CEO and Founder of Numan: Sokratis Papafloratos

Can you give me an introduction about Numan, and then we can start with a story about how you started entrepreneurship?

Sure, thank you Kyriakos. Likewise, thank you for the invitation and really good to be speaking with you. So, Numan, I started Numan in 2018. So, we're gonna be entering our, we're in our sixth year now, we'll be six years old this summer, which is, you know, simultaneously. Leave that it went by so quickly but you know what it would kind of the journey feels like a very long time in the first very short time at the you know all together so how we got here Neiman is my my third business so I've now been an entrepreneur if you like I've either been starting a business growing a business or sometimes investing in a business for the best part of the last 17 18 years.

The first inception behind this idea came to me after I had sold my first business. I was at the time quite burned out. I was really looking, I was both at the same time very proud and very pleased of what we had achieved. But you know, that journey of starting a business, taking it to profitability scaling and then exiting. and I had started my first company when I was 27 was, you know, was hard.

And I was looking to see what I was gonna do next, what I want to commit for a very long time, a problem that I was really interested in. And naturally kind of human performance for me was very exciting, but also I could see that kind of the...

how health and well-being were becoming a lot more secular, they were becoming a lot more connected, and how behaviors were really starting to change. This is now back in 2012. At the time, I didn't commit to the idea because I couldn't, I wasn't personally ready. The...

infrastructure and the regulatory landscape wasn't quite mature at the time to be able to execute an idea like Numann. But crucially, I think expectations from a large enough member of the population, part of the population wasn't quite ready to engage with their health and their well-being the way that I want to do it. I scale in a mainstream fashion that would involve not just suggestions of tools for behavior modification but would actually include medicine as well.

So in 2018, my kind of personal, if you like, stars and also the world around aligned a little bit better and I started the business with that kind of passion and vision to bring together medicine, diagnostics, access to experts and then tools to help you help yourself. And I started Numan.

Learning and Growing from Past Ventures

And that was quite a broad, challenging, if you like, idea to grasp and bring to market. So what we did is we narrowed it down. We focused on men's health, and then we focused on even narrowed domains of health, men's health. And that's how we started in London and went to market in 2019. So first I approached the problem space differently. I took longer to figure out what I was going to build, how I was going to do it, where I was going to play. I took a different approach to fundraising, a lot more committed to raising more earlier than before.

Good, I'll get into distribution in a bit.

worried less about certain things that I was worrying about as a first-time entrepreneur. And then really focused on that end to end funnel that involved distribution and not just product, which is painful lessons I had to learn.

It was simple. It was, well, in our eyes, it's simple, right? So we solved, we focused on one of the areas of men's health that is often overlooked. It is really riddled with stigma, but it is also an area where the problem is undeniable and yet, the awareness around the solutions of that problem are also not very well understood, or at least they were not very well understood in 2019 when we went to market.

And that was sexual health, sexual performance, and erectile dysfunction. That's where we began. And we followed that quickly with hair loss. And now this may seem the kind of the challenge and the opportunity there is that these are pretty fundamental conditions affecting a man's health and well-being.

What I mean by that, if you have issues with your erections, you could have a number of underlying health causes, you could have a number of areas that you need to understand better and you need to act on, and the lack of satisfaction there can have a downstream effect that is really, can be quite devastating in some cases, right? It affects relationships, it affects self-esteem, it is a real issue.

Similarly with hair loss and aesthetics, the typical approach from medicine is not that it's a health problem. Actually, hair loss, you can't say it is a health problem, but hair loss is significant. If you are in your whatever age actually you are and you start losing your hair, it really affects the sense of who you are as a self. At the time, even though those solutions were really undeniable, you can't deny either of those things, you know that you have them, they're not like invisible things, you need to be diagnosed.

The understanding around the solutions around both of those things was not what it could be. So you have that combination where there was a lot of, call it latent demand, people wanted to do something about those issues, people were not aware that they could have effective solutions that they could trust.

Everybody knew of course of Viagra, but people thought of it as something different, something else, something perhaps for much older men, something that you, it wasn't really okay for you to do. And when it came to hurdles, again, a lot of the solutions that are safe, effective, that you can access, but you need clinical support. You need to engage with a doctor to be able to safely understand and get access to were difficult to. get hold of difficult to understand, difficult to get hold of, and then difficult to find the right, if you like, fit between the medication and your need.

