40: The breastfeeding app answering over 100k queries a week with Enric from LactApp

15 Minutes With The Doctor: Learn from Healthcare Entrepreneurs and Innovators

Enric is the co-founder of LactApp, a mobile app that offers personalised answers to women struggling or needing breastfeeding support. The app is driven by a complex and well-designed “navigation system” populated with 76 000 questioning paths to provide more than 3000 unique answers using AI. Learn how an unforunate event led to the creation of the app, the features, how they create new content, their competitors, how they generate revenue and more. What you will learn from this episode: Why was the app developed? One of the Co-Founders, Maria, got into a car accident and found it challenging to breastfeed. Empowered by her unfortunate circumstance and realising that not every woman has a strong support system, the company was founded to bring that “support” to other women who have difficulties breastfeeding and with other pregnancy-related issues. Is the information about breastfeeding not already digitally accessible? There are three big keys to their success: information, support, and network. Information is about the verified sources, evidence, and data on breastfeeding, menstrual cycles, menopause and more. Support is all about the professional entities who can corroborate or verify the given information, like doctors and other health professionals. Network is the amalgamation of experience from other women who had been in the situation, it’s the community that helps personalise the system. What are its features? The app has a symptom checker or Q&A navigation system with different areas of consultation. The mother will tap on those areas. Depending on the mother and baby’s profile, the app can guide her, with the assistance of the symptom checker, it provides an answer that is unique and highly personalised. Through artificial intelligence, the app generates more content based on the questions asked by the user, and from there, builds it back to the system. How do you create all these paths, and how did you know these are the questions people are asking? The founding team and the rest of the team have more than 50 years of experience in one-on-one consultations and guiding women. Initially, they used notebooks and spreadsheets to populate questions. From there, they transitioned to using artificial intelligence that takes real-world implications into consideration. This way, they can create more content, more consultations, more paths, and eventually, more answers. Since the start, they surpassed 12 million consultations and currently handle over 100 000 consultations weekly. How do you generate revenue to make it sustainable? They have a brick-and-mortar clinic in Barcelona to do one-on-one activities, academic activities and bootstrapping to generate revenue. Added to that, corporates and health insurance companies are now starting to propose partnerships. They are also launching a premium version of the app that operates in a monthly subscription model. Links: Connect with Enric Pallarés on LinkedIn Connect with Vinay Shankar on LinkedIn Once Daily: https://www.oncedaily.co/lactapp-breastfeeding-app/