---
title: "Don't Just Build Software, Solve the Problem"
episode: 23
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "Dan Friedman"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO, Moxie"
date_published: 2025-04-30
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:29:14
word_count: 4751
topics: ["gtm-strategy", "brand-positioning", "sales-leadership"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/dan-friedman-moxie-solve-the-problem/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Don't Just Build Software, Solve the Problem — Full Transcript

> Episode 23 of The LeanScale Podcast, with Dan Friedman.
> Published April 30, 2025 · 00:29:14 · 4,751 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/dan-friedman-moxie-solve-the-problem/

## 00:00 — Intro: the Moxie founding story

**[0:00]** (logo whooshing) - Dan, really excited to have you here today and really excited about what you're building with Moxie. I think you have taken a really unique approach to building your company, and it shows a lot of the experience and expertise that you have in the industry and just building companies in general. So I was thinking it would be really insightful for our audience, our listeners, to really hear that founding story of Moxie, the problem you were solving, and the unique approach that I think you've taken to build your company. - Awesome. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. I love sharing the story of Moxie.

## 00:39 — Origin: a family friend opening a med spa

**[0:39]** It's my favorite topic to discuss, so always a pleasure to have a chance to share it. If we go back to the beginning and the sort of origin story of Moxie, it started in the way that everything has kind of some random coincidence behind it. I was exploring ideas for what my next company would be and had a family friend who was an injector at a high end med spa, and he was looking to start his own med spa, and I looked at him and it was really obvious that once he opened, he was going to be successful. He had a huge following. He'd had a bunch of years in the industry, but then actually starting the business was proving to be incredibly complex,

**[1:27]** incredibly expensive, and far more time-consuming than we thought reasonable, or it sort of defined everything we knew about starting businesses in the modern era, which is it should be fast, it should be easy. And so that caused us to pay attention and start to dig in. We started interviewing med spa owners and met with over the course of two months, probably 50 or 60 med spa owners who actually shadowed a few and followed the owners round for a couple days each, and that led to the definition of the initial pain points and value props that Monty focused on. We made it far easier, faster, and cheaper to launch a med spa.

## 02:09 — Not a software company: solving the customer problem

**[2:09]** We made the process of growing your med spa more disciplined and repeatable and scientific, and we fueled back some of the complexity of managing your med spa. And that was those three themes just kept coming up again and again and again. And so that was effectively where the business started, going back three years and change. - That's awesome. And you guys have experienced a ton of success so far, even LinkedIn's fastest growing company, one of them, which is huge. What do you think some of these factors to get this type of growth were that led to all the success? - So one of the things that I think we did a little differently,

**[2:51]** we're often asked about like, who's the competition? There's, is this EHR a competitor or is this practice management tool a competitor? And on the margins, of course, yes. Sometimes that they are competitive bake-offs between them, but we don't necessarily define ourselves as a software company. We define ourselves as stolving the customer problem where the customer problem is, I want to start a med spa. I want to grow my med spa. I want to run my med spa. I want my med spa to be compliant and for that to not be a difficult thing to pull off. And so we said, these are the problems we have to solve.

**[3:35]** And of course it's great if we can solve them with software, but if we need to solve them by building a service, if we need to solve them by building out a content library, if we need to solve them by building some new AI solution, we're willing to do whatever needs to be done to solve the customer problem. Even if that thing isn't a classic, this is an 80% gross margin tool with where we can just measure against all the classic SaaS ratios. And we've found that by pouring all of our energy and resources into solving the whole customer problem, everything else has actually been easier and more efficient. And the all in one nature of Moxie has meant

## 04:20 — A sub-10% go-to-market team

**[4:20]** that we're actually just not competing with all of the, or at least not competing on the same playing field as all of the narrower point solution vendors or even, you know, couple points solution vendor. And so that has meant that our go-to market has been far easier. And as a kind of specific data point to support that our entire go-to market team, including both sales and marketing right now is a full-time headcount out of a global team working on Moxie that's like 144. And so I think like any reasonable benchmark would say that team should probably be 30 to 40 out of 144, but in our case, you know,

