#457: Should medical education let AI in?

0:02There are platforms that are propping up, people I've never heard of before, that already have a question bank on 5 ,000 questions, whereas we've manually written 1 ,200 questions over the space of a year. It's very likely those are AI-generated questions. In a world of AI, the one who has the edge is the one who is human, and that is the USP.

0:26Hey everybody, this week, this is going to be a fun one. I've got Yasser with me, who is a pharmacist, barista, founder, CEO of Microfarm. Dude, you've got such an awesome background. Everything that you're doing, I find fascinating. I love your content and I'm looking forward to talking about loads of that with you. So welcome to Healthset Podcast. How are you doing, sir? Good. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. whereabouts are you speaking to us from today uh wimbledon london very nice is that home for you looks like you're in a hotel looks glorious no this is part nursery part office i didn't know is that is that a crib behind you how old you how old your little one uh gonna be two two amazing i've got an 18 month old currently so uh not too dissimilar i'm i sort of feel like i'm getting into the fun part with him now um and his little personality is really growing and he's grabbing my hand and dragging me towards stuff in the house normally the tv um which is not ideal but ah it's it's super fun it's super fun i absolutely love it but um yeah you you've got an eye for design mate your house looks glorious um well your nursery in your house looks glorious um so yeah listen i'm uh yeah excited to hear this your story is fascinating um from yeah pharmacy to uh to micro farm and yeah serving your creative desires um through barista work and stuff as well so why don't you start the beginning man how does how does your story start yeah so um i initially uh i started studying pharmacy in 2012 um so i've been a pharmacist for nine years now and I initially worked in community for my training year and I'm into a hospital role because I found that to be I really like the fact that you can manage patients clinically in an environment where you can see their blood test results you can have a lot more input in terms of patient care and so worked my way up over the last nine years so I worked from being a rotational junior pharmacist which was and I always speak about this was 13 pounds an hour or wow yes uh worked my way up to being an advanced specialist pharmacist and alongside that around five years ago I was offered a position where it was a split position working as a specialist antimicrobial pharmacist and also working as a lecturer um at university and that was the same university i studied studied at so i worked alongside the lecturers that taught me nice and essentially this is where i had the idea of creating a social media page um the idea behind the social media page was i was completely new to the antimicrobial field and i thought i can use the posts that i create for essentially for it to be a way that i revise So I'll revise the topic.

3:31So a certain bacteria, for example, and the infections that it causes. And I create a post around that and then share it on Instagram. It was around the same time as COVID. And a lot of content creators that you find started during COVID. And that's primarily because they had a lot more time at home. The name of MicroPharm, because people often ask me where it came from, is a combination of microbiology and pharmacy. which is why it's called Microfarm and I started making these posts the idea behind it was I was inspired by Khan Academy I used Khan Academy when I was studying and I was like we should do something like that in the pharmacy space and I just started making these posts with no obligation or no vision of what's going to come from it and I started to realize that I ran out of microbiology content very quickly so it expanded way beyond even though the name's called micropharm it expanded way beyond microbiology because a lot of pharmacy students and trainee pharmacists struggle with a wide range of different topics so i just started making content five years ago and then realized about a year or two that this could operate as a business I could start to provide training material for a trainee pharmacist so trainee pharmacists are pharmacists that have completed they've graduated at university but they've got a training year and they've got a national registration exam the reason why I targeted that group of trainee pharmacists is because one the stakes are really high and two it's a national exam so if I was to cater for different universities I realized curriculums are different the way teaching is delivered is different at different universities so I thought let me position myself to teach people for an exam that would be the same for all people that are sitting the exam in the UK so that's where I started my business and I think one of the things that probably caught your attention was last year I realized I was at a position where the income that I was receiving from the business was the same as my specialist pharmacist role alongside lecturing and I had to make the decision of do I continue with both or do I let go of let go of one or the other But one of the things, there's two things I was really struggling with.

6:10One, I became a dad. And as you know, that changes a lot of things in terms of the time that you get to spend with your little one. And two, just that lack of flexibility that you have whilst working. So I know this will resonate to a lot of people in the health care space. but during that time where I was trying to make that decision my dad got diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and it was a like it was a bit of a shock of a diagnosis and my dad said to me do you know what let's go let's go away next week and let's go somewhere we'll chill forget about the diagnosis and I know my clinic needs six weeks notice for me to just take a couple days off and just to find cover for that clinic was like it was a real battle just to get those few days off and I understand it from the hospital's perspective right it's one week before covering six patients like this week but from just like what my life was like and the fact that I didn't actually need to work because the salaries were mirrored on both sides it was a choice that's where I was like there's times like this where I just want that flexibility I don't mind working 40 50 hours a week but I want to do it around free drop off and pick up I want to do it around family just wanting to chill with you and the fact that I have that option when not many people have that option is where i was like i'm going to give my notice in now um and i'll see how it goes uh for that was a year ago and i was like if i'm really struggling um in terms of financially or in terms of my ability to deliver teaching then i'll i'll jump back in but it's been a year and i i don't think i'm going to jump back in anytime soon thanks jas a great story um i've got I've got so many questions it's so it's it's so relatable the first thing I relate massively to is is teaching and the Khan Academy so I did um I did a uh post what was it postgraduate certificate in education I don't know postgraduate diploma I think I did in in clinical education um at UCL and I loved it and I love teaching I I think it's so unbelievably rewarding it's just something about it that I even even just teaching I remember teaching one of my friends how to play tennis and or how to play tennis like you know better than he was uh in the first year of uni and like even that was just incredible it was just incredibly rewarding just seeing people get better at something that they really enjoy and that you're part of that there's something about teaching that I just think is is so awesome but I also I also remember the Khan Academy the Khan Academy was unbelievable like I don't know whether it's still going or or anything but I can remember is it still going growing I can remember using it for an aesthetic exam stuff and um oh what an unbelievable resource yeah that has been for me in my life um but yeah I I really relate to this my question is when it comes to you said your salary you got to a point where your salary was kind of equalizing what you were what you were making um from pharmacy what what were your revenue streams at that point and how did you build them up like really practically now just thinking like there'll be people listening that have got side hustles or they've they're trying to think about other things and i think this decision is a really interesting one for people in health care because it it comes with i think a lot of mixed emotions for people there's a lot of elation and i speak for myself right there's a lot like elation and joy that you've that you've created something or are creating something that is making money and you've done that and that's that's incredible but then when it starts to um encroach on well i've got to give up my license which is what it was for me um a lot of guilt started coming in of like previously i'd have i'd have been shouting it from the rooftops then when it got really real like guilt started to creep in and it became like a more complicated decision than i think what it actually was for me and i know that's that's true of other people but i'm just interested on that how did how did you build how did you build that up um quite practically and then and then how was i mean you mentioned that decision was forced in some ways and a few forcing functions in there but yeah talk talk me through that and and the decision to the decision to to jump yeah so from a practical perspective in terms of revenue um my main source of income was at the point where i was about to leave so i initially told you i started creating content yeah and i started with selling one ebook selling one webinar that was the start of it now we've got um an entire learning learning management system that has 500 videos 1200 questions and study guides for all of their notes uh for the registration exam so people don't have to write their own notes as well so we cover everything from all the therapeutic areas that need to be covered for the exam including their notes and the practice questions that they need for the exam yeah and we've got to a position where once i started offering this essentially a premium product um i wanted people to be confident in that premium product so what i said is if you complete the course and you don't pass the exam you get all your money back so that i love that yeah so that's the point where i was like we i'm confident enough with this product that i know it's it will be my strongest revenue stream it the the memberships in terms of the platform make up about 90 to 95 percent of my revenue um a lot of people may be listening to their content creators so currently i have uh 200 000 followers on all social media platforms which sounds great and for someone that's not got a following probably thinks i'm making a killing in that area but there's so many different stipulations for you to make revenue on social media platforms that i'm i'm getting close to nothing in terms of revenue um my biggest platform is tiktok uh tiktok only gives you income from what they consider not all views are considered monetizable.

