I’m building Veevo Health (veevohealth.com), a startup offering preventive CT angiogram heart scans to give people clarity and confidence in their heart health. I had made a brief announcement before; I wanted to share a longer post in three parts on: 1) why we’re doing it, 2) our progress, and 3) where we’re struggling. I’d love to get feedback from the community on our challenges.

First, why: I started working on it because my dad passed away at a young age from a sudden heart attack. I’m at a higher risk too (elevated cholesterol, family history, and south asian genetics). I wanted something that gave me confidence in my heart health long term as well as helped other people live a life free of heart disease.

I was first looking into blood tests, but I found half of the people who get heart attacks have normal blood test numbers. So I decide to tackle the source of the problem: plaque buildup in our heart arteries, which can develop slowly and silently over decades, often without any symptoms.

This got me to working on CT angiogram heart scan, because it’s the only non-invasive way we can give people a clear picture of their heart arteries. It’s main strength is that it captures the soft plaque, which is 80% of total plaque and the riskier kind.

Second, our progress: We launched our website for early access and announced in a couple places. We’ve been surprised by the amount of interest and signups we started getting and it’s constantly growing. It’s very encouraging to see that our belief and our product are resonating with people.

Third, challenges. They are mainly two: * Healthcare compliance is brutal. Every partner and every state require a ton of paperwork. It’s very time and resource consuming. * Social media marketing is hard. We need to post constantly on socials (like Instagram) and get collabs to reach out to wider audience. We’re still figuring out how to do it.

Fortunately though, our pricing is resonating with people. Currently, self-pay CT angiograms are typically $2,000–$3,000 and have a lot friction in getting referrals. We’re able to offer referrals, scan, and follow-up for ~$800 in most places and our customers are liking that.

We’d love your feedback, especially if you’ve who’ve dealt with healthcare compliance or direct-to-consumer healthcare marketing.

Thanks, Arvind