In July 2020, CribMD officially launched operations in Nigeria; our growth journey has been phenomenal since then. But for you to fully grasp the CribMD journey, you will have to know the WeCare story.
So, let’s go down memory lane a little. WeCare was where it all started. WeCare was born out of Ifeanyi Ossai’s drive to provide quality healthcare for patients in his Nigerian hometown.
While growing up in Delta State, Nigeria, Ossai lost an Aunt to an illness that could have been avoided with fast treatment. Many years later, after relocating to the US, the idea of giving back to his hometown came up. He launched the company WeCare in 2017. He built four physical clinics and had experienced doctors, and nurses treat and offer health consultation services to the inhabitants.
Even though WeCare recorded immense success, it became evident that building more physical clinics to meet up with the increasing influx of patients wasn’t going to be economically sustainable.
So, there had to be a way out. Ossai had the eureka moment in the 1st quarter of 2020. The idea of CribMD was born – which was to take quality healthcare to the homes of those who need it through technology. No more waiting lines at the hospital lobby, No more rushing to beat the traffic to get to the hospital.
Together with his co-founders: Lorna and Mike, he assembled a formidable team to build the excellent health tech product.
Ossai gained hands-on experience while running WeCare; the lessons learnt came in handy and helped get CribMD off to a good start. We leveraged the network of caregivers already established at WeCare and onboarded them on CribMD.
A $250,000 pre-seed founders’ raise helped get things done – appropriately deployed to product development, hiring, sale and marketing.
Did it yield results? Absolutely!
After rolling out the MVP, within the first four months, we recorded over 700 subscribers with an MRR of $15,000, over 20,000 patients on the waitlist and 10+ corporate customers.
We eventually decided to seek seed round funding, the goal was clear, and we weren’t going to be deterred by the series of NOs we were getting, and the popular response from VCs:
..thank you for your mail. We are excited about what you are building, but….
We set out to raise $2million seed funds, and Sputnik ATX, accelerator, Texas, USA set the ball rolling, then Norrsken, Stockholm, Sweden followed closely. The Guardian Nigeria came on board as our 3rd investor. In the end, we smashed our goal to raise a total of $2.6million. Our seed round was oversubscribed.
After ten months, we are proud of our growth journey.
With 5,000+ Doctors on the platform, 2000+ Subscribers, over 30 corporate customers and an MRR of $55,000, we know we are taking the proper steps in the right direction.
There is also room for improvement, and we intend to maximize every growth opportunity we have in building a customer-centric product.