**[5:01]** the vast majority of the team is either building product and across a much larger surface area or helping to deliver some service for our customers. And that has meant that the eight or nine have been able to punch way above their weight class. - That's an unbelievably lean team. And something Joe and I talk about it all the time here at LeanScale is finding ways to be incredibly efficient with your go-to market team. And I want to go into that in a little bit, but before we move off of your initial approach, I think it's very, I hope it's fair to use this word brave to build your company that way because it goes completely against the grain

## 05:42 — Conviction: strategy that adds up over time

**[5:42]** of what you would typically hear from VC recommendations and when you're playing in the startup game, what people are trying to do, but I think you're doing the right thing. I'm curious, what gave you the conviction to go down that road? I don't know if it came down to a moment or if it just organically kept building up to that point, but what kept you going down that path to really, really just pour everything you have into that very specific customer? - Yeah, it's funny. Describing it now, it sounds like a strategy when the experience of building it is more, we're doing the work that feels most important in every given quarter,

**[6:23]** and then it kind of adds up to a strategy over time. And some of the times when we do things a little differently or a little weird, I'm not even sure we're doing the right thing. Like a rational board member might come in and be like, "Hey, if we hired 10 more people there, would we produce twice as much?" And the answer is probably we would, and probably we should go do that, and maybe next quarter we will. But we've sort of followed the lead of, let's build something great for our customers, let's continue to double down on that. And the more that we dig in there, the more that we uncover, the more there is to build. It's one of these classic,

**[6:58]** like we thought the roadmap would last X long, and it just now is already five times deeper than that, and it's gonna be 25 times deeper than that. And so we just find that if we're building to keep and grow our current customers, that that is continuing to compound into yet more efficient, yet more effective go-to market. And go-to market, last year, by the end of the year, we were bringing on about two and a half times more medspas than we were at the beginning of the year. We're already up another like mid double digit percentage year to date, sitting here on April 15th. And so that the second half of the answer is it's worked.

## 07:46 — Do the work for you, not just the tool

**[7:46]** And so while we're always asking our thing, can we make things that work even better? Part of it is there's limited bandwidth. And so if we have to choose whether we solve a customer problem or go find more of them, we always solve a customer problem. - And Dan, really quick on that. Do you have an example where something might classically have been solved with building more features in your product versus rolling out a service to solve that? - Yeah, I think the way that we think about helping our customers grow is a classic example. A lot of practice management solutions will talk about their growth support or their marketing enablement.

**[8:27]** And really what they mean is we have a tool through which you can send your customers text messages or you can send them emails. And that's great, that is really useful. There's an important tool. But our approach to that same problem is A, we have a team that will run ads for you to find new customers. And then B, for the text message narrow pain points, we will not just give you the tool, but we'll actually write the text message for you. We'll run the AB test to figure out which text message works. We'll integrate the buy now pay later into the right touch points for the right types of appointments and not for the wrong types of appointments

**[9:09]** for lower cost treatments, for example. And so it's not here's the tool so you can do the thing, it's we're gonna do the thing for you. And of course tell you and get your approval and never be contacting your customers without you being aware of it. But there's just those hundreds and hundreds of little touch points that you wanna get right. And for a small business owner, that's like an unbelievable burden. And so our approach is we do the work for you, not we give you the tool so you can do the work a little more efficiently. - I love it, I love it. And I love the approach. I was watching a old Zuckerberg clip

**[9:51]** and he was explaining great companies are built by people who are passionate about solving a problem, not necessarily trying to design a business and make it as profitable as possible. So I think when you have an authentic passion for solving a real pain, the success follows. And if you stay focused on that, just like you have. And I like that it was organic. Looking back, yeah, it looks like maybe you have to map this whole thing out, but I think it tends to be as you're going along and you find new problems to solve, authentically solving those just keeps adding to the success. - And I've heard for SaaS, it's software and a service

**[10:36]** instead of as, and I think that's been used as a way to show early on when the product's not working, you're doing some stuff behind the scenes to make it work, but you actually doubled down on that, kept providing services and that's led to you guys having such big success. So I think that's an interesting thing to see 'cause it's definitely not something we come across often with the tech teams that we talk to. - Dan, what do you think is gonna keep powering the growth of Moxie forward and what's next on the docket for your business, your team, what's on the horizon? - Yeah, so there's a couple of things that I respect to deliver this year.

