This Ex-Doctor Turned Career Regret Into a $2M Business Helping Healthcare Workers Pivot | Entrepreneurship | How We Profit | E9

Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha: Entrepreneurship and Self-Improvement Podcast - Hala Taha | Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing | YAP Media Network

Rami Webby, a former family medicine resident with nearly $400K in student debt, turned his career regret into Match Day Health—a $2M+ busin

Key takeaways

• Turning personal pain into a scalable business model can drive both purpose and profit.
• The healthcare workforce faces widespread burnout and career stagnation, creating a massive untapped market for career transformation services.

Main topics

• Career transition for healthcare professionals
• Entrepreneurship born from personal failure

Notable quotes

"I just let go. And when I did that, everything started to kind of fall into place."

Conclusion

Match Day Health exemplifies how deep personal experience, combined with systemic

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) 2023, we did $8,000 in sales. 2024, we did $30,000. 2025, almost a million. Speaker 2 (0:07) Wow. What changed that year? And Speaker 1 (0:10) then this year, we'll do almost two million. Speaker 2 (0:15) Rami Webby left family medicine residency with close to half a million dollars in student debt and no clear path forward. That experience eventually became the foundation for Match Day Health, a company that helps healthcare professionals move from clinical practice into non-clinical careers. Speaker 1 (0:32) Our gross profit margin is around 60%. Okay. Speaker 2 (0:35) There's Speaker 1 (0:35) around 10 million healthcare professionals if you count all of Speaker 2 (0:39) them. Speaker 1 (0:39) In Speaker 2 (0:39) the Speaker 1 (0:39) US? Yeah. Speaker 2 (0:40) That's so many people. 4 million Speaker 1 (0:41) nurses alone. How Speaker 2 (0:42) much does it cost to acquire a customer? What's your customer acquisition cost? Speaker 1 (0:46) Right now, it fluctuates between and . Speaker 2 (0:50) Wow, that's a lot. Yeah. Now that you changed the business model, do you wish that you just bootstrapped it? Because your cash flow- I do. Yeah. Speaker 1 (0:57) Here's the thing. So our business was going to fail. We were going to run out of money and we weren't going to be able to raise again. But Speaker 2 (1:04) Rami, welcome to How We Profit Wednesdays. Thank Speaker 1 (1:07) you so much for having me. Speaker 2 (1:08) Thanks for being here. I know you're based in Austin, so it was an easy trip out to the studio. And we're going to really be unpacking your business model today. I want to understand how Match Day Health profits. So to begin, let us know what Match Day is exactly like. What is the business today as it stands? Speaker 1 (1:27) Yeah. So to put it simply, Match Day Health, we are a career transformation company. for healthcare professionals. So we help healthcare professionals build second careers, maybe even third careers. And in a nutshell, that's what we do. Speaker 2 (1:42) Okay, cool. So you basically are helping healthcare practitioners transition into more of like a corporate career. Speaker 1 (1:51) Correct. Yeah. So if you think about healthcare professionals, they start, you know, their degrees when they're 18 years old, get into professional school, and then You know, they do that for a number of years, some five years, some 10 years. But what nobody thinks about is what do they do after that? Typically, healthcare profession careers have a ceiling and you enter that career and you kind of stay at the same range for as long as you're in that career. A lot of healthcare professionals, when they're, you know, maybe five years or 10 years in, start thinking about a second career. Speaker 2 (2:25) And Speaker 1 (2:25) so what do you do when you want a second career or you want to grow or you want to progress or maybe you're burned out? The typical path has been going back to school or getting an MBA or getting more certifications or just staying in your same job forever. And so what we've created is a path now or an off ramp, so to speak, for health care professionals that doesn't require them to get additional schooling or certifications. but rather teaches them how to take their existing experience, repackage it, and enter into what we call non-clinical careers or just industry in general. Speaker 2 (3:03) That's really cool. I actually come from a family of doctors. So my dad was a surgeon. He passed away. My three siblings are doctors. Two of them are actually no longer doctors. One of them is an entrepreneur who works on all different things, like has a peptide business, had a medical device company. And my second oldest brother, he's a pediatric neurologist, and now he works in pharmaceuticals and research. And he's like a research