13:08So you could reach a million people and they'll say only 80 ,000 of those views you get money from. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is it has to be longer than a minute. Students love videos that are less than a minute. So I cater for both, but ultimately my income from social media is close to about 50 pounds a month. And if your idea is, yeah and this is my idea initially when you look at Khan Academy and he runs on a one he runs on revenue that he gains from that and sponsorships and donations and that model is just extremely hard uh for it to work and that's the reason why a training for like I charge all my courses but to have that non-profit model is extremely difficult so most of my revenue comes from the people that I teach I'm very risk-averse so there was there's been times like before I left three years before I left in the in those three years I've had like three or four times where I've had the opportunity to leave the NHS altogether.

14:22And I was just terrified, terrified of, and I'll address this in the in the latter question, terrified of leaving practice naturally, which a lot of people are, particularly when you're teaching. And I was also terrified of in terms of the income. So I needed enough of a buffer to know that I will be comfortable, particularly when you've got a family as well. so that uh buffer for me was was my salary being matched with my net profit and that's after i pay everyone that teaches on the platform because i've got 25 pharmacists that teach on the platform if after i paid everyone after i've paid for everything is my net profit matching my salary and that's the point i left yeah so what like your take home being the same is what you're essentially getting to there it's it's so interesting and thanks for saying that by the way that you were terrified I guess that is also what I didn't say there as well that that the kind of the way that you go through medicine and you're taught that medicine is everything and I'm sure it's the same in every clinical profession right that um everyone around you is like you can't leave like you can't leave what and then you think oh god yeah and it but it's everything to you isn't it and it's and you don't know anything else out in the real world you don't know what's possible you don't know that actually most people in life are carrying this risk of jobs being made redundant or all of this sort of stuff it's crazy um and i'm i feel like i'm risk averse too and people don't often identify that in my story but i i i'm always holding on to the next branch before i let go the current one and that's why you know is my take home the same is does net profit equal salary that's incredibly relatable but back to what you said about uh the followers and not being able to you know monetize directly i think this is this is a fascinating conversation because you're right people look at large followings and and they will always assume that that is how you're making money i think though they're and then when they realize oh it's not that oh well there's no point making a big following then but there is because that following is your distribution you are building a distribution network for your messages and in those messages you can place things that add value to people and if you do that you can then charge fairly for those things that add value to people and that is then then how you make your money and people are talking about you know creator-led product businesses and all this sort of stuff it's just you know it's essentially the same thing is that you you create this distribution network you figure out what that audience wants and then you can sell products to them um i know there are like almost like product or venture studios been cropping up with with this kind of model and all that sorts of stuff but i think i think that that really is important to call out um and and do you find do you find yourself wanting to grow that audience for that distribution do you find yourself wanting to grow that audience at all what what do you where's your sort of focus now where do you feel is the bottleneck now that you're trying to tackle and what are you trying to achieve going forwards with it all yeah a very good question and um it's something that i think about like every day so yeah so there's a real bottleneck in terms of the platform and i'll tell you why there's a real bottleneck um that's because there's only three thousand roughly three thousand people sitting the june assessment and one thousand people uh sitting the november assessment that's four thousand people a year is my target audience and i've been through enough business accelerators to know that at any one time i'm teaching about 20 of the uk audience wow um and that's amazing by the way which is amazing but at the same time a lot of those mentors say listen mate like it's not like getting above 20 of your target market is at some point you're kidding yourself right like there's there's new businesses coming there's like 10 new businesses looking for the same target audience yeah uh so i'm always conscious of that i'm always worried of that i'm always trying to deliver more for essentially the same price just because i'm so worried about competition and at the same time i realized that if i'm going to focus all of my energy uh on the platform without having a backup plan um that's when i could fall into some problems because if i don't grow my audience is my audience is 200 000 people there's 4 000 people sitting the exam every year clearly i've got a larger audience than my target market only about 50 20 percent of that target market actually purchased some purchased something from me so i'm not catering for a large portion of followers that's the first thing and there's definitely a reason for me to grow my following so a large focus this year has been to improve the quality of the content uh and uh just uh like you uh my wife just joined my business uh so she was working full-time and of course working full-time uh she was working for laura ashley actually so a lot of people didn't know that laura ashley is still there it's still surviving it just has a much smaller team uh but she was really cooking with the full-time aspect and they needed someone full-time for that role um so she's joined the business part-time but she it because she's got that creative vision she does all of the editing now uh so i'm very conscious of growing that audience um i don't worry so much about what i'm going to do once that audience like what i do with that audience in terms of um the opportunity will show itself exactly and and over the past few years like huge opportunities have shown up um so as a result of me building that audience i've worked with cera v i've worked with la roche for say um i've worked with tiktok uh i was invited to paris as well so those opportunities will arise if i just make sure i'm not neglecting the content absolutely i actually saw you on stage at um in the tiktok office that time as well um loads that i can ask you about here dude um firstly i think and just going back to something else you said earlier as well the the money back if you don't pass your exams thing is interesting because i think as as evidence-based creatures um in health care we we sort of want and need something that is like okay what's the how can I separate myself from the pack here and give someone some proof and some evidence that that I am okay this is a good thing for them I am trying my best and I think that is a really nice way of doing it because my question was actually going to be there's loads of people that do courses and education like what what do you think makes this stand out to the tune of 20 % I actually think you know that is in part because of the money back thing but it's going to be massively in part because your content