Dendritic Health AI
From Idea to 240k+ in ARR: Founder of Med Student AI Platform
My Role
Founder
Students Served
30k+
ARR
240k+
Timeline
2.5 years
Funding
1.1 Million
Recognition
Crain’s Business Magazine
Overview & Problem
Burnout among medical students is higher than ever
Dendritic Health AI is an education-technology startup I co-founded to help medical students prepare for their board and institutional exams. With burnout among med students at an all time high, we leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver more personalized, efficient, and scalable study solutions. At Dendritic Health, I lead the product vision and design while wearing multiple hats across research, UX, and strategy.
Existing study tools
🪫
Increasing Burnout
🛠️
Lack of Personalization
💰
Less Accessibility
Solution
Neural Consult: A new way to engage with educational content using AI
Our main product, Neural Consult, offers students a more accessible, personalized, and engaging way to interact with their educational content. It contains a core set of AI powered features including patient simulations, lecture summaries, and flashcard generation. Also, it provides deep analysis into students specific strengths and weaknesses’. This leads to less time spent preparing study materials and more time learning.
Design Standards
Setting the standards - Establishing the Neural Consult brand as the sole designer
As a founding designer for a new product, there were no existing design standards to work from. Coming from an enterprise background I was used to working from well defined design systems and patterns. Being the sole designer for a startup, I was responsible for establishing the typography, color standards, and component library that would establish the personality of our platform.
Product Architecture
Crafting an MVP that scales - Building modular feature flows and a standardized navigation structure
To build our MVP, I worked closely with the founding team to translate abstract ideas into key features that med students needed. I decided to take a modular approach so that new tools could be added without disrupting one another. This approach along with a standardized navigation structure ensured that future sections could be slotted in without redesigning the entire app.
Organic Adoption
Driving adoption with limited marketing spend - 5x conversion rate with a redesigned landing page
After launching our MVP, we struggled to attract traffic. With a limited marketing budget, the landing page became a critical channel for reaching students. However, the original page lacked the trust signals needed to convert interest into sign-ups. I redesigned the page to highlight credibility and encourage action, resulting in a 5× increase in conversion rates
Key Additions - Live product gifs, specific call to value, testimonials with images, statistics of student usage, transparent pricing plan, meet the team section
Increasing Engagement
Reducing core feature drop-off with data driven decision making
After improving our conversion rates, I worked with the head of data to identify usage patterns and ensure students stayed on the platform. We noticed high drop-off rates on the patient simulator which was one of our key features.
Iterating quickly, we tested our assumptions and discovered that shortening the length of the form pages led to significant improvements. Applying this strategy to other features throughout the app helped drive up our overall engagement.
📦 Before
✅ After
Feedback Loops
Continuous Discovery - Listening to students and answering the “So what?”
With an increasing amount of users and better engagement, we received more interest from students who wanted to contribute. We established student groups to gather their feedback. We learned that while the features were helpful, students had trouble understanding how they came together when landing on the site for the first time.
To address this, we wanted to make the site more goal oriented and introduced study sessions. I designed study sessions to flip the architecture so that you can start with the exam first instead of the features. This catered better to the students mental model with their main goal being to ace their exams.
Enabling Future Expansion
Positioning for B2B and new healthcare education markets through scalable UX
As Dendritic Health continues to grow, the user experience becomes even more critical. I’ve worked to ensure the platform remains consistent and content-agnostic. This allows us to repurpose our key features for adjacent markets like Nursing and PA school.
Also, for our institutional partnerships, I’ve established a simple theming system that can adopt custom branding in the UI and an admin portal for institutions to upload and manage their own custom content.
Let’s work together
Let’s build something together. Feel free to drop me a message