Jamie Harsevoort, CEO of LaunchIt Solutions, on Building Platforms, Choosing Partners and Evaluating Markets for Health Tech Success.

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Jamie, thank you for joining us this morning. Thank you, Neil. I'm excited to be on your podcast.

There's always this kind of commingling when you're an entrepreneur of your story and the business story, because it is very hard to pull those apart for entrepreneurs. So let's start a little bit with the Jamie story, and then I'm I know that that will merge in with the Launch It story, but let's get a sense of your career journey. Where did you start? How did you begin? And I know we went to the same university and almost at the same time, but give us a sense of the early days, and then we're gonna move into launch it and what is launch it and where are you going?

Early Career In Digital Media

The Leap Into Entrepreneurship

Yeah, excellent. Well, I, you know, as you mentioned, we both went to McMaster University uh here in Hamilton, which I still reside in and where Launch It Solutions is located in. Uh I graduated in the uh mid-90s, I think it was 1996, that I got my uh degree and moved into the business world. Uh that was, you know, what I like to describe as the Wild West. Uh, that was when the internet was just taking off. There was lots of opportunities. And uh I worked initially for a just a generic software company, uh, but very quickly at the time I actually moved into the media industry and working at that time with a company that was called Can West Global. Um, that's since been um bought and sold all the different uh media things, and then the remaining parts I think would be called postmedia today. Uh, but those were good years. We I had good fortune both of working with a great team there, but also the really good fortune of being able to work on some exciting large projects. And that allowed me to be part of a pioneering group that brought the first digital newspapers into Canada that did a lot of firsts. So in fact, the uh website that we ran, which was called Canada.com and which uh powered a lot of newspaper and TV sites as well, was for a number of years the highest trafficked website in Canada and gave me a lot of good experience at building large-scale systems dealing with uh real-time data needs and and you know, learning how the internet truly worked. That said, after spending seven years in the media industry, it was quite obvious that uh the media industry itself was starting to go into decline, the opportunities in the tech world lay elsewhere. And so in 2007, I made the decision to uh start my own business. And I'll say right off the bat, I don't think I had any business making that decision.

Um I because I was gonna say, I was gonna say that the transition from manager of software development at Canwest to entrepreneur running my own business seems like a leap. Like, what was the genesis for that? Did you have folks saying, hey, listen, uh, you know, if you started something up, we could, we could, you know, use your services. Did you see a need in the market? Was it just like, I want to be my own boss? What was the spark that said, uh, okay, Jamie's gonna be now be an entrepreneur?

Well, I think when people are entrepreneurial, it's something that they need to do, and that's what it was for myself. Yeah. Because I actually had a job that I enjoyed and I worked with a team that was quite good. Um, I had my boss and my boss's boss were very supportive of me, and I always had great relationships with them. So some people leave because they have negative experience. I never had that. I left solely because I had this drive in me that I wanted to do this, I wanted to start a business, I wanted to see what I could do. And uh, like many entrepreneurs, I jumped in before really figuring out how that could be possible and learned as I as I went. And so the early days, I had actually just prior to making that leap, had talked to a few people in my network who assured me that there was lots of work out there as a contractor. Uh, in fact, one of them told me, be in my office uh the first Monday morning after you you make the jump, but I've got about six months' worth of work for you. And so I made the jump. I, you know, started a little side business. I uh quit my job. I went to that guy's office first thing on Monday morning and said, here I am, let's get some contracts going. You got six months worth of work for me. Uh he looked across his desk and said, uh actually, I don't, uh I don't have any work for you at all.

I can feel that, I can feel that coming, and my my my stress level went up just anticipating that might be the answer.

Discovering A Healthcare Software Calling

But you know, since then, and that's been now uh that was 2007, so we're talking uh almost 20 years ago now. I've never actually had a day without work to do. Uh very quickly I landed a few contracts, uh, started building up a client base, and as a great omen of what the future would hold for me, a number of those initial clients were in the healthcare sector. And that's where, over the next few years, what I found is I really discovered I had a strong passion for that. Uh, some of those early contracts were with uh research organizations that were moving from paper-based systems to uh digitizing their phase three clinical trials and other studies. Did some medical education uh software platforms. And then in 2010, I did my first software platform for a patient support program. Uh, and that one I really, really fell in love with. The uh seeing and learning a little bit more about how the pharmaceutical world worked, uh, the role of patient support programs and the effect it can have on patients, uh, became really passionate about that part of the business. And we started developing a lot of platforms in that space and really started trying to drive a lot more business out of the pharmaceutical world and healthcare world in general.