as well and what i've noticed as well with content is that you know what is this 450 odd episodes that's 450 hours probably closer to six seven hundred hours of content and you can't hide your morality and your ethics and your integrity behind 500 hours of you talking online like it's there it's there and especially with the ai tools now i just wonder like someone's gonna run i was thinking about this day right someone's going to run a prompt that's like can you look at all the episodes of blah's podcast and just make a list of all the things that could get them cancelled yeah like petrified that i've like said something in like episode three that it's now like completely off um but as i say that there's there's no there's no getting away from it that you creating that content and being so visible and it's funny that you say about your wife being the editor i can remember that i think there's a i remember a video that you that i saw of you guys and maybe in like a car or something or to do with a car with your wife editing were you calling out that she was the editor or something like that and I did think at the time I was like oh nice like they're working together um and just on that like I'm gonna say congratulations that you're working with your wife because I have found it wonderful working with Jessica and it's funny because I don't know if you've started to get this but people the most common thing people will say to you is well they'll breathe in through their teeth as soon as you say it they'll go oh i couldn't work with my wife i'm like okay i can and i am and it's great so like and they always say it with this air of like you must argue all the time do you know what i mean like oh you work with your wife like that must be uh that must be uh i'm like what go on finish the sentence give me some insight of what your relationship's like do you know what i mean yeah it's not easy and yes you disagree but you know what like i i think when you when you have a good day and a good week and a good month and a good year and it's with your wife in your business and you get to see your wife um at work doing what she's really good at i i i think there's so many wonderful parts to it but how have you found working with your wife yeah exactly the same as you and i get those comments all the time um and what i gather is people don't like spending time with their the hot if you don't like spending time with the other half and if you look forward to going to work then it probably isn't going to work out um so if you actually enjoy spending time with the other half then it it's it's gonna be uh pretty much the same in terms of there's not going to be a massive difference but yeah if you're like coming home after work and sitting in your car for another 15 minutes to have another 15 minutes of a break from home life then it probably won't work out uh so yeah i think it tells it tells you a lot about the other person than it does about your own life um yes i think i think so i think so do you know one of the one of the do you know one of the best things about it is for me is when there is a conference abroad when there's a conference abroad you both get to go and so you don't have that moment of like getting back to the hotel room alone or like you don't gotta call your family you gotta go on facetime you gotta see your kid that like everyone's there and that's what i really have loved about it that we can actually really lean in like as a you know as a family with a little one we can all go and all that sort of stuff it's actually like really nice um but yes it's interesting what it tells you about the evil and look a lot of it is in jest like as people are saying they're kind of playing on a stereotype right i think i do think though a lot of people would be able to do it that perhaps think they wouldn't um from what from what i've heard and i sort of hear people like no you definitely could like honestly you could and you know you find a way to communicate and you find a way to disagree professionally because you you have to um and that actually turns around and serves the relationship as well we found but um yeah anyway um love that uh question you obviously setting this up and running it alongside what we what you were doing in pharmacy were you would you have described yourself as businessy in inverted commas were you were you someone who always had an entrepreneurial idea were you selling your homework as a school kid were you do it were you you know selling sweets and stuff like were you were you that kid like were you were you doing that stuff or or was it that you just saw a love for education saw a problem to solve and then went after it that way like what way round is it for you um for me it was a bit of both uh so like when i was at school i was definitely um i was definitely selling a lot of things so i was one of the first uh students to bring uh i had mp3 players shipped from china so one of the first people so no one really knew what mp3 player was um and i was selling them at school uh for 20 pounds uh yeah so it 20 quid oh my god you must have made good money you made good money it depends what your gross margin was but you made good money there they cost me 12 pounds and uh 30 of them came back because they broke so probably not a good business model but yeah with your integrity you probably gave them the money back didn't you you probably yeah you did of course you did but i did because they live some of them live right next door they literally know where you live yeah um so yeah in terms of i used to enjoy that i used to enjoy selling things on ebay as well yeah my sister has always been like that so my sister has always sold things on ebay um so as business of a lot of tech products and i used to work alongside her so i used to be like the handyman that does the collections of the stock because a lot of the stock used to come from suppliers in london and we were based in leicester so i used to do the traveling for that i used to do a lot of the packing of the orders for that so i've already enjoyed that the the education side it was never intended to be a business i just initially i had the naive mindset that the and this is what everyone thinks that the ad revenue itself would pay for everything i'm doing online and like i said i realized that it's a very hot tough business model so that's when i thought let me use my like maybe business acumen to start selling products um but yeah it was i'd say a combination of both nice but look what's common in that story you you had that as part of your nature that i've learned from a lot of entrepreneurs on here they've got some sort of selling background in them somewhere as a kid but also you you know you sailed close to an entrepreneur in your sister who was doing this and you'll have learned from her what's she doing now out of interest is she yes she does a different every five years in her life she's doing something different so she is studying accounting right now and she's got four children so yeah she's always doing something different interesting she sounds very much like an entrepreneur um you're bootstrapping your company now that might have been a decision it might be something that you're actively batting away people that want to invest in what you're doing it might be that you might do that in future i i don't know but i'm interested in the way that this business is financed now you do you make this elusive thing called profit which is amazing anyone that operates in healthcare technology and anything in between to to be profitable is a very wonderful and privileged position to be in and so as you say your net profit equaling your uh take home when you made the decision to to jump out that is an unbelievable thing to have achieved and so congratulations first of all on doing that I know how difficult that is.

