What's the Startup?!

Crafting the Perfect Pitch with PreventScripts Founder Brandi Harless

• Sprocket • Season 1 • Episode 12

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In this episode of “What’s the Startup?!”, we sit down with Brandi, co-founder of PreventScripts, to uncover the decade-long journey behind building a game-changing health tech company. Brandi shares the raw realities of startup life—how iterating on a product and refining your pitch isn’t just a one-time event but an ongoing process that can make or break your business. We dive deep into the importance of staying grounded, setting realistic goals, and the lessons learned from five years of rigorous R&D. If you’ve ever wondered how to craft a compelling brand story that resonates with both investors and customers, this episode is a masterclass in persistence, adaptability, and the art of the pivot. Tune in for actionable insights and inspiration from someone who’s been in the trenches and come out the other side.

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Well, thank you, Brandi, so much for taking some time out of your day to chat with us. You have been building your company for over a decade, so we know that you have vast experience in crafting your pitch and refining your story over time. So first, introduce us to PreventScripts, what you do, and what led you down that journey.

Brandi Harless:

Yeah, golly. Well, so at PreventScripts, we are on a mission to level the playing field when it comes to access to behavior change methodologies. And so specifically what that means is we work with primary care providers to help them help their patients take on healthy living behaviors like drinking more water and eating more vegetables and moving more. But we do it in a clinical way so that the clinicians actually can make real changes. money from insurance companies. And it's usually pretty free to the patient. So it's our way of saying we're going to help disseminate all of that knowledge has been in the field for decades in that way. The way I started this journey in particular was dr Davis, my co one of my co founders. There's three of us. had approached me right after I had left a job and I can't remember which job it is now. And I was on my way to medical school. So I had already gone to graduate school to get a master's degree. I had come back home and had worked in a couple of different positions and I didn't really know what was, I thought medical school was next. So I had applied to 18 schools and she comes to me and she says, you don't want to be a doctor, you should make a bigger impact. Because doctors can only make an impact one by one by one. And at first I was like, kind of take it back. Like, you don't get to say that because you already are a doctor. That's not fair. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, you know what? She's not wrong. I have a public health degree. We think about populations and public health. Maybe this is something I should do. So we started our endeavors on March 11th, 2014, and we basically did R and D for five years. We really wanted to take this prevention approach because we were both passionate about it. She had come home from St. Louis and worked in Benton actually. And was realizing how much of the conversation she was having with patients were about preventable episodes. And so, we knew we wanted to do prevention, but there was no business model for that in healthcare. None. There was not a way to help our customers make money. There wasn't really a way for them to then want to pay us money. And so we just kept learning and getting ourselves involved in the networking and the marketing. In the market, not the marketing. And finally, in 2019, Medicare passed these new CPT codes, so the way that, you know, physicians get paid by insurance. And it was this aha moment for us to say, okay, now wait, now things are starting to shift and healthcare's starting to get more interested in prevention. Maybe we have something here. So, that was kind of the beginning of the journey.

I love that story because I think a lot of people feel like entrepreneurship just happens in the span of like 30 days. Like you get this great idea and you know, it's the one. And then immediately you just know the path, but I think it can probably provide a lot of comfort and motivation to people to know that it is kind of a long haul. But you spent five years just dedicatedly watching and inputting information. And I'm sure that translated into an incredibly strong pitch and obviously a strong business model. How did that all that time researching and paying attention and inputting this information, how did that translate to a strong brand story? And pitch for you?

Brandi Harless:

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of it goes back to the how, once we knew that there was a value proposition, then the pieces of starting to build a product to actually build something out of that. And we had built some little MVPs with grant money. It all looked like an app at the time. And then we kind of realized like, no, we are onto something bigger than that. And we need to be thinking about all the pieces of that. So I would say The, the piece that I would land on is this realization that it's an iterative process. And in the iterative process does end up building the brand. Because you're building it not from this like, I always say this to Natalie, my co founder, we're not copy and pasting other people's stuff. And it's really easy to do. It's easy to go look at all the thing, people that you think are your competitors or further along than you are and just say, Oh, look what they did. I should probably do that too. Because what if that got them the next thing? Most of the time, what I've learned now is when you get under the hood, if you happen to have a chance to talk to those people and start to have the deep conversations, most of what we put out in the ether is not as deep as we think it is, right? Or as deep as it looks on the outside. So I think By iterating in your own story and iterating in your own product with your own unique capabilities that you bring to the company with the team that you surround yourself with. You don't copy and paste that. That's not available to copy and paste because we can't clone ourselves. So that right there starts your brand story because your unique opportunities to find your value or the problems and the challenges that your customers Are coming to you with are all your own perspective. And I think now I see that, but during it, it's just this constant feeling of not being enough. It's a constant feeling of like, we're not there. We're not there. We're not there. And I always tell Natalie, be where you are. We need to be where we are right now, because in 2019, when we finally started doing this, I said to myself, the beginning of the year, I said, okay, it's been five years. If we don't, what's the next best thing that needs to happen to move this company along? And I said, we have to pilot our guesses. We have to pilot something. We have to actually take our assumptions and our hypotheses and put them into action somewhere to see what happens. Again, we had literally paper based products with this measly little app. Like that's all we had. And I said, if we don't find a place to pilot in 2019, I'm done. And it was just enough of like, whatever that was to motivate me that we found a pilot in five months. In 2020, I said, if we don't raise real capital and have real investors involved in this, I'm done because I'm exhausted trying to pay the bills and do all those things. We raised half a million dollars in 2021. I said, if we don't create the product of our dreams now that we've piloted and we have funding and then we go to market and get in the market, I'm done. We built the product and we got our first customer. And it's like the next best thing was the thing I kept holding myself to because I, we did spend five years of R and D, but I also feel like there's so many lessons in that whole thing too, of like doing too much wandering and guessing and debating about it. I think five years is too long, but we did have to wait for a healthcare value proposition to show up too. So there's kind of both things that had to happen, you know,