It sounded like there was a shift from sort of opportunistic to intentional in the sense that you know you picked up a research client or someone introduced you to a med-ed client and you built a platform for them. But the light, it sounds like the light went on at some point where, oh, this is this was a vertical that one, we we are passionate about, but that there's opportunity in. So was there a point in that process where it felt like okay, in our narrative about who we are, healthcare is going to be in the first few sentences?

Well, it actually was about a 10-year transition.

And again, you know, so not as not as night, nice and neat and wrapped up in a bow that I just tried to do there.

No, being entrepreneurial, you know, of course, other opportunities come up that make me excited as well. And so I jumped into a number of other verticals, but always maintained that a good part of the business was healthcare focus. And that was always something that guided me through those years and was always part of it. And other things would come and go. We we did a bunch of work when with IoT components, uh, we did work in the energy space. Uh, we've done a number of work in construction and logistics and actually still support a few legacy clients in those areas. All of those things were business lines that I enjoyed, but uh healthcare is what I always kept going back to, is what I really had the passion for, and where I also spent my time thinking more about what the future would hold and where my company could actually start getting a strong competitive advantage and helping to move things forward and really developed this desire that I didn't just want to be a contracting company that was available to be building the same things, but I wanted to become one of the leaders in the industry. I wanted to figure out how we could do programs more effectively from a patient perspective, also from a pharmaceutical company perspective in terms of the cost of running these programs. And so that's ultimately, you know, again, over 10 years of transition. It was about 2018, 2019 that I really made the decision that I want to focus strictly on healthcare.

And what happened after that? 2018, 2019, the focus is on healthcare. How did you go about really kind of leaning into the vertical? Especially in the software, the platforms that you're building, there's this sort of tension between finding clients, right? Like having folks who will pay for you to build things, having those things that you're building be meaningful and impactful in the market for patients or consumers, and also being able to build them in a way that has them be kind of production ready, you know, such that they're really solid solutions. It feels like there's tension between all of those pieces. When you started to move over and say healthcare is our is our focus, was there any retooling of the business that you needed to do? Uh, was it just more about kind of fine-tuning the narrative and looking for clients? Like, what did that mean for launch it?

Launch It And Canada’s Commercialization Gap

Yeah, there were two big moments that changed the business. Uh, one of them was I was working on a uh research platform, not so much for clinical trials, but more for long-term longitudinal uh studies, so you know, large cohort studies and so on. Uh, I ended up being introduced to a uh autism researcher, also locally here in Hamilton, and he was a big influence on teaching me what really needed to be done to solve a few problems in that industry. And so we actually built a platform and the Doctor's Research Study, which is part of the McMaster pediatric autism team, was our initial pilot customer that's running that software. And they still run it today. Uh, and interestingly, that is now the world's largest pediatric autism study. It's running in several countries, and we've had to translate the software into uh four or five different languages now to support that. But the genesis of that software and more importantly, the learnings of working with a leader like uh the people in that research team really let me build a platform for the future. And so what I did then is I I thought I can't market this as a software development company. We want to be more than just software development. So I wanted to spin it off as a second company, and I did that in 2019. So I created a second company called Lumedi, whose focus was going to be on uh long-term studies, both in terms of uh patient cohort programs, but also recognize that the same type of system is very applicable to the patient support program world. And so Lumedi launched, and it wasn't initially a success. And that's in part, I hate to bring this up and remind everybody of what happened in 2020, but we did live through a bit of a pandemic. The what really delayed the success of Lumedi was a lot of the initial clinical trials that we were expecting to go in, or cohort studies that were expecting to use the software, as priorities in healthcare changed and funding tended to get removed from some of those projects and redirected into uh the COVID support. And so a lot of the people that were initially going to be my uh client base ended up having to back out of uh using our software because our studies weren't moving forward. At the same time, in parallel with all of this, I was also setting up a new company, and that's where the name Launch It originated, that I wanted to create a a what's known as a venture studio. And very quickly, a venture studio is an organization that commercializes whatever it is that they're they're looking at. In my case, it was healthcare technology, and they do so in a very hands-on manner. So, unlike a fund which just provides money, um, Aventure Studio would get very hands-on in building the product and marketing it and being uh a major part of its success. And I did that with uh two other partners actually and getting launched off the ground. Uh, when I had started Lumedi, I had met somebody named uh Frank, who ended up being one of the core uh employees that worked along with me. Uh through Frank, I met another partner, Justin, who had gone through his own entrepreneurial journey, uh both within uh private sector and public sector. And the three of us were really looking at healthcare in Canada. And one of the things that we wanted to address, Canada is a world leader in so many areas when it comes to research, but we do a really poor job of getting those things out of the labs and into real-world patient care. There's a number of reasons for that, but one of the avenues, pretty much the only avenue available in Canada is through the incubators and so on that are typically tied to a lot of our universities or teaching hospitals, and they do a good job. But the premise behind them is that when a doctor or a scientist has a good idea, that they want to turn that person into an entrepreneur. And what we realize is there's a, you know, first of all, there's inherent challenges in that model.

