Q&A With Jephthah Aletan

Jephthah Aletan at UXDX Community: Africa. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0T-x4Fnkls

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Building on what already existed

[00:00:00] Rory: Welcome, Jephthah.

[00:00:02] Jephthah: Hi Rory. I'm great, great. How are you yourself?

[00:00:08] Rory: Thank you. Excellent. Your talk was about going from physical to digital and creating an effective user journey for WellaHealth. I've looked at some of the feedback from people as well, and it was a very highly regarded talk, very well received, and I thought it was great as well, so thank you very much for sharing.

[00:00:32] I want to jump in with a few questions about the products and how you went about it. One of the problems that people always have is they think, "I don't have this amazing idea." So I'm just curious: did your company invent the tests and the treatments, or were you just finding an innovative way to market and get them out there to people?

[00:01:00] Jephthah: The crazy thing is those things were already available. The rapid diagnostic test kits have been around for years, and pharmacies have been in existence for hundreds of years in Nigeria. But nobody had thought about linking the treatment procedure to these already existing channels to make it way more effective, and that was the opportunity we saw.

[00:01:27] I'll give you a little bit of background. The founder of WellaHealth is a medical doctor who was working in Northern Ireland and in Nigeria. He came to the country and realized that malaria was killing so many people, and he wanted to do something. That was when the idea came around: how can we, as much as possible, allow people to access treatment? The main goal was for us to reduce the cost of treatment, not to change the way people were accessing treatment. We weren't really thinking about leveraging pharmacies at all.

[00:02:00] But by the time we did our user research and spoke with a lot of people, we realized that, like I said in the talk, virtually everybody we spoke to goes to a pharmacist before they go to the hospital. So it was an established behavior, and we felt, rather than change this behavior, why don't we build on what already exists? That was what literally led to the name, [?] extraterrest.

Getting pharmacists on board

[00:02:26] Rory: Excellent. I love the idea of piggybacking on top of something that's already there, but making it better. In line with that, there was already a habit or a practice of people going to pharmacists. You mentioned that one of the challenges you had, and thank you for sharing the challenges as well, because often a lot of people just give the story that everything worked out perfectly when it never does, was that it was difficult to get some of the pharmacists on board. What were the key challenges you had there, and how did you as a team figure out their needs and get them aligned?

[00:03:06] Jephthah: There aren't too many secrets about what happens in the Nigerian health space, but pharmacies are not really regarded as primary points of care, primary care, in Nigeria. There's this big disparity: should the pharmacies actually take care of people, or should people go to the hospital? So it was imperative that we try, as much as possible, to educate people and also to speak with the pharmacists to engage them.

[00:03:36] Then here comes the point of payments. We were coming in and saying people are going to be paying us 459, which is less than a dollar, every month to be able to access treatment that is about five thousand naira. So there was that challenge of, "How would you guys manage this? Where would the money come from? Are you an NGO?" No, we are for-profit, not an NGO. But we definitely had to find a way to speak with them and engage them more.

[00:04:00] The other thing we did was make pharmacists partners. Rather than just saying we want to work with you, we changed the strategy from working with pharmacists to actually partnering with them. That led to us partnering with the Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria, which is now a main partner. We also started creating tools that help the pharmacies improve their operations and make them more effective and faster.

[00:04:27] So rather than them just helping us with treatment, now we allow them to do patient follow-up with tools created by us, we give them access to loans from our side, and they have a wallet system that allows them to collect payments. Now we are doing more business with them than what we started with initially. Because of those value-added propositions and other things that were available, it became easier to convince them to get on the train with us.

The business model and profitability

[00:04:56] Rory: Great. I love that leading by just demonstrating value. One question, and you brought it up there: what you're asking for per month is quite low and the treatments are quite expensive. From your perspective, are you one of these Silicon Valley companies that doesn't make any money and is hoping that eventually, down the line, you'll make some? Or are you actually profitable at this point, or do you need to grow to a certain stage to get to that profitability point?

[00:05:27] Jephthah: Our goal is to be profitable. The first thing is that there's usually this confusion that we are an insurance company. WellaHealth is not an insurance company. What we do is work with insurers to create technology-driven solutions that allow people to access insurance in micro, bite sizes. We do not actually own the insurance that we give to people; rather, we work with insurers. Ours is to develop a technology system that allows this to be distributed to people, for people to be able to access those micro-insurance plans that have been created by these bigger insurance companies.

[00:06:07] But as we went on, we started to realize that there are way more opportunities around the business. That's part of putting your hands down, seeing what is already available and trying to build on it. So we now have more different kinds of offers aside from the insurance. Like I said in the talk, we've now gone into doing pharmacy benefits management with these insurers. So our network of partners, and our patients, now have access to drugs cheaper than the regular rate they would normally have accessed them at pharmacies, because we started seeing those kinds of opportunities. We're getting to the point where we'll be very profitable, but not right now.

Reaching people who aren't insured

[00:06:48] Rory: They always talk about having a mission behind your company that will get people really excited, and to be honest, the mission behind WellaHealth does sound really exciting. That's great. In terms of what you've done, is there anything for the people who aren't insured? I guess it's a twofold question. Can they just go to the pharmacy and take advantage of all the work you've done setting up the pharmacists, or do they have to be a part of WellaHealth? And the second part is, can they go up that day and join?

[00:07:34] Jephthah: That's a very good question, but I'll share a story with you, because I like to tell stories. We recently started working in [?] Eco Techno, a small town in the eastern part of Nigeria. We got over 2,000 subscribers from there, but over 90 percent of the subscribers are first-time subscribers. They've never had any form of insurance before, so meeting WellaHealth was the first time they actually had access to a plan.

[00:08:07] What we did was allow them to get access to the service at the point of sale. We partnered with pharmacies there, so when people walk in and want to treat malaria, rather than spend five thousand naira on treatment, they're told: subscribe to our plan. It's just two thousand four hundred naira for the next three months. Why don't you subscribe to our plan and have access to your treatments for the next three months, rather than spending this large amount of money? That made it easy for us to onboard more people, and it spread like wildfire.

[00:08:36] Now we have an experience center there. We actually built a physical space there for people to be able to access these tools. So people sometimes walk into the pharmacy and find out about WellaHealth for the first time, and it's almost impossible for them not to subscribe and get assistance. But now we are also thinking about this, and we're building a community that allows people to actually speak with doctors and have access to that information, and from there, hopefully, we can get them onboarded onto our platform.

[00:09:10] Rory: Great. Well, thanks very much for your time. Just to summarize, I love the approach of going with a niche and then expanding, rather than being like the people who try to build the everything product. It was a great idea to start that way, and I loved how you explained the user journey in your talk. So if anybody hasn't watched it, I'd advise you to go watch it now.