director helping like cure pediatric epilepsy. So he still gets to work on his dream of helping with like pediatric brain issues. And he just does it in a different way. And so it's really cool that you're actually helping other medical professionals do something similar. Speaker 1 (3:44) Yeah, absolutely. And it's actually not that uncommon. especially nowadays with the way industry is growing, both on the pharma life science side of things, but as well as health tech as well, it's becoming much more commonplace for clinicians to have that role that maybe isn't fully clinical or patient facing. And, you know, sometimes they start hybrid or part-time and then potentially becoming full-time. Speaker 2 (4:08) Yeah. So this is a How We Profit episode. I've got to know, like, how do you actually sell? Speaker 1 (4:14) Yeah. So we run, Speaker 1 (4:17) It's a career transformation fellowship. So we call it that because it's a comprehensive coaching program. And it takes people through a journey that we've developed now by doing this hundreds of times with clinicians. And so it's a $6,000 coaching program. And it's paid up front usually by our clients. Speaker 2 (4:40) Okay, so it's $6,000 for the coaching program. And they're paying it all at once. How long is the program? Speaker 1 (4:47) Three months. Speaker 2 (4:47) Three months. Okay. And then you're basically getting them ready, repackaging their experience, redesigning their LinkedIn profile, coaching them on how to do the interview so that they can actually land a job. Speaker 1 (4:59) Exactly. Yeah. And all the way through to landing the job, getting the offer, negotiating the offer, and even becoming part of our alumni system after that. Speaker 2 (5:09) Okay, I want to get more into the nitty gritty of your business. But first, let's get into your story, because I think it's really cool that you basically turned your pain into a business, your own pain of transitioning from a medical, you know, degree into the corporate world. You actually never became a doctor, right? So you... I Speaker 1 (5:30) did, actually. You did? Okay, well, tell us the story. Speaker 2 (5:32) Tell us Speaker 1 (5:33) the story. Yeah, so... I'm Middle Eastern Lebanese like you. And you just mentioned to me, like you have three brothers that are in medicine. Yeah. Speaker 2 (5:41) Two brothers and a sister. Yeah. Two Speaker 1 (5:42) brothers and a sister. So for our culture. Speaker 1 (5:46) it's very common to be encouraged to pursue the medical path. And for me growing up, our families, a lot of them came here as immigrants, escaped war, tragedy, a lot of suffering. And so they came here looking for stability and opportunity. And so our parents, their number one priority for us was to have stability, to have a great career. And it wasn't about our passions or... what makes us happy or what we're good at, right? They just wanted us to be secure and established. And respected. Respected and prestige and all that. And so I think that's very common amongst our community and many other communities as well. And so my idea growing up was that's the route I should take. And that's, you know, if I was going to do anything, I want to do something that I can be the best in. So obviously, if you become a doctor, that's a... career path where you can be the top of your field or the best or respected or that sort of thing. And so, you know, graduate high school very vaguely decided I want to go down this medical career path. I had an interest in sports. I was injured one time, went to see an orthopedic surgeon, and I liked that experience. And so without too much thought, I kind of just decided I'm going to go down the medical path and pursue that. And so I did it. I got good grades. I got into medical school. And my first two years of medical school, I did great. And it was when we started actually seeing what is it actually like being a doctor and working in the clinics and preceptorships that I had like a huge shock. And I realized, oh, no, I think I made a huge mistake. I don't think I want to do this at all. Speaker 1 (7:32) I want to say after it first happened, I thought it just would go away. And I thought, no, I just, you know, find a specialty I like or something else. But that never really happened. I felt like as time went on, things just kept getting worse. And I kept feeling like this wasn't what I wanted to do. And so I almost actually didn't do residency at all. So I thought, okay, do I just drop out of medical school and then start something else? Well, Now I'm $400,000 in student loan debt. Oh Speaker 2 (8:03) my gosh. Speaker 1 (8:03) And so I kind of felt pretty stuck and pigeonholed. And so I said, well, I'll do another year. I'll do a year of residency, see if it gets better. So I did that. And Speaker 2 (8:12) you're at least getting paid, right? Yeah, you're getting