Blackstone Techstars Social Impact Fellowship

As our participation in the Blackstone Techstars Launchpad Fellowship has recently ended, we want to take the opportunity to thank the program and the mentors we met along the way, who help us develop and grow our capabilities as an organization.The Blackstone Techstars Launchpad Fellowship provides a number of opportunities to learn from experts about digital marketing and media, pitching and storytelling, customer discovery, design thinking, leadership, and team management. These meetings have had a pronounced impact on our organization’s trajectory, and have helped us gain truly valuable insights about the work we’re doing. 

We embarked on this eight-week journey to learn more about methods and strategies we can use to improve various components of our organization. With the help of our mentors in the Social Impact Fellowship, our organization transitioned from full stack development to selecting a new, low-code app for building new healthcare documentation modules. This pivot was a key decision in aligning our product with our mission to bring rapidly adaptable health documentation to volatile healthcare delivery scenarios. We were also able to firmly establish our key differentiating elements including fast-adaptability and streamlined design, which our organization can further optimize to maintain a competitive advantage over other firms in the industry.  Upon our acceptance to the Blackstone Techstars Launchpad Fellowship, our organization already considered itself to be sprinting towards implementation. Our participation  in the Launchpad Fellowship resulted in changes to the trajectory and timeline of this sprint, and also raised issues which put Frontida in a position to move forward past its first implementation and to provide its service at scale during 2021 and 2022. Most of the results which arose out of participation in the Social Impact Fellowship are chiefly related to the three core fellowship goals: successful implementation in Greece, establishment of new partnerships and especially with a satellite internet provider, and establishment of corporate identity for 2021 and beyond. Two of the three goals were achieved, and Frontida has undertaken a thorough effort to resolve the third goal with the help of Fellowship mentors. We look forward to collaborating with Blackstone LaunchPad & Techstars mentors to continue refining our business model, and as we continue to pursue the funding necessary to scale and save lives.

We set out to achieve our goals by bringing together strategies and case studies each week to share with mentors and execute new strategies born out of their criticisms and suggestions. Our product was being transformed constantly to use faster and more effective methods for building healthcare documentation modules to accommodate different needs encountered by our healthcare partners on the ground. At team meetings each week, our team discussed which themes would be most useful to discuss with each person and briefed the team on the last week’s meetings, each time assigning new follow-up work and goals for our team.

While most of our mentors had not worked in nonprofit organizations, our organization received invaluable feedback and sharp business critiques that caused us to shift our focus a number of times: Frontida was repeatedly pushed to understand our work and direction more quantitatively. To prepare for meetings and in response to new critiques, we researched new pricing models, growth strategies, fundraising strategies, humanitarian and academic foundations, government grants, recruiting scenarios, low-code tools, and created numerous comparisons to play out how strategy and growth would differ for Frontida depending on the future organizational identity and product development strategy. Our progress throughout the Launchpad Fellowship was largely shaped by pivots within the company and the situation on the ground, and meetings with mentors which challenged our assumptions. These are reflected in Frontida’s results and changes to strategy on a weekly basis. 

Everyone at Frontida Records would like to sincerely thank Blackstone Techstars Launchpad Fellowship for the tremendous support throughout this program. We truly believe that the work we are doing will save lives, but the barriers it faces to do the work that needs to be done are challenging nonetheless. We would especially like to thank Ms. Joy Fairbanks and Ms. Pam Roux for pushing Frontida to quantify its problem-solving. Without this encouragement, our organization would have struggled to understand the value of our products and would have lacked confidence in our pricing with our first milestone client. We look forward to collaborating with Launchpad Fellowship mentors in the future, and leaves the Fellowship with the highest regards for the time and effort spent by the organizers to ensure that Launchpad Fellowship participants are pushed to excel, to question assumptions, and to take calculated risks which are necessary to move forwards. 

A special thank you goes to our amazing mentors: Joy Fairbanks, Pamela Roux Castillo and Shehreyar Hameed.