Sheraan Amod, founder and CEO of RecoMed, South Africa’s largest healthcare booking platform, joins Jason to unpack the founder’s story behind building a two-sided healthcare marketplace – the “hotels.com for healthcare.”
In Part 1, Sheraan shares how he spotted a model proven overseas but missing at home, and why “obvious” ideas are so hard to sell (10 years ago, people laughed at the idea of booking a doctor from your phone). He explains why healthcare runs on trust — and how that trust creates inertia, high switching costs, and the need for deep local customization. The breakthrough? Instead of forcing doctors to adopt shiny new software, RecoMed integrated with 90% of the local practice-management systems they were already using – now the company’s biggest strategic moat.
He also gets candid about survival: almost going bust after three years, becoming a nationwide player overnight thanks to a hospital CEO’s birthday deadline, and the hard-won principle to “architect for survival” so you’re still in the game when luck arrives. Plus, why the Silicon Valley unicorn playbook doesn’t translate to African markets – and what founders here should build instead.