paid Speaker 1 (8:14) a small amount. It's like $60,000 in residency. But yeah, you're at least getting paid. And also maybe I should just finish, do residency, get done and have a stable career after that. Speaker 2 (8:26) So Speaker 1 (8:27) I sucked it up for a year. and did it. And then at the end of that year, I was super burned out. And I almost decided I was going to drop out then. I got cold feet and decided, all right, I'm going to do another year. So I did another year. Again, that was when COVID hit. It was about 2019. The burnout got so much worse. And it really started to feel like I was swimming upstream. I don't know if you've ever had this feeling where you're going in a direction in life and you're just resisting. everything, the way life's trying to take you. Speaker 2 (9:00) And Speaker 1 (9:00) that's the best way I can describe what I felt is like I was trying so hard to show up every day, enthusiastic, engaged, and trying to do what's right for my patients. Speaker 2 (9:11) But Speaker 1 (9:12) the matrix of healthcare and the system and the hierarchy and all of it was just so soul-sucking for me. And so it really felt like I was just swimming upstream and like it reached a point where I was like, I just can't do this every day anymore. And I just kind of like let go. And that's the best way to describe it. I just let go and I just started going with the tide. And when I did that, everything started to kind of fall into place for me. I dropped out of residency. So I put in, I talked to my program director. We had the heart to heart. We just talked it all out and decided, hey, like, I'm going to put in my month's notice and I'm out. And that day was January 21st, 2021. Speaker 2 (10:00) Wow. So I just want to pause here because your story reminds me of something that Gretchen Rubin talks about, which is this idea of drifting. So, so many people actually just drift into their careers. They drift into $400,000 of debt. going into medical school or going to law school, they're doing it because they just feel like it's the next logical step. It's the right thing to do. Somebody else told them to do it. They're doing it with like no thought. And you were able to study, do well on your tests, get into residency. You could have completed residency. It was you who didn't want to continue on and do it. And so talk to us about the sunk costs that you felt with this $400,000 in debt. Speaker 1 (10:46) You know, it's so funny you mentioned that because I actually, at one point I was writing a book called The Sunk Cost Fallacy. Speaker 2 (10:53) And Speaker 1 (10:54) I wanted to just talk about it because that was the biggest thing holding me back. I invested so much time, so much effort, so much money, and I felt really, truly stuck. And unfortunately, not too long ago, I heard of a medical student, a medical resident who had finished from the Caribbean, graduated with $600,000 in student loans, couldn't get into residency, ended up committing suicide. And so people feel so stuck when you have that kind of like, it's like you're stuck in the matrix. Speaker 2 (11:29) And Speaker 1 (11:30) people don't know how to look at that objectively and take themselves out of the situation. and not just be drowning by it. And so for me, the sunk cost fallacy is really perspective shifting because you can look at a situation and say, this is doom and gloom, or you can look at it and say, well, You know, what if I gave myself three years? What if I time boxed the situation to try and create something new? So I could just take some risks, so I could try something different, so that I could just start on a new path. Speaker 2 (12:08) And Speaker 1 (12:09) it's really just fear around all of this on cost. It's not really, it's not a real thing. It's something we perceive. to be the case. And so you just have to remove yourself from it. Something Speaker 2 (12:21) that I loved about your story actually was that you positioned like once you, from my understanding, when you left residency, you were like, okay, this is my fellowship and I'm going to do like a three-year business fellowship. Because you see all your friends who were in residency taking their fellowships, basically working for free training, working for a low amount. And you're like, well, I could do the same thing, but in the business world and not feel so bad about it. And I thought that was a really great way to think about it. Speaker 1 (12:48) Yep, exactly. That was exactly my mindset shift that allowed me to take on all that risk because a lot of people thought me jumping out of residency with that much student loans without any real tangible path is just absolutely crazy. And I've always kind of been someone that's okay with risk. Like I'm willing to take risks as long as they are calculated. Speaker 2 (13:09) And Speaker 1 (13:10) as long as