Can getting Botox treatment at home be as easy as ordering a cheeseburger on DoorDash?
That's the goal of a Marin County-based health care startup, Persimmon, that is building a gig economy platform for nurses eager to administer filler injections on their own schedules.
The company launched the service early this year and has since performed about 600 procedures at an average of $550 a pop. The company currently employs 60 nurses around the Bay Area, who typically sign on to the service part time for extra cash between hospital shifts.
Persimmon co-founder Matthew Bartlett came up with the idea after hearing from a friend who had paid a nurse from a local spa to come to his house during the pandemic to administer Botox for about $1,200. Bartlett thought he could provide the service cheaper and at greater scale, and he teamed up with Mark Hadfield, who previously founded HelloMD, a telehealth startup writing cannabis prescriptions.
"We did a lot of surveys before we went to market," Bartlett said. "We found that 65% of people would prefer in-home for their Botox procedure, and their top concern was discretion. People don't want to run into someone they know while they're getting Botox."
The company raised a $1 million pre-seed round last year in August and is currently in the process of raising a seed round. It plans to use a new injection of cash to onboard new nurses, expand services and start opening brick-and-mortar locations to serve as training grounds for nurses and for inpatient procedures.
Contrary to popular belief, Botox actually requires a prescription from a doctor, so the company requires customers to fill out a questionnaire on their website, later approved by a doctor, similar to other direct-to-consumer telehealth platforms like Himms.
"The industry is seeing rapid growth, massive, but very little oversight as far as the prescription goes," he said. "Being a tech company, our exposure is much higher than mom and pop med spas go, so we have to do everything by the book."
Bartlett says his goal is to make Persimmon "the No. 1 side hustle for nurses," at a time when part-time health care employment options have blossomed due to the rise of telehealth services during the pandemic. The service offers nurses an hourly rate of $85 to $115.
"The perception around Botox is changing rapidly," he said. "People are more willing to get it done inside their homes and at younger and younger ages as a preventative measure for future wrinkles."
