The Company

Founded by Patrice Harris in 2020, eMed is democratizing healthcare with a digital point-of-care platform that provides fast, easy and affordable at-home healthcare testing, supervised and guided online by eMed Certified Guides. They embrace quantitative medicine to deliver prescribed tests and treatments directly to patients, driving better and more cost-effective results. In essence, eMed’s goal is to democratize healthcare regardless of insurance for around 25 bucks.

The Team 

Justin Kittle is the Manager of Technology Partnerships at eMed, having been at the helm of the company for over a year now. At eMed, apart from his day job, Justin is also responsible for building demos and prototypes of the product to be able to showcase it to their partners and customers. Prior to joining eMed, he was one of the founding members at Magic Leap.

‍The Problems

When Justin joined eMed, he was surprised to find himself in a meeting of 12+ people, all gathered to discuss building a demo for an upcoming pitch. What’s more surprising was the team comprised program managers, engineers and even the president for shipping the demo.  Some of the other problems he encountered were, 

📌 Utilization of Engineering Resources for Building Product Demos

‍At eMed, the idea always was to build in public to get feedback from customers and iterate on the go. That meant quickly shipping out prototypes. However, due to engineering involvement, this was increasingly becoming a time consuming task.

Building demos meant many different teams had to come together to give it a shape. This resulted in consistent back and forth leading to crucial engineering hours getting sucked in non-technical work. Many times the team had to literally pause product development to focus on building the demo, compromising on roadmaps. 

📌 eMed's Staging Environment wasn't Ideal for Product Showcases

‍The sales team was using the company’s staging environments to showcase the product which wasn’t ideal. Because of the typical uncertainties around the demo environment, there were cases of random bugs or unexpected hiccups popping up during showcases. Additionally, because the team had to always wait for a "good-enough" version of the product on staging, it prolonged the time it took to send product pitches or share product functionalities with the target audience.

The Search

Justin’s search for an interactive tool started with two primary goals in mind,

1. For using it on live sales demos
2. For onboarding new customers

He was looking for a way to capture the eMed platform, be able to edit and customize the captures down to personalizing them for specific customers. He wanted to replace the one-pagers and PPTs, with interactive leave-behinds, for their efficacy in shortening the sales cycles. 

Justin looked at a bunch of different HTML-based demo tools, before zeroing in on Storylane. In one of the instances, he said he could not even see the tool, even after much coercing, as the rep adjudged his use case to be a wrong fitment for the tool. 

"What differentiated Storylane was the feature set. Being able to put in a whole host of content types (videos, text, images, gifts), edit the HTML, be able to add in the steps easily, and much more. The tool had all the right ingredients."

-Justin Kittle, Head of Technology Partnerships

‍The Solution

Since onboarding Storylane, a lot has changed for Justin and his team on how they’re building demos today.

📌 Get Immediate Feedback on Under Development Features 

‍Storylane has made it possible for Justin and his team to get feedback on the product direction sooner by getting interactive versions of the product in the hands of beta testers. He uses design mockups of unreleased product and features, and pieces them together to build out a pitch for the product, with HTML linking.

The result is a consistent stream of important customer feedback that’s quicker and easy to implement, with the product still being in the development phase. This earlier took months when the product team always waited for the almost final versions to share with beta customers.

📌 Simulating the Actual Product Experience for Different Stakeholders

In addition to customer feedback, many times even the executive team wants to see the improvements the team is bringing to existing products or new products they’re prototyping. Other times, the sales team wants to show the upcoming upgrades to push prospects further down the pipeline.

In such scenarios, being able to simulate the product flow during live calls to show how the products will look and function in different stages for different stakeholders becomes really helpful. eMed uses Storylane to get its customers acquainted about their testing experience. It’s like a teaser that they click through to understand how a test would look from start to finish. 

eMed recently scored a big win in terms of partnering with the National Institute of Health (NIH), and when asked about how they did it, Justin said,

"The deal was won purely with Storylane demos and some powerpoint presentations. Rather than sending them actual tests to show the procedure, we used Storylane as a prototyping tool to just mock it up for them. It's super useful and very easy to use."

-Justin Kittle, Head of Technology Partnerships

‍

📌 Reducing the Number of Support Calls and Speeding up Resolution Times

Justin has also been tinkering on using Storylane on the support side. He recently created a few product tours explaining how to use the eMed portal  - accessing past results, setting up users, etc., that the support folks are now actively sharing with existing customers to troubleshoot queries.

This has cut down the number of support calls that the team otherwise would have had to go on. Even the support team has now started sending customers these interactive tours for a quicker and much more efficient resolution.

The Impact

The biggest impact of using Storylane for eMed has been in terms of non-utilization of engineering resources for demo creation. The clearest outcomes have been, 

• Saving 15-20 engineering hours per month that were previously utilized on building demos.
• Putting a pause on a couple of tech hires that were to be made solely for the purpose of demos and prototype building.
• The request for support calls has gone down by around 8% while the query resolution time has improved by more than 20%, courtesy of Storylane product walkthroughs.

Future Use Cases

• Create more interactive sales content which could be either demoed on live calls or shared with the buyers after the calls as a leave-behind for multiple decision-makers. 
• Use it on their website to showcase the product to website visitors and in turn convert them. 
• Setup a custom domain and integrate with Salesforce to build a strategy around how the demos should be shared and how to act upon the insights thus gathered.