I... feel internally that good about it. Like I have to have conviction. And so for me in that position, I said, I'm going to give myself three years. And like you mentioned, a bunch of my friends were doing cardiology fellowships, GI fellowships, and all these different things. And they were taking a pay cut to do that. Speaker 2 (13:30) And Speaker 1 (13:30) I said, this is so stupid because we're able to take a pay cut for someone else. as long as it's some corporation or institution that tells us, hey, you have to do this for three years and do X, Y, and Z. And we're so willing to do that because it's the norm, because there's some institution making it normal. Speaker 2 (13:52) I Speaker 1 (13:53) said, well, why don't I just do that for myself? Why don't I give myself that permission? I Speaker 2 (13:57) love this. I love this reframing. It's so good. Speaker 1 (14:00) And I could easily make $60,000 or $70,000 a year, which is what you would make in a fellowship. Speaker 1 (14:07) And I'd say if I worked this hard, like 100 hours a week, which is what I was working in residency, at anything, I'm going to be successful. It's just I haven't done it yet. And so that was my commitment. I'm going to give myself three years. By the end of three years, I'm going to have my own business. I'm going to be making X amount of dollars. And if I haven't reached these goals by January 21st, 2024, I'll go back to school. I'll go back to residency. I'll do something else. And that was my commitment. And that was what allowed me to. take my, like, just reframe everything and just not be so caught up in the fear or the drama or what people are going to think. Just, I'm going to go do my thing for the next three years and figure it out. Speaker 2 (14:50) So what did you do first? I think you raised some money, right? Speaker 1 (14:53) So the first idea was I'm going to go right into being an entrepreneur, right off the bat. Speaker 2 (14:59) No experience. Speaker 1 (15:00) No, no experience at all. And so the idea I had was I wanted to build this shared co-working space for clinicians where they could work together and see patients and rent out space almost like, you know, like we work, but it's just for patient space. So Speaker 2 (15:17) it's like private practice doctors can like share an office space, kind of like a medical center. Speaker 1 (15:22) Exactly. Yeah. But it's more like hip. It's more, it's more like your average co-working space. Speaker 2 (15:29) It's like a hip medical center. Speaker 1 (15:30) Yeah, exactly. And clinicians can rent space like by the hour, by the day. by or just permanently. And that was the idea. And it had its flaws at the time. And so for about six months, I was working on it. I was pitching to investors, trying to raise capitals, a capital intensive project that would have taken $2 million to stand up the first kind of full building and operations for a year. And so I pitched like 100 investors within that six months and raised $0. Speaker 2 (16:01) $0? Speaker 1 (16:02) $0. Speaker 2 (16:03) Yeah. Speaker 1 (16:05) Nice. Yeah. And basically at the end of that six months, I was like, okay, I'm running out of money. I got to do something. And I, you know, that was my first failure. And it was a huge punch in the face for me because I had so much riding on me being successful after that. Because I was like, I just left out, dropped out of residency. I'm doing this thing. But I felt like everybody was watching me. They obviously weren't. Speaker 2 (16:30) Yeah. But Speaker 1 (16:30) I felt like. I had to prove myself. I had to do something big to Speaker 2 (16:35) be Speaker 1 (16:35) successful so that I could justify dropping out of residency. Why Speaker 2 (16:39) do you think nobody gave you any money? Speaker 1 (16:41) I think I just probably didn't have enough experience and it was a big risk for people. Speaker 2 (16:47) Yeah. Speaker 1 (16:47) Probably at the time. Like this is a first time founder and the environment I would see is very different today. Like what I'm seeing now in the venture world is... lots of people are getting money and getting funded, but it wasn't a tech business. It was, it was almost like a real estate business. I'm someone without any real estate experience, don't have a co-founder. And I don't think I'd built enough trust. Yeah. And maybe Speaker 2 (17:12) even the upside wasn't enough. Like. Speaker 1 (17:14) Yeah. Yeah. So, so there are multiple reasons. I just don't think that, you know, I took the swing and I think I learned a lot through that. It taught me how to pitch. It taught me, you know, how to build a pitch deck and tell a story and what investors want to see. And so even though it didn't work out, I've learned so much from it and it gave me the confidence to go and do my next thing. It could be for many reasons. I think I remember the feedback