And that was a perfect problem to apply a digital-first approach because the clinical risk is very manageable. The solution is contained. You only have like a limited amount of available treatments to work with when it comes to case pharmacological. treatments and you could execute across the whole awareness brand building and then onboarding and managing patients using a playbook that was readily applied in a whole bunch of other industries but you could bring to bear in a space like health.

What about, when did you introduce blood analysis? Was this from the beginning or was it?

It wasn't, we did that about two years in, we started our first diagnostic product. And again, to go back to the previous point, the people would go to great lengths and they would also put themselves at risk at times, counterfeit medication and it still is and it was back then a real issue or people used to order things from overseas online pharmacies that would send things across borders with no real oversight or no real understanding of what it is that they were getting themselves into.

And as, if you like, well tested and safe those drugs are, they're never without side effects. You should always use them within, of course, a clinical setting under the prescription supervision and ongoing care of a team that is, you know, you can rely on. And that's again, is the big difference with what we're doing. To your next question, which was about the, remind me what we're just talking about.

So let's speak about the introduction of blood analysis. How did you make the decision as well? This is, I think it's a big introduction into a new product and also it requires a lot of testing and laboratories and all of that work. How did you make that decision?

For me, look, from the beginning, the pillars for the business were medicine and medication, diagnostics, access to experts, whether they're doctors, pharmacists, nutritionists, whatever the expert that you need for the specific issue, and then digital tools to help you help yourself. That was the, you know, these were the pillars I always thought of when I was thinking about the business and what we're building.

And diagnostics and the proactive approach to screening, for me, is fundamental to prevent disease, to understand your kind of personal baseline of where you are, and then to make informed decisions about your health. This comes from my view of the world. It comes from where I believe health and medicine is heading. It comes also from a personal experience, right? So I've been blessed with high cholesterol from a very young age, right?

It runs in my family. I've been lucky enough to be aware of the issue from a relatively young age. And even though I was aware of the issue, because I didn't stay on top of it as well as I should have because I, like everybody else, let life get in the way, didn't do my testing as frequently as I should have done, didn't make the right decisions when it came to treatment or intervention early enough.

I found myself with early onset of atherosclerosis in my early 40s. When I say I find myself, again, I took a proactive approach. I requested to have more in-depth screening because I was familiar with the risk associated with that. And because of that, I worked with the right clinical professional as well and I went on statins sooner than I would have otherwise gone. And now the trajectory and the risk profile that I have is a lot lower than what it would have been had I not actually done anything about this issue or relied on traditional guidelines of when a man like me who doesn't smoke, exercises regularly, eats well, theoretically should have been, you know, looking into his cardiovascular health or his lipid profile or everything else.

So I think it's absolutely fundamental for clinical reasons. The other thing that I think diagnostics does is it's kind of modifies behavior by default in a sense when you know you're going to have a set of markers that you're going to be looking to work with. You will actually work better to improve them. And I think it is one of the areas that especially in the UK, we're not as the public health system, but even the private health system in some cases are not as proactive. as they should be.

Yeah, it's, when I contacted you for, to do the podcast, I also bought a testosterone test, the blood analysis. And actually it was so much more convenient than what I expected because, yeah, so I heard that if you do the shower before and then the blood circulates easier. So I did the test and it was super easy. And in comparison with, my test usually I would need to go to a doctor or take their prescription and then go and find the donor lumbar line. So it would take ages for me to be doing that. So I think the ease of access is very interesting here.

I'm really glad to hear that you had that experience. And look, a lot of what we do is, if you think about health outcomes and health equity and access, what it boils down to is cost, time, and then that friction, if you like, and that right threshold between motivation, energy, and then hurdles that you need to overcome to do something, right? I believe most people have a general sense roughly of what it is that they need to be doing.

The reason they don't do it, if you take out a lot of the, if you like more deep psychological or social barriers that inhibit people from taking action to their health are that again, life gets in the way or, you know, as building products, moment you introduce friction into something you drastically reduce the probability that it's going to happen. So if you put motivation and friction on those two axes the easier that you can do something the higher the likelihood that it's going to happen.