29:58But I'm interested in what the journey is like now for the business model and the financing of it and what you want to achieve because some people would turn around to you and go, okay, cool, you've got this platform, you've got this education universe that you've created along with content. Actually, if you took a million quid and hired a load of people, set up this team that did this, that and the other, and people could draw a decent plan for you that could, I don't know, 10x this business in two years. Or if you spoke to Alex Hormozzi, I'm sure he'd be telling you to do X, Y, Z with it. But how do you feel about the growth of it?

30:38What are you looking to do? Are you looking to raise money? Have you ever looked to do that? Would you? Or are you the other thing that's pretty elusive? Are you just happy? Do you have enough? Yeah, so I've considered everything that you've spoken about. So I never did. So initially I was bootstrapping because I never knew any other way. So that's the first thing. And I was extremely lean in terms of anything. Like I said to you, I'm very risk-averse. So when I started this business, just paying for£200 editing software, I was umming and ahhing for two months over this, right? and now like i'm probably spending like 10 000 pounds on soft just software every year yeah so yeah i was very much risk averse initially um and bootstrapping because i never knew any other way a thing that i did which was quite different is when i started going to these um i went to a lot of business accelerators and that's when i started seeing oh my god there's another way in terms of some people haven't developed they've got an idea for a product or they've got such a good plan for a product that people are investing before they've even delivered the product and some of these people founders were their salary was from the investment money and they haven't delivered the product yet so that's when I started to realize like there is another side to the way this business works.

32:10So for me, that business, that model didn't work. And I'll tell you why that model didn't work. And that's because my target market is relatively small, right? So my main priority is to keep a very lean business. My main expense is the staff and the expertise that I bring in. And this is something that makes me different from other providers. So we do charge a premium price for the product uh but the reason why we charge a premium price is we have a team of 25 people and if you don't pass you get your your money back right um so a lot of my competitors have one person delivering the entire uh program from my understanding all businesses in this realm in this where we're delivering to this target market all of these businesses are bootstrapped and the reason is is if i raised money so i asked myself this question when i was in these business accelerators and i had to deliver these pitches uh to invest so these practice pitches to investors i really struggled with the slide where i said what am i going to do with this money yeah and this is where i like even when we were doing these practice pitches the with this dragon's style i would get ripped to shreds when when i had this slide because they they could clearly see i had no plan for the money and the reason for that is i can completely and i speak to developers all the time i could completely change the way the platform looks it can be like this life-changing amazing education platform however the amount i'm spending on that for me to get that back in terms of revenue for this small target market that i'm going for is almost impossible so i could do it that route.

34:00I could, I could make a completely change the way the, the platform works, have a corresponding app for it. I just don't have the market for it or the need for it. So that's the reason why my main priority right now is to have a very lean business, uh, because of that target market. I have considered expanding to pharmacy students, uh, in terms of the platform. one of the challenges for pharmacy students and this is one of the things that founders get wrong is they create such a brilliant solution for that struggling pharmacy student but they didn't ask that pharmacy student whether they yeah you're struggling with your studies i could create a platform for you that's extremely helpful are you willing to spend 200 pounds a year for this platform and they'll say no way like are you willing to spend 20 pounds no so you're creating a product that's very expensive for an audience that's not willing to spend.

35:00So this, what I found in terms of offering something for pharmacy students is I started all the notes that I was telling you about, the digital notes that I had for trainee pharmacists, I started creating physical study guides. So I've got a range of physical study guides for pharmacy students that costs around£10. And that's a way that I've added another revenue stream, but again, as lean as possible in terms of business. If I find a target market that has a problem that they're willing to spend thousands on, that's when I think, and I need to develop product that would cost me$50 ,000 or$70 ,000 or$100 ,000 to create.

35:48that's where i'd be worried more about um investment but if i right now if i don't know what to do with your the money that you invest in me 100 i'm gonna bootstrap well of course and you're already profitable so you're accumulating a war chest if you need it you're taking out the business what you need to live and yeah the rest just sits in there as basically investment money anyway you're but you're you're the one investing in it and also you you retain your freedom as well and you retain that sense of freedom because you know an investor an investor comes on it depends what type of investor obviously it depends also you don't necessarily need to take on equity you could take on debt but um there's different ways obviously of taking money into the into the business but ultimately if you if you were to take if you were to sell some equity in the business and now you've got someone you've got a board now so you'd assume um you've now got a report to that board or you've got someone to report to they they might have in the terms of the investment that you can't make a decision on a hire that costs more than 75k without asking them and now all of a sudden you've got you know you you now also and here's the thing as well that that i've you know noted that's really practical about this you can't just issue you just can't issue yourself a dividend as carefree as you used to either you've now got this other person that you're going to have to make a bank transfer to or at least ask and now now have you got to actually pull more salary because you can't just issue dividends and then what does that do for your tax and like all that sort of stuff matters like and and this is the thing about bootstrapping isn't it that there's so much i think about bootstrapping that doesn't get talked about i know so much more i run a bootstrap business like that that you know i mean people know this size some houses but like i feel like i still know more about about how to run a company that's raised vc money than i do a bootstraps uh company because of the just the the the different things that you have to think about like that you know once you've got other people on the cap table issuing dividends is very different you then have to take more salary well actually yeah and that changes tax so it's it's it it's really strange i mean how how have you found i'm interested actually like did you get did the accelerators help you bootstrap did the accelerators teach you anything about bootstrapping did they talk about the challenges did they talk about how to run your personal finances at the same time as your business finances because when you're bootstrapping it's one thing did was that was that any of that ever talked about or discussed very much uh so i actually i i was part of uh a barclays accelerator i was part of a few accelerators with founder vine as well eagle labs the barclays one yes yeah it was yeah um it was it was actually a one they did in collaboration with plexel um it was barclays eagle labs with plexel that was good there's one that is tiny uh in terms of relative size and that was leicester startups um because i was living at in leicester at the time yeah that was fantastic like it was interesting it was fantastic um i they're they're really they're really early on in terms of they've i was probably the fifth or sixth core cohort amazing they spoke about uh loads of different things that so they spoke about how to uh get an ai agent to manage the customer service side of things and i'm still using the things that they taught me to this day so i've taught uh an ai agent about ended up teaching over the past year about a thousand different scenarios of questions trainee pharmacists may ask and that those questions are being answered while i sleep so like uh that's one of the things i struggle with in terms of customer service i today i can have 15 queries tomorrow i can have one how do i hire someone for that so um exactly that so the the tools that i've learned from those um startup uh accelerators fantastic funding is like one component but they do realize a lot of companies will end up bootstrapping i think a lot of uh time is spent which is very good a lot of time is spent of seeing whether or not your product works um and sometimes someone could tell me what their mvp is and i already know like the business model is not going to work so sometimes the product's great but so someone uh read like spoke to me about their product recently and they said and you probably see this in in the medic world they said a lot of healthcare professionals have whatsapp groups where they're asking people about oh these are the these are the kind of situations i'm facing in practice what do you what advice would you give and they're giving actual advice in these WhatsApp groups, right?