## 11:19 — What's next: new states and vendor consolidation

**[11:19]** One is we're actually just not even in all 50 states yet, including we're not taking customers in a handful of the largest states. So, sometimes it's good to just do the obvious things and so unlocking those states, which is just months and months of regulatory work is one of the more kind of predictable drivers. And then two is we've spent most of the first three years narrowly focused on a very clear to my persona, which is medical professionals opening new medspas. And that has served as well, it's been an incredible, it's such a clearly findable group of people. It's a group of people who have the same set of pain points

**[12:09]** and problems and so we've been able to really build against those problems and master that craft. And we're now in a position, and it frankly took us a lot longer than we expected, but we're now in a position where we're starting to serve additional personas, including we're seeing existing medspas that have been open for years starting to do what I think is called vendor consolidation. So, we do so much that medspas switching to Moxie might be terminating five, six, seven distinct vendor relationships as they come onto Moxie in favor of one integrated solution. And that's our ultimate vision is our customers will pay their rent to their landlord,

**[12:57]** they'll pay for meta ads to meta, and just about everything else that they need, they're getting either from Moxie or through Moxie. And so we're able to solve truly all of their problems either directly or with a partner. And so we're beginning to serve that next tier of persona of existing independent medspas with one to three locations. Maybe or maybe not, we ultimately get to larger chains beyond that as well, but the already operating independent medspas is our next tranche. - And you mentioned it's a lean go-to-market team. Just to reframe that, it's less than 10% of your team is on go-to-market. You're one of the fastest growing companies.

## 13:43 — Keeping the team lean: contractors and disciplined no

**[13:43]** How do you expand into those new markets? Is it, you said it's a lot of regulatory work, but are you gonna be building out the team significantly? Can the current team handle that? What's the approach look like? - We will, we're definitely, right now our open roles are actually mostly across product engineering and our service delivery teams, our practice success group, our onboarding team, but we do have one open role on our sales team and I'm expecting that we will open a handful more across sales and marketing over the next three to six months. Our approach is typically to do some early channel testing

**[14:26]** before we go all in, certainly before we hire full-time. And so we're working through some of those experiments now before we decide where to really double down. - That makes sense. How are you keeping the team so lean? Is it a mix of tech? Is it really well oiled processes? How do you keep the growth sustained while keeping that team so small? - There's, I think a couple inputs to that. One is we are, we do use contractors, no doubt. It's a, you know, there's additional effort beyond the work of those eight or nine people. Two is just discipline decision making about what we do and don't do. So there's a lot of good ideas that we haven't yet

**[15:09]** said yes to that will all have their time, but that we just, we constrain ourselves to the number of ideas that we can execute at a high quality to make sure that we're doing the things we do very well. And so we've actually just done less of the good ideas and go to market than we have in other parts of the operation. And in the long run, that's a problem. In the short term, that's okay. Because we're growing fast, we're serving our customers well or our customers are sticking with us and themselves are growing. And so, you know, fundamentally, I think it's, I think it's both, you know, smart use of additional resources outside of the core full-time team.

**[15:50]** And then two is just to make the hard choices about what we actually do and don't do and sequence things carefully. - No, it makes a ton of sense. And I think the future of startups, especially on the go-to-market side, is really keeping FTEs as small as possible. That way you can be more flexible. When you're going through the decision-making process, you can be more efficient with that process too. It doesn't take as much time to enable and get everybody going the same way. I think the leaner you can keep your team, the more effective you can really be. - It's also less of friction between you and the customers,

**[16:27]** which seems like it's been a big thing for you, is just staying close to the customer, knowing what they need. So that's another big part of it.

