Healthcare startup 1DOC3 keeps growing.

As I’ve stated in the past, one of the most rewarding things that I do is advise startups. I truly enjoy working with strong founders and, though, I’m called an advisor, I see myself more as an admirer and fanboy of these entrepreneurs.  Fortunately, I can say that all of the companies that I advise are going strong and most of these have had some great news to report recently (I need to write a post about this).  Today, I’m proud to say that I am now advising another company called 1Doc3, which currently offers a health Q&A site for hundreds of thousands (and growing) of Spanish speakers from all walks of life.

I met the founders during my mentoring stints at the local Wayra accelerator during the past year.  I met several impressive founders and startups from Wayra’s last batch, but there was something extra that I felt about the 1Doc3 founders and the opportunity they were pursuing.  One of the things that I really like about identifying and working with early stage companies is how hard it is to spot future success stories. Time will tell whether I’m any good at this, but, even though there were, apparently, “sexier” startups both at Wayra and elsewhere, this company and it’s founders stood out in my mind.

The founders, Javier Cardona (CEO), Julian Villareal and Alejandro Pinzon had all worked together previously at another startup. They’ve done a great job of promoting their site in a number of different publications.  The result is that they have been growing rapidly and plan to reach over a million users a month by the end of the year.  They are already the most used app within Facebook’s Internet.org initiative in Colombia and have closed one deal with a mobile operator in Colombia.  More operators and countries are in the works.

The founding team has a lot of background in mobile solutions and have worked for an operator in the past.  Nonetheless, there’s a lot more to this team, which includes a “can-do” attitude, methodical execution and an insatiable drive to succeed.  One last factor is that, as with the other companies that I advise, these founders are top notch human beings.

Since this is an early stage startup, there are still a lot of decisions yet to be made.  However, any path they decide on will probably require them to build a large audience (in the millions) and they are certainly on their way to accomplishing this.  They are currently focusing on the Spanish-speaking population for a number of reasons such as the cultural issues of this group’s relationship with healthcare, the dearth of credible medical information in Spanish (compared to English) and other factors.   That said, as a recent PWC research reported has stated, there is a huge healthcare market among US hispanics alone.

Whatever direction they do take in the future, fortunately, these won’t be based on any limitations in the founding team’s skillset.  All of the founders have worked internationally, have a habit of adopting world-class methods and technologies and are comfortable speaking in English.  It’s exciting for me to be a small part of this team and am extremely optimistic about this company’s future prospects.