40:43And one of the challenges they said with this WhatsApp group model is you have no idea who's giving you that advice and they're giving you clinical advice. So their idea was to, they've developed an app, but alongside the app, one, you have to put your registration number alongside your name and any advice you give is attached to your registration number. again the idea is fantastic there's two i was like there's two glaringly obvious problems as soon as i tell you james give me your gmc number and advice you're not going to give me advice especially for free or i'll give you a very different gmc number but that's a very different so uh so they one that no one would give you advice on that platform they will stick to the whatsapp the the whatsapp the terrible idea of a whatsapp group but they will stick to that because they're not identifiable and two you are now asking people who are using this free service to pay for your membership because he said i want a membership model and again the solution is fantastic even the gphc who managed the registration said this is a fantastic idea but whether or not people will pay for that solution completely different story yeah you mentioned AI AI agent doing your customer service obviously the the AI conversation is just changing every day at the moment I'm interested in where you're at with it you've got 25 people doing stuff in your company you've got a lot of tech infrastructure in terms of the platform that it's built on you're getting a lot of data through in terms of usage and all that sort of stuff there are lots of and you mentioned customer service agent there are clearly a lot of different ways that you can use ai to vibe code this that and the other for different ways that your stuff can turn up and even thinking about students you know my mind just went to okay well what what can we pull and you know get out to students that's actually largely ai based in its in its build that would then bring people into your ecosystem not cost do anything like all of that stuff starts crossing into my mind but i'm interested in how in how you feel about it it's quite overwhelming i imagine because um yours is probably one of those businesses where people are like oh you should use it for this you should use it for this you should use it for this and actually a lot of what your brand seems to be is it feels very you like it's a very personal thing i think a lot of people's relationship to you and your company and i've spoken to pharmacists by the way who use your stuff who speak incredibly highly of you um incredibly highly of you as if you know as if you're best friends with them kind of thing because of what you've managed to do for them through the things that you've built that is a wonderful thing that you do not ever want to dilute with any ai nonsense um but yeah so i'm interested in kind of how you feel about building ai into what you do yeah very it's very limited so in terms of and i tackle like i'm dealing with this every uh like every day i'm thinking about the worries around this and the worry is is there are platforms that are propping up that people have never heard of before that already have a question bank of 5 000 questions whereas we've manually written 1200 questions over the space of a year and to me it's very likely those are ai generated questions so none of the content is ai generated and the reason i've i've been worried about this because i know there is something that's going to come up on the market that will have far more content than we deliver yeah but it's going to be ai generated yeah and the way i've tackled with this is the the way for me to stay unique is to for me to so ai can do great things in terms of question writing ideation all that and maybe these people are final checking this stuff before it goes up maybe they're not that's another problem altogether because there could be a lot of errors in those.

44:45I like, I see myself, there's a lot of errors in those questions. That's one thing. I thought the best way for me to approach this as a founder in the education space, if one thing that those AI platforms will never do and they can't is do face-to-face teaching, right? Because I say online teaching. So if I lean into video creation and webinar delivery, right now we're delivering just to give you some perspective we're delivering a webinar a date leading up to the exam yeah so after this session i and after this session i said i've got some time i literally said to my students an hour ago i've got some time to deliver a session do you want to attend a free webinar uh in the past and i'm not joking with you in the past hour 180 people signed up yeah so like as long as i can really lean into live delivery yeah i will have an edge over and your in-person events by the way which i've written down here as well yes yeah absolutely and uh in terms of why do moving forward the closest thing i i feel i can sort of dip my toe into is having a model that learns from the content that we have on the platform where you can essentially one ask an AI agent to ask you questions based on the stuff that you've learned utilizing the stuff on the platform but honestly I think that's as far as I'm going to go because that's the one thing that gives me an edge compared to all of the other platforms that are using AI know that i i couldn't agree more the thing that really uh the thing that really resonates for me there is is the in the the notion of in a world of ai the one who has the edge is the one who is human and that that is the usp and i think that for me yasser is like the better i think that's the most incredible thing that you've managed to do with your with your brand is that it it all just feels very you and it's so funny the amount of people that if i had a if i had a pound every time someone had said to me you need to divorce your personal brand from uh from the somex brand because you know you're never going to be able to sell somex and i'm like firstly like okay thank you for the unsolicited advice like anything anything else that you want to tell me that I'm doing badly in your opinion?