And then of course the more you reduce cost the more again you're going to increase the population that can access those things and with diagnostics, remote diagnostics, you also remove the geography which is a massive factor right. We're lucky enough you're in San Francisco, I'm doing this interview from our office in London. We're five minutes away from world-class healthcare. You drive two hours out of London and it's just completely different.

And for a lot of people to come into central London to do something like this, it's just such a big decision. And a lot of them will never actually get it done. So taking the test at home completely transforms that experience for them.

It was embarrassing when we started. When we started also, of course, there was a little bit of disruption, if you remember around 2020 with access to... We went through all that craziness. And in fact, that accelerated a lot of the screening and a lot of the diagnostics that you see today are a result of infrastructure that was put in place because of COVID. But I think also the massive difference that you see in behavior right now is because of COVID.

We're all a lot more accustomed to getting tested. We're also a lot more now in tune with what, how necessary it is to maintain, if you like, an elevated baseline of underlying health. So the first version was genuinely embarrassing. We would send you your results in a PDF, actually, sending the results in a PDF, I don't think it's a terrible experience, right? But actually, when you came then to see the results into your account, to act and do something about them, we're just kind of very far from where we needed to be.

Now you have a dedicated mobile app that you can see trends over time. You can see information. You can request the consultation and more information. And you can see the history of the different blood tests that you've taken and very soon you'll be able to start connecting them also with the treatments that you engage with with Numan. So still ways to go. I think it's that area is becoming a lot more interesting both in the breadth of diagnostics and screening that you can do but also the depth of that experience. So but at least now we do have a much better platform to build from than when we're getting started.

You mentioned in the beginning doing bigger fundraising from the very early on. Why was that a choice? And also, how do you approach fundraising for first-time founders? How was your approach? What did you try to convey earlier?

So first of all, I set my goals on actually raising a bigger amount because the market that we're in, what we needed to build, and where we would need to take the business for the next milestone needed that money. I also was a lot more comfortable with being uncomfortable or being unclear and unsure about what it is that aspects of the plan, right? Because obviously when you're starting, you have nothing.

You will have things that you don't know. Otherwise you are, you know, you're being naive about what it is that you're trying to do. And you need to have the capital that will give you the time to make mistakes and understand things and take risks. Obviously, you know, there's a balance between those things. We didn't do anything crazy. And when I say crazy, you know, some of the raising too much at too high evaluation before you've proven nothing comes with a whole bunch of risk attached to it.

So you need to find the right balance between raising enough that you can recruit good people, you can spend some money on testing propositions, you can put some money behind marketing. And that when you add it all up, it comes to a figure that is in the low millions. And that kind of should be enough to get you going. And I was very comfortable to say that we're going to get things wrong, we're going to make mistakes.

That's the things that we're clear about. And we need to raise this amount of money. And we need to be able to not give more than this percentage of the business so that we don't really hamper our ability to raise follow-up money. Because the business that we're in and the space that we're in, we knew from the start you would need to go and reach scale and do it quickly. 

This is by the way, by no means the right way, the only way, that stuff doesn't matter, right? You absolutely don't have to raise money to go after and execute what it is that you want to execute. Or you may want to raise a lot more money than I did to get going. It entirely depends on you what you want to build and where you won't take the business. And the difference between now and the first time I raised money, well actually I don't know the first time I raised money I really knew absolutely nothing.

When I say nothing, I found the original deck that we had done with my co-founder at the time and it is just so innocent. It's probably something that kids at school do now as part of the kind of classes that they do when they're 13 years old or something like that. It was 2005, 2006 when we put that together. So you can imagine what that was like. And I was very paranoid about raising money. I was very paranoid about these people that would come into my business.

I was completely horrified about some of the terms that I would start discussing with investors. I really didn't understand concepts like reverse vesting or vesting on its own or what it means to be a good lever. A lot of those things that come with when you're dealing with more sophisticated investors. But the thing that we did do really well as first time founders back then, because we didn't know any better, we had the complete lack of any fear or an inhibition and we had an absolute, you know, just mountains of energy to be out pretty much every night or every other night to every single event that was happening in London where we'd go and speak to people.

