In January 2023, we met entrepreneur Jen Wirt through our venture partner Julia Bernstein. Jen came to us with a problem she wanted to solve and a draft idea of the business she wanted to build. Over the course of ~10 months, we helped her shape, test, iterate, build, and get funding for Coral Care.
There are 7M young children in the US who experience developmental delays and don't have timely access to great care.
Coral Care’s platform easily and quickly connects families with local, vetted, in-network pediatric developmental specialists by allowing providers to start and grow their own practices. By enabling each provider to take insurance, Coral Care expands access and affordability to critical care for families.
In this phase, we aim to define the business idea and speak with a small group of key stakeholders to show enough signal that there is a real problem and opportunity.
Jen had conducted an initial survey with parents to validate that parents were having challenges finding providers. In designing for a marketplace, we needed to validate willingness on the other side, while also derisking GTM and channel strategy.
Through both warm and cold outreach, we spoke with:
The goal was to find at least:
After getting initial commitments and learnings, we set goals to speak with more customers and to start to build a waitlist to gauge the scope of demand for all key stakeholders.
We helped Jen build a very lightweight version of a website with a concierge service so that we could collect sign ups and speak with more potential, qualified customers.
The goal was to get waitlist sign ups from 10+ families, 10+ providers, and 10+ referral partners, while speaking with at least 30 people in each. Through this, we were able to develop a clearer understanding of what the core value props to each of the customer bases needed to be.
In order to get the concierge service in front of new audiences, PB team developed and ran targeted Facebook ads and launched cold outbound campaigns to target communities o reach both parents and providers.
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We also mitigated secondary leaps of faith by doing research and speaking to experts to ensure there were no payor challenges, regulatory issues, or a constrained market.
After working with the founder and validating the idea, we evaluate whether we want to invest and build a business together.
If the answer is a “hell yes,” we make an offer to the entrepreneur to go full time, incorporate the business, build traction, and start fundraising to bring the mission to life.
Purpose Built acts as their founding team – supporting them through all the major functions of the business.
We invested cash in Jen at this stage for her to leave her job to dedicate herself fully to Coral Care and have enough resources to start to build traction over 6 months.
We planned in 6 week cycles to build and advance the business, with the goal of creating more and more demand. The first sprint cycle was 80% focused on getting business fundamentals lined up and 20% getting more waitlist signups.
Subsequent sprint cycle goals were to be dedicated to 20% business operations and 80% growing demand, while also setting her up for a successful pre-seed fundraise. We helped her set up her business, design the first version of her product, brand, GTM and in bringing on her founding team.
During launch, we aligned on a fundraising strategy and helped Jen understand how to pitch VCs and angels.
We conducted a 3 day intensive, in-person fundraising summit where we built and refined the pitch deck, model, and had her pitch live to 5 friendly investors to start getting her feet wet.
Over the course of 4 months, we:
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In ~10 months of working together, Coral Care raised an oversubscribed pre-seed round of $1.3M. The funding announcement was featured in Axios, MedCityNews, Boston Business Journal, HIT Consultant, and CityBiz.
As of Feb 2024, Coral Care has 30+ fully credentialed providers in MA, 5 insurance contracts in place, and 4 full-time employees.
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Now that Jen has a full-time team in place, we’ve taken a step back and serve Coral Care as more traditional investors, with Taylor (one of our co-founders) sitting on Jen’s board. As investors, our goal now is to help Jen accelerate and strengthen Coral Care to expand their reach and impact, while ensuring Coral Care is resourced and can raise subsequent rounds of funding.
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If you’re interested in working with Purpose Built as your founding team, see if you’d be a good fit here and send us your information here.
