Fruit Street

Lawrence Gerard studied pre-med in the Harvard University Extension School before deciding to pursue Fruit Street full-time. His interest in health traced back to his high school years playing goalkeeper, and he later spent a year volunteering in an emergency room, which pushed him toward a career focused on social impact.

Fruit Street is a HIPAA-compliant telemedicine software product licensed to healthcare professionals. It lets clinicians hold video consultations with patients and monitor their health, diet, and lifestyle through connected devices such as FitBit products, wireless bathroom scales, FDA-approved blood pressure cuffs, and a mobile app where patients photograph their food for feedback from a registered dietitian. The company started in May 2014. Gerard described 2016 as the year of building the minimum viable product that people were willing to pay for, and 2017 as the year focused on scaling.

The company is a public benefit corporation, and its social mission is written into its bylaws: to prevent and treat lifestyle-related disease using telemedicine, wearable devices, and mobile applications. Development is handled through a joint venture with VSee, which owns a portion of the company and provides about 10 of its staff on design and engineering.

Fruit Street raised about $6 million from roughly 180 physicians rather than from venture capital firms. Gerard said physicians offered product feedback from real practice use and acted as a sales network. Physicians were reached mainly through LinkedIn advertising, followed by one-on-one calls with a full business and product presentation. Customers were mostly small medical practices at an average price of about $200 per month, with some discounts, and the company had begun institutional pilots with larger organizations.

The physician-funded model gave Fruit Street both capital and a built-in network of potential customers. The company had not yet fully tracked churn or lifetime value. Gerard said churn was roughly 10% of customers, though he acknowledged the metric was still being measured more carefully, and he could not yet give a reliable lifetime value figure.

At the time of the interview, Fruit Street was at $15,000 in monthly recurring revenue with about 100 customers. Gerard said total revenue to date was about $130,000, mostly earned in 2016. The stated 2017 goal was to scale toward $100,000 in monthly revenue while reducing churn, increasing lifetime value, and generating more referrals.