being was just, you know, you're going to need so much money and there's no way to scale this and you don't even have anybody signed up yet. Speaker 2 (17:45) Okay, so that didn't work out. And then you were like, I'm going to go actually get experience at a startup. You went to a startup, right? Speaker 1 (17:53) Actually, before that, I moved back to Michigan. I had to get a real job. I had earned my medical license. So technically, when you have a license, you can still practice. So I had Speaker 2 (18:04) an Speaker 1 (18:04) unrestricted license, wasn't board certified, but it allowed me to go work in the urgent care, which is what I did. Worked in the urgent care for a little bit, made enough money to pay my bills. And then I was actively pursuing my next thing, which was trying to get into health tech. I figured, hey, I'm not ready to be an entrepreneur yet. Let me go work with a startup founder, work in a startup, do something that I'm potentially passionate about and see what happens. Speaker 2 (18:31) And Speaker 1 (18:31) so it was about nine months and I caught a break, which actually brought me here to Austin, Texas. And that was my first health tech opportunity. So Speaker 2 (18:38) you did this health tech opportunity and then on the side, you started to build your next business. Speaker 1 (18:45) Correct. Yeah. So I actually landed another opportunity after that. Did that one for about six months, landed another opportunity. And during that time, I was getting so many clinicians asking me, hey, Rami, I want to pivot too. How did you do it? Can you show me where you're finding these jobs? And that was around the time that I realized, well, it's not really about a job board. It's not about just finding the jobs. You have to go through an entire transformation. You have to rebrand yourself. tell your skills in a different way, go through this identity crisis, because it can be a lot to process, Speaker 2 (19:19) you know, Speaker 1 (19:20) from thinking about yourself as a doctor to now thinking of yourself as someone who's an operator. Speaker 2 (19:25) And Speaker 1 (19:26) so I had to kind of figure out how do I tell people or show people really that there's a lot to bridge here and just applying or finding the opportunities isn't actually going to solve the problem. And Speaker 2 (19:40) so while you were working in corporate, you also started a podcast, right? Speaker 1 (19:43) I did, yeah. So actually while I was in medical school, I started the podcast. Oh, wow. Long time ago. Yeah, Speaker 2 (19:48) it was in Speaker 1 (19:48) 2017. Speaker 2 (19:49) Okay. I Speaker 1 (19:50) was doing my first few episodes on Skype. And because Zoom wasn't even around then and it was just so early. Yeah. Speaker 2 (19:57) And Speaker 1 (19:58) so it was called Beyond Medicine. And what I did was I would interview physicians that were famous on social media. Asked them what they're doing beyond medicine, what they're doing with their social media platforms. No Speaker 2 (20:11) wonder you left. You got all this inspiration from all these other people who had Speaker 1 (20:15) left medicine. Yeah. So I had that entrepreneurial bug and I was actually making money from my podcast during medical school and residency. Was selling t-shirts and all these other things. And it wasn't a lot, but it was a small business for me at the time. And so, yeah, that did trigger my inspiration. And I think looking back, I was always interested in that. But yeah, that was my first podcast and I grew it through influencers at the time, which was kind of like a new thing. So Speaker 2 (20:42) you ended up starting Match Day. Talk to us about like how you like what was the first iteration of the Match Day concept? Speaker 1 (20:51) Yeah, so I started Match Day in 2023. So the first iteration of that was we were doing a startup and we went actually. pitched the idea that we want to build like the Tinder for doctor jobs and build a matching platform that helps physicians and other clinicians land jobs in a better way. And so we raised about a million dollars in capital from investors, angel investors, and we started building the platform. And it started that way and obviously, and then it just evolved from there into something completely different. Speaker 2 (21:22) Okay, so it started as a Tinder for doctors. Why don't you think that worked? Why didn't you continue building that? Did it ever launch? We Speaker 1 (21:29) never actually launched it, no. So we spent money on, you know, hiring the right team, engineers, building the tech stack, and then doing sales and finding partnerships. And so we were looking to partner with hospital systems, and we were talking to hospital systems. Speaker 1 (21:48) You know, at the time we were burning about like $30,000 a month, which is not that much for a startup. I think it's pretty lean