HELLO THERE! WELCOME BACK EVERYONE!
Well hello there everyone! Welcome back! We hope everyone had a wonderful holiday enjoying time away with friends and family! We’ve missed hearing from you and can’t wait to catch you up on what’s been happening the first few weeks in the new 20’s!
When we last spoke, we had just finished a monster of a month kicking a massive bunch of goals. Missed it during the holiday break? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. Go check out our previous investor updates here.
CULTURE AT OUR CORE
Company culture is hard to get right and something we are always working to improve. We got lucky though in attracting a team that are as passionate as they are talented. November saw so many large projects running, with everyone putting in incredibly long hours to ensure our customers had the best possible experience with Cogniom. Come December though, it was time to celebrate the team and show them appreciation as you may have read in our last blog post.
After a marathon effort it was time to step back for an ENFORCED Cogniom Holiday break. (anyone who knows us will no doubt be laughing. Cogniom? Take a break?! HA!) While we did all agree and participate in some well-earned downtime, there was no stopping any of us from logging into Slack excitedly shouting out new ideas and updates. Why? Because while we believe in working hard, it’s just as important to play hard and allow freedom for individual flavours and drives. Creativity is one of the main pillars we’re building a cultural foundation on from day one. So, I offered to let everyone work on the projects that energized and excited them while the holiday months were quiet…and they didn’t let that opportunity to go waste.
Want to do that infrastructure project you’ve always wanted Mr. CTO? Go for it! Got a new framework library you want to add to our software Mr. R&D – go nuts! Want to start exploring new marketing campaigns? Have at it Ms. COO! Want to read some cool books you’ve been sidelining and draw new features on some wireframes Mr. CEO? Well I don’t mind if I do…
Taking two full weeks to unwind and spend with family I think is just what everyone needed. Getting out of the office and getting time to relax allowed us to let our minds wander and come up with some massively innovate ideas. Check out the Milestones below!
MILESTONES COMPLETED
Development – We found a common request from our customers wanting the ability to observe more than one person/item at a time or be able to run more than one type of study at a time. Up to today TANDM was built so a study was based on a single template (or collection of buttons) and only one ‘Observed person’ could be recorded at a time. After some incredibly insightful discussion with clients, we suddenly understood that we should be able to have researchers change their buttons to suit their conditions. Our CTO has unleashed his inner coder and has restructured the way TANDM operates to make sure clients can have several templates (collection of buttons) all related to a single study. Now researchers can report different data sets from all over the hospital – customized to the work they happen to be watching.
Research and Development – Another request we have gotten several times is to be able to use the phone to take pictures and video and record audio during interviews. With our TANDM Suite version 3.0, that was going to be a challenge. Luckily we have a coder extraordinaire that is currently working on a way to keep our software browser-based and compatible with any device, but still allow users to take photos, video, interviews, and share their location. Are you ready to bask in the glory that will be TANDM 4.0?!
Business Management – This is a milestone that we keep forgetting because for a regular business it’s just the norm. But for a startup, it’s a novelty and a day that not all start ups even get to see. That day is called… PAY DAY. That’s right, Cogniom officially began employment status and earned their very first paycheck in January! None of this would have been possible without our COO and her business prowess. She has worked tirelessly to ensure employment agreements meet Fair Trade requirements, that our team is well looked after, that Super and PAYG and insurances are all in order, Term Sheets are finalized, and that Xero is all set up perfectly to suit.
Don’t even get me started on the HR policies document she brought together to boot. All of which was completed in record time. If any of you have seen the TV show suits, she is The Donna of Cogniom!
Business Growth – While my team were hard at work, I too was on a pathway for future development. Business Development. Earlier this month I was invited to be a guest speaker as part of the new online video courses that will be made available through Startup Onramp. In the same week, I also was invited to be a guest speaker on the HealthTechX podcast to discuss all things Lean Startup and Healthcare Innovation (listen here). While these were both amazing experiences, we’ve had several similar minds reach out to us and connect, which is already opening doors to new opportunities. Lastly, I’ve been overloading on coffees meetups to cultivate our next round of clients for this month (stay tuned for more updates in the coming weeks for some exciting updates.
PROJECT UPDATES
JOHNSON AND JOHNSON
December saw us complete the Med Tech Got Talent Gala Finals and a massive project with Johnson&Johnson. At a large hospital in NSW they used the TANDM Suite to track how patients were progressing through the operating theaters and identified several ideas on how to make things smoother. With our dashboards, they were also able to prove it in terms of labour hours and potential cost/time savings.