47:24Like, well, a good one. Like, I don't know why that's come up, but okay, fine. Thank you. So that's, that's the first thing. The second thing is there are so many assumptions baked in to what you've just said that means that I would even be receptive to this sentence, let alone care about it. And I think there have been times where, and I think because I live in the very venture backed startup world, like the default is grow a startup to exit, take on multiple investment rounds and get the exit, get the exit. Like everything's like plan for exit and it's funny like i i feel like i've been caught up in that and we've done a lot of lifestyle architecture which actually i can talk to you about as well bootstrapping and jessica and i and we've even sat down like in the last week and and talked about this in in really kind of granular detail about like you know how how do we want our life to look what does our life look like and we've talked about exit we've talked about would we ever sell some x i'm not saying we would sell some x for 100 billion quid um but you know could you get to a point of getting to a million ebitda sell for eight to ten like maybe like that's that's in that's you know within reach but then then the question is like okay well what do you do beyond that you've lost the thing that gave you identity you've lost your anchor into the health tech system you can't just like you've you've you've lost a huge part of you and actually it's incredibly painful to get to a million ebitda from where we are now like that there's and you want to go through that for a thing that then and it's kind of I don't know we've we've had to go through this process of really kind of understanding ourselves and getting to know that and the plot twist is like at the moment and things can change at the moment I don't feel that I need to divorce my personal brand for Somex because it inhibits me at sale that's actually completely irrelevant to me right now and I look at you and what you've built and it reminds me of all the times where people have said to me that one thing they like is that I'm close to it one thing that they like is that it's me that they see on the calls and as part of it and doing their strategy and all the rest of it and actually do you really want to do this really hard thing to divorce that which may or may not lead to any more success but actually I it's just it's just a stranger but as I say the reason I explain a lot man is because I think it's it's quite inspiring the way that you've done things and um and speaking to you now it's kind of stuck with me that i'm gonna i'm gonna think about it after we've chatted and um and and look at it because i i i do i do think the way that that as i say the people i spoke to just they they love you man people in your community love you like it's it's awesome so leading on to what everything you just said is very relevant.

50:00So early on in Microfarm's like sort of initiation, when we were about two years in, I wanted to work with a much larger competitor. So there was an opportunity for us to work together. But they were really struggling with the fact that I had a business at the time that was in the same space. So they offered to buy Microfarm. Interesting. It was very much intertwined with my personal brand. Yeah. and I just couldn't see it working for that very reason I think one of the largest things that people lean into and the reason why people come to my farm is some people will message me and they shouldn't be like this but like one of the guys was messaging you yesterday and he said are you delivering last night's webinar and I said no not me he said that I'll leave it there's that mentality right it's like if you're not there um i'm not interested and it just doesn't work for the person that purchases it i i understand that that may be a problem but i don't see it as a problem right now um and and even if if there was ever something that i would want to build uh in order to exit it it's not this i like i i want this to stay with me or i would rather just close it down like either it's it's me as the face of it or i close it down i can't i can't envision someone else being the face of it so as far as this venture goes i don't see an i don't see a need to exit so i'll carry on with the way it is love it um in-person events let's talk about this for a second because i'm obviously in the comms marketing world and i see trends come and go we're entering a phase now very very very acutely i think this is coming into such sharp focus to me the events have gone from like oh there's always an event i roll they're always free they're always an add-on um to people i mean i can cite three calls this week and it's only wednesday so far of people coming to like jumping on a you know discovery call with us and going i want to run an event with some x because you get the right people in the room i get to i get all the content i get to speak to all the right people blah blah blah blah like and people honestly it feels like in the last genuinely like last few weeks that this is this is really come into sharp focus for people but hold on a minute in a post ai world where digital content is commoditized how do we build real connection with people so that they trust what we say oh we've got to do it in person oh who owns the distribution network for my audience cool i'll go to them and do an event with them and that's where we've started to come in for a few of these people and it's honestly it's fascinating to me just how much it's gone up in value and i think one thing that i really like about it from my perspective and I'd love to hear your perspective is that it's a it's a part of it that I really enjoy and when it comes to bootstrapping a business one of the absolute beautiful things about bootstrapping a business is not having a board investors people telling you what to do you can in some part lifestyle architect your way into a week that you just enjoy this is something that I just enjoy but also it seems to be valuable to people now so I'm going from a position of doing events always for free at our own cost it comes on the pnl as marketing in the costs line to actually now it's less a cost sensor and actually becoming a revenue sensor like that's that's really interesting to me but the but the beauty of it i suppose from my perspective is that that has come from just doing the right thing i.e knowing that events have always been valuable when you do them right so doing the reps and learning how to do them right and then now being able to lean in which is really nice and obviously being a content creator as well and and you know talking and sharpening that craft has just put me in the right place at the right time it seems like you're leaning into in-person events as well um which i find just as fascinating with everything that you could be doing and so i'm interested in in how you feel about in-person events and why that's being added to your kind of strategy yeah so in terms of in-person events I've done a few throughout the five years and you've probably seen that I've done a lot more now the the real yeah the reason is I've always struggled in terms of so it's the finances behind events right I've always struggled with getting a nice place in London where I can hold the event for so venue was a difficult thing and we didn't touch on this the whole episode which I'll touch on now when I left my role as a pharmacist my cousin said to me he's opening up a speciality coffee shop in London.

54:58How many of you have been talking about this? This is wild. Yeah. So what I said to you, I've always been passionate about coffee since I was about 16. So I've got all the gear at home and it probably takes me about 12 minutes just to make one cup of coffee. So I said, I'm going to work for you as a barista. Before I considered pharmacy, I wanted to open a coffee shop, but just never got around to doing it um i spoke to the the guy who owns the local coffee shop next to the university the special coffee shop and i said to him you know i wanted to open a coffee shop he said what are you studying i said pharmacy he said stick with pharmacy man he's like there's no money in this uh so uh in terms of like i i never got around to doing it i said let me focus on pharmacy but i was like i can live the best that it's the best of both worlds i don't have the responsibility of managing the business but i can literally step in work as a barista and i was doing i do that like once a week what i realized was a better way for me to spend my time as a barista is to essentially do both so we hold an evening event at the shop so it's completely closed to the public i bring in the people so we hold two types of events one we hold for healthcare content creators and the idea behind it is we learn from each other so it's chilling networking i make the coffees the speciality coffees and the matches for them and i cover the cost of all of it and what i ask people to do who are much more experienced in the content creation world is share some insights and it's in terms of to some extent it's a mess there's 20 seats there's 50 people in the room people are sitting on the floor people are sitting on top of each other but the value is incredible and the and then i do something else is the trainee pharmacist i teach i limit it to 20 seated tables and i have a pull-up projector and i make them coffees and i deliver a one hour teaching session where i go through everything they need to know for the exam and i to me it's just, it's the enjoyment of bringing those people together in the same room.

