Quit Genius: Medical Student to Y Combinator, 1 Million Users and Silicon Valley

It's an interesting one, looking back on it. It really started at med school. We were in hospital, in respiratory departments, and we saw that smoking was still the biggest cause of preventable disease and death within hospitals. When you do the research, there are still over a billion smokers worldwide. And one of the big stats that stood out for us is that 70% of them want to quit, but only 3% are successful. So there was a huge gap between people who had the motivation to quit and the tools they needed to actually do it.

We looked at the best way to quit, went into all these different therapies, and realised that CBT was the gold-standard form of therapy to help quit smoking — and any addiction. There's a whole host of reasons people don't have access to CBT: the inconvenience of going to see a therapist, taking time out of your work day, the cost. There are a lot of barriers. We realised that if we could create that experience in a digital format, we could improve access and standardise the quality of care for everyone coming through the Quit Genius experience.

It took a lot of steps before we realised this was a viable solution — a viable commercial enterprise. We did a lot of work on weekends and evenings, trying to validate the market and what a good solution would look like. We had a framework we'd developed during our management year, looking into gamification and how it can create engagement with healthy behaviours. Throughout that process we built up this overall hypothesis: can we commercially create a company that tackles this problem and delivers good-quality care to the millions and billions of people out there?

It was only up until our final-year exams that we delayed the decision around going full-time. We did our exams, and then realised that if we really wanted to fulfil its potential, we needed to go full-time and dedicate all our attention to it. Luckily, we got into the Wayra accelerator, which is run by O2 and Telefónica. That gave us eight months of office space plus a bit of funding. Up until that point we'd been self-funded — we pulled together money we'd collected over the years through other work and entrepreneurial activities. That initial funding turned an idea we'd been kicking around in each of our houses into a company we could work on full-time and grow.

It's a good question. From my side, the thing that resonated most with me was making a difference to people's lives. I'd been part of charitable outreach programmes throughout med school and before, and it's something I connected with most — it's why I wanted to become a doctor, to have a truly positive impact on people's lives. So it made the transition easier. Leaving medicine, and having that conversation with my parents — "I've worked six years on becoming a medical doctor, and now I'm leaving" — the reason was that I wasn't going into a completely different field. I was still trying to help people; I was just trying to do it at scale, using technology.

Obviously not well the first time. It's something you have to persist with — you have to let them see things from your perspective. Definitely a difficult conversation. I'm still hearing the end of it today.

A lot of it is about how much you can validate without diving into the deep end. Validating market size — there are a billion smokers around the world. Validating the current solutions — what does the user journey look like today, and what are the pain points that could be solved? And, if this is a commercial enterprise, how are you planning to make it viable?

We went through the Y Combinator program, where it's really about thinking big: is this going to be a billion-dollar company, and how do you make it into one? That's the shift — going from "I'm going to do a research project and get a publication out of it" to "I'm going to make this into a commercially viable solution that could eventually become a billion-dollar company." It's having that slightly grandiose thinking, and a master plan behind what you're trying to do.

The big difference is validating that this is a market I have some understanding of, and some care around what a good user journey looks like — and understanding who is going to pay for it. Where are the current costs being taken up, and how can I either create a cost saving or a healthcare improvement, and charge around that?

We started off going down a consumer route, really because what we were doing was very innovative. We hadn't seen anyone translate this traditionally face-to-face approach into a digital format, so there were a lot of theories to test. From a product perspective, we developed the CBT program and delivered it, scripted, face-to-face to people. It was quite awkward — you try not to deviate from the script, so you just read it out and see what the feedback was. If they asked questions in between, you'd shy away from it somewhat. But that let us validate that the product actually worked and actually helped people quit smoking.

We then shifted to more of a B2B approach, for two reasons. One: even the best consumer startup only gets 10–15% of people to convert into paying for a subscription, and therefore access to the full suite of tools. We didn't want that — we wanted everyone to have access to all the tools they needed to quit. Two: we knew there was a huge economic cost saving to healthcare organisations and employers when an employee or member quits smoking — somewhere in the region of $3,600 to $4,000 per year. We wanted to capture that value and move the cost upstream to those employers and health plans, so we could increase access for the end user and get as many people quitting as possible.

In terms of the markets we're in now: we're predominantly focused on the US, but we do work with NHS clients here in the UK — some of the big tenders where we provide digital smoking cessation services. In today's climate that's super important, where face-to-face services just aren't possible at the moment.

Being from the UK, the UK was naturally what we tried first. But as a single-payer system, the NHS can be quite difficult to get into, and if it's your only business, it can be quite slow — which isn't in sync with a startup's need to move fast and get into as many hands as possible. In the US, there are multiple different employers and a very different system, which gives you the opportunity to apply to different business streams. You can engage with clients who are enthusiastic technologists — willing to take a risk, willing to take a bet on an early technology they think could disrupt the market. Some of them did that quite a while back, and now, as we're growing, you see more and more people coming to the market asking for a digital solution.

