:08:23] We are spending a lot more as consumers of health than we did before. The self-pay market in the UK has been growing at about 70% over the last four years. Health has become part of our identity. It's become part of who we are. It's become part of the conversation. That was already happening and that accelerated massively because of COVID. Expectations also have really shifted over the last six years.

[00:08:52] We demand things to meet us where we are. We demand responsive experiences. We demand experiences that are really, truly personalized to us. In other words, the expectations that we have right now are very difficult to be met by traditional delivery models of care, either through public health care or through private health care as well. So those were some of the conditions that we're really creating this massive opportunity

[00:09:20] around digital health that we happen to be building and executing at the right time. And when I was doing a little research on you guys before you came on the podcast, I was reading how Newman has launched two new health tech products through an online portal. So how does that platform enhance the patient experience and make Newman stand out from all those other digital health care providers? And maybe tell everyone listening a little about those health care and health tech products too. Absolutely.

[00:09:47] So what I was talking about at the beginning, this bringing together pharmacotherapy, medication, drugs, and behavioral change in one platform, in one brand, specifically tailored to you as an individual. That was a vision and an idea and a dream at the start of the business in 2018. We started building what is now a reality about two years ago, our obesity care proposition that

[00:10:14] brought all of that together in a dedicated mobile app that also includes a diagnostics component that would help you find the right medication and the right medication journey to be able to sustainably lose weight. That would also pair you with a set of tools that can help you find medication success, can help you track your weight, can help you understand symptoms and side effects, chat and speak to our clinical

[00:10:44] team and our support team, but would also introduce content and coaching as a way for you to really make, not just make the most of the medication, but to create a relationship that would put you in a very different health journey and health trajectory. So that was a big product that we built that has proof points that the people that go through that journey achieve better results than the people that use medication alone, significantly better results.

[00:11:11] Intuitively, it makes sense, but it's always great to see the numbers reflect that intuitive belief because that's not always the case. And some of the other work that we're doing right now involves the use of an AI health assistant that, again, understands you intimately and can guide you through that journey on a 24-7 basis by giving you the right answers,

[00:11:36] giving you recommendations, helping you understand what is the kind of healthy habits you should be building, helping you understand your nutrition and plans around your nutrition, your exercise, your mindset, all those kind of core pillars of health that have to do with who you are, your habits and your behaviours that help you be healthier. And I think anybody that's following this space will know that obesity management through GLP-1 treatments is a real growing focus around that in health tech at the moment.

[00:12:06] So how have you at Newman approached this area and what kind of impact are you seeing on patients' outcomes as a result as well? Because there's so much more than hype here. You make a real difference to people's lives ultimately. We are making the most fundamental difference we could be making right now. After smoking, the things that you can do to live a healthier life and a longer life are, if you're smoking, stop smoking. That's number one.

[00:12:36] After that, it is if you're obese, treat your obesity. Obesity, we all understand that obesity is a detriment to your health, but I don't think we fully appreciate how deeply that statement goes. Obesity is linked to different types of cancer. It's a precursor to type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease. It stops people from exercising. It is a massive impediment to you being productive,

[00:13:05] to you doing the things that you want to do to be healthier. And there's also a really difficult disease to live with, and it's a difficult disease to manage. So when we help somebody treat their obesity, we are genuinely having an impact on how much their quality of life today and the years to come, the quality of life that they're going to have and the length of life that they're going to have. So we've now helped the UK population,

[00:13:35] our patients lose something like 350,000 kilos of excess weight. We were talking the other day, going through the whole company, an example of a patient that Brian, your medical director, was presented to the whole company, how we've helped, we've added seven quality years, quality years of life to that person. So that is the impact that we're having. And I like to think about anti-obesity medication and GLP-1s as gateway drugs.

[00:14:05] Gateway drugs, not in the negative sense that we think of drug abuse, but these are gateway drugs to a whole new way of thinking of disease and how to treat it strategically, but also a whole new way of the people that we have right now that are coming to us for this problem. We have an amazing opportunity to help them become healthier as a whole and follow a completely new journey for the rest of their lives because we've caught them at the moment of transformation.