57:13And, uh, even I was, uh, I was at an event yesterday, uh, uh, uh, South by Southwest. And there was like a content creation section in Adobe's that, uh, like Adobe's corner that I was invited to. And I started to realize like even these huge brands, the value of just having content creators in the room is just amazing. so i haven't i haven't nailed that side yet because i'm like taking on the cost of all of these events is on me but i know the value will and the opportunities will open up in down the road because everyone else feels the value and i think that's the thing is that you're feeling similar to me that you're feeling that the value of this is definitely here people are loving it the business model aside i agree though venue venue's the biggest issue um a really nice place and we were super lucky man that we got to do our events at Google and they came to one of them we were super lucky to get them to get them there because Google saw the value in it because of the people that we could get in the room and again it's just it's just that thing of like if you just start with good content and we will the story behind that by the way is that Amber Marie who worked at Google at the time came to those event what one of those events when they were at the health foundry like a super small co-working space in Waterloo for the health tech stuff like Like they were one of 30, 40 people in the room or two of 30, 40 people in the room.

58:37And after COVID, they were like, do you want to do these at Google? I was like, oh my goodness. Amazing. But again, it was just to focus on good content with a few people because the whole premise was just, let me have a chat to a founder, but ask them really honest stuff. And like, no one can record it, but you can sort of write it up afterwards if you want, just be sensitive about what you say. And so that allow everyone to be, allow everyone to be relaxed in the room and do the professional thing, but be relaxed. and I think that's the thing is that I'm an introvert by nature and so I I don't I saw your post by the way about being south by southwest like I and I related to it so much about like everyone's networking I'm just sat in the corner like I get it man I get it and I think in part that's why I have a podcast because it's sort of one-on-one and someone has to speak to me like so this is my version of networking it's just a lot it takes you seven years to get to 500 people doing it my way whereas you could probably knock that out in three networking events if you're slightly better yeah but i'm i'm i get i get there eventually slow and steady wins the race etc um but no i i i totally hear you man on that side of things and i i think it's i think it's fascinating you know that you're i'm learning a lot from you even in this conversation about um you you you see everyone as peers and you just see yourself as having expertise that you're sharing with them and similarly you're bringing people that they can share that expertise with you because you're on you're in a different part of the journey when it comes to content creation for example you're in a you're in a you know you're further along when it comes to pharmacy and so you're you're just paying it back there and paying it forward somewhere else and I just think that's such a it's such a nice it's such a just a nice mentality to have and like and a really kind of I don't know an always on always learning approach that just means that you actually have community because everyone talks about it don't they everyone wants to build a community you might have people that have gone such a little so can you just help us build a community of blah first question i always ask why do you want a community of blah oh because we want them to buy blah and you're like yeah okay we need to we need to probably think about why you actually want that no no we just want to sell to them like no no don't stop saying it out loud so let's get to a reason why you actually want to build this community and then obviously it works so we never end up doing it um this are honestly it's so funny but your community looks wonderful and it's one of the reasons why like a lot of these people have uh some of the creators that are on the panel have millions of followers and they've been approached by brands like they'll probably be paid a couple thousand by brands just to speak at a panel why would they do it for free right and it's because it's genuinely there's nothing attached to that right uh it's purely There's nothing I'm gaining from that.