## 16:37 — Advice for founders: the embarrassingly small TAM

**[16:37]** - So I think something interesting, especially for the segment, is people who are starting out and they're getting their companies going, a lot of first-time founders as well. So what advice would you give somebody who's just starting out their journey right now? Are there any high-level big things they should be looking at that would help them skip a few potholes along the way? - I think one of the things that Moxie ultimately did well, it took a little while to get right, was the narrowness of the persona that I talked about. And it, to some degree, conflicts with some generic startup advice. Because if you just think about the market

**[17:18]** of new medspas being created, and you define the Moxie TAN for the first hand, with years as that, it's no question too small to build a big business. There's only so many new medspas being created. Medspas is a very healthy category, but most business is not going to net new medspas. Most business is going to medspas that already exist, to sort of state the obvious. And so I think there was a narrowness of the persona where we could really be best in the world. And if we started with a broader solution, we would have been pulled in a bunch of different direction. And not actually have been the best in the world for anyone.

**[18:00]** And so I kind of believe in this micro niche with a category that on its own is probably too small to support a big business, is most of the places where there are still opportunities to go solve a problem far better than anyone solving it today. And doing that, and doing that really well, and actually winning in that segment, almost always inevitably unlocks a next move and a next category of the segment where you can go be the best in the world as well. And so I shy go even smaller, pick a smaller TAM, like an embarrassingly small TAM, and go like truly win at that, to the point where real high double digit percentage

**[18:49]** of people going through that decision-making process or choosing you, and then go and do the next one. And I think that was like a formative lesson in proxy. We had a false start moment six months in where we thought we could actually start to serve an additional persona. And we very quickly realized, actually there's just no way that we're gonna be excellent at both of these. - I think that's great. And also another contrarian view. And I love that term, an embarrassingly small TAM. I think if people start with that, where it's, hey, it's a no-brainer, I have the right to win for this. I can't lose right here. And like you said, during that process,

**[19:29]** you're gonna build the skills, you're gonna build the capabilities that allow you to move into other markets and personas anyway, but an excellent place to start. I do think a lot of companies, when they start out, get overwhelmed by the amount of opportunities, more so than lack of opportunity.

## 19:49 — Hiring 'adults': going senior early

**[19:49]** And Dan, I think you also, you had an interesting approach on hiring too, early on. I know you've done, you've started businesses before. How did, how is it getting people on this same mission and what were you looking for? - One of the things we decided early on was we were just going to hire more senior. And we actually used the phrase, we're hiring adults. And I think that that is a little bit of an offensive phrase to young adults who may also define themselves as an adult, but that's kind of by design. Versus in my first company, we've just shied towards people who have done a similar job at a similar type of company and are also high capability.

**[20:35]** And so, still smart, still rising in their career, still hungry, but probably two steps further. And so, the consequence of that is to attract pets on, of course, we have to build a great company, build a great culture. We also probably pay, I don't know, 50% more than I did in my first company. And we just have a willingness to sort of pay at least appropriate to the stage of the business, if not even one stage ahead, and know and believe that we're gonna grow into that being appropriate. Now, of course, these are still people who can do the work in detail. And so, that's the hard part of getting this right, is can we hire someone who's great

**[21:21]** when they're a team of two? And so, they have to do a lot of the work themselves and be directly talking to customers. And then, can they scale up to the team being 17 to 20? And so far, I would say we've gotten really lucky and have a really fantastic leadership team that has stuck together quite well from when we were a pretty small business. And I think the fruits of that we're seeing now in terms of how closely that team works together,

**[21:50]** how the level of ownership they bring to their work, how mature they are in the way that they're approaching building their team and their department. And so, I think that has played out incredibly favorably. And you can also imagine trajectories where that trade-off would not have been worth it. Had the company grown really slowly, the size and seniority of that team might have been inappropriate to the stage. So, it had to have worked, not only for where we were when we made that choice, but also for the trajectory that we've been on since. But in our case, for our specific situation, shying more senior has just worked out incredibly.

**[22:30]** - I think it makes sense. And I also think it helps support keeping the team really lean as well. I think, yes, maybe you're paying 50% more, but maybe you need a third or a fourth of the people. Just because you're not wasting your time on doing the right thing, they know what to do. And as long as, I think that's for anything, though. If you get somebody who can execute, that's gonna be important. You can't just have, if you're in a startup, you can't just have the idea strategist person, even the founder/CEO can't be that. That is so far along the company-building journey. I think you have to have executors. And being senior and being an adult

**[23:15]** shouldn't be an excuse to not be an executor, too. - Totally agree. - Well, on that, in terms of background. So, Dan, I know you've had a great background in tech, previous founder. What kind of led you to this point? How did the inspiration to start these businesses start initially?

