I'm going to say something that won't make me popular at the next startup mixer.
You already know the fitness scam when you see it. Lose 50 pounds in two days. One detox drink. No diet, no sweat, no time. Nobody serious believes it, because deep down everyone knows the real answer is boring: eat right, train, wait years.
Healthtech has the exact same scam. It just wears a nicer logo.
Every few months a new app launches here promising to fix Philippine healthcare overnight. Book any doctor instantly. Consult in one tap. Raise a big round, run the ads, trend for a quarter. Then quietly disappear, because the boring work underneath was never done.
Here is the boring work. A doctor will not change how she runs her clinic for a flashy app. She changes when something saves her real time on a real Tuesday: the patient queue, the SOAP notes, the PhilHealth submission she used to encode twice. That is not a viral feature. That is years of unglamorous EMR work that nobody claps for.
We built SeriousMD the slow way. No overnight fix to sell. And that is exactly why it has grown past 32,000 users, one clinic at a time. Not because we promised anyone the detox drink. Because the boring thing actually worked.
I'll be honest about the hard part. The get-rich-quick version always looks like it is winning. The app with the louder launch gets more press, more downloads, more buzz than the team quietly fixing double-encoding for clinics in the province. For a while it genuinely stings to watch. You start to wonder if you bet wrong.
Then you watch what time does. The shortcut apps get discredited. The doctors who trusted them get burned and go quiet. And the boring product that kept showing up, the one that never promised magic, ends up with the one thing you cannot buy with an ad budget: doctors who actually know it, use it, and trust it.
So if you are building anything for doctors in this country, here is the convicting question, the same one I ask myself. Are you selling the detox drink, or are you doing the boring work? One gets you a good quarter. The other gets you a decade.
I picked boring on purpose. Ten years later, it is the only thing that held.
That is the whole bet. I'm still making it.