Sheraan Amod
Marketplace Platforms

I think, subconsciously, the fact that my family are medical professionals. My parents are both doctors and my brother started a healthcare equity analysis division at a major investment firm. So given all these strands of healthcare, I think there may have been a subconscious pull to health care as a sector.

Certainly, one that is in recent memory was in 2021 when we had to be part of the COVID-19 vaccination effort in South Africa with RecoMed. We were tasked by some major corporate partners of ours to put together a platform to vaccinate potentially millions of South Africans in a short period of time. It turned into one of those beautiful struggles where the team had to work late nights and weekends, and we started taking in more vaccination bookings in a morning than we'd normally do in a month.

RecoMed is sub-Saharan Africa's largest and fastest-growing online healthcare marketplace and booking platform. It's like a Booking.com for healthcare. RecoMed's a platform where consumers can go to find and book doctors, dentists, physiotherapists and clinics, 24/7 on any device. 

We simply chose the appropriate technology stack to build on top of, which I think is an important decision. Generally, my recommendation for founders is that every business and platform is different. But try to pick one of the newer technologies that have proven themselves because that will help you to recruit strong engineering talent for a long time.

A great tech team will have a few elements working together and one is that, especially in the early days, Full Stack engineers are important. People who are willing to work on the backend and frontend, because this creates a knowledge of the platform that is compounding over time. So super specialisation is not optimal for an early-stage tech team.

My recommendation for entrepreneurs is if you're planning to have a quick in and a quick out or planning to not raise a lot of capital, marketplaces are not for you. The marketplace business needs a tremendous amount of patience as well as the ability to raise capital, to take the business through the false starts.

Normally, you'd have to hire your own salesforce, hire a massive marketing team and have massive marketing spend, which is why marketplace platforms may be the most capital intensive technology businesses in the world. Now, if we're looking at an African market, certainly in South Africa, trying to raise that type of capital will be impossible. So you have to find innovative ways to solve your marketing and customer acquisition challenge and I feel B2B2C partnerships are the best way to do that.

I think rule number one of establishing a corporate partnership is to establish trust. The way to do that is to, in my experience, have faith and belief in yourself so that you're not so secretive that you're not willing to communicate. What I will typically do is try to meet who the prospective best partners in my space and tell them exactly what our two- to three-year business plan is.

Having scaled a prior business internationally, we feel very prepared as to how to scale. And it's a simple playbook. We'll first look at how we can replicate the initial things that we did in South Africa five years ago in another market with similar dynamics. 

I've seen extremely limited success from companies that try to build using partner builders or using agency builders, and the reason for that is that they're never 100% bought in. Even if they're good people, fundamentally, they're mercenaries and what you want are missionaries. There's a big difference between the two. So you need people who are evangelised into the mission of the company - that's how you build, not just a technology company, but a great business.