And actually that's how we met. We met our first our first investor was somebody that I worked for in my first job as a graduate. I did my first job was a Vodafone.

I did an internship for the CTO Vodafone at the time for six months. And after I had left, I joined another startup and about Two years after that, I called him up and I went to see him and I pitched him and he invested because, I don't know, he liked us and he believed in us. And then the first more institutional money that we raised was my co-founder just was queuing up in one of those events to speak to somebody, started the conversation with another person that was there and that ended up being Hugo Birch that led our first half a million pounds. investment into my first business, Trusted Places.

So I guess energy and kind of maximizing the opportunity that you're going to have when you have no network is a thing to really focus on as a first-time founder. As a repeat entrepreneur, you have a very different network to lean on and work with, so you can be a lot more targeted, a lot more effective.

Thank you. So we started, by the way, distribution and growth and acquisition and marketing weren't the areas I gravitated naturally towards. I'm more, I come from an engineering background, I'm more focused on product, on the concepts, on the user, that's the stuff that's a bit more in my comfort zone. But again, from first principles, when you start, even though we had raised money, we were very results constrained.

And we could only do things that were... I spoke to a bunch of people that were a lot more experts than I was at the time, and what I got back just didn't make sense to me. It was very diluted. It was, let's try a whole bunch of different things and see what might work. Which I couldn't really understand the mechanics and the numbers behind that. When you have a limited amount of capital to deploy and distribution, you have to find the one channel that kind of works.

You need to start with the tried and tested things where people are. Search and performance. You need to figure out, and there's only a limited amount of channels that you can start with. You need to kind of start getting some momentum and then you need to look at your entire funnel and optimize it. And know that the place that you're going to start will be very different from where you're going to be in one month, three months, six months a year, because you're going to keep learning, keep improving, keep iterating, right?

So it doesn't make sense to go with a big above the line campaign when you launch and your product hasn't been tested by real people at scale, because your conversion will be significant. If your conversion is... if you like the ceiling of where naturally it's going to be, you've launched way too late, right? It's impossible to get to that point. So by definition, the place you're going to start is going to be severely suboptimal.

So at that point, you need to be frugal, you need to be kind of testing, and you need to kind of work through that and figure it out. Which is, by the way, it's not a cheap exercise. You can't really scale those things right now. You can't figure out what your paid search or your paid social strategy is going to be without having some real money to spend behind that. Maybe again your product lends itself fantastically to PR.

You can build, you can create a category, you can have some kind of unique edge that the market doesn't have, in which case, and you should try to find that by the way, fantastic if you can do that. If you have like a unique IP that you're building on, if you have a product that... hasn't been seen ever before. If you happen to be Elon Musk, funny aside, I was speaking to the ex-CEO of a massive FMCG business, publicly listed business, and his advice to me at the time was get the basics really absolutely best in class.

And then he used the example of Elon Musk as somebody that... does all the work for Tesla so that they don't have to spend any money on marketing and distribution. That's quite a difficult strategy to try to replicate unless again you are really prepared to be very visible, very controversial and also have some traits that let you do that, right? I didn't pretend that I had those so we had to settle for things that are a little bit more in our control.

So anyway, that's kind of where you start, but then quickly we wanted to be non-reliant on a single channel or performance auction-based channels. And we explored above the line and we explored TV. And again, we took an approach there that was iterative. We started very humbly, very simply, very cheaply. We iterated a few times and we started getting traction and learning and uncovering a little bit more about how that world works.

We got a bit lucky and that's how we started scaling the business. For us, TV was relevant for a number of reasons. A, it added credibility and trust into what we're doing. Automatically, when you see a brand show up in a place that you associate with businesses that have earned the right to be there. You'll take a different view whether you're going to trust them with something that requires to have that level of trust.

After that, because of a lot of what we wanted to do involved awareness in an audience that we knew had a problem, because you have the statistics of the people that have the problem, but wasn't actually acting on it. We wanted to create awareness that captured their attention. And then when we did that, you need to figure out how you're going to do that, and what is, you know... What's the message that you're gonna go with and how are you gonna evolve that?

