3 Things: Scarcity-as-a-Service, Trade School for Care Navigators, Verticalized Zapier
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently and associated business opportunities. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Scarcity-as-a-Service
Trade School for Care Navigators
Verticalized Zapier
1. Scarcity-as-a-Service
Scarcity is a powerful psychological motivator. Throughout history, humans have always placed a higher value on things that are scarce over those that are abundant. This causes humans to do often irrational things, especially when it comes to consumption and spending behavior. Humans interpret an item being sold out or having limited availability as being “better” since others seem to want it too and provide social proof. We also for some reason want things we can’t have, so if there is a good or service that we’ve decided we want and now it’s unavailable, we want it even more and are willing to wait or pay a higher price. The marketing industry capitalizes on this social psychology constantly through everyday sales, huge events like Black Friday, or limited edition items.
Luxury brands in particular have been manufacturing artificial scarcity for a long time. When Rimowa and Supreme came together to do a collab on limited run luggage, they sold out in 16 seconds, despite each piece selling for $1800!! I remember when my (actual) favorite brands Missoni and Target did a collection together, it was nearly impossible to even get items like socks as it sold out so quickly. Top end watch makers like Rolex and Patek Philippe are notorious for having months-long waiting lists to get one of their coveted watches. Over the past 2 years, we’ve seen this move to the digital space as well with NFTs exploding as they were able to capitalize on the ability to create digital scarcity. Creators launched 100-image collections or even 1 of 1s which elicited the scarcity mentality and sent consumers into a frenzy. A company could focus on providing “scarcity-as-a-service” for both e-commerce and digital goods. It could aggregate market intelligence and data on consumer trends to help inform how and when brands should leverage scarcity, and pair the data with a widget that can be embedded on websites, mobile apps, product pages, and more to indicate scarcity and provide the pricing engine under the hood to optimize value. It would be a simple no-code configuration so that the marketing team could set it up and put some basic constraints in place and the rest would be automated.
2. Trade School for Care Navigators
The concept of patient navigation (or care navigation) traces its roots back to the 1970s when the US first declared a “war on cancer”. Dr. Harold Freeman, a cancer surgeon in Harlem, noticed that poor, black, uninsured women were dying at a disproportionate rate of breast cancer. This was mostly due to the fact that they weren’t seeking (or able to access) care when they noticed a lump and were catching the cancer so late. Freedman set up his own clinics that offered free screening and began employing people from the community who didn’t know anything about healthcare or cancer but were compassionate and cared about the people in their neighborhood, to act as the first patient navigators, helping them access care. These non-clinical practitioners provide patients and their families with logistical, social, and cultural support as they navigate the healthcare system and their personal care journeys. While the roots of care navigation are in cancer treatment, we now see care navigation playing a crucial role in many other parts of the health system from pediatrics and postpartum care to chronic disease, stroke, and geriatrics.
Today, there is no licensure or certification to become a care navigator and many who work in this field only have a high school diploma. Trade schools (aka vocational training) have been around since the 1880s where they focused on agricultural education. They now provide training for a wide variety of careers such as plumber, electrician, elevator repair, dental hygienist, HVAC technician, and legal assistant and currently serve around 18 million students annually in the US. Trade schools often partner directly with employers to make the path to a well-paid job as seamless as possible for students. Most vocational school programs range from 3-18 months in length depending on complexity of the profession. Given the relatively low complexity of care navigation training and the huge demand for healthcare professionals, there’s a great opportunity to provide online trade schools for care navigators. You can partner with hospitals, community-based clinics, and even payors to provide navigators who have training for all kinds of demographics and conditions. Given this work can be done virtually, you can train people all across the country and match wherever their services are most needed.
3. Verticalized Zapier
In the current world of unbundled, proliferated SaaS tools, Zapier is a godsend. The product allows you to connect and automate nearly any function across different applications by connecting the respective APIs and using if-then logic. They have over 5000 apps that you can automate workflows across to do things like: if someone fills out my Google form —> add to Mailchimp contacts, send Welcome Email, and add to Facebook ad campaign with a specific tag. Many startups and mid-sized companies have nearly all of their automations handled through Zapier which is now generating $140m+ annual revenue and valued at $5B (having raised only $1.4m which is nearly unheard of for tech companies).
The great thing, but also challenging thing about Zapier is that you can do nearly anything with the product, but you need to know what to do and it’s easy to get paralysis analysis with the possibilities. Which tools should you be using and workflows should you be automating? If you’re an insurtech startup, what are the best ways to handle lead management? I find that today, most buyers actually want opinionated products and for vendors or other experts to tell them best practices and give them an “out-of-the-box” ready solution for their exact use case. All of the RPA (robotic process automation) solutions take a very horizontal approach to automation, providing a platform to creation your own recipes with some templates to get you started based off of role. There’s an opportunity to take a more verticalized approach to this space based off of industry or buyer (ie developers) and create a suite of pre-configured, bundled automations based off the nuances of that sector or champion. You could also offer software procurement through the platform since part of the opinionated approach to each vertical would be suggesting what tools best serve the need and work well together. Start with one vertical, deeply research and understand the use cases, and market to companies who sell to that audience. Rinse and repeat with other verticals.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please subscribe and share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine
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Trade school for care navigators is brilliant. Really interesting insight.