Making Something From Nothing: Jonathan Hunt-Glassman Of Oar Health On How To Go From Idea To Launch

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

… Trust your instincts. Founders and CEOs will inevitably get competing advice. In fact, it is your responsibility to seek out diverse points of view! While it’s important to empower your leaders to make decisions, there is a set of choices about who your company is and what it stands for that can’t be delegated and that your team craves clarity from you on.

As a part of our series called “Making Something From Nothing”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Hunt-Glassman.

Jonathan is CEO and co-founder of Oar Health, an addiction recovery platform focused on making science-backed addiction medicine approachable and accessible for the millions of people who struggle with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD). Jonathan brings 15+ years of healthcare experience, including strategy leadership roles at Humana, Optum and Bain & Company. He also brings personal experience confronting his own addiction to alcohol — a journey that inspired his passion for transforming today’s addiction treatment landscape and led him to start Oar.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I grew up in Los Angeles. My father was a university professor and consultant to local governments, and my mother put her teaching career on pause to focus on raising me and my sister.

A formative experience during my adolescence was editing my high school newspaper. I learned what I loved and what I was good at: leading a diverse cross-functional team towards a common goal, empowering talented teammates to do their best work — rather than bossing them around, and acting with integrity instead of always doing what was popular. I actually had the same high school newspaper adviser as Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, who wrote about learning some similar lessons from her.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Do well by doing good.” It’s a simple piece of advice that my middle school principal shared with every student, but I have found that it encapsulates a powerful truth: we create the most rewarding experiences for ourselves when we focus on the wellbeing of others. It’s true in a marriage or friendship, and it’s true when building a mission-driven, customer-obsessed business.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

“Winning on Purpose” by Fred Reichheld, Darci Darnell and Maureen Burns crystallizes the idea that the primary purpose of a business should be to improve the lives of its customers and rewards will follow: customer loyalty, word-of-mouth referrals, employee engagement, sustainable profits, long-term shareholder value.

At Oar, we decided that our success should always stem from our customers’ success, which means helping each member meet his or her unique goals for changing their relationship with alcohol. While it may increase our costs in the short run to provide unlimited access to clinician care or invest in digital health tools that put evidence-based practices in the palms of every member, we believe these investments are well worth it.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. There is no shortage of good ideas out there. Many people have good ideas all the time. But people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. Can you share a few ideas from your experience about how to overcome this challenge?

I’m a perfectionist by nature. I wanted the idea for Oar to be as strong as possible before executing on it but the trap of “paralysis by analysis” is a real one. The breakthrough moment for me was when a trusted mentor helped me see that beginning to execute and test the idea — even in small ways — would improve my ability to iterate on the idea quickly and effectively. There are certain nuances for what consumers want in a product and experience that can only be learned through trial and getting feedback. For example, our initial members helped us understand the power of journaling, setting flexible goals, and other self-help exercises that we are now building into our app. Ideation and execution may be separable in theory, but they are dynamically linked in practice. I found that insight liberating.

Often when people think of a new idea, they dismiss it saying someone else must have thought of it before. How would you recommend that someone go about researching whether or not their idea has already been created?

Spoiler alert: 99% of the time someone else is working on something similar to your idea. It’s near impossible today to come up with a truly unique idea. The more important questions to ask are: What do you understand about this market that no else does? And what is your unfair advantage relative to everyone else trying to solve this problem?

At Oar, we have no shortage of peers and competitors that use telemedicine to help people recover from addiction. However, we have a unique perspective on the treatment and recovery landscape. We believe that every person who wants to change their relationship with alcohol deserves the simplest path to recovery that works for them. This means that digital health providers must create more approachable, more flexible treatment options instead of just replicating brick-and-mortar treatment methods and dogmas online.

For the benefit of our readers, can you outline the steps one has to go through, from when they think of the idea, until it finally lands in a customer’s hands? In particular, we’d love to hear about how to file a patent, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer to distribute it.

The specific steps will vary with the nature of the business but a few important questions that any entrepreneur needs to answer to get their business off the ground are:

• Have I established a legal structure that provides adequate protection for me and other key parties while enabling nimble execution?
• Have I found supplier and distributor partners who understand the needs of an early stage company and are willing to invest time and energy while also being sophisticated enough to grow in tandem with my company?
• Have I done sufficient due diligence to ensure that my MVP (Minimum Viable Product) complies with all legal and regulatory authorities, embodies recognized best practices, and delivers real value to our initial customers?

