Rumeesa Rais & Arjun Singh Deep - Founders - Reflect

Yesterday I broke my own convention and did something unheard of (even the waiter said 'you orite mate?')

I had breakfast with not one, but two founders!

Finding a co-founder who shares the same passion and interest in a domain eliminates the need to force them to develop enthusiasm for it over time.

I met with Arjun Singh Deep and Rumeesa Rais - co-founders of Reflect, intelligent technology developed to create a seamless way of understanding your skin’s needs. 

The skin is one of our largest organs, yet oftentimes the one we have the least awareness and care for.

We spoke about:

- Rumeesa and Arjun's individual journeys up until this point, including their own individual experiences with skin health and becoming co-founders off the back of masters research in medtech at King's College London. This led us to discuss how finding a co-founder who shares the same passion and interest in a domain eliminates the need to force them to develop enthusiasm for it over time.

- Bahrain! 🇧🇭 The world really is a small village, when Rumeesa told me she spent a year abroad at med school in Bahrain.

- Skin care as a segment. An area which has for years been very marketing and aesthetics-led, brands have neglected educating consumers into understanding their skin and the causes of skin conditions. Reflect allows users to track their skin health to better understand the impacts of products and their lifestyle on their skin (think what Whoop has done for heart rate data).

- Paths of least resistance. Products within the health tech can sometimes be subjected to a long journey comprising of the usual parts of any tech, like understanding your users, the problem and building a solution - but also not without countless months of research, development and refining. In the case of AI-accelerated solutions, your outcome is in the quality of data you inject into the model. Mathematically, we'll never achieve perfection, so on that basis how do we ship the minimum viable product that is both ready for customers and valuable.

- The role of mobile apps. I wrote a post on this a few days ago. Whilst native apps can be great for technical performance, they can also be difficult to adopt. With any product, you need to understand how user behaviour can be led towards downloading your app. Any friction point along the way can inhibit users from converting. It's important to understand this to enable you to address the pain points along the way.

We also touched upon a few areas in raising investment as a consumer-first tech business and retaining equity in an otherwise potentially long journey.

Thanks to Vestd for supporting our series!