Lessons - Creating and Scaling a Ketamine Company | Jose Muñoz Aycart - Co-Founder of Wondermed

Want to take a look at how you build a ketamine ketamine company Because how did you how did you going into this Even start to think about the commercial structure how to build it out how to scale it I mean if you are blue ocean then you don't have a lot of examples to look to right? So you're going in day one you know like listen I am entrepreneurial. I have a mind for business. I'm going in but There's a million different ways to revenue. There's a million different Legal items that I have to you know deal with so what what is it day one going to this is as the new CEO Um to to that point. I think you've been calling me a CEO. I appreciate that a lot I'll go founder as well. I'm a co-founder and managing director Ryan is the co-founder and CEO of the company. Oh, okay Still fantastic duo. That's how that's how we call each other um and Day one is a puzzle without the pieces If you've ever built a puzzle you start going to the boundaries the edges of the puzzle And you start kind of creating what the overarching structure is going to be of the building of of the of the build In this case in the company we started looking at all the different boundaries from legal boundaries to business model boundaries of margins What the legality in each single state was because he's very different what the federal guidelines were And we started putting the pieces together. It actually took us Two years to launch the company that you see today and that people are able to benefit from and a lot of those things were to your point a lot of Thought provoking exercises with experts in the legal field things that have been happening on the telemedicine space Things that had been happening in the off-label prescription space. We learned from past mistakes And most importantly from present mistakes a lot of it was a proper build of a structure that Took a lot of resources and a lot of time And wouldn't have been possible without the team that we were able to assemble the experts that came in and help the company Get to where it is today and how did you you raised 5.6 in a seed raised 5.6 million dollars in a seed round. How do you find investors for this? You know, there's a very common trade out of a lot of investors that have come into the company and that is their own Self-actualization their own self-improvement through the medicine So a lot of people have come to these because they have been able to have their opportunity To experience it and experience the positive impact of it and realize that the one this to be something that more people can benefit from We're also getting a lot of investors Interested in early-stage industries or markets. I think psychedelic is a market more than an industry and You know with that risk with that innovation comes the reward and I think that some investors that are Business savvy and they're interested in looking at I mean things from consumer branding perspective to actual technology The way we see it as I mentioned before Keremin or psychedelic substances are a technology that we need to maneuver that we need to master that we need to improve And at the same time it is a service because it is an experience and it is a product because it is a substance And so all of these things put together Are a very unique type of business model that when you add on top of that the fact that every single patient interaction is unique and different you have really even a marketing exceptional opportunity to understand how to talk and Provide people with the necessary knowledge for them to do it was it was it hard to raise the money It was difficult, but I think that the support that we've been seeing from our investors has been And once you get this once you get them on board How did you find the the 5.6? It took us some time we've actually didn't do it in a in a full block We wanted to do it in a you know kind of pragmatic way of understanding how the business Went through a building a stage and I started pivoting to a growth stage and within the same round investors have been coming in different points and Positive impact. I think that what I started talking at the beginning of how tough it was to go to some investors The psychedelic industry and market has been Time after time bringing experts and investors into the space understanding why we're doing this for what reasons and That made it pretty easy to To make people feel that they had the possibility of making a change and they weren't the investors They didn't have concerns of regulatory uncertainty. Of course they did Yeah, the investors that we have in the company are some of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life and the conversations that we had This is not a happy happy Situation. This is not a super easy type of market the building in itself from a structural standpoint is incredibly complicated the contextual risk of illegal and regulatory Components is also very risky, but It is a matter of looking at it understanding what the changes would look like How we will adapt and if you have a team that is able to adapt to any form of change You will have a successful company and I think that investors as I mentioned before provided that type of Of inside just from conversation those that invested and those that did not invest The conversations that I've had with investors in this company has been quite quite unique