[00:14:34] We helped them with one of the most persistent, difficult problems to deal with. And our job now is to make it really easy for them to build healthier habits, to figure out what else they might need support with, to help them understand their health better, and to just be there when they need us as they need us. And that's the stuff that we're investing with a product. And for you personally, I was doing a little research on your background. It is an incredibly rich background in the tech startup ecosystem.

[00:15:02] How has that previous entrepreneurial experience, all those experiences, how have they shaped the way that you've built and scaled Moom? And I would imagine there's been a lot of lessons learned in that time. I'm curious, are there still things that you refer back to that help you present day? How has that shaped you? It has. I was listening to something different the other day that was talking about how our fluid intelligence is kind of peaks when we're in our 20s and our 30s

[00:15:30] and how you can achieve your most intellectually demanding creative work earlier in your life, which sounded like a pretty depressing read. And I was hoping for the positive, which came. And the positive was that as you actually enter your later life, your ability to effectively be wiser starts to become a little bit more crystallized. And you can... I'm not sure I'm quite there yet, if I'm honest,

[00:15:57] because I do believe one of the most important things when you're building something that... When you're fighting against the world around you, effectively, which is what you're doing as a kind of... As a small company is nothing beats a sense of urgency and intensity and a bias to action. And you can have all the wisdom in the world, but I think those are the characteristics that are really important. And sometimes I've had...

[00:16:26] My first business was a successful experience, a successful exit. My second business was not. And obviously I've taken positives from that, that I carry with me today. Great lessons, great people that are within the business today with us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It was a failure. We didn't set out to achieve what we did for reasons that also were, to a large degree, driven by us. So that is a painful experience. And this kind of...

[00:16:56] This sense of how important winning and being successful is, not for the sake of winning and being successful, for the energy, for the momentum, for the oxygen that it gives the business. That's some of the stuff that I try to kind of especially speak to people that are joining us really perhaps a little bit earlier on that haven't experienced some of that stuff. Other than that, I am a lot more comfortable now with where we are, with the people that we work with.

[00:17:26] But I also have to say the exciting part about doing these kind of things is that you are always pushing at the edge of your comfort level. So where we are now, I've never been before. Where are we going to be next year? I wouldn't have been there either. So it's just being comfortable with a sense of growing and learning and being uncomfortable, but also being a lot more secure and being uncomfortable not knowing and sharing some of that with the people around it.

[00:17:55] That's very, very different to the way I was 15 years ago. And you've stated a bold vision to position New Moon as the leading health tech company in the UK with ambitions to eventually scale globally. And on behalf of startup founders listening everywhere, I've got to ask, what steps are you taking to achieve that global scale? And what are the biggest challenges that you anticipate along the way in doing that?

[00:18:23] So let me also say that when I started this business, I mentally, I kind of committed myself and I wanted something that I could see spending at least 10 years on potentially the rest of my productive life. It takes a long time to build the muscle, the business, the company and the team around the business, the culture,

[00:18:53] the everything you need to do to be able to grow sustainably. And also most of the businesses that have become valuable and also you can see it takes you about eight years to get to the point where you kind of really have done something significant and also things start to compound after that if you are succeeding, right? There's other paths that you can end up along the way. But for most things that are meaningful and impactful and large enough,

[00:19:22] if that is your ambition, they don't really happen overnight. So we are now entering the, we're kind of in the seventh year of the business. We're very much focused on the UK. We have a huge amount of work to do here and we have massive room to grow and build a very, very large, very successful business and brand that has real impact. And that's what we're really focusing on. So I've become a lot more patient and thoughtful

[00:19:52] about when we expand internationally. But I've also, I'm cultivating some of those opportunities by speaking to the right people, understanding those markets better. But, you know, we're going to take a little bit of our time to do this where we're not in a rush. But the ambition is to be an international business because the impact that we want to have is global. Fantastic. Well, I wish you the best of luck there. And looking forward, looking ahead,

[00:20:19] how do you see the future of digital healthcare in general evolving? And what role do you ultimately see Newman playing in shaping both that future in the UK and indeed globally? What's that road ahead look like to you? I think digital health, it will sound like a little bit of a misnomer. It's a little bit like when we used to talk about digital media 10 years ago, right? We're using technology to really help you understand where your health is, where you are as an individual,