## 23:40 — Dan's path: the Thiel Fellowship and Thinkful

**[23:40]** - Yeah, I started with kind of a lucky break, which was, I was doing my undergrad, and a good friend shows up one day and is like, "Do you wanna apply for this fellowship "where we'll get paid for two years, we leave college, "and we'll go start companies?" And we were working on an idea, as undergrads do, but not with a level of seriousness, that warranted dropping out of college for sure. And this ended up being the first class of the Teal Fellowship, where Peter Teal was paying 20 people a year to initially leave college. Now, I think more recent classes, a lot of them have already left college and are pursuing startups, and go start companies instead.

**[24:21]** And I think the thesis at the time was, A, to start a public conversation around, is college a good value, is it a necessary path? And then, two, to show that, at least on some small scale individual level, it's not the only way to pursue interesting things. And so I ended up leaving after my sophomore year, and over the course of about a year, ended up starting a company called Thinkful, which was an online education business, helping adults learn technology skills and change careers. And we specifically built everything around one-on-one mentorship, so use the power of the internet to bring, to bring effectively high quality,

**[25:10]** very one-on-one mentor-led learning to a much larger number of people. Versus, I think, a common approach at the time was to use the internet to just bring large lecture-led learning to everyone, which is also great, also valuable, but we were just taking a little bit of a different approach. And we ultimately built that business independently for about seven or eight years. It became, the coding bootcamp market emerged over the course of our second or third years, and what we built became the largest online bootcamp. And then we sold it to Chag, which was a larger public education company, still public, although it has had some post-AI struggles.

## 25:55 — The Chegg exit and the mission through-line

**[25:55]** And that was in 2019. And so we kept building it there for a handful of years, and then ultimately moved on. And yeah, we talked about the genesis of the Moxie story, but for me, one of the connections between the two is the Thinkful Mission was all about economic empowerment and helping adults pursue a career and support their families in a way that was meaningful to them. And Moxie, similarly, is unlocking entrepreneurship for medical professionals, largely for registered nurses, nurse practitioners, physician assistants. And that is, for me, in a lot of ways, a continuation of the mission. Of course, in a totally different category,

**[26:41]** using a totally different toolset, but the mission of giving people opportunities to do what they love, own their own business, find work that they love that supports their family well is a direct through line for me across the two companies. - I love that, and I love that the mission is carried through, I think that's really unique. Two seemingly totally different companies, but at the heart, a lot of the same. Was there something earlier on that gave you the bug of entrepreneurship and gave you the interest in that type of mission in general? - I think my answer to that, I'm not sure that there was a life experience,

## 27:22 — The craft of building things

**[27:22]** but I just love the craft of building things. And things might be the product, might be solving the customer problem, might be the team and the company. The breadth of problems that I have the chance to solve is just like day to day enjoyable for me. And I think I got that taste through working on projects and then ultimately got the chance to kind of try it directly with the Teal Fellowship. And have not once in a serious way ever looked back or had a question about whether I'm doing the right thing. - That's amazing, that's amazing. Well, Dan, I think we are huge fans of Moxie, everything you've built there, everything the team is doing.

**[28:16]** I think we're probably even bigger fans of Dan. And just your story and your approach, I think it's really authentic, it's really unique. And I think that's a lot of what's driving the success. And I appreciate you sharing everything you've shared with us. I feel like I've learned a lot. I know our listeners and audience learn a lot too. If anybody's interested in getting connected with you or getting connected with Moxie, what's the best way to reach out or connect with your brand? - Yeah, thanks for asking. You can check us out at joinmoxie.com, M-O-X-I-E. And I'm just Dan at ourdomain.com, so feel free to shoot me a note.

**[29:00]** - Thanks again, Dan, that was great. - Yeah, thank you, Dan, I appreciate everything. And best of luck with everything at Moxie and after as well. - I appreciate it, it was a pleasure.