The idea for Deebo started with an ear infection that wouldn’t quit, and a mom determined to solve the problem.
Meet Minni Marwaha, founder of “DIY kids health startup” Deebo in Raleigh.
As few years ago, Marwaha didn't saw “founder” in her future. She had climbed the corporate ladder working in hospital operations. Then a hospital she was working with started to look for more health tech startups, exposing her to the world of entrepreneurship, and she was hooked.
“I started realizing, hey, this looks really interesting to me,” she said.
In an interview, Marwaha talks about how she got started and what’s next for the colorful medical devices she hopes will soon be a part of your medicine cabinet.
Marwaha remembers when it clicked. While working with entrepreneurs, she saw people trying to effect real change – “while I was sitting in the four walls of a health care system, and change was a lot slower.”
So Marwaha took a chance, quitting the corporate world in 2019, without an idea other than that she wanted to work in health care and pediatrics.
The idea for Deebo would fester in a doctor’s office.
At the time, her daughter just couldn’t shake chronic ear infections. Either she brought her kid to the pediatrician’s office too soon, the classic “watch and wait” situation, or it was too late, the infection already raging and in need of aggressive antibiotics.
“As a parent, I started to feel like I was in a washing machine, I was being flipped around,” she said. “I felt like I had no control over my daughter’s health. … I felt like the stupid parent.”
On a whim, she bought an otoscope online, the device pediatricians shine into kids’ ears to get a look at what’s going on. But the sterile, boring-looking device was more complex than she’d anticipated.
“I still had to Google everything, how to hold it, how to insert it,” she said. “I was playing doctor on Google and that’s when the light bulb went off.”
Thermometers are a mainstay in medicine cabinets, but why not otoscopes? And why can’t they be more user friendly?
As her mind was churning, the world, too, was changing. The do-it-yourself trend was escalating amid a global pandemic. And health care was front and center, with patients suddenly willing to have more devices in the house amid Covid-19.
Marwaha decided to leverage that momentum into a startup – Deebo. The idea wasn’t just to put out a more user-friendly otoscope, but make it like a DIY kit, she said.
“You get the otoscope, but you also have this really beautiful manual that teaches you what to do,” she said. And it incorporates play, coming with a toy otoscope to demystify the process for kids. “I made it really colorful and fun and not intimidating … not the sterile medical device that’s usually on the walls of medical offices.”
Marwaha bootstrapped the device herself, funneling money she’d saved up during her corporate career toward a contract manufacturer that can turn her designs into products.
But her ambitions are even higher than ears.
“Ultimately my vision is to be a home health company and to bring medical devices that you typically find in a doctor’s office into a home, into our home medicine cabinets,” she said.
Right now, she’s self-distributing the devices but hopes to get a retail strategy in the future.