Yeah.

But secondly, there's a lot of people that don't want to go down that journey. And there was a study that was released in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is going back, I think, seven or eight years ago, that looked at innovation in healthcare. And one of the things that caught my eye is that they noted that 85% of new innovations that will impact patient care never live beyond their originator. In other words, you might have a cardiologist that has a novel idea that improves the health of their own patients. Because that's never commercialized, when their practice ends, that innovation ends as well. And that's really a shame. You think of how much faster we could progress in healthcare if all of these ideas had a new pathway. And what we found is just a lot of people don't want to become the entrepreneur themselves. They want to keep their day job. And that was one of the things we kept telling everybody. If you don't want to leave your day job, come talk to launch it. We'll take on the risk of bringing your innovation to market. We'll help build it. We'll take care of the regulatory, we'll take care of the funding, we'll take care of marketing it and getting it into different uh jurisdictional markets and so on. And in turn, we will create a revenue model for that, whether it's an equity share uh or a royalties going back to the innovator. And typically, we would want the doctor to become a medical advisor to the product. So that's a different model, one that I've seen a few times in companies in the US, which I had not at all seen yet in Canada. So we wanted to do something that was a little bit new in here in Canada. And we started with a modest goal of saying we want to bring three new innovations to market within three years. And then, like all true entrepreneurs, we went way too gung-ho. The first year we decided to launch five new innovations.

Look at us, we're way ahead of our three-year goal.

That's right. That's right. They were all pre-revenue at one point. So it's uh, you know, we we were taking on a lot and we were building, you know, different software platforms. But uh just a little bit of a backstory on the one that's really taking off for us is in our work on patient support programs, we've supported pharmaceutical companies working in the diabetes and obesity space now for 15 years. And so that's a market that we know very, very well. And through that, of course, we've also been introduced to many of the leading KOLs in Canada. Uh, and Canada is a world leader in obesity research, as we are in many areas when it comes on the research side. Canada was also the first country to adopt new clinical practice guidelines based on uh the new science of how we understand obesity. And so back in 2021, uh, and I actually just to back up a little bit, back in 2020, Canada adopted these clinical practice guidelines. And in 2021, I was starting to hear a lot of disappointment out of some of the leading experts in Canada. And the disappointment was around the fact that despite having world-leading clinical practice guidelines and excellent researchers and leading doctors and scientists here, none of that was actually impacting patient care. And patient care in Canada continued to have a lot of barriers. Uh, it continues to be a lot of bias and stigma in the ecosystem. And so obesity treatment was not moving forward in the way that they had envisioned when Canada wrote our new clinical practice guidelines and so on. And so this turned into uh what was ended up being our fifth venture that we started. But we tried to connect these two worlds together. We said, we're already working at obesity, we've got 15 years of experience, we know how to do things effectively when it comes to helping patients in that journey. We have some of the leading KOLs in Canada that are expressing this frustration, and we're a venture studio that says, if you have this problem and you know how to solve it, bring it to us and we will help move it forward. And so that led to us establishing a new venture, which we call the Medical Weight Management Center of Canada, which is a virtual obesity clinic. It covers the full treatment, non-surgical treatment, anyways, for obesity, which would include not just access to medications, but most importantly, the behavioral support that's necessary to make patients successful.

