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A dermatologist built the software her own telederm clinic runs on, then started licensing it to other doctors — the clinic bills $150K/mo and pays the software company half of it
Oro Health (the software): ~$75K/mo = 50% of Dermago's revenue, an ~$900K run rate off one customer · $3M seed at $10M pre-money · MVP built by an outside dev shop for $20–30K in 2017
"The doctor doesn't learn to code. The doctor has an idea and then hires coders to build the SaaS tool." She paid a Quebec City dev shop $20–30K out of pocket, ran the resulting clinic as a real business for three years, and only then spun the software out as a product — with the clinic as its first paying customer.
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The founder is a Canadian dermatologist — BSc from McGill, MD from the Northern Ontario School of Medicine in 2011, then a five-year dermatology specialisation at Laval University. In 2017 one of her cofounders, another dermatologist, and his brother were talking about how to increase patient access to dermatology in Canada. Waits are long, specialists are scarce, and most of what a dermatologist does is look at an image and make a call. So they hired a small firm of developers in Quebec City, paid roughly $20,000 to $30,000 out of their own pockets, and spent a few months building an MVP: dermago.ca, an asynchronous teledermatology clinic. Dermago launched in 2018. Critically, they did not treat it as a demo — they ran it as a clinic. They saw patients, billed for consultations, and used that cash to pay for the technology. Volume grew. Then the inbound started: other physicians and other clinics asked whether they could have the same thing, white-labelled, for their own specialty. As the founder puts it, when they built the MVP there was no plug-and-play option — no "Shopify of medicine" where you could stand up an online clinic in a few days with your own branding, colours and specialty. That gap became Oro Health, incorporated in 2020. They took everything learned from Dermago, rebuilt the platform properly for multi-tenancy and security, raised a $3M seed round at a $10M pre-money valuation, and shipped the new platform at the end of November, migrating Dermago onto it. Dermago now runs on Oro and pays Oro half its revenue. At the time of the interview Dermago was Oro's only real customer, plus a second in-house clinic they had just launched — a virtual STI testing clinic.
There were two sets of first customers, and the order matters. The first were patients, not clinics.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on a promotional SaaS podcast. Every figure is self-reported and unaudited: ~$150,000/month of Dermago clinic revenue, the 50% revenue share to Oro Health (~$75,000/month, which the host rounds to an almost-$1M run rate), the $3M seed at a $10M pre-money valuation, three cofounders splitting equity 33% each and now holding ~27% each, 17 employees of whom 8 are engineers, and the $20,000–30,000 paid to a Quebec City dev shop for the 2017 MVP. No dashboard was shown and no third-party data was cited. Two important caveats. First, Oro Health's revenue is an intercompany transfer from a clinic the same founders own — at the time of the interview Dermago was its only real customer, which the founder states plainly when asked. Second, the auto-generated transcript garbles proper nouns: the founder is rendered as 'Dr Borjo'/'Dr Borjeau', the cofounder as 'Dr Dolce', the company as 'oral health'/'Oro', and the second clinic as 'ton test poinsettia'/'your test.ca'. Verify all spellings before publication. The host's on-air arithmetic (e.g. '$175 grand a month') drifts from the founder's stated $150K; we use the founder's figure.
The first dollar was a consultation fee, not a licence. A patient submitted photos and a history to dermago.ca, a dermatologist reviewed it asynchronously and the clinic billed the visit — and that revenue is what paid for the engineering: "that's pretty much how we paid for our tech is by seeing patients."
The clinic paid for the software, and the software made the clinic worth copying. From 2018 onward consultation revenue funded the build with no outside capital; a better platform lifted Dermago's throughput; higher throughput produced numbers worth quoting; and those numbers brought peers asking for the same thing.
The long stretch here was structural rather than silent. From 2018 the clinic worked, so there was always a number to look at — patient volume and monthly billings — and that is precisely why the wait was survivable: the service funded itself while the product did not yet exist.
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