By Dr.Vish Banthia, ZendyPlace founder and Chief Medical Officer
Business Overview
ZendyPlace is an innovative platform connecting patients seeking discounted non-surgical cosmetic procedures to Board Certified physician-owned practices willing to sell excess capacity at reduced prices. A patient selects a popular non-surgical procedure, acceptable date or dates, location with a search radius, and inputs a binding offer. ZendyPlace takes a patient’s offer and notifies eligible practices. Practices review offers anonymously and determine whether an offer is acceptable to fill an unused, perishable time slot. Once a practice accepts a patient’s offer, ZendyPlace informs both the patient and the practice of the match. For this service, ZendyPlace secures 20 percent of the customer’s offer accepted by a member provider.
ZendyPlace is entering a fragmented, $6 billion industry where individual practices are typically wholly- or partially-owned by a physician and typically have excess capacity, especially with the growing influx of additional aesthetic providers given the changing health care environment (i.e., declining reimbursements).
Almost 13 million non-surgical procedures are predicted in 2013, with an expected annual growth rate between 4-and-6 percent as more people age and less invasive technologies are released to an image-and cost-conscious population with the ubiquitous desire to look and feel young.
Business Model and Product Portfolio
ZendyPlace functions primarily as a system connecting patient offers to practices with excess capacity and under physician supervision. The system requires the patient (customer) to authorize prepayment through credit card or PayPal, and keeps eligible practices (providers) anonymous until one provider accepts and matches to the customer’s offer. This system is currently in place and has been shown to work. Revenue from this system is derived by charging 20 percent of the value of a matched offer. The remainder of the payment is made by the customer at the time of service directly to the provider.
Additional planned revenue streams: pre-and post-operative product advertisements; increased offerings such as non-surgical dental enhancements (i.e., teeth whitening, Invisalign, etc.); increase of offerings from any well-regulated cash-based service industry, including concierge medicine.
ZendyPlace has one patent pending (application #13672508), which was filed November 8, 2012.
Management Team
ZendyPlace was founded in April 2012 by myself, a Stanford-trained, double-board certified facial plastic surgeon. Additional team members include Kimi Verma, MBA—marketing; Jeff Pollard, MD FACS—medical advisor; Eris Poringer—web design; SEOhaus—SEO; Gundersen Dettmer—legal counsel; and several independent sales consultants acquiring providers.
ZendyPlace is based out of downtown Los Angeles, with member providers across the United States.
Marketing and Conversion Plans
Provider acquisition – Practices with Board Certified physicians are being acquired using a network of independent sales consultants with high credibility within the industry.
Customer acquisition – Customers are being solicited using a variety of traditional and digital marketing techniques; critical to customer acceptance is buzz and awareness.
Where Are We?
ZendyPlace launched December 1, 2012 with $100,000 of Seed funding. We have focused primarily on inventory acquisition—acquiring providers throughout California, Phoenix/Scottsdale, Houston, and New York. Up to this point, we have had a limited number of transactions as we continue to increase our page rank and our presence. Examples of some matched offers include:
• $200 for 20 units of Botox (40 percent discount)
• $900 for three sessions of RF Skin Tightening in the San Francisco Area (38 percent discount)
• $600 for one syringe of Sculptra Dermal Filler in New York City (40 percent discount)
• $2,000 for one session of Ultherapy (43 percent discount)
• $55 for one session of medical-grade microdermabrasion in Los Angeles (60 percent discount)
What Do We Need?
ZendyPlace is seeking $750,000-$1 million of Angel funding to increase customer awareness and transaction levels, build a high-caliber team, grow our provider network, and continue evolving our web presence using a variety of A/B testing methods.
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Company: Zendy Place
Website: www.zendyplace.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2012
Founder: Dr. Vish Banthia
Investors: Undisclosed
Twitter: @zendyplace
Facebook: facebook.com/zendyplace