Again, when you're starting out, there are certain kind of places you can go on TV that are simpler and cheaper. You cannot be, I think, too smart about it. You have to be very clear, very to the point. If you think about a really high-end abstract... very brand-led combs campaign that is perhaps a little bit obscure about what the product does or what it is there to do. If you go with that approach, which is quite easy to do if you let your ego or your preconceptions kind of dictate your decisions, you are likely to fail.

When you're starting out, you need to be quite clear, quite distinct. You need to be doing selling and you need to go with a message that is going to... be really well understood and it's going to convert. And that's where you're going to start. You do need to have certain necessary ingredients, right? So this idea of distinctive brand assets, again, a lot of people are trying to think about how they need to be different, how they're going to be unique, how they're going to be, perhaps have certain attributes of the brand that they believe are the ones that they should have.

The main thing that you need to do is you need to be distinctive so that people will remember you. You need to create relevant memory associations with what it is you're trying to do and the message that you're gonna try to convey. And then you need to use creativity to capture people's attention. And that's how we evolved our strategy. We started with a very simple 30-second advert that said exactly what we did.

We evolved to something that was a lot more provocative and attention-grabbing. And then after that, we graduated to a world that we have now that is, again, quite distinctive and very different than what the category actually typically does. But aesthetically, it's a lot more cohesive. It's a bit of, it lets us build different narratives and it serves as a kind of communication platform for everything that we want to do as Numan, which is not the original categories that we started with, but it is a ecosystem around your health for a number of conditions with a number of products.

You won't see the sales immediately typically with TV, but you will, especially if you do it early on, your attribution is kind of fairly simple because you will be able to see the fluctuations that you're going to have in your traffic according, you know, against your typical baseline. You can measure response times fairly accurately because you can track when your media is shown and what happens, but then you need to be able to figure out how that actually translates in conversions in revenue across a period of time.

And as you scale, that becomes a little bit more complex. In fact, it becomes a lot more complex. You need to build your own view of the world. How are you gonna do your attribution? What kind of econometric model are you gonna create? Are you gonna how you're gonna use data science around all the data you have collected at that point. And that will get you some of the answer. It won't give you the whole answer.

But you can refer to your own data over a period of time. You can supplement that with different surveys, different ways that you can actually ask your audience. You can refer to research that's been done before. But I think a lot of those things, you need to also apply that kind of logic test and that first principles, like think it through if it really makes sense and if it adds up, go back to your data and then build your own tools to be able to figure out what that will tell you.

It is not a simple exercise. But if you're going to build something that has a big consumer appeal, I think it is hard to not have it as part of your mix, especially if you're going to try to follow a strategy that is a little bit more robust. You're not depending on what policy is going to change in X platform that you're using and a bit more scalable and will also let you deploy spend in ways that are perhaps non-linear and above the line lets you do that quite effectively.

So if you think about the journey that we've been through and that's kind of where we started from, right? And where we started from, you know better than I do the challenges with infrastructure and accessibility and interoperability when it comes to health. We had to build pretty much everything by ourselves. But sorry, let me back up. We didn't have to. because you could execute the model of what we're doing by stitching together different platforms and different components and you could get going quickly, but you would have found it impossible, I believe, to scale beyond a certain level and you would have also found it impossible to really make the economics work.

So with Numan, in our third year of operations, we acquired our pharmacy partner. So we started integrating, becoming a much more integrated group that really owned the entire user experience. From a very early on, from pretty much the inception of the business, we registered to become a healthcare provider to be regulated by the Care Quality Commission, which is the regulator that oversees the delivery of care in England and Wales.

Because we believe that you needed to own those parts of the experience, deliver the experience that you want to understand it deep enough, but also to make the economics and the margin profile of the business that you're building work. So we started and again the promise and the proposition to the patient at the time was safe and accessible access to medication that can help you alleviate symptoms of a certain problem that you have.

We layered on top of that diagnostics so that you can understand your underlying health better as a whole, but also specifically to the areas that we can help you with. And most recently, we started adding the different journeys with obesity being at the, if you like, the initial wedge in that, where we will give you medication that will deliver results for you over a longer period of time. It won't be an instant erectile dysfunction.

I want better erections. I'll take a pill. I'll see the result. It won't be also as simple as hair loss in terms of the kind of the product that you're getting. With medication around obesity, you need to understand the starting point and then you need to evolve the patient on a journey that has like any personalized dietration program for that patient, which means that the way that you find medication success is very, very different.