Definitely. That would sum it up.

Y Combinator is a US startup accelerator. It launched about 15 years ago and has had thousands of companies go through it — some incredible ones, like Airbnb, Dropbox and Twitch — which makes it one of the biggest and earliest accelerators to ever exist. There's a lot of history behind it.

The big benefit of a startup accelerator is, first, the mentorship and coaching. As a founder you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and it's about learning from them — but also learning from other people's experiences, understanding what to do at the stage you're at. It creates a peer support network, and a culture where you want to move and grow as fast as possible. They ask you to pick a metric to work on for the next three months — how long the accelerator lasts — and how you want to move that needle. Every week you meet up with a group of other companies in similar areas, and you all talk about how you're moving your needle. Just the fact that these other founders are making 30–40% improvements in their product or revenue pushes you to move yours even further.

The second big benefit is funding. Having that Y Combinator validation gives you access to a whole host of investors that, as a UK startup, we probably wouldn't have had access to without that YC backing. It gives us access to an entirely new market and investor base, which propels the company to a new level.

Definitely — one of the best accelerators, and one of the earliest.

Some of us — myself and Yusuf — do have some coding experience, but obviously not to the same extent. At some point we did have to hire in the experts. We brought in our CTO, Lucas, who's been awesome and with us from the very start. He helped us build our first product and iterate on it ever since, and he's now helping us build out this multi-addiction platform.

When we got into that first accelerator, we did have an MVP, which we'd outsourced — we got an external agency to build it for us. We also built a pitch deck explaining the market, how we could disrupt it, and what our USP would be. That validated it from an external investment point of view. Once we got that first set of investment, it became: how do we build this with the right team internally, with the right engineers to actually implement these designs? So it was a bit of both.

It's hard to tell what living the dream looks like from the outside. It's a lot of hard work — a lot of long hours. There's always more you can be doing as a startup; there isn't a cut-off where at five o'clock you're done. There's always this next thing you need to be doing.

At the same time, it's very rewarding. The space we're in, and the mission we have, is quite easy to articulate and define, which means we're able to attract the best talent, create a good culture, and have a quick feedback loop from our end users — who see the positive impact we've had on their lives and feed that back to us. That's rewarding, and it makes us work a lot harder. So if it's something you're passionate about, a mission you align with, then yeah — I'd say it's definitely living the dream.

It's grown as the company has grown. As a three-to-four-person company where we're all founders and all friends, we didn't necessarily need the best processes in place — we could connect with each other whenever, and we all had a good, open, transparent relationship. As the team and the company grow, you do have to implement processes that maintain that culture of openness and transparency. There are a lot of moving parts, and you have to ensure they're all moving in the same direction, towards the same north-star goal. That's something you have to be very intentional and purposeful about — otherwise it's quite easy for the company to end up running you, rather than you running the company.

I think it's led to a huge amount of success. Being alone in the startup world is quite difficult — I empathise with solo-founder companies. Having Maroof and Yusuf go through the trenches with me has been super beneficial: to have a sounding board, to talk things through, and to have everyone see problems from the same perspective and empathise with each other. It's been super helpful.

That's a good question, and it's one of the things that, as a medic, can seem quite daunting. You start medicine at 18, and it's quite a charted plan: six years of med school, two years of foundation training, then you choose a specialty and go through six or seven years of specialty training. Going into the startup world can be a lot less structured — a bit of a black hole where you don't know exactly what to do.

The thing that helped us most was reading a lot around the space — around how to build startups. One thing I'd recommend is Paul Graham's essays on how to build a startup, what to do in the early days, and the mistakes early startups make. Beyond that: really look into the space you're going into. What are you trying to achieve? What does the current journey look like, and how will it be changed or disrupted by what you build? How big is that disruption — is it something that could lead to a complete change, giving you a large amount of defensibility as a company and a product? Or is it small, and can you make it bigger?

Then it's about validating those things. One of the things Paul Graham says is: do things that don't scale. For us, that meant going out underneath the library and speaking to smokers who smoked outside — understanding their experience. How have you tried quitting before? Do you want to quit? What have you tried, and why wasn't it successful? We asked so many people that a specific pattern kept repeating: they didn't know about CBT, or how helpful it could be. They thought the only way to quit was to wake up one day and just decide to. They didn't realise the downsides — you didn't have this preparation phase, you didn't know why you started smoking or what caused you to continue, and so you were a lot less successful at actually quitting.

Then there's building out designs and an MVP to validate it. Our first MVP we made in PowerPoint — literally a slideshow that went through some really basic pages: here's how much money you saved by quitting, here's some CBT advice. We were validating loads of different solutions in this PowerPoint slideshow. If I find it, honestly, it looks awful — but it helped us gain a knowledge base around this space. As a doctor you don't really know too much about the smoking cessation space from a user perspective. From a clinical research perspective, sure — but I'm not a smoker myself. I really needed to empathise with my users and understand what they're going through to build something that truly works for them.

