From a spark of an idea to a thriving reality, City Innovations helped create a revolutionary chiropractic services app that soared to $10 million in revenue, turning $100k creative capital into a major success.
Client: Chiropractic Appointment Management
Industry: Healthcare
Funnel Stage: Envision, Validate, Bootstrap, and Build
The Challenge
A client working within the chiropractic industry saw a need for an easy and efficient way for patients to schedule, cancel, and manage their appointments. The current method consisted of patients calling their offices to speak with someone over the phone. However, this manual method was time-consuming for both the patient and the employees.
With many chiropractic patients being tech-savvy 20 to 40-year-olds, the client was determined to transform the industry with a mobile chiropractic scheduling app. This generated a need to transcend the mundanity of scheduling and create an app that could orchestrate appointments seamlessly.
Before moving forward and building their app, the client wanted to be absolutely certain that it would be a good fit for chiropractic practices and their patients. The client reached out to City Innovations to help envision, validate, bootstrap, and build a solution that was sure to be successful.
The Approach
City Innovations worked with the client by applying lean startup principles to determine if their idea of a mobile chiropractic scheduling application was the right fit for the market.
Envision:
Before any portion of the app-building process could take place, the initial concept needed to be researched at a deeper level to fully understand the industry needs and the market landscape.
After a full industry competitor analysis done by the City Innovations team, they found that there was nothing in the market that offered this type of service, specifically on a mobile device platform to chiropractic offices. Knowing this allowed them to move forward.
The team then conducted on-site walk-throughs to document the chiropractic journeys while learning everything from what a chiropractic doctor does on a daily basis to what chiropractic assistants were responsible for.
From there, they learned the point of friction within the industry. In their study, they found that manual input and scheduling took up the majority of a chiropractic assistant’s time. This was an area that could be automated to increase efficiency throughout the office.
Validation:
To validate their idea for product-market fit, City Innovations worked with the client to put together a simple PowerPoint prototype to showcase their mobile chiropractic scheduling application.
Upon creating a prototype, they validated it with current chiropractic customers, potential customers, and chiropractic assistants, while gathering feedback and feature ideas from the groups.
City Innovations also took the prototype to several conferences to demonstrate how it worked and encourage pre-sign-ups.
Despite the application not fully functioning at the time, the team manually got the backend office scheduling systems to talk to each other to appear like the application was ready for market. Hundreds of pre-sign-ups were collected, along with further feedback about the idea.
Bootstrap:
After feedback was received and interest levels were validated, City Innovations worked with the client to create a minimal viable product (MVP).
Through reverse engineering EHR software and combining it with open-source software, the team quickly bootstrapped a low-code solution that would allow chiropractic patients to manage their appointments via a mobile app.
From there, a go-to-market strategy was determined and the product was tested within the market.
Build:
Once the application was validated in the market and used by over 100 chiropractic locations, City Innovations assembled a development team to extend the application’s code to support the scalability that the client needed. This team was then onboarded as full-time employees working directly for the client to support the application.
Once completed, a minimal marketable product (MMP) application was developed that integrated with three top EHR systems in the industry.
The Results
Guided by lean startup principles, City Innovations was able to develop a successful chiropractic appointment management mobile application for the client, turning $100k of creative capital into $10 million in revenue.
Overall, the app helped increase office efficiency and productivity by freeing chiropractic staff from scheduling and managing appointments over the phone — ultimately saving practices over $7,000 annually.
Fast forward to today and the company serves hundreds of chiropractic offices throughout the United States and thousands of mobile app users.
About City Innovations
City Innovations is a venture studio focused on building digital businesses that will matter to the world. Our strategists, technologists, and capitalists all work to make sure clients build the right thing and get it to the market faster — supporting entrepreneurs every step of the way, from idea to launch. Learn more at CityInnovations.com.
