A decade ago, I made the transition from practising trauma and orthopaedic surgeon to first-time founder.
The idea for Doctify came from a personal moment. I was working in London as a surgeon when I noticed a mole I feared might be cancerous. Despite working inside the NHS, with an extensive clinical network, I found it genuinely hard to find a specialist I trusted.
That experience stayed with me. If it was this hard for someone like me to navigate healthcare, what was it like for everyone else?
A decade on, we operate across seven international markets, we have connected 50 million patients with the right doctor and we have given healthcare providers the verified feedback infrastructure they need to improve their practice.
These are some of the things I wish I’d known at the start of that journey:
This too shall pass
Even the problems that keep you awake at 2am on a Tuesday pass…
There have been more than a few of those moments. A work crisis that felt overwhelming. A particularly bad board meeting. A quarter where nothing seemed to go right. A whole range of panic-inducing, sleep-disrupting moments.
But the one thing they all have in common is that they passed. All of them.
The problems that felt unsurvivable became stories I told over dinner within months. Some didn’t get solved.
They just stopped mattering. The ones that did taught me something I couldn’t have learned any other way.
You learn more from hardship than from good times.
Celebrate your successes. No, seriously, actually celebrate them!
When we got our first patient review, there was barely a champagne moment. We were already onto the next things: retention, pipeline, growth. That instinct is what helps you survive, especially in the early years, but it can also make you completely miss what’s in front of you.
Those first reviews were proof that the problem I had experienced personally was not personal at all. It was systemic. That’s the moment Doctify stopped being an idea, and became a scalable concept with the potential to have real impact. I perhaps didn’t fully realise it at the time.
There is also genuine scientific lift that also comes from celebrating success. That dopamine hit is actually crucial, and addictive. It gives you the motivation to keep going and find that feeling again.
Imposter syndrome will drain you
Imposter syndrome is a useless feeling. Every hour spent questioning whether you belong is an hour you’re not spending building, leading, or solving the problem you came here to solve.
Seven years in, I referred to myself as an inexperienced CEO in conversation with an advisor. They stopped me mid-sentence. It was the first time I’d been called out for it, and it made me realise how much energy I was losing by questioning my own position.
I removed my imposter syndrome like a jacket I was never meant to wear.
Invest in yourself
No one wants to follow a leader running on empty. Exhaustion is contagious, and so is energy. How I show up, physically and mentally, sets the tone for an entire organisation whether I intend it to or not. Even what I wear matters.
That took me longer to learn than it should have. Making my health non-negotiable, protecting sleep, looking after how I presented myself to the world are necessities rather than indulgences. When you walk into a room looking like you have things under control, you give people permission to believe that’s the case.
So, dear younger me: The hard moments do pass, and most make for great future anecdotes! The good moments deserve to be felt, properly, not just noted and moved past. You won’t always feel like you belong in the room. You do.
Stop wasting your time believing you don’t. And looking after yourself, however easy it feels to push aside, is non-negotiable.