[00:20:48] and then help you make the right decisions to achieve the most you want to achieve in life. If you want to kind of really abstract it away. Okay. And what we want to do is help our clinical team really make the most of the talents that they have. We want to be connected to every single one of our patients at the very deep, intimate level. And we really want to write the playbook, if you like,

[00:21:16] of how you can use technology to help people be significantly healthier than were before by putting the person at the center and then everything else around them, the medication, the diagnostics, the experts, and the ongoing engagement that will increasingly happen through agents that are driven by data and AI. In that world, it is the only way that we can scale health, not necessarily healthcare, globally,

[00:21:45] and do it in a way that you really start bending that curve of health and not the costs of healthcare. Everywhere you look in the world, we are in this economic intractable problem where the delivery of healthcare is becoming more expensive and people at the same time are becoming iller. And the only way this is going to be solved is by introducing something completely different that is going to be driven by technology

[00:22:13] that's going to help you be that healthier person without necessarily the costs that you're going to have to incur to do that. Well, we've started our conversation today talking about your origin story, the origin story of Newman, and you've taken us all on a journey to the future of health tech. But before, one of the things I'm conscious of is we've been very forward-looking. And as we come full circle, I want you to look back at your career now because none of us are able to achieve any degree of success without a little help along the way.

[00:22:42] So is there a particular person that you're grateful towards? Maybe they saw something in you, invested a little time, and ultimately helped you get you where you are that we can give a little shout-out, a little thank you to today. Well, sure. Look, first of all, I am privileged and lucky enough to be in a place. I started my first business when I was 26, 27, and I also had the safety net of a family to go back to. I don't come from a wealthy family or anything like that,

[00:23:11] but I never felt like I felt whatever risk that I took, I couldn't really fail because failure would be just starting again or going back home in Greece and licking my wounds for a few months and chilling and coming back. So I am grateful to my family, but one specific person in a professional context is Chris Burke. My first job as an engineering graduate was at Vodafone, and Chris was the CTO of Vodafone.

[00:23:38] And he saw something in me when I was in the third or fourth month of my graduate placement program, and I did an internship for him for three months, which was completely mind-blowingly opening for me. It's like taking me behind the curtain of how businesses really work, and I was like, aha, so this is what really happens. It's not like the normal path that you see. That's how decisions are being made. And then I worked for him for a bit.

[00:24:07] I had like a very fast growing for a graduate career for three years, and then I just quit. And I joined another startup for about a year, and then I was ready to start my own business because that's kind of what I wanted to do. So I hadn't spoken to Chris for, I don't know, two years, three years, and I called him out of the blue. And I said, I'm starting a business, and I wanted to basically pitch him for him to invest in us.

[00:24:37] And he did, to my after surprise, and he was the first person that wrote the check and invested in me, really, and at a company at the time. And then, of course, I took the fact that the ex-city of Oraphone is our first angel, and then I raised a little bit more money, and that's how that company got off the ground. So for Chris, if you are listening, a massive, massive, massive thank you. I will never forget that Chris was very influential

[00:25:07] in that whole trajectory since then. What an inspiring story, and a quick shout-out to Chris. I really do hope that if he gets to listen to it or hear it firsthand, maybe someone that knows him will point him in the right direction to this podcast, because I think he is probably blissfully unaware on the impact and the gratitude that you have and the impact that he's had on your life and your career and everything. So it's so important that we recognize that. So thank you, Chris, if you're listening.

[00:25:35] And for everybody else listening here today, maybe they want to find out more information about Newman, what it's all about, and dig a little bit deeper. Where would you like to point everyone listening? They should go, thank you for asking, to Newman.com. That's N-U-M-A-N dot com. And explore Newman and see if there's something that we can be relevant to them for. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today, sharing your origin story, Newman's growth journey, the strategic innovations and technology driving its success,

[00:26:04] and some insights on the future of health tech too. And it's easy to see, I mean, listen to you today, why it's becoming the fastest growing digital healthcare company in the UK. So just thank you for sharing your story today. Really appreciate your time. Thank you, Neil. That's very kind. Very much enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for having me. That's it for today. I will be back again tomorrow with another guest. Please join me again. We'll keep talking as long as you keep listening. I'll speak with you all bright and early tomorrow. Bye for now.