I love that concept of setting these goals. Like what is worth it to do this year or right now? And if we don't accomplish that, then it's worth it to quit or it's worth it to call this the end. That is huge. And for some reason, that's impacting me in a really big way. How do you come to what those goals are? How do you decide, okay, we're doing this or it's done?

Brandi Harless:

For me, it really was going back to the basics. Truthfully, I had so much noise when I entered 2019 because of now knowing there was an opportunity, but also knowing all the things we learned in five years. And I finally was like, let's go back to the basics. And what are the basics, right? The basics are that the best products are created by iteration. The best products are created in the real world. They're not created in the lab. We know that. We know that when things from the lab have to get transitioned into the real world, there's a huge hurdle that happens. They don't get created in this conference room. They get created by creating something that you think is going to solve a problem, and then finding someone who's willing to test it for you. And it doesn't have to be some magical, like, humongous test. In this case, it was literally one doctor in one clinic saying, Sure, I'll try to roll out your theorized protocols. And then guess what? 40 percent of it didn't even work. Like, they were like, this is too hard, I can't remember to do this, or this is never going to work because the patients aren't going to care, and I'm not going to sit here and sell this to my patients like you want me to. All that insight turned our product into the better product it is today because we recognized that, okay, if you're not going to sell this product to the patient, quote unquote sell it, then we need to get around that and educate the patient in a different way. So just getting in the real world, I think I'm answering your question. I just want to make sure because now I'm on a soapbox, but I think that real world piece is what grounded me. Then from there, it becomes more obvious because from there you have, Hey, we've already piloted this thing. We now know what the real world's going to do with it. We need to either go back to the drawing board and re imagine it and keep testing. Or in our case, it was, we have just enough of a value proposition and a performa that we can show up and say, Here's how health care works. Here's how we're going to get our customers paid, etcetera, etcetera. So I guess maybe the back to the basics piece is the truth of it all because there's so much noise.

How has your pitch evolved over time too? Because I'm sure like what you initially set forth as here's what we're going to do. Then you get that feedback from from the doctor and how it performs in real time and you have to quickly iterate. And of course I'm new myself to the startup world. So it's wild to me that we pitch something that we plan to do or we're going to do. We want this to happen, but then we learn new things and we have to keep iterating. So how does that iteration process translate to the pitching process?

Brandi Harless:

Golly, listen, it is a feedback loop slog. It feels like, I mean, I feel thankful that we finally got to a place where we could actually like it. hired somebody to help us design a deck and all that kind of stuff. But before that, it was all me. It was all me thinking through and Natalie helping, but to think through the essence. And I'll go back to the basics though. There's a reason why the pitch deck that we all see has a template because investors want to see very specific things. And so use the template and just iterate on the template. It makes it simpler. I will say over time, I did get a little tired of the template because I didn't think it was accomplishing what I needed at a certain time. So I will just caution everybody. I think that as you grow and get more traction and you get more insight, The pitch does need to evolve a little bit, but to start out, I think the basic 10 slide pitch deck is perfect because it really is challenging us as entrepreneurs to think about the essence, right? It's the essence we're looking for. It's, it's the don't fluff this up. This is not a marketing game. It really truly is not a marketing game. And I think if you treat it that way, and, and I don't mean marketing's fluffy. I just mean, It's not about, it's a, it's a combination of a vision that is not real yet, but that is grounded in some good assumptions that have good logic behind them. And I think that's what I always struggled to do was to make sure that I wasn't just talking about some, you know, vision that's not realistic because people are wanting to see some groundedness. That makes so much sense because when you're

marketing, you're trying to propose a solution to someone who is experiencing the problem. And a lot of times you're trying to use the very language that they're using in their head to talk about their own frustrations. But when you're pitching to investors, they're not your target audience for this product. They're your target audience for. for what are they looking for? What are you exactly trying to sell? Cause it's not your product. It's the, the vision of your product. Yeah.

