Nice Healthcare is a tech-enabled primary care clinic that gives patients access to unlimited virtual and home visits, prescription delivery, and more at an astonishingly low monthly price. Launched in 2017 using no-code tools and third-party practice management software, Nice quickly outgrew those platforms and turned to Cloudburst to develop their own custom software. Cloudburst has been the company’s product and technology team ever since.
Nice’s founders had launched companies previously and knew that Cloudburst’s product-led, Shared Success, and bootstrapper-friendly approach made Cloudburst the right partner to preserve ownership while they gained business traction. Nice co-founder and CEO Thompson Aderinkomi explains, “Cloudburst is founder-friendly in that they have an appreciation for the time and money constraints that early stage startups are under and are able to work within them.”
Nice quickly reached the limits of the no-code tools like Google Sheets and Zapier that they had stitched together to run their business since its founding in 2017, but cash was incredibly tight. To be able to deliver what Nice needed within their budget, Cloudburst’s team drove critical conversations around the priority and complexity of individual features, helping Nice manage the scope of the initial development effort. Together they rebuilt the core technology one priority at a time and made the new tech work seamlessly with Nice’s existing services.
Another way Cloudburst helped the Nice team manage cash flow in the early days was through a Shared Success Agreement, which deferred some of their development costs for a share of future revenue. This model allowed Nice to do more development, and close more business, without having to raise more money.
Cloudburst’s first project for Nice was launching the patient and provider apps that let Nice migrate off of expensive third-party software. Since successfully delivering that first project, Cloudburst has continued to develop Nice’s platform to improve the patient experience, streamline internal operations, and expand its service offerings.
Cloudburst’s care, responsiveness, and accuracy has created a high level of trust between the two teams, letting Thompson and his co-founders focus on what they do best. Says Thompson, “Trusting Cloudburst as our dev team has allowed us to focus on doing the things that founders are uniquely positioned to do, that leverage our expertise.” Cloudburst has served as CPO and CTO for Nice, and is now assisting Nice in building its own internal tech teams.
In developing that trust, Cloudburst has become well-versed in Nice’s strategy and how it best translates to technology holistically—not only its costs, but also the platform’s reliability, user-friendliness, and scalability. On that, says Thompson, “Building a company is more than building its technology. There are many decisions and factors that go into building a company and Cloudburst is interested in understanding and impacting all of those things.”
By being the tech partner that serves the overall business, Cloudburst has helped the Nice team grow to seven figures in annual revenue while raising only $6M in venture capital and expanding beyond Minnesota to five other states. Nice recently added access to 550 medications and virtual physical therapy to its services free of charge and plans to expand to seven additional states in 2021 as it builds toward becoming a billion dollar company.
“Nice is the archetype of the new independent startup success story,” says Zack Steven, Cloudburst CEO. “They bootstrapped themselves to early traction, focused on their strengths to grow the business, trusted a partner to handle the early tech, and took investment on their own terms.”
If your startup would like to develop its tech as strategically as Nice Healthcare did, we’d love to discuss how Cloudburst can help.
