(Ep 40) MONUMENT -> Building an online alcohol treatment platform 🍷

Mike Russell | Co-Founder & CEO

Jan 26, 2021

Hey friends,

Back again with another edition of The Founder recap - this is Episode 40. If you’re new here, my goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.

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Mission control:

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And who am I?

I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself.

Let’s get it.

This Week’s Episode (Ep 40) 🍷

Guest -> Mike Russell, Co-Founder & CEO of Monument

Mission -> Monument is on a mission to help those looking to change their relationship with drinking.

Episode available on -> Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Website

In this episode we talk with Mike about…

👶 The origin story of Monument

😀 How Monument’s platform works to help low/moderate problem drinkers

💡 How to build an idea list and use it for inspiration

💥 Mike’s unique spin on a venture fund (Bombas, MyClean, Zipdrug)

🤔 How Mike’s childhood cancer mapped his thinking about alcohol treatment

🔨 Brainstorm of the week -> Custom building Land Rover Defender trucks and trading cards

Summary 🔍

What is Monument and how did Mike get started?

Mike is a serial entrepreneur, having previously launched several businesses including VenueTap (positioned as a digital platform for club promoters) and Paintzen (a marketplace for buying paint and choosing paint contractors that was acquired by PPG in 2018).

He also runs a unique version of a venture studio. Instead of taking investor meetings and deploying capital, Mike keeps an idea list and then finds operators to spin up his most exciting solutions.

He spends ~5% of his time helping launch the business during the first 3 months, takes low single-digit equity and then serves in an advisor capacity as the business grows.

He’s successfully deployed this model at several companies including Bombas, MyClean, and Zipdrug.

Monument is an online alcohol treatment program designed for users with low to moderate consumption habits.

Mike and his team launched Monument to help democratize access to personalized and affordable treatment for those looking to change their relationship with alcohol.

Monument’s flexible subscription model enables patients to access a licensed physician, specialized therapist, community and/or prescription medication depending on their needs.

They just announced a $10.3M Series A round of funding led by VMG Catalyst.

🚀 Here’s why I’m a fan and excited about the future of Monument 🚀

Mike is the perfect person to run this business. Monument is effectively a marketplace for low to moderate alcohol treatment. They’ve taken a telemedicine-style approach to build a network of specialized therapists on the supply side and a subscription base of qualified patients on the demand side. Mike has previously built and sold 2 other marketplace businesses and knows the playbook well ✅. He’s also had personal struggles with alcohol in the past and is open and honest about how this treatment protocol worked wonders for him. Typically, it’s beneficial for the founder to be customer #1 of the product/service, so that is another plus ✅. Lastly, and this is a big one, Mike isn’t concerned what others think about him. In order to be effective in this industry, it’s critical that Mike be willing and able to take scrutiny about his prior struggles with alcohol. During our conversation, Mike stated explicitly that this didn’t bother him, a third positive ✅.

Mike’s Startup Manifesto 📜

What’s a Startup Manifesto?

During each episode, I ask all of my founder guests this question:

If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?

Here’s what Mike had to say:

Research as long as you can and as much as you can. Turn over every rock and get conviction. You also have to be able to walk away if the research is telling you the market isn’t right.
Make a really deep, well thought out financial model before you do slides or anything else. Building a model will help you understand how much money you need and how to structure your business.
Avoid launch paralysis – you have to get the business off the ground. You don’t want it to be perfect. You want to launch in a way that your customers can easily tell you what they want. The business has to be built around gathering the data and iterating.
People are everything, especially at the beginning. I love hiring the underdog – the people that might not have as much experience but are just killers. Build a team early on with people that share the same vision/passion and empower them.
Culture. It’s been challenging with covid to build a culture remotely, but we have a team dedicated to building it through zoom. The brand values and culture are so important and need to be set collaboratively from the beginning.

What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔

After reflecting on my conversation with Mike, here’s something that really got my wheels spinning:

Where to look for opportunities 👍🏽

A “problem drinker” is defined as:

Male: 14+ drinks per week or 4+ per sitting
Female: 7+ drinks per week or 3+ per sitting

There are 40 million “problem drinkers” in the United States.

40 million…

A portion of that population are alcoholics that have alcoholism. There are currently treatments that exist to help them recover (e.g., AA, in-patient rehab therapy, detox, etc.), but those programs are costly and often require inconvenient travel/lodging.

Believe it or not, the portion of “problem drinkers” that are alcoholics is likely the minority.

That’s the bet Mike was making.

He thought that the majority of the “problem drinker” population was made up of people who were low to moderate drinkers that wanted help but didn’t have access to it in an affordable, convenient way.

I spent a while talking to Mike about how he analyzes market opportunities. He said that research was core to his process.

Before starting a business, he researches for months by looking at reports, analyzing existing solutions, talking to potential customers and interviewing other key stakeholders in the industry.

He realized two critical things about this industry:

It’s a massive total addressable market (TAM) - There are 40M problem drinkers in the US spending $300B+ on treatment or alcohol related expenses
There’s a portion of the population that is unserved.

Think about it, if you’re someone that only drinks a couple times a week and you have 8-10 drinks per night, you’re technically a problem drinker.

If you enjoy that lifestyle, then keep it up!

But there’s many people out there that want to cut back on their drinking and don’t know how.

Programs to serve those people just don’t exist today.

Why not?

Prior to telemedicine, it likely wasn’t feasible to build brick and mortar clinics and hire full-time, in-person physicians/therapists for a patient that only needed to come to treatment once/twice a month.

With telemedicine as an option, the unit economics have completely changed.

That’s why I think Monument is going to be huge.

When looking for ideas, you don’t need to always reinvent the wheel.

Ask yourself these two questions:

What’s a massive market where the major players haven’t infused technology into their solutions?
What’s a massive market where a major portion of the customer base is underserved or unserved?

Start there and you’ll uncover huge opportunities.

Wrapping it Up 📕

I hope you found this interesting and inspiring! If so and you want to help support our journey to bring The Founder to millions of people across the world, here’s a couple things that would be really valuable to me and the show:

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Till next time ✌️

Kallaway