Trusera is a Seattle-based startup founded in 2007 by former Amazon.com executive Keith Schorsch. The business plan grew from Schorsch's own struggle to find relevant health information on the web. The firm has received initial investment from a team of angel investors with experience from Expedia, Amazon.com, and Washington Mutual. Here's our interview with Keith:
1. What was the impetus to start Trusera?After leaving Amazon.com in 2002, I was bitten by a deer tick while on a family trip to the East Coast. I flew back to Seattle and grew progressively ill over the next three months, as eleven doctors were unable to diagnose my worsening condition. I wasn’t properly diagnosed with Lyme disease until a friend who’d been through it called and recommended I get checked out for Lyme.
What I found in my experience with Lyme disease was that I lacked access to the people, tools and information that could have helped me get treatment sooner and that would have been more personalized to my health situation.
As I recovered, I realized that my experience was not unique. There is a sea change going on in consumer health. Increasingly, people are taking control of their health by collecting multiple points of views and trusting their own process to make health decisions. But today’s consumer has more information about buying their next book or automobile than they do about addressing a personal health issue. While there is no shortage of health information on the Internet, finding and filtering relevant and useful information is a difficult and time-consuming process. I started Trusera to address this consumer problem.
2) "The business plan grew from his own struggle to find relevant health information on the web" -- please elaborate?
Some of the most valuable information I received that directly impacted my outcomes was from other people who had been through what I was going through. But my personal network, while trusted, was limited in scope. When I turned to the Internet to find people who’d “been there”, I found it extremely difficult to find relevant, credible, and useful information that I could use to take action. Most, if not all health social media was buried in message boards and fragmented blogs that were difficult to find and qualify. I found it hard to determine if content was relevant to me and if the source was credible. And expert information, while plentiful online, was too general and hard to relate to my own situation.
The Internet has now surpassed doctors as a source of medical information. To find health information, 59 percent of consumers use the Internet, 55 percent turn to doctors, and 29 percent access friends and family. More than a third of people searching for health on the Internet use social media, particularly when they are in decision-making mode.
Why not make finding relevant and credible health experience as easy as buying a book online? I thought that a purpose-built online health network that utilized the tools of social networking, personalization, and advanced search could change the consumer’s online health experience. Trusera is the missing piece of the online health consumer’s experience today:access to relevant, useful health experience from others who’d been there.
3) Health 2.0 is torrid, but sites have had difficulty monetizing pageviews at even near mean CPMs in eHealth-- your thoughts?
Trusera is attracting health consumers when they are in decision-making mode. Our customers have told us they want practical support that they can apply to their personal context so they can move forward in their health journey. Many of these customers view advertising as another information source when it is properly and transparently presented in a relevant context. These are the type of customers that advertisers want to reach and result in high eCPMs that reflect the health category online. We are building a technology platform based on relevance, personalization, and tight user control to match people and content, which includes advertising.
4) What firms do you see as your major competitors, and why? And how is Trusera different?
With more than 120 million people searching for online health information and more than a third of them using social media, there’s a lot of room for many sites to succeed.
Trusera is different from other sites in this space in several ways. First, we view people as whole individuals and not just the sum of their conditions, and have structured our site to reflect this philosophy. This resonates with our customers, who want to be viewed as multi-faceted individuals with many health and wellness related issues. Trusera’s use of keywords to facilitate discovery of people and content is very different than sites that are centered on condition-focused silos of community and content.
Second, we offer tools to find and filter relevant and useful content tailored for you. For example, unlike other sites we do not allow anonymous content on the site. We believe that authorship, even when protected by a user ID, is important to establish source, quality and credibility.
Third, we view storytelling as a fundamental way that people like to communicate. We have focused on delivering simple, easy and fun tools to create useful content, and have created some unique intellectual property to support our customer experience.
Finally, we offer a network for people to create and find practical information from others who’ve been there. Our central focus is not emotional support – we’re a place where passionate people come together to communicate and take action on a health interest. We support people taking charge of their health through the power of a network of people who’ve been there.
Other sites in our space solve different customer needs. Daily Strength delivers emotional support using community forums across a wide variety of health conditions, while PatientsLikeMe focuses on data sharing on a few serious chronic illnesses. They both do a fine job of delivering for their customers’ specific needs, and as I said previously, there’s room for several approaches and companies to address the clear customer need for consumer-generated health content.
5) Is Trusera a direct-to-consumer site, seeking partner deals on a co-branded or white label basis, or some combination thereof?
Yes, Trusera is a direct-to-consumer site. Trusera is focused on delivering a customer experience that fulfills the unmet needs of today’s online health consumer. We have received tremendous interest in our platform from potential partners and look forward to exploring these potential relationships going forward.
Some 50% of refer traffic to eHealth sites comes from Search-- how can you address this?
Trusera’s product and engineering team has world-class search and personalization expertise at scale. We have designed and engineered our site so that consumers can easily discover Trusera through search. Since many consumers are searching for relevant and credible consumer-generated health content, we are developing a content base that the search engines also see as valuable to their audience and customers.
6) What's in your future product path that you can tell us about?
We’re excited about what’s in our product pipeline for customers. We’re just getting started on innovating for our customers and see our June launch as just the first step in a continuous process of improving our customer experience.
In the near term, Trusera will be focused on delivering product features to deepen customer engagement on our site.We are developing features that improve relevance for our customers and that further personalizes their experience by surfacing the right content and people on the Trusera network to match their health and wellness interests.
[Trusera screenshot below]
