The Forbidden Love Every Founder Feels
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Raj Mehra had it all: a personal reason to build, a hot new technology, a sector ripe for disruption. Then he put his product in front of real users and watched them fail to use it. So he did the hard thing. He listened. What he learned wasn't just a fix. It was a completely different company. This is the story of Sage Healthcare, and it's also the story of what it takes to break up with your own idea.
0:00 – Intro: the "forbidden love" of founders and their original ideas
1:36 – Meet Raj Mehra, CEO & co-founder of Sage
2:33 – What Sage does today (senior care tech platform)
3:14 – The origin story: his grandmother's fall
3:57 – The original hypothesis — building a voice app (Alexa/Google Home era)
5:24 – Building the "expensive paperweight" before validating with users
7:56 – The co-founders join, and the decision to finally talk to users
8:56 – What they learned: hardware was outdated, but voice wasn't the answer
11:44 – Feeling relief, not defeat, when the original idea ...
Raj Mehra had it all: a personal reason to build, a hot new technology, a sector ripe for disruption. Then he put his product in front of real users and watched them fail to use it. So he did the hard thing. He listened. What he learned wasn't just a fix. It was a completely different company. This is the story of Sage Healthcare, and it's also the story of what it takes to break up with your own idea.
0:00 – Intro: the "forbidden love" of founders and their original ideas
1:36 – Meet Raj Mehra, CEO & co-founder of Sage
2:33 – What Sage does today (senior care tech platform)
3:14 – The origin story: his grandmother's fall
3:57 – The original hypothesis — building a voice app (Alexa/Google Home era)
5:24 – Building the "expensive paperweight" before validating with users
7:56 – The co-founders join, and the decision to finally talk to users
8:56 – What they learned: hardware was outdated, but voice wasn't the answer
11:44 – Feeling relief, not defeat, when the original idea didn't hold up
12:46 – Finding the middle ground: off-the-shelf hardware + exceptional software
16:39 – Taking the product to market — first customer deployments
17:00 – Solving the hard technical and life-safety challenges
19:27 – Using design sprints to navigate every major crossroads
20:36 – Filtering ideas through the "North Star": does it improve care?
22:15 – Advice for early-stage founders navigating a new market
23:57 – Advice #2: knowing when the technology is actually ready
26:15 – Where to find Sage, and closing thoughts
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