CEO Spotlight: Joe Brown, Founder and CEO of DearDoc, on his Personal Path to Success

DearDoc, a New York-based technology start-up company, is on a mission to push the healthcare industry forward. The practice growth platform helps doctors and medical practices grow and increase their patient load and their suite of services allows doctors to utilize the chat components that most Fortune 500 companies have been able to use for years to convert website visitors to customers.

The reason why medical professionals could not avail themselves of these chat services in years past – which allow each website visitor to get personalized messages from the office urging them to set up an appointment – is because they were not compliant with industry standards. That is until DearDoc came on the scene and began helping independent medical practices across the country work at capacity.

All in the Family

Joe Brown, founder, and CEO of DearDoc considers himself a true family man. In fact, the inspiration for DearDoc came from his grandfather, a small-practice dermatologist in Massachusetts, who inadvertently provided the founder with his first product idea, as well as the motivation to make it happen.

“He mentioned there wasn’t a way to convert his web traffic to patients, and that was my first ‘aha!’ moment,” he said. “DearDoc was founded on the ideas of accessibility and patient care, and we’ve been able to expand our products to touch every aspect of the patient journey, which is amazing.”

DearDoc started off as a small operation – without even any investors, Brown said – but when the pandemic hit in 2020, the company seized the unlikely opportunity to fill yet another untapped need.

“That’s kind of been our pattern, I guess,” he said. “We were struggling at first because doctors couldn’t take new patients or see their existing ones because of the pandemic. We had on our product roadmap to have telemedicine in place by the end of 2020, but we accelerated that and we were able to save the company. In April 2020, we had the best month we had in history.”

DearDoc’s main focus is, and has always been, simple, he added.

“We want to serve doctors and patients at every step of their journey,” he said. “We provide solutions for them at every touchpoint on the patient journey.”

Overcoming Adversity

One of the reasons Brown started a company was to offer opportunities to people like his staff: new graduates and those just entering the field. He sees himself in his team, and loves to offer mentorship, as his grandfather and father offered to him.

Brown attributes a lot to his father, who was a lifelong entrepreneur, but passed away when his son was just 22.

“As a businessman, all he wanted was to see me go into business and do well,” he said. “And he died six months before I graduated. So I took all the things he instilled in me and tried my best to make it in the real world.”

Despite his long list of successes – all achieved before he turned 30 – he was not a good student in high school. He struggled with tests, homework and everything else. But his dad never gave up on him. His deepest wish is to continue his father’s legacy and show the world what a person – even a former self-described ‘troublemaker’ – can accomplish if someone believes in them.

The entrepreneur’s father cheered him on at every early professional success. They became extremely close before he passed, regularly getting into long, passionate conversations about sales strategy, theories, case studies and more. Their hours-long phone chats became something they both looked forward to when Brown was away at college. They easily bonded over their shared interest in sales and people skills. When the elder Brown passed away only a semester before his son’s graduation, Joe was crushed.

“He was more than just my dad. He was my mentor and my partner. I want to honor his faith in me through what I do now,” Brown said.

About Joe Brown: Joe Brown is an entrepreneur, optimist, and the CEO and founder of DearDoc, a practice growth platform for doctors and medical practitioners. He has been featured in Tech Times, Thrive Global, Yahoo Finance, Business Insider, and MarketWatch. Click here to learn more about his AI software that is helping doctors get more patients: https://www.getdeardoc.com/