What is the job?

Founder and Chief Technology & Product Officer at Oto Health. We provide help to people looking to manage their tinnitus with tools like CBT and teletherapy. I'm the main developer and I lead the product team in search of the fabled product-market fit.

How and why did you get into it?

At the end of my commission as a General Duties Medical Officer (GDMO) in the Royal Navy I was faced with a choice — start a specialist career or leave and do something else. I've always wanted to start a business, and I hadn't been able to find a specialty that appealed to me.

I love tech and so searched around for a domain I thought I could make an impact in. I have tinnitus myself and struggled managing it in my patients. I'd found the problem and that was it. After a few ludicrous app development quotes from agencies I decided to pick up a Udemy course and build it myself. I worked 3–4 twilight shifts a week as a locum in my local ED to pay the bills until we raised our first investment round and could start paying myself a salary.

How does it compare to your clinical career?

I probably work more hours overall now — it's not unusual to spend evenings and weekends fixing bugs, trialling new ideas and doing whatever I need to do to keep the business going. It's caused an occasional strain in my relationships with friends and family, but I'm much better at managing the balance than I was at the start.

In every other aspect it's incomparable. The work environment is relaxed, friendly and fun. We have a beautiful office, eat great food — I really hated eating in hospital canteens — and have a huge amount of flexibility in when, where and how we work.

I start at 10 so I have time to go to the gym in the morning (in theory) and still get a good sleep in. I aim to finish around 6 but it really depends on what's happening that day. If there's no meetings I'll often slink off a bit early and finish my more mundane tasks on the sofa watching Netflix.

How is it related to medicine — why were you suitable?

I sometimes think to myself that seeing my patients struggle to manage their tinnitus allowed me to understand the problem and gave me the impetus to start Oto. I think I only half-believe that. A patient experiencing tinnitus and watching their GP struggle to help could have come to the same conclusions without the 7 years of medical training.

The credibility of being a doctor has probably helped when it comes to raising money and building relationships with other businesses though it's difficult to quantify how much. Ultimately if I could go back I would skip medical school and start a business straight after my GCSE's or A-levels.

How could someone go about getting into your field?

Pick an idea, hustle your way to an MVP and start making money or demonstrating some traction with your customers. Your first idea will be crap but that's ok. If you keep going you'll land on the right thing eventually. There is no shortcut. Locumming is a fantastic way to support yourself during the tough early days.

What can I earn?

We set our own salaries. As a seed-stage founder I'm roughly on the same as what I earnt as a GDMO. I think most health-tech founders cap their salaries around £100–120k once they're Series B+. The big money comes with an exit, although I understand these are relatively rare in healthtech when compared to many other startup fields.

If you were starting out without any tech experience, how would you go about getting into the field?

YouTube and Udemy courses. Pick a programming language (I'd go Python or JavaScript) and roll with it. You don't need to be good at programming, but it is helpful to understand basic concepts like Git version control, product analytics, front-end vs back-end, testing & QA etc whatever area you're in. If you're a founder you really do need to understand the engine that sustains your product.

Udemy taught me everything I needed to build our MVP. Don't pay more than £50.