1:01:24So I may get some insights from you, but alongside every other attendee, the whole idea behind it is let's just share some insights with each other. And like, I was quite worried about calling these large creators to the room. I was like, would they come for this free event? Would they speak on a panel for a free event? I've had no problem with creators that work with large brands saying like, they love this idea and they've always wanted it to be there so as long as we can keep that essence alive um it'll keep going love it love it what is it about making coffee that you enjoy is it the process is it do you find yourself in flow state when you're making them like and what is it about making them where does that passion where does that passion come from where does it of thought tell me about that initially when i start first started i never knew like what speciality coffee would taste like so uh i used to i grew up on costa uh with like seven sugars uh to the point that you can't even call it coffee anymore um and and when i was about 18 my cousin was like you need to try the speciality coffee shop in london and when i had a sip i could taste like i could taste all sorts of like it's fruity and i can taste some of them i can taste something like there's caramel notes and this is without sugar and i was like i had no idea coffee could taste like this so since then i've been experimenting with different types of coffees and looking at how they're made and how so the coffee machine i have at home costs about three grand oh my goodness i yeah can't wait to see in fact in fact this is uh there's no space for it on the counter because we live in a flat i had to buy a new special yeah a new house i have to i have to have a new unit just to hold it because the coffee was using 30 kg so just the wooden box that holds it is 600 pounds so but this it's so insane this machine you can literally adjust the amount of pressure the coffee machine is delivering whilst the shot of coffee is coming out to take out different notes of coffee wow i like different flavors of coffee outside of those beans uh so i think i'm very passionate in terms of process i was very passionate in the process of getting it right um and the the coffee shop thing was when i was working as a pharmacist my last job was i was seeing patients in clinic once a week but writing about i was an independent prescriber so i was writing about three four hundred prescriptions a week and what i'm doing is i'm checking the bloods of these patients checking uh they're doing their monitoring as required seeing if the dose is still appropriate prescribing and doing that for three days a week and it was mind-numbing yeah right so when i left and i was just even if it was just one day a week uh where we have this sort of fast paced environment of making coffee and what was happening was we started doing these coffee nights uh during ramadan for muslims like anyone would attend but it was like coffee at night the idea is insane um but of course for someone who's fasting all day the idea of getting a coffee is like amazing right i had a coffee all day in the like when we're working in that environment we'd probably serve about three four hundred people in a three hour space space of time and i've got like time lapse of me working that environment it's exhilarating compared to like when you're sitting and it went to a computer for eight hours checking bloods it just brought out this sort of like i i said to my wife i was like i i really like i for the first time i enjoyed something what i was doing for like four hours in a row i i didn't even feel the fact that i was working four hours non-stop so it's it's that i guess it's that feeling um of working in that fast-paced environment there's element of that element of passion of coffee yeah element of talking to people uh but yeah i just really enjoy it it sounds yeah it sounds so similar to when um when i was in my when i was in my 20s and you know you'd uh you come back from a shift in the hospital and and i mean yeah to be honest you've you've described what most of an f1's job is checking the bloods and like frotting in the nose basically i mean that's largely what the f1 role is and just getting just getting home and like you know i was a bit of a bedroom dj i say a bit of like yeah didn't really get out of there but at the same time just me in my headphones just again another relatively repetitive process and definitely you know repetitive sound and but whatever it was i'm just in an absolute flow state and just loving what i'm doing and then you're right the hours just ticked by and then for whatever stupid reason I then just decided that all was told and got it into my head that I had to be serious now and inverted commas and so I ended up binning the whole music side of my entire personality which is quite sad but um yeah it is what I'm so I'm so glad that you've got that man I'm so glad that you keep that up because I I yeah I think I think that's awesome and it just adds such a I don't know it just adds such a color and a flavor to what you do and the fact and again the beauty of a bootstrap business you can build that into what you do like there's no one telling you that that's the wrong thing to do and you can combine your hobbies you can combine your interests you can combine what makes you money with what brings you joy into this evening that actually just gives loads of value to everyone as well and also as well I think it's in part a gift to be in service of people as well and to be to be of service to people I think I think that's also a bit of a gift in that as well that you get to provide for them in that moment and you know it's all it's all on your dollar and you're they're feeling all this value but you're you're doing a physical action for them which i think as well you know if i if i think back to you know when i would dj at a party for example i'd love the fact that i actually have a thing to do and yeah i can't be talking like everyone or drinking or like what all the others were doing but like i had a role and i had a purpose and and that that yeah you don't i don't know how much you get thanked for it at the time but like at the same time like i just felt good about the fact that i was the one providing the service to the whole party and like that i don't know it's just nice it just got me out my own and anxious not wanting to network head you know as well that i just had a thing to focus on um yeah but yeah i absolutely absolutely love that one just to touch on that uh because i got a lot of there's a lot of comments particularly from uh people from other countries that were like just really found i knew they'd find it odd that i'd work as a barista and they really just didn't like it didn't sit right with them but is that Because of the subservience kind of connotation.

1:08:21Subservience, expectations of a pharmacist, you should never do any, like, and the fact that this role is below you, is something that I've gathered. Yeah. Like, which, honestly, as a content creator, I loved. Because, yeah, they complete, one, I completely disagree with them. Two, thank you for the engagement. So I was like, this is going to drive the engagement. would you say that to a DJ no would you say it to a sommelier like sommelier is pretty much the same thing like an expert in wine that pours the wine for you and just gets it from the cellar yeah that's the same thing like you wouldn't say it to a sommelier like it's that's so interesting yeah it's interesting but it's such a spec like in terms of coffee making it's such a spectrum you can you can do it terribly and you'd still get away with it yeah and there's there's there is really an art to it.

1:09:12So like just to give you perspective in terms of the worries at the coffee shop. So the every time we do a shot of coffee, it has to be between a certain number of seconds. That's the first thing, because if it's the extraction, yeah, the extraction in terms of the temperature of the milk, we like it to sit between 60 to 65 degrees. This is something that's quite interesting. I never knew this until I started working in a coffee shop. If the door is open for the coffee shop the humidity from outside affects the grinder no way and we have to adjust adjust the grinder throughout the day no way to in order to get the same extraction time so you're literally like your weather app just checking the humidity in life the wind direction and the cloud cover so there can be a real art to it and i think that's often missed when people like some people just do not understand it uh but yeah it it's that essence of well it becomes art you're right it becomes art it is a craft it becomes art and i think that's the thing with it with anything with that many variables that has an output that someone is to be you know someone experiences that through one of their senses in this case taste it's the same as a painter it's the same as a dj it's the same as it's the same as any of these things it becomes a it becomes an art becomes a craft it's like a chef you're a chef like essentially you know it's it's all of that it's all of that stuff and i think it doesn't the the below you thing's interesting because it's like it's not it's not um i don't know how to explain this but i keep pulling this analogy a lot recently that you wouldn't ask a painter why they paint you wouldn't say to a hobby you know a hobby painter or or or a semi-professional if there is such a thing painter you wouldn't say to any of those people or someone who's being paid to do it you wouldn't ask them why they did it or you wouldn't say that like that's below you you would they're they're just they're painting they've their mates paid them a tenner to draw something or they're commissioned to do this thing at high but like it just is what it is and it's i don't know i don't know what it is you're right maybe it's the spectrum of things in coffee that perhaps people are just assuming you're working costa and therefore they're drawing conclusions but even then what if that person really enjoys it and it is their art it is their craft you know it's it's it's a it's an interesting one to ponder but um i know that i've taken three extra minutes of your time mate so i'm gonna i'm gonna wrap it up i'm sure you've got many things to do um it's been a pleasure thank you i've loved this if people want to learn more about you or um get in touch or learn more about micropharm what's the best way to get in touch with you or find out more linkedin or micropharm on social media platforms uh it's just micro farm on all social media platforms uh so and that's farm with a ph yeah the other micro farm is probably slightly different content but probably also quite fun to look at so maybe look at that as well uh yeah so absolutely pleasure mate i've learned a lot i'm gonna reflect on a lot of what we just talked about and um yeah loved it thank you mate thank you いる