When facing a diagnosis of brain cancer at 23 years old, Matt Davey learnt the challenges of navigating his health first hand – from tracking symptoms to managing appointments and medications. Teaming up with his brother and software engineer extraordinaire Noah Davey, they – alongside a team of patients, clinicians and advisors – co-designed Mend.
Mend is focused on enhancing the experience of people with chronic health conditions, helping them to manage their health information and access personalised insights and resources to improve health outcomes. The brothers are just over 2 years into their entrepreneurial journey with their patient-led app, and have made a name for themselves not only in the chronic illness, cancer and disability communities, but in the HealthTech and social impact space.
Matt and Noah spoke with WDEN entrepreneurs and The Adaptable CEO Podcast co-hosts Tiffani and Anja to give us an insight into the HealthTech startup world, including developing their app Mend, turning lived experience into purpose, mentorship, incubators and accelerators, co-founder dynamics and so much more. Listen to the full podcast episode here. Some key learnings from Matt and Noah:
What consumes the mind, is reflected in how we live our lives and our future trajectory. Matt and Noah, what are the three things you think about the most?
Matt:
- Real Estate Market: the way sustainable housing looks and the way that people are having access to real estate.
- Health Tech: giving people the opportunity to utilise technology to improve the way that they view their health and they can access different ways of support.
- Creativity: I also love the idea of creativity and finding different ways to inspire myself and inspire us in the work that we do.
Noah:
- Intersection of Health and Technology: my interests are very much in tech and seeing how the two come together is super interesting to me.
- Augmented Reality (AR): Especially with the vision pro coming from Apple recently, I find it super fascinating. How AR will impact the health space and many other industries and how we will start to interact with the world differently.
- The Future of Tech and Mobile Apps: if mobile apps will be the future or if vision pro apps will be the future.
You’ve co-founded an incredible, high quality app, Mend, for people with chronic illness and disability to self-manage their health. What gap in the market does Mend fill?
Matt: Being able to give people an alternative way to manage their health was really important to us. And just utilise the idea of technology to bring everything together. And for me going to more than 10 different specialists, being able to manage and understand your health from a consumer perspective was really important to us. Really looking at the way that consumers could have control rather than giving that over to a number of different doctors. That’s where we saw the gap in the market.
Noah: We noticed many of the health apps out there at the moment look like they were built 20 years ago. They’re super difficult to navigate, not easy to use. And I think for both me and Matt, we both looked at those and we agreed that there needed to be a bit more of emphasis put into making them look and feel like an app that is out of today’s generation. Especially for us, most of the people that will be using these apps and we’re pitching them towards are younger people who are going through this because those are generally the people that are looking for tech solutions. And so whenever I downloaded any of these apps, I just looked at them and was like, “I would never in a million years use this” and so I think for us that was definitely one of the gaps that we thought we wanted to fill.
You’ve both had a number of mentors across your business journey. What have you found helpful and hindering in a mentor? How crucial do you believe their role is?
Noah: I think one of the most positive traits that we saw in mentors is that they’ve actually tried to do or start something themselves before, that mutual understanding and empathy. It formed such a strong foundation for a relationship with you as a mentee and then as a mentor. I think that’s so important because building a business or a product can be such an absolute slog at times and sometimes you really need to hear some hard hitting advice. And you need that from someone that you have a good strong relationship with. Without that strong connection, it’s just a stranger telling you that your idea sucks. Whereas if it’s someone that you actually have a bond with or someone that’s coming from a place of love, that advice can really cut through and help you hear the things you need to make the thing work.
Matt: I think in terms of mentors in general, like Noah said, it’s really important to just give you a different perspective. Especially in the early days, you might have an idea like we did, and think it’s the best thing ever, and go and speak to a room full of people and say, “this is what we want to do and this is where we’re at”. They might say things that can be a little bit difficult to hear, but it gives you that really good perspective to think, “we could actually do this” or instead, it’s really going to help us move forward. And instead of hindering you, it’s just giving you that insight that you need as a founder.
We spent a lot of time speaking to lots of different people. So whether it’s mentors or we established an advisory group, which gave us some really, really good feedback. And just understanding the problem we were trying to solve, the people that we were going to work with, and really focus on that co-design element as well. So that we were building the best product possible and that we, as founders, were accountable for what we said we were going to do versus what we actually did.
So I think mentors are really important. Building those relationships helps you get to the next stage and they can also connect you with some really good people in terms of finding investment or just moving forward. We’ve been really lucky with the people that we’ve worked with so far.
What advice would you give to your younger self with everything you know now?
Noah: I think just even with Mend, I probably would have focused on one key thing rather than three or four key things. I think we started off with three or four key things because we thought these are the things that we must do to even be a MVP or have something viable. But I think with only the two of us, we would have been able to have launched quicker, gotten into the market quicker and released something worth releasing two or three times quicker if we had just said, “Hey, we’re just going to do medications, or we’re just going to do appointments”.
One thing, when I looked back at us building the app, we just spent a lot of time trying to make it perfect because we just cared so much about it. I think it’s a mistake so many people make. I wish I could just wring my younger self and be like, “no, just just do the one thing, one thing is enough, and you can always add on those other things as you go”. But at the end of the day, it still ended up being fine. It’s just, try to make it so that we could have released it faster to the people that we’re trying to help.
Matt: I would definitely give myself the advice to be more patient, find the right people to surround myself with and look after my mental health because I think that you spend a lot of time when you’re younger thinking that everything’s going to be very linear and happen in a certain way. Especially when you’re a perfectionist, or you want everything to go ‘the right way’, the reality is that life is always interrupting you and throwing us curveballs. Everybody knows whether it be health, changes in jobs or changes in relationships, just being patient and knowing that things will work out. And just always looking after yourself, always prioritising good mental health and good people around you that can support you in the not so good times.
You can connect with with Matt and Noah, and download the app here:
Mend (& available on Google Play and App Store) – https://www.mendhealth.co/
Matt – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattdavey142/
Noah – https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-davey/
Listen to the full episode, and more on The Adaptable CEO – available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and where you listen to your podcasts.