Rohan Desai has just finished his MBBS from NHL Medical College and he knows where he would be heading to next. He has secured his seat in IIM-Ahmedabad for MBA. This was 2008.
He had taken up a job in a consultancy and has decided to quit. This was 2013.
Fast-forward to April of 2014. Rohan has started working on his own startup and is looking for like-minded people to join him. A common friend pesters Rohan and Kinnar to meet up. Impressed by Rohan’s sheer conviction and the scale at which he could visualize the landscape, Kinnar, who has an MBA from SPJIMR, decides to join him. Soon, they meet Binal Doshi, MBBS and a post-graduate from IIM- Kozhikode, working with GlaxoSmithKline India. Rohan pitches his startup idea to her and in the next 24 hours, she quits her job to join Rohan heading Customer Acquisition and Engagement.
Fast-forward to June 2015. We meet them at their office – a cozy, welcoming house with some of the best brains working on an idea. “The idea is to get doctors and hospitals at a common platform. There are various specialties for doctors and Facebook/LinkedIn is definitely not the place where they can leverage out of. Recruitment for doctors is mostly through references. There wasn’t one specific place to display these openings until we came up with PlexusMD“, says Rohan, CEO at PlexusMD.
While the team was speaking to us about PlexusMD, we couldn’t help but think about what made a doctor to turn into a management student, and then, into an entrepreneur.
“Both my parents are doctors. I was always good at studies and entered medical following the usual pattern without questioning it. However, I always had this desire to become a businessman”, says Rohan. The idea to build a platform like this became stronger when he was hunting a job for his wife, who is also a doctor. “She was looking for a job in Mumbai and most of the places we went, we either had to drop a letter or inform people, at random”, he shares.
“While I was working at the consultancy, whenever I went to a hospital they asked me to refer them a good doctor looking for a job”, he adds. This lack of system to apply for jobs triggered Rohan to build something in the healthcare industry. They were soon joined by Kiran who takes care of admin, Karan Shah and Mihir.
“PlexusMD is primarily for recent graduates and doctors looking for internships, jobs in different hospitals, fellowship programs, government openings. We also provide a news feed for users where they can upload their research papers, patents, findings in the their field or interesting cases”, says Rohan. PlexusMD has also launched their Android app recently.
Their stats to date speaks for the startup’s success:
- 6000 users enrolled on the portal
- 600+ job opportunities
- 100+ fellowships
- 300 applications
- 200 hospitals posting job requirements
PlexusMD has bootstrapped so far. They are now looking for funding to accelerate their growth. Once the portal has adequate users, the revenue model will be that of any job portal where revenue comes from advertisements as well as premium listings. The firm is also looking to hire more workforce, especially for tech support.
“We want to make ‘Let’s PlexusMD it’ a verb for doctors and hospitals when it comes to finding jobs or finding doctors respectively, or connecting with people in the medical industry”, says Kinnar who takes care of Corporate Relations (Careers) and Product.
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