Cydoc

Filed cause: integration — lost to the Epic interface monopoly (roster cause field, logged 2026-06-27). The founder's own accounting supports the filing. Peak paying customers: 4. Revenue in 2024: $27,900, of which only $4,200 was subscriptions [FDR]. Cost to connect one practice's EHR: $4,000–$6,000, and nearly every prospective customer sat on a different EHR, so each sale carried its own toll [FDR]. Target buyers would pay under $100/month; hosting plus AI costs ran about $70 per doctor once the scribe shipped [FDR]. The founder states the arithmetic plainly: "With revenue only $30 above hosting costs, and $4,000 to $6,000 per EHR integration, it would take 11 years per practice just to break even" — Rachel Draelos, MD, PhD. Integration was ruled out for years on principle — the mission was to become an EHR, so paying to connect with incumbents felt like waste; the essay logs this as the fatal mistake [FDR]. The founder ties two of the four customer losses directly to the no-integration decision: the endocrinology office manager blocked the check-in workflow change, and the family-medicine practice's new front-desk staff dropped the QR-code intake — that practice stayed subscribed but stopped using the product [FDR]. The other two losses ran on separate rails: the urgent-care client rebuilt the key features in its own app (filed by the founder under the no-moat mistake), and the psychology practice stalled on insurance cash flow, then declined to subscribe pending features beyond the original scope [FDR]. Our read: the product worked; the distribution physics did not. Where incumbents own the interface layer — Epic foremost among them — every seat sold carries a fixed toll that a sub-$100/month price cannot amortize [INF — the roster shorthand "lost to the Epic interface monopoly" extends the founder's broader fragmented-EHR framing; the essay names Epic as the integration target to prioritize, not as a named killer]. 88 months and $265k crowdfunding plus a $50k grant were spent building around the toll booth instead of pricing the toll on day one.

Roster lesson, carried forward: before building on or into someone else's system, price a single integration first. The number was knowable in 2018 [INF] — $4,000–$6,000 per EHR connection against a sub-$100/month subscription never amortizