LabDoor: Our Story
By Neil Thanedar, LabDoor
LabDoor, a digital health company and a member of the White House Initiative Startup America, is mid-way through the Rock Health incubator program. While our startup story is just beginning, here’s a look at where we’re coming from.
Where there’s pain, there’s an opportunity
My LabDoor journey began in a Startup America meeting with Scott Case. While brainstorming ways to take my product safety lab, Avomeen Analytical Services, to the next level, I grew increasingly frustrated with my company’s industry. Our independent laboratory had become an industry expert in understanding what makes consumer products like supplements and pharmaceuticals safer, but our reports to the FDA and manufacturers were never released to the public. Meanwhile, customers have been left on their own, stuck with confusing product advertising, labels, and user reviews.
Disrupting a trillion dollar industry
What if you could easily access a ‘consumer report’ for every energy drink, multivitamin, or cholesterol pill? One that simply explained the safety, efficacy, and price of products on a known A-F grading scale? That’s the vision behind LabDoor’s consumer product ratings.
Manufacturers in the pharmaceutical and supplement industries make over $1 trillion/year, and a huge chunk of that revenue comes from uninformed consumers buying unneeded or unsafe products. For nearly a century, we’ve entrusted the FDA and their $4 billion/year budget to regulate these products. But where bureaucracy has failed to provide consumer-focused solutions, LabDoor’s team of mobile health entrepreneurs are developing beautiful, easy-to-use iPhone and web applications that you can use in stores or while shopping online.
Finding a new startup family and home
After spending four months building the data, APIs, and applications behind LabDoor, we were presented a unique opportunity–Rock Health, a San Francisco-based startup incubator, offered us an interview with their program leaders and investment partners. We jumped on the first plane out of Indianapolis, and rushed to prepare our pitch. Three days later, we were sitting across from a table of five top VCs, and that evening we received our first offer.
For most of our team, who have spent decades growing and supporting technology startups in the Midwest, it felt almost blasphemous to pick up shop and move to Silicon Valley. But we decided that partners and investors like these will only come around once in a lifetime, and we accepted an offer to move into Rock Health’s offices in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Rock Health has been a transformative experience for LabDoor. Healthcare is traditionally a very complex, difficult market to break into, and the Rock Health network and community is where we get our best advice, feedback, and support.
Neil Thanedar, 24, is CEO and Founder of LabDoor, a digital health company that grades the products in your medicine cabinet LabDoor is Neil’s fourth startup, and second as a founder, earning him the title Generation Next Entrepreneur To Watch by CNNMoney.
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