As you're evaluating, is there a set of criteria or a specific lens through which you look at a potential product to evaluate whether or not it is something that be that can become commercially viable, not necessarily just that it can make a positive impact on patient outcomes, but you know, from a business standpoint, how do you evaluate, okay, this is an idea, a solution, a platform that can be self-sustaining from a business standpoint. And so therefore we're gonna go build it.

Three Tests For Viable Innovation

Yes, we have a formal methodology for your evaluating these ideas. And uh, we actually take it through a system that'll result in uh usually about a 10 to 20 page document assessing that, which we always share back with the people we're working with. So at the very least, if we say no, they get something out of it in terms of some feedback and and how a company like Launcha would view their innovation.

And is that proprietary? Can you give me a taste of what that is? Because I've I've through my experience, multiple times I've had you know interactions with KOLs or other entrepreneurs come and say, I've you know, I've got this great idea. And so often, especially in healthcare, it's driven from a very, very deep passion to serve the patient, but that passion doesn't always uh result in a in a practical application. I just imagine there are some folks that are listening who have ideas that they're thinking about. Oh, this could this could maybe be a product. Is there a greatest hits three or four, two or three uh criteria that you that you think about first?

Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that we decided when we started launch it is we're gonna be very transparent about how we do all of this stuff. And and we hope that other people can learn from our journey and and that we see lots more uh venture studios and uh more commercialization of healthcare in Canada.

Perfect.

But just to distill this down to a couple things, uh I think I can take it down just to three main questions. One, is there clinical utility? What I mean by that is we don't pretend to be doctors and scientists ourselves, even though I would love to uh, you know, in another lifetime to go down the road of doing many of those things, uh, we're not the leading experts. And a lot of companies on the technical side make a big mistake of thinking that they can use their knowledge to make an impact in healthcare. In my experience, the winners in this world are ones that originate with doctors and with scientists and with people that have the knowledge to know because healthcare is very complex, and to really know what is needed and how to solve these problems, you need those leading clinicians. And there needs to be established clinical utility, uh, which again is specific to the way we do business, but we also decided early on we're not going to sink all of our money into RD. We want people to come to us with things that are clinically validated, and we will take that forward, but it needs to be scientific evidence-backed. Uh, number two is your market for it. And again, this is where you got to be very specific and where I see a lot of people jumping into healthcare without necessarily being able to answer that question. Uh, if you take a our own country as an example, for there to be a market, you need to know your regulatory pathway. You need to know who's gonna pay for it. In a publicly funded system, things can be very binary. Either there's a fee code that you can claim your service against, or there's not. And if there's not, you're gonna have a real struggle in trying to figure out how to make that work. Uh so again, you know, is there a market? That that's it's a big, big question. Um, but I would want to know if it's a uh therapeutic. What is it classified as? Does it have clinical trials? If it's something like a medical device, what does it class? Do people understand the regulatory pathway? Um, and ultimately at the end, you know, who to establish your market, who's going to actually pay for this product, whether it's public or private. And then number three would simply be is there a business case? And that goes into the size of the market, uh, the price point that can be achieved, and so on, to ensure that this is something that's actually going to be commercially viable. Uh, and maybe, you know, a fourth if you want, are there global opportunities? Because in order to take something successful, if it can be successful here, it should be able to be successful anywhere. And so you're trying to look for those opportunities which have potentially a very big future upside.

That was fantastic, super helpful. And also, you know, really highlights uh for me something that's is always in the back of my head when I'm talking to entrepreneurs is the sort of defensibility of their position in market. And even just listening to you articulate sort of number two, like is there a market and who pays and fee codes? You know, you are obviously deeply embedded in both building platforms that work, but building platforms that work in healthcare. Um, and that feels like a very, a very defensible position. So let's uh loop back to where you were, which I always take a little longer to catch up, which is the uh medical weight management center of Canada. That is, uh, I think right now probably one of your marquee products. Um bring us along through how did that come to life and then you know through to where are we now? Because there's some really meaningful, interesting partnerships happening. Uh, you're you're looking at global opportunities, like that's that's a story and itself.

