How Solace Health uses Canvas to acquire customers faster

The following is transcribed from an interview with Jeremy Guerwitz, Founder and CEO of Solace Health.

Tell us about Solace Health.

The catalyst for Solace is that my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few years ago, and unfortunately, she passed away. And so I got to see firsthand just how challenging the U. S. medical system can be. So many people, unfortunately, have dealt with this for themselves or their loved ones.

It's one thing if you or your loved one has a disease. It’s another thing to feel like the system that's supposed to be helping you is ending up fighting you. And so what Solace does is we connect individuals to healthcare advocates. Healthcare advocates are doctors, nurses, and experts who have a deep understanding of the healthcare system and help solve these issues.

They work for you as an individual instead of for the institutions. And we're a marketplace, so we make it a seamless Airbnb-like experience. We work with individuals and businesses, offering Solace as a benefit. We also work with larger-scale organizations like the VA and other types of government entities.

What were you doing from a data perspective before you started using Canvas?

We launched and had a huge uptake of people using the product, which was fantastic. But we were doing nothing before Canvas. If I wanted to know something, I would ask an engineer to run a SQL query and see what we came up with. It was ad hoc and unreliable, and we had no idea what was happening in our business.

Why did you choose Canvas?

I have a lot of experience in Silicon Valley. I've worked for a few different startups and unicorns, and I've used a lot of other BI tools. So I was familiar with the landscape, but, What struck me about Canvas was a combination of things.

First, the structure of it was straightforward for anybody who wanted to get data quickly. Many products claim to do this, but Canvas actually delivers. It’s highly customizable, and you can easily make it what you want.

Most importantly, the team, in particular, are some of the most responsive and thoughtful people I've met in this space. When you’re thinking about data, especially for a company that's starting, you want people who care and make sure you get the correct answer. And you all blew me away.

What were the immediate use cases that you jumped in with?

The priority was to figure out what was happening in the core of the business. So for us, it's finding out how many people are using Solace, how they’re using it, and what our revenue looks like on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

We wanted to see how to categorize our revenue. For example, how do people use Solace, and how should we consider finding more customers? What are some of the areas that people are having challenges with? We were able to hook up Segment and our product database to understand which people are using a feature and how they're not using it in the way we didn’t expect. We could save significant engineering time by not investing in features our users weren’t adopting.

What’s driven the most value for Solace?

We made specific changes to how we were acquiring customers because of insights we saw in Canvas. We've also made very distinct changes to our engineering roadmap because of how our users interacted with our product, which we could discover because Canvas made it easy to do.

The product is super powerful. You can do anything about it. And what's interesting about it is that everything regarding our data is there, so it's just a matter of finding it and implementing it.

And that's where the team comes in. When I have a question, not only do I get the help I need to answer my question, but I frequently get responses from the Canvas team that says, “Hey, we did this for you already here.” They’ll also ask me about alternative ways to approach the problem because this is something they’ve seen before in other businesses they’ve worked with.

What would you say to other early-stage companies considering getting their data house in order early?

A lot is going on regarding data and a lot of complexity. But if you’re not analyzing it, you’re just not going to understand your business.

You might have assumptions that you think are true, but until you validate them with the truth, which I think the goal is to have the data representing the truth underneath your business, you might be missing a lot of opportunities, or there might be some real things that are costing you a ton of money.

For example, when we were looking at the connections feature in our business, which is towards the end of the process, when we connect individuals with advocates, we noticed that it wasn't working correctly in certain circumstances. And we only knew that because we hadn't found this gap in a particular grouping of customers.

If you're a business looking to understand what's going on, you can go with a piece of software that is hard to use, or you can go with software that's easy to use. And you have people obsessed with data and have worked with tons of businesses, probably similar to yours in one way or another, and care about helping you find the correct answer.

Who uses Canvas at Solace, and how do you see Canvas evolving as Solace grows?

Our whole organization uses Canvas at this point. Certainly, folks in Product and Marketing, but also Engineering because it's easier to have that set up than running their manual queries.

Canvas can connect to anything that we build or want to use. So if we add more products or connect with other vendors, Canvas can be our source of truth, no matter how we grow, which is exciting.

I am confident with Canvas that no matter what we do or how the business grows, Canvas will support what we're doing.

Where can people learn more about Solace and get in touch with you?

Yeah, sure. So if people are interested in what we're doing, they can check us out at https://www.solace.health/. You can also find me on Twitter @jeremygurewitz.