All three of these questions were especially important in Oar’s earliest days. Consumers were coming to us for real healthcare and access to FDA-approved medications. It was imperative for us to comply with healthcare, telemedicine and pharmacy regulations.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Started Leading My Company” and why?

1. Tell your story — again and again. I started Oar because I struggled with addiction to alcohol for my entire adult life. I binged, blacked out, made bad decisions, and felt consumed by regret and shame. I sought treatment in multiple settings — AA, primary care, therapy, emergency rooms. I always heard that I needed to quit drinking immediately but I didn’t get a lot of practical advice on how to change my relationship with alcohol until I connected with an addiction medicine specialist who accepted my goal of moderation and suggested medication. I founded Oar so that everyone can get the same level of access to empathetic, expert care that I ultimately received. After I told that story a few times, I assumed that everyone — customers, employees, investors — got it. But it’s unrealistic that others will understand your story as well as you do, or see all the ways that it informs your business. Your story is one of your most important assets and you need to keep telling it to put it to work for you.
2. As a founder and CEO, your job is to lead, not manage. I’ve found that I add the most value to Oar when I trust our leaders to execute against immediate priorities and focus my time disproportionately on identifying and accelerating one or two things that support long-term goals.
3. Invest in culture from day 1. Two of our most important values at Oar are empathy and high performance. Neither is created just by repeating the words. One of the most important things we’ve done to build empathy is launched teamwide meetings with first person stories of addiction and recovery that our members are generous enough to share. On the performance front, we’ve found that building transparent accountability checkpoints is a continual source of motivation and satisfaction for our team.
4. Trust your instincts. Founders and CEOs will inevitably get competing advice. In fact, it is your responsibility to seek out diverse points of view! While it’s important to empower your leaders to make decisions, there is a set of choices about who your company is and what it stands for that can’t be delegated and that your team craves clarity from you on.
5. Even if you fail, you succeed. I wrestled with the decision to leave a job at Humana that I loved to start Oar. Ultimately, I came to feel that even if the business flopped, I would grow as a leader in ways that would serve me well throughout my career.

Let’s imagine that a reader reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to invent. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

Get feedback from customers as soon as possible. Ask them about the problem they’re trying to solve and what would improve their ability to solve it. Don’t try to sell your idea, but rather learn deeply about who they are and the impact you can make for them. When you have a prototype or MVP, repeat the process.

One of the most important steps in translating Oar from an idea to a business was to perform concept validation tests with real potential customers by participating in Tacklebox’s structured program for entrepreneurs who have an idea, but want to test it before they go all-in.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

I don’t have personal experience to comment on this one. I think the general principle that applies is that you should prioritize hiring to fill gaps in your personal capability set.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this question. It is essential to look within and honestly assess why you are starting a business and what outcomes are most important to you. For example, is it more important to you to maximize your personal wealth creation potential? In which case bootstrapping can help you hold onto equity. Or, is it more important to you to build scale quickly? In which case, VC financing can be very helpful.

I built Oar by working with Newco, an IAC accelerator. I was able to supplement my passion and healthcare expertise with a team of designers, engineers and brand strategists who knew how to launch a startup.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Our mission at Oar is to help the people we serve overcome addiction and compulsion by making highly effective addiction medicine highly approachable. Our success is our members’ success. We are still in the early days but have already helped thousands of people change their relationships with alcohol and get back to being the parents, partners, friends and workers that they knew they could be.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

The movement that I’m most passionate about, and of which Oar is a small part, is transforming the way that our society understands and treats addiction:

• From a personal failing to a common, chronic medical condition.
• From a hopeless “rock bottom” to a challenge that most people do recover from.
• From abstinence as the only answer to support for moderation and abstinence.
• From specialized, intense treatment as the only option to the simplest path to recovery for everyone.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I’d love to meet Headspace Co-founder Andy Puddicome and hear his voice in person instead of through my AirPods. At Oar we’re inspired by what Headspace has done to transform meditation, from the province of a few highly trained practitioners to something that anyone can do anywhere. This is similar to what we are trying to do for addiction treatment: transform treatment from a specialized service for a few, to an approachable, effective option for anyone who wants to change their relationship with alcohol or any other form of addiction or compulsion.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.

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Making Something From Nothing: Jonathan Hunt-Glassman Of Oar Health On How To Go From Idea To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.