And the way that you engage the person through that journey is also a lot more sophisticated than just sending them a medication through the letterbox every month or every three months. But with weight, we don't just stop at giving you the medication. We also, again, onboard you on a mobile app that has dedicated content that can educate you and help you understand nutrition, mindset, sleep, and exercise. and it will connect you also with a team of coaches that are there to support you along the journey, either as accountability partners or experts that can provide specific plans, action points, and support as and when you need it.

We're adding after that diagnostics that are relevant to your metabolic kind of health and what that looks like. And that's when you start seeing that original vision that I've talked about just come together in one place. The way we apply that and the platform that we've built to deliver that experience, we're not looking to expand it into other areas of health that are quite relevant to what we do.

And we see, you know, huge opportunity to serve, we've now served half a million patients in the UK alone, and we see a massive opportunity to actually scale from this point with the brand recognition, with the infrastructure and the momentum that we have. to really have impact into millions of patients here across a number of conditions. And then after that, you know, still there are billions of people globally that deserve better access to health and the way to deliver that is through technology.

And that's what we're excited about. So, but you know, we're in our sixth year now that may take at least another six or probably a lot longer than that, but. That was also one of the reasons why I was excited about building this company and committing to building this company because you can stay energized by the problems that you're solving for quite a long time.

So this is the, what I fundamentally believe is that the number one, if you like, the mistake that we often make as entrepreneurs or people that, you know, product people, brand people, when you work on the inside is what I've just talked about, right, is sounds exciting. This is how I approach my health and this is what I'm really excited about. You need to find out what people really want right now and what is that most important kind of first step for them.

And for a lot of people what I just described, that's exactly what they want. They want to take a very different view to their health holistically. And they want something that is can be personalized to them at the price point that is they're prepared to pay with an experience that they're prepared to engage with. For a lot of people, they're kind of coming on a journey towards that. They're still very much have a specific pain point.

They need a specific solution and the most important thing for them is ease. They want something that is at the kind of the least amount of effort and a maximum amount of results. And that is universally true, right? But I also believe what I was saying earlier, we are seeing an increased amount of people that their behavior to health is changing drastically. If you think about the way that we're now, where we're spending money, both kind of in people more around my generation, but also people that are a lot younger, that are engaging now, and they're actually spending money on whether it is fitness, whether it is wellness, or it is kind of health.

They display very, very different attitudes, desires, and behaviors, and spending behaviors as well. So I think we're getting into a point, and of course, what you do with Terra and how you see also kind of that proliferation of understanding the impact that a number of different factors have on health outcomes, but also on everyday, if you like, performance, energy, vitality, all of those things.

And those proliferations of interconnected technologies, I think completely transform the landscape of what health is now and where it is going to be in the next five years. Where you're to have genuinely relevant personalized insights, but then the infrastructure to deliver the right kind of intervention to do something about those insights. And that's the exciting.

I like this question that I took from one of the previous podcasts. If we go 100 years into the future and we look backwards at healthcare, when are we going to, like, what things are we going to say that we're really stupid about in terms of how we're considering them today?

That's amazing. It's such a great question. Look, a big one is nutrition, right? Nutrition is one of the areas where we're flying kind of blind in a lot of cases. And that's changing a lot. You had George from Zoë on the podcast before, who's a great friend who's doing something to really change that. But I think also the approach that we take to health and the way that we practice medicine, we will look back at it and be amazed at how reactive we were, we are right now when it comes to health.

We spent 98% of the spend in this country, in the UK, spent on cure rather than prevention of disease. And also the view that we take on risk. This is something that for me blows my mind, again, when it comes to that cardiovascular risk where great doctors are making decisions with guidelines that are looking at your 10-year risk horizon. As I was saying earlier, right? Oh, you don't smoke, you exercise, you don't drink, you do this and what.

You don't need to worry about any risk for the next 10 years when it comes to your cardiovascular health. So we're going from this system of health that optimizes at the population level to a place where we're gonna genuinely be able to maximize for the individual. And I think that's gonna be the big transition, but I hope we'll be able to see that a lot sooner rather than next 100 years.