Building A Virtual Obesity Clinic

Yeah, so things at this point are actually moving quite fast in terms of the of the progression. So I mentioned 2019, I I spun off my first company, which was Lumedi. 2020, I established launch it as a venture studio. 2021 is when we set up the Medical Weight Management Center. And we spent a little bit more than a year really working on what the clinical protocol was going to be, building the technology. Uh, we built a lot of technology around this one uh to really make sure that we could map out patient journeys in a way that were both comprehensive, but also flexible and individualizable because it's a uh patient journey that's uh it's a very personal patient journey for people that are living with obesity and that are going through uh treatment with drugs, treatment with behavioral therapy, and all the changes that come along with that. And we launched that into market in uh March of 2023, and we we took our first patients into care right away. Uh, it was an interesting journey there. We had through past partnerships with pharmaceutical companies and so on, we had a little bit of experience with hiring healthcare professionals, but this was the first time that we were launching something at this size, where we needed uh doctors and we needed dietitians uh across the country. And of course, everything in Canada is run provincially. So uh if you hire someone that's licensed in Ontario, they can only treat our patients in Ontario and so on.

So, sorry, I'm gonna I'm gonna just pause and say outline some of the the contours of the Medical Weight Management Center program because there's there's there's lots to it, and I'm not sure that everybody would be as familiar.

So, Medical Weight Management Center is set up to treat obesity well. And if I can quote one of our uh medical advisors, they would refer to uh the Medical Weight Management Center or MWM, as I I like to shorten it to, as the Rolls-Royce of how obesity ought to be treated. That means it's actually a fairly high-touch program. When we started, we had what we call our foundations program. Our foundations program would give a patient access to seven consultations with an obesity specialist medical doctor in their first year of treatment. And as well, it would give them 12 one-hour sessions with a registered dietitian. So we're talking 19 uh consultations over the course of the first year. During the first number of months, those will be bi-weekly consultations and then switching to monthly consultations uh once we've taken the patients through the critical phases. And what's really instrumental in a patient's journey is uh the behavioral support, which is educating the patient, but it's also using techniques like cognitive behavioral therapy to address the root causes of our appetite system, the majority of which is controlled subconsciously in the brain. And so we understood through our medical advisors and through the work that they've done over the past decades, the different challenges patients face. And so we designed a program with the goal of being able to educate patients to get onto the right treatment. And then the secondary and probably the main goal is to keep them adhering to treatment. And this is an area that with the new weight loss obesity medications, you know, the OZEP, um, Zepp bound, the Wagovis out there, those medications really are a godsend to many people. And I've I've seen when they're used appropriately, they can have a big impact, not just on weight, but on a patient's overall health. And we are an obesity center. Uh, we are concerned with overall health. We're not overly concerned with the number on the scale. We want to see people live a better life, a healthier life, a longer life. And by doing that, we need to know how to keep people on treatment. So there's been a number of papers published about adherence uh with these medications. And interestingly, the adherence rate is typically about 35 to 40 percent, which means a majority of people are gonna stop using the medication, stop their treatment in less than a year. And then typically their weight goes back to where it was, and there's no long-term health benefit. Our program, by giving patients the right information, giving clinicians that will be empathetic and listen to them and guide them along, achieved a 95% adherence to medication. So that surprised even us. We we knew that what we were doing was going to make patients more successful, we didn't realize how powerful it was. But that effectively almost triples a patient's chance of success. And so, you know, if 100 patients get prescribed medication by uh by a pill mill who's not gonna um give them support and just wants to make a quick buck off of giving them a prescription, you know, 100 of those patients, 65 of them are gonna stop treatment over the course of a year. Um, 100 of our patients, 95% of them are going to be successful. And even the ones who've dropped off were typically for reasons that um were not they were not giving up on on the treatment itself. Um, but you know, we've had uh females, for example, who became pregnant along the way and the medications are not uh appropriate in in that situation, so they would go off treatment. Um, you know, people who unfortunately had other other medical conditions come up. Um, but for those people that are actually able to complete the journey, almost universally our patients completed that journey. And so it shows the power of providing this type of behavioral support. It also highlights some of the weaknesses in standard primary care today, too, where we do tend to focus on the prescriptions. Uh, we don't tend to focus on preventative health, on behavioral support, on a lot of patient education. It's just doctors do not have the time, and the system is not set up to provide this type of support to patients. And that's really unfortunate. But we created a system that shows that it can work, it does work, and we've had many, many very successful patients come through our program because of that.

