How We Flipped the Playbook to Build Australia's Fastest AI Company

Heidi is a company building an AI care partner to address the overwhelmed and overworked healthcare system, specifically the human bandwidth constraint faced by clinicians. Its current product focuses on transcribing patient visits and generating clinical notes, saving doctors significant time daily. The ultimate mission is to absorb the entire friction of practicing amazing healthcare.

Heidi achieved rapid growth by flipping the traditional enterprise playbook and adopting a product-led growth model. After an initial failure with a top-down sales approach, they stripped their product back to a simple AI scribe that was offered for free. This created immediate value for doctors, leading to viral adoption and high retention, which then generated leads for sales.

Heidi's initial top-down sales strategy failed because they confused the buyer with the user. They built a complex AI telehealth platform tailored to the C-suite's requests, adding features like compliance dashboards and administrative gates. However, this product added 14-15 extra clicks to doctors' workflows and changed their entire practice, leading to doctors hating it and the product becoming shelfware.

Heidi's AI scribe works by having doctors wear a lightweight remote that captures high-fidelity audio during patient visits. It automatically transcribes the conversation and uses a large language model to write clinical notes in the background. Additionally, an "Evidence" feature pulls the latest global medical research in seconds, allowing doctors to focus on patients and complete notes throughout the day.

The key strategy behind offering Heidi's product for free was to buy distribution and treat the compute cost as a marketing budget. With no traditional marketing budget, they aimed to remove all friction for doctors to experience immediate value. This led to high retention and viral adoption, ultimately generating leads for a commercial model where doctors pay for customization and integration.

Heidi leverages user advocacy by identifying clinicians who love their product, like Dr. Catherine Scallon, who championed it within her hospital. When their enterprise sales team engages hospital leadership, they highlight that clinicians are already using and loving the product. The sales pitch then focuses on benefits for the buyer, such as billing, coding, and enterprise compliance, rather than cold pitching.

Building Heidi in Australia provided several strategic advantages, including being close to users due to a smaller market, which allowed for faster feedback. It also forced the company to think globally from the outset, as the local market wasn't large enough to hide in. This constraint demanded clarity, focus, and the development of a better product that could be taken to the world.