The preliminary results? Using the data collected from TANDM, the J&J research team discovered several ways to help eliminate delays during surgery time and with the recommended changes – predict an increase of 600 surgeries per year! Even with only a few of those recommendations implemented so far this year, the Hospital is already on track to increase patient surgeries by 200 total! Not a bad way to start the year! With massive pressures on the healthcare system and long waiting lists of surgeries for public hospitals, that’s a huge increase that helps everyone get through surgeries in less time and more patients through the hospital. We started this journey to ‘change the way healthcare is delivered’ and finally seeing that come to fruition with this project is a pretty incredible feeling. I think Granny B would be proud.
HUMMINGBIRD HOUSE
The Day in the Life study was completed late last year and saw some incredible data come through. As the consulting team finalises their report, Hummingbird House expects to make several changes that will have massive impacts to helping the nurses spend more time with patients and less time on administrative tasks. The report is still being written, and it will likely serve as a framework for Aged Care facilities looking to
improve their bottom line profitability and nurses’ time with patients. Aged Care is a storm brewing at the moment in Australia and we’ll see a LOT of instability and changes this year in this industry as underfunded facilities struggle to make ends meet. Just over half of all residential Aged Care last quarter were operating at a loss with new government funding measures going into effect. Without urgent action, we’ll see a lot of facilities closing their doors without outside help. Our clients aim to use a custom built TANDM framework to help aged care manage costs and keep their patients in facilities closest to loved ones. For some those that would like to hear more, check out this report on the current state of the Aged Care sector as of Sept 2019.
UPCOMING PROJECTS
Big Four Consulting – Conversations are still underway with two of the Big Four as they continue to understand the value TANDM brings to the service they offer their clients. True to form, big organizations have a lot of departments that each need their own documents and security reviews, so we’re working through those requirements to become a vendor to them hopefully very soon.
Big Four Banking – We’re starting to see a trend emerge here! A Big Four bank has approached us to work with them on a number of efficiency projects from combination safe register management, to customer service, to process audit and reporting. It is incredible to watch TANDM evolve and adapt to a number of different industries, that are all still so heavily reliant on paper based methods which ultimately is costing a fortune. Never in our wildest thoughts did we envisage such a widespread impact TANDM would have on industry.
Mentorship – Zoe is back on board as Program Manager with AH-x as Cohort 2 pick back up their studies for the new year. She has also signed on to assist Cohort 3 which is likely to kick off later in the year. I have signed up as a mentor again this year with Startup Onramp and have spent some time over the break fine tuning my ‘Power of the Pivot’ presentation. It is crazy to think just how much we’ve learned since we started and we feel pretty chuffed we’re able to pay it forward and help others who are standing in the same spot we were 12 months ago.
Marketing – We’ve received many compliments on our blog posts and social media activity, which frankly makes Zoe blush more often than not, but also drives us to be even better at it. So, its time to bring in the reinforcements! One of our current investors, Chris Hewson, has thrown his hat into the ring and is helping us navigate marketing plans and PR specialists which we are beyond grateful for! We’re also delighted to be bringing on a marketing specialist – Samantha Pickering – to help us with social medial and marketing analytics, next level content and strategic pathways. Now that TANDM is built and running, we can finally put some major focus into marketing experiments and filling our sales funnel!
Pirate Metrics – AARRR matey! No, not the Captain Jack Sparrow kind. AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. Basically how well is our Software as a Service business model getting customers and keeping them using our TANDM software.
Right now most of our understandings come from a variety of places – Hubspot, Social Media, Xero, TANDM, Intercom, and the Cogniom website. It can be a really heavy undertaking to get all of our metrics into a readable format on a regular basis for our advisor and investors. Never fear, we have Endra Nat, a business strategist and PowerBI expert coming in to help us! We’re working to add our pirate metrics into a single view and track them regularly so our investors and advisors can see our progress from month to month in one easy view.
With nearly the first month of the new year done and dusted, we are roughly half way finished with our pre-seed round, have some big name potential clients about to turn into paying clients, and some impressive tools to share some more in depth metrics with you through future updates.
So, for those on this investor email we’d love your help. If you can think of three people we should know in your network – we’d love to have a coffee or warm introduction. Whether they are investors, someone at a business that would benefit from a TANDM study, or someone that you think we should meet for advice – we’d love to keep the intros coming. Finally, if you have and questions, thoughts, comments or feedback on these investor emails, we’d love to hear from you too, because if you ask our COO, there is no such thing as too much coffee!