One is looking at the market and how big it is. Another is speaking to users, trying to understand what they feel and empathising with them. And the third is understanding whether someone's going to put money to this — both from an investment point of view and a purchasing one. Is there a price point you can sell at that creates a certain level of demand?

We've actually debated this internally. I personally don't think you need a brilliant idea to start up. The way a startup works, you start off with an idea, but it may not be the idea you end up going into as a company. Your idea evolves as time goes on — as you get a better understanding of the market, the technologies available, and what people use today. So it's about constantly evolving that idea. But execution makes a huge difference. From a product perspective, some of the best products don't win the market — it's the people who execute and dominate the market who tend to win. It's not necessarily about having the best idea; it's about doing the right thing from an execution and process perspective.

Interesting one.

Yeah, let's do something else. In the current climate, telemedicine is something that's kind of been switched on — a lot of GPs and practices are getting involved in that space and moving into it. There's that initial burst of firepower for people to innovate. But I'd say it still hasn't been achieved to the level of its potential, and that's where I'd want to start, at least from an ideation perspective: what's preventing primary care practitioners from going fully digital, and how can we help them achieve that? How do we get them access to the right data at the right time? How do we ensure patients can get the right care at home when necessary, rather than having to come to hospitals or primary care practices?

One of the big habits for me is being a really good listener and taking feedback well. It's better to learn from a hundred people's experiences than just from my own. I try to learn from reading books by other startup founders — one of my favourites is Shoe Dog, about the Nike founder and his story, how he started off as a regular guy, an avid runner who wanted to disrupt this trainer market he thought was awful for him as a runner. I also learn from my mentors, and from building up a good network of them who can guide me through the process. The advice changes — from a startup phase, to a growth phase, to a final-stage, mature company — so you always need the right mentors for the right situation. Always having your ear to the ground and taking on other people's experiences is super key.

It starts with having the right positive intent. If you go into a conversation with an open mind — this is a person I respect, someone who gives good advice, who could potentially help me change direction — then you're probably on the right footing already. The other aspect: as we've grown the company, I've got a lot better at process. Previously I'd only listen — I wouldn't take down any notes, wouldn't put anything in my diary. Now it's about having a book where you write down your own learnings and reinforce them in your daily habits. If someone tells me to do something differently, I write it down and actually implement it in my daily life.

Honestly, I've read pretty much all the startup-founder books out there. One of the learning points I have is that no two leaders are really the same — everyone has their own personality and their own approach. You don't have to be brash and loud, and you don't have to be quiet and shy, to be a good leader. There are commonalities — being a clear communicator, having a good understanding of the market, a good strategic perspective — but reading about it just makes you realise it's about keeping your own personality when you become a leader.

Exactly.

Before you make the jump, try to ensure you've made as informed a decision as possible — you've gathered all the information you need. Obviously you won't have all of it, so there'll still be a lot of risk and unknowns. But for us: when someone invested in us, that was external validation that someone else believed there was truly an opportunity here. When we put the product in front of users — even though it was a PowerPoint slide — they were amazed, they were interested. People actually wanted something that could help them quit. And when we looked at the clinical research, we knew there was something that could be 10 times better than what's currently on the market. That's what we look for: is it 10 times better than what's out there?

That helped us make the jump from part-time to full-time. If you have the answers to a lot of these questions, then to really propel the company you do have to make that jump. And if it's something you're passionate about, something core to your mission, it won't feel like a massive risk. There'll be ups and downs — times where it's going really well and times where it's not — but as long as you internalise that and understand, at a higher level, what you want to achieve, then definitely go for it. There's a community all around you who've been through the same process and are willing to guide you and help you. You'll be astonished at how supportive and helpful this community is.

Being an NHS doctor, sometimes you don't realise how well respected a doctor really is. You see it a lot more in the US. When people find out you're a doctor and you're doing a startup in healthcare, they're astonished that someone would give up a career in medicine to go into a startup doing behaviour change — it's just not very common there. The lucrativeness of being a physician there is so high that there's a high barrier to actually leaving medicine. Whereas here, it's a bit of a different training path, a different reward-to-risk ratio.

I'm committed to Quit Genius. I really want to see this company grow — to fulfil our mission of being that technology-enabled digital clinic for multiple addictions. Seeing that fulfilled would be awesome. It's a five-year goal, a ten-year goal, and we're quite relentless and persistent in how we approach things. It's definitely something we're going to spend a lot of the next years trying to achieve.

Just to follow up on that — if anyone is looking to do their own startup, or looking for any advice, they can reach out to me, to our team, or anyone else in the founder network I think might be helpful. I'm sure they'll get some really good feedback and responses.