Shoppers Partnership And Scaling Support

And that program now has some pretty meaningful partners in Canada with Shoppers Drug Mart, for example.

That's right. So the program, um, and also, of course, because of the credentials of our medical advisors, uh, has attracted a significant amount of interest. And within Canada, that did lead to a partnership with Shoppers Drug Mart. And uh so Shoppers Drug Mart has their own obesity program, which they just rolled out a couple months ago. Uh, that was developed along with launch it, and it's an adaptation of our medical weight management center. Uh, what's really exciting about the partnership with Shoppers Drug Mart is the business model in the pharmacy world is a little bit different than the business model within primary care and family doctors. And because of that, through uh a pharmacy partner like Shoppers Drug Mart, this type of support can actually be offered at no charge to patients. So a lot of your listeners may not even realize that, but they can walk into a shopper's drug mart and enroll themselves into this obesity program and they don't have to pay for that specific program, uh, cost of medications. You know, unfortunately in Canada often still has to be paid for out of pocket. Uh, but if they're making that decision to go on that journey and paying for the medications, uh, they can get this type of behavioral support available to them at no charge. Uh, and that's I think a big game changer here in Canada.

Next Frontiers Longevity Women’s Health Diabetes

And so um obesity is such an exceptional category over the last number of years, obviously with like uh GLP ones, and it's just it's in the air in a very different way than a lot of other you know categories are. There's different dollars behind it, there's different off-label uses, there's there's it's it's a whole different kind of world. And so it makes a bit more sense that a platform could scale in that therapeutic area. When you look out kind of beyond obesity, do you see other therapeutic categories or conditions where you say, oh, this is this one's really kind of ready for launch it to you know create an impact here as well?

Yes. And that's uh we've got two arms to our future strategy, and one of those arms is taking the the platform that we have and using it and some of the adjacent spaces to obesity. And we actually have some early ventures going on there that have not are not yet ready for commercialization, but where we have partners and we're starting to build out what that will look like. Uh, that includes the longevity space, where we're working with a very reputable KOL out in Beverly Hills, who's on the forefront of the research into longevity. And again, trying to distill what is real scientific evidence-based treatment versus all the misinformation. It's very similar to the obesity world in that regard. And again, patients need a bit of a higher touch. It's not as simple as writing a few prescriptions. So it's an it's an adjacent area, very close, and where we think that we can employ the same uh type of business model that we are with the Medical Weight Management Center. Uh, we're also in conversations with a few partners right now about uh woman's health, you know, again, another area where primary care can struggle to be effective and where there's a you know a lot of need for getting the the true evidence-based programs out there and educating people, also within diabetes. Uh, diabetes Canada does a good job of with our diabetes education centers and so on. Uh, but we do believe that there's a stronger role to be played for virtual clinics to be able to offer some of the assistance or possibly hybrid clinics uh to do so that can provide some new options for patients there as well.

It it feels like a through line in all of those as you described them, and I jot some notes down is this sort of need to surface up evidence-based approaches uh and clear away, uh, if not misinformation, at least noise in a marketplace, provide access to the right medication or the right treatment, and then reduce the friction in terms of ongoing support, provide access to ongoing support. Like it feels like those three components are at least kind of strategically embedded in each of these markets that you're talking about.

Absolutely. And the first one that you touched on is really important to me personally. If you asked a random person that knew a little bit about my company to tell you one important thing about the brand, I would want them to say anything that launched is involved in must be scientific evidence-based. Those people really do their homework on making sure that they bring legitimate things to market.

