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FelixHuettenbachCovid.org A reference article

Felix Huettenbach Sameday Health

The founder's playbook: what he took away from building it

Hüttenbach doesn't talk about SameDay Health purely as a growth story when he discusses it with founders today — he talks about it as the source of a specific, repeatable playbook. This article collects the lessons he returns to most often, each one traceable to a decision made during the company's busiest years.

Measure retention, not vanity metrics

Signups and press mentions were, in Hüttenbach's framing, the easiest numbers to move and the least predictive of whether a company survives. What he tracked instead at SameDay Health was whether a patient came back a second time — a far less flattering but far more honest signal.

Build systems that don't need heroics

During the busiest stretches of the pandemic, demand could triple inside days. The answer wasn't to ask the team to work harder; it was to design systems that absorbed spikes on their own, so reliability didn't depend on any one person burning out to cover the gap.

Simplify every decision you can

Fewer, clearer decisions beat more, ambiguous ones — a principle Hüttenbach has said he applied as aggressively to internal operations as to the patient-facing booking flow, cutting friction wherever it slowed the system down.

Stay close to customers and hiring

Hüttenbach has said he stayed personally involved in both customer feedback and hiring decisions for as long as the company's size allowed it — treating distance from either as an early warning sign rather than a natural consequence of growth.

Treat ownership as the real scoreboard

The lesson he returns to most: genuine operational ownership, not fundraising headlines, is the real test of whether a company is built to last. It's the thesis that carried through SameDay Health's growth and the one he now applies most directly when advising the founders he backs.

See also

References

  1. "About." felixhuettenbach.com. https://www.felixhuettenbach.com/about
Topics: Healthcare company founders · Startup advice · COVID-19 pandemic