3 Things: ZoomInfo for Devs, Generative AI Books for Kids, Trusted Health for Locum Tenens

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:

• ZoomInfo for Developers

• Generative AI Books for Kids

• Trusted Health for Locum Tenens

1. ZoomInfo for Developers

Today, ZoomInfo is a public company with a $18.2B market cap that does close to $1B in annual venue. They are the largest provider of B2B company and prospect data and the amalgamation of DiscoverOrg and ZoomInfo who were the biggest players in the category (DiscoverOrg had also previously acquired the #3 player RainKing in 2017 for $100m) where DiscoverOrg purchased ZoomInfo and took on their name/brand in 2019. Originally, ZoomInfo was focused on IT professionals at enterprise companies and has subsequently grown to 100M+ contact records across thousands of companies and widened the scope of coverage. Still, their primary focus is on businesses who rely on top-down sales as the primary go-to-market motion and the product is both pricey and thought of as currently suboptimal.

Recently, there have been many new entrants going after ZoomInfo with players like Lusha (raised $245m) and Apollo (fka ZenProspect which has raised $150m). There are startups like Ciro who focus on SMB and ExactBuyer who levages AI to enable list building using semantic search. The rise of the developer has been in full swing for a long time and with that, came a shift towards open source options and PLG (product-led-growth) go-to-market motions as developers prefer to try before they buy and let the product do the selling. The problem is, there’s no data source on developers as buyers. The data you’d want is totally different than information in a tool like ZoomInfo. You’d want to track things like Github contributions, research papers/publications, personal websites, twitter, etc. You’d care about what languages they’re proficient in, what tech stacks they have experience working on, and what specific and niche technologies they’re an expert in. The way you market and sell to developers is also wildly different than a business buyer like IT, Sales, or Marketing. There’s an opportunity to build a prospecting data company focused on developers that both offers contact data as well as tools to appropriately market to developers.

2. Generative AI Books for Kids

The number of projects being built using the new generative AI models are truly amazing. Tools like Lex help combat writer’s block, Jasper and Copy.ai will write your blog posts, Glossi will take 3D models and turn them into high quality images and video for brands without a photoshoot. Drawanyone lets you upload pictures of yourself (or another person) and it will draw you in a variety of styles of your choosing. GitHub Copilot acts as an “AI pair programmer” helping developers write code significantly faster. Every week, new creative people find interesting ways to build novel applications as this is the buzziest space since the latest crypto hype cycle. There’s a list of over 100 companies all building with generative AI here!

One area that I think we’ll see a lot of things take off using text and image models is in games and activities for kids. These models lower the barrier to creation and make generating text, images, apps, (eventually video), and more extremely accessible. A low hanging fruit opportunity is to build an app that lets kids create their own picture books. They could speak or type in pieces of a story which an AI could help continue, using the input as the prompt. It could even be as simple as selecting checkboxes with words like “dragon”, “adventure”, “group of kids”, “princess”, “soccer”, etc that you can choose from to help generate the story. From there, the kid could describe what images they want to see on the page and instantly you’d be able to visualize each page of the book. You could also start with classics and have a "create your own ending” type of experience. Ensure kid-safe controls so parents encourage use and partner with book-printing sites for a 1-click “Print This Book” experience that will send you a custom, paperback or hardcover storybook. You could also offer gift options where you gift the generative app plus book printing bundle.

3. Trusted Health for Locum Tenens

We all keep hearing about the tremendous strain the US healthcare system is under and the lack of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals needed to provide adequate care. Nurses in particular are in high demand and the gap between that demand and qualified supply continues to grow, which will become more and more of an issue over time and as the Baby Boomers age. Companies like Trusted Health (started in 2017 and raised $175m) and Incredible Health (started in 2017 and raised $97m) provide marketplaces connecting nurses with hospitals and health systems either on a permanent, part-time, or travel perspective. Other companies aggregate clinicians to provide various telemedicine services ranging from psychiatry, psychology, urgent care, direct primary care, and some specialty care. Telemedicine helps fill gaps in care but there is still a tremendous supply need to provide critical in-person services at hospitals and clinics.

The modern concept of locum tenens (which translates from Latin as “to hold the place of”) has been around since the 1970s in response to a lack of physicians in rural Utah who could fill in as local doctors needed to leave and continue their medical education. Health Systems Research Institute (HSRI) was created by the University of Utah’s College of Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare which started placing physicians in rural areas on a part-time basis to compensate for gaps in physician coverage. Two of the first placements, Therus Kolff and Alan Kronhaus saw great success with the program and carved out a stand-alone locum tenens practice from HSRI and expanded nationally. In 1979, they founded CompHealth (now called CHG Healthcare) and grew the company tremendously. The company places over 15,000 physicians who serve 27 million patients a year. As of 2017, over 94% of all US healthcare facilities use locum tenens services each year with family practice, internal medicine, general surgery, psychiatry, and anesthesiology being the most in-demand specialties. There is already precedence here but the incumbent company is legacy so there’s an opportunity to add technology, take the Trusted Health model, and apply it to the locum tenens space. We already know the most demanded clinicians so start there and continue to expand.

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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