Which is such an interesting, it is such an interesting position because I think that so often, you know, a CEO in your position would be leaning on their technical credentials as much or more as their credentials in terms of uh we draw a line, you know, an ethical line almost, which I imagine, you know, that is that is the kind of position that's really in your DNA that helps to open doors in the healthcare space because that is not a position that is opportunistic. That is a very principled position to be taken.

It is, and and it changes the business model significantly as well. Uh, whereas most people in the obesity space are, you know, what I like to call the pill mills, uh, that's really a direct-to-consumer business model and it focuses very heavily on social media marketing, on you know, getting those impulse purchases in. Whereas with us, we like to be a true healthcare player. And what I mean by that is if you take a look at weight loss in general, that's never really been baked into the healthcare system. It's always operated on the fringes or out in the wellness space. Uh, but to actually treat obesity as a real metabolic health condition, as a chronic health condition, one that has uh viable treatment options for patients, you need to treat it from a healthcare perspective. But by doing that, that's what's actually opened up the door for us to much more of a B2B business model. And so the majority of our work and the majority of where our revenue comes from is through partnerships. And so we partner with pharmacies, like we mentioned, Shoppers Drug Mart. Uh, we partner with all of the leading pharmaceutical companies in different ways in the in this space to help support their patients. And in doing so, you know, it becomes a fundamentally different business model than if we were opportunistic and just looking at doing direct-to-consumer marketing.

Global Expansion And Going Public

So looking forward as we kind of look to the end of this uh episode, this conversation, where are you now and where are you looking? I guess in the near term for Launch It, um, it must be challenging to be nurturing uh a successful platform. Uh, I know you're looking at different um geographical markets. There must be uh you know lots of opportunity uh in terms of other categories. You know, we are going through a seismic shift in terms of technology infrastructure with AI. As the CEO running this business that has, I think, your fingers probably on a lot of buttons. What's top of mind for you as you look to the near term of Launchit?

Well, since since starting Adventure Studio, of course, the the first few years of Aventure Studio involved spending money and not making a whole lot out of it. So this was our transitional year. So what we're really looking forwarding forward to now is really growing the business. We doubled our top line revenue in the last year. We will more than double it again this year and then double it again the year after just based on our signed contracts. Uh, as you mentioned, we're working on international expansion. Uh, very proud to say that we actually launched our first international obesity clinic, and that's in Brazil. And that took the first patients into care just in December. So very early days. Uh, we're working on getting an obesity market entry in Germany uh later on in 2026, and we have some early conversations in a few other jurisdictions. But what's really keeping me busy in the last little while is transitioning launch it from a private company, and we aspire to become a publicly traded company. So we're working on a transaction that we hope to close uh in the next month or two that will take us onto the Toronto Venture Stock Exchange. And we're just in the final stages of uh doing a financing round, and that will really allow us to fund the roadmap that allows allow us to build additional success on top of what we already know that we can achieve.

And from what uh little I know about going public, uh, that is not just a job into itself, it is like three jobs unto itself. So you are going global, you're going public, and you're going stratospheric with sort of multiple revenue growth year over year over year. So uh so not much on your on your uh on your plate, really, is what you're saying.

Yeah, I don't get a lot of vacations right now. Yeah, but we're enjoying what we do. And you know what, when when you're entrepreneur, you set out on the journey, uh, this is the type of things that you want to happen in the future. Yep. And uh I'm actually really excited about it. I also think the the role of the public markets is underutilized in the life sciences. And as we go through this too, I really want to educate people in that community about the role of things like the venture exchange in Canada and the roadmap of what that looks like. Uh, because again, if we want to solve how do we get more things out of research and into real world, these are the types of things that will open up doors and provide the capital, provide the structure for a lot more people to do it. So I'm excited to do it. I'm also excited to take that blueprint and share it widely, and hopefully we can help just improve the ecosystem in Canada to the best of our ability.

Well, Jamie, momentum is an excellent problem to have, and this was an excellent conversation to have. So thank you very much for spending some time with me this morning, uh sharing your story and your insights. I really appreciate it.

Well, thank you very much, Neil. I appreciate you taking the time and uh very much enjoyed going through this podcast.