Brandi Harless:

And it's the, for an investor in particular, even if you have nothing and you don't have, sales to say, I've already been able to prove that this is, you know, going to work because people have any money for it yet. Even when you don't have that, it's, it's really, again, it goes back to the what assumptions are you making and what are they grounded in? Are they grounded in really solid logic? You know, can you really tell a good logical path to where you want to get that it makes sense and who's your buyer and what their problems are? And this, the business canvas, the business model canvas that has been out for now, what, two decades? I did that early on and I do think that activity helped a lot. It got a little bit too robust for where I was, I think. But it helps to answer some of those key questions about Who are you really going to sell this to? And even if you're wrong, right, even if you're wrong that that's not your actual buyer I think, you know, when you talk to investors, you can say, here's what I need to test. I need your money to help me test this theory. And let me just tell you, if this theory is wrong, I'm going to commit to trying a different one. Right? Because early on, that's what investors want to hear. They're investing in you. First of all, I think we hear that all the time, like early on, they're investing in the entrepreneur. And I think one of the. capabilities and skills they look for is that you're not going to quit. You're not going to quit. If your first hypothesis is wrong, you're going to keep going and keep thinking about, okay, I was wrong about that buyer. Now I'm going to go to the next one. And you're not going to stop. And I think that is a very appealing. That's why I think I was able to raise money after I was the mayor because people saw my willingness to be persistent and that I could flex constantly when things didn't work. And I think that gave a lot of confidence to my early investors because they saw me do it in real life. So I think establishing that that capability of yourself is a really strong thing to think about when you're talking to investors.

What are some ways that that actually manifests in the pitch itself?

Brandi Harless:

Yeah. I mean, I, I think it manifests in talking about your own story. Absolutely. Because it's still a personal game. It's still a, you know, your interview, you're looking at me as an individual. So I think it manifests mostly in how you tell your own story. Your own story of what you've done and what you've come through, even if it's personal and it's not professional and you're just, your story is the example. Right? Your story is solidifying the fact that you have this ability. And then I think in a pitch, you can set it up as, Here's where I am. I'm in the concept stage. Here's what the concept stage means. The concept stage means that I have a hypothesis. And my hypothesis is this. And I'm going to go talk to these hundred people that are maybe having the same problem, and then I'm going to take that information, I'm going to create something out of it, and I'm going to turn back around. Again, it's essence. It's the, it's the basics, right? And so that's the basics of business is solving a problem. That's all it means. That's all people do in business every day, all day long is solve other people's problems in exchange for money. And so I think if you can keep that, the strength of your pitch, between your own story and between telling the actual phase you're in and how you're going to iterate through it. I, I think that's a really strong place to start

for sure. What are some other components of a strong pitch? What needs to be included? Like absolute must haves?

Brandi Harless:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the basic 10 slide that I think you guys use actually. But if I could summarize it, I think it's the, it's the story. The strong, compelling story. Remember, it's not only the story of your concept, it's your own story. Your own connection to the thing you're doing is the most important. I'm just going to say that. The strongest pitches are the individuals who stand up there and can tell a compelling reason why they're standing in front of you in the first place. The second piece of that is the problem. Okay. What is the actual lived experience problem that you're trying to solve for, and who has it, right? Even if it's a group of different kinds of people that you think you could go after, what's the problem? And then the way you talk about your own product, I think you made a really great point when you said, it's not really a marketing story. You're not marketing to the investor. You're talking specifically about the product you've put in place and why you've chosen the product that you've created.

Now, when you get to this stage where we were, which is a seed investment, you know, we're, we have revenue that we can build a story off of, you know, there's some proof there. And then we also had investors wanting to know, well, what's the end game. You know, are we going to exit this thing? Are we going to build a legacy business? Which means we're just going to run it until we retire. Are we going to, really there's only two options. Selling, and there's all kinds of exit strategies, like to sell it or merge or whatever. Early on, I always felt so silly because I'm like, who knows? I mean, I can tell you what I kind of sort of hope and think I did realize later on that investors do want to know what you think you want to do though, because I didn't recognize how many options there are on the table. And an investor does want to know, am I investing in this for like your legacy, you know, your whole career? Or am I really investing in this for like a five to 10 year return? I did recognize that eventually. But I think sometimes we get really stuck on trying to figure all that out and really it's a guess. And just make your best educated assumptions and move on. And focus more on that front end, I think. On the flip side of that, what are the components of a weak pitch? I was kind of sort of saying that I think as I was talking about the strong components because of the parts that I've always been frustrated by. You know, I think showing There's this tendency to feel like you have to show this hockey stick graph of all your revenue going up And I just think that is nobody believes it. I just sure do it and then even joke about it like hey I'm doing the hockey stick because I know everybody likes to see the hockey stick, but here's really what's gonna happen It's gonna go like this. No more coffees. I spent Yes, making this pitch Yeah, maybe do that instead I like that actually, you know, you had to see a hockey stick So I'll just give you my coffee intake Instead but I think, I think feeling like you have to be a vision is one thing, trying to make a pitch deck for a place that you're not really at is probably the weak pitch, right? Because then it's just not, it doesn't feel real. It doesn't even feel available. It feels like you're, and being aspirational is great. And I think there's a balance here. I don't even know that I could formula that right now, but I do think it starts with getting grounded in like where we are right now and what's the next best thing I can do. But make sure you keep that aspiration. Like, here's where I hope I'm headed one day. But just maybe that's enough and don't tie it into all of the other, the other parts, meaning don't create that big hockey stick unless you can just joke about it, you know, but show that total addressable market so that your investor sees. Okay, wait, there's 300, 000 primary care providers in America. I only needed a percent of them. You know, a small percent of them. That starts becoming believable. Because if I can get 3, 000 of them, or 5, 000 of them, of 300, 000, I'm like, okay, wait a second. Yeah, you probably could. Or, like, there's 50, 000 in an eight state region. I only need three. And you know, it starts to become believable that way. For people who, maybe like me, who are stage fright and feel a little nervous. What, in your experience, has worked well for you? Oh, you know, I think everyone has a different, depending on your personality, you have a different approach to this. So I want to be careful not to think that this is like, The end all be all, right? And I want to give a hard example. I cannot memorize a speech, a pitch, or anything. I cannot do it. My brain does not want to hold on to it. Although that's how I made it through college. I just memorized a bunch of stuff. I still don't know. I can't do it. Natalie, that's how she does this. She memorizes by heart. Almost word for word exactly what she's going to say. So that's the difference that I think we just have to recognize. Some people need that memorization piece and some people don't. So just know, know which one you can work with. The reason I can't do it is because I will get too tied up in forgetting the words and then I won't know where I am and I'm a visual person so I'm literally in my brain reading that thing and I can't come back to it when I'm in the middle of nervousness, you know. So what I have done instead, this is how I handle it, is I will go through my slides and pick out three really key components. How do I want to, how do I want to transition from the slide before to make this all feel like it belongs together? What are my top three things I want to say in that slide that are important? And then how am I going to transition out of it? So I just try to think about it high level so that when I'm doing it, I am. A little bit more seamless, if that's even possible. The other thing, I mean, practice, practice, practice is always going to be one of the answers, right? Because doing it over and over again just gets you more familiar with what thoughts you're putting together. And then, you know, I always do this thing where I, like, stand with my hands on my hips before I go into any kind of setting like that. And it's just this, like, 100%. It's something, it's just like a redirect really fast to your amygdala or something. And it, like, flips your brain to be like, I got this. I'm big. And sometimes I even have to do this, like take up all the space. Yeah. And it is something just with your mind body connection that completely resets. It's nuts. But I have to do it right before. I can't, like, and I sit there and kind of anticipate, like, when am I going to do this, when am I going to do this? And so it's like five seconds before somebody calls my name, I'm like, okay, here I go. You know, so I think that is absolutely a secret weapon. For anyone listening to this and they're about to get their own pitch ready, and they might be a little nervous. They might be wondering, Can I do this? Is this actually for me? What's next? What is one tip or piece of advice or one take away that you want them to walk away with? I mean, I think the biggest thing I'm realizing now in my life is You kind of don't realize that you're getting better at it when you're getting better at it. I just had a call with one of my mentors before I came in and we were talking about this evolution of where I am and where our company is. And, and they said to me, well, don't forget, don't forget what, how far you've come. Like, don't forget all the things that have happened to this moment. And I think the same thing is true for pitching. I mean, my very first pitch, if I probably have the video, I can't even imagine how like nervous I was and scatterbrained I was and all the things that could come with that. And so I think it's just like entrepreneurship. It's the same exact thing. You have to be willing to persist and to iterate. Constantly. And when you go into your first and second and third and fourth, you know I'm coming out the other side with feedback and I'm coming out the other side to make it better the next time I do it. And I think that having that mentality going into it is probably protects yourself from too much suffering. You know. Hear, hear. Thank you so much. Brandi for spending time chatting with us today, sharing your wisdom, your expertise, your knowledge. Thank you again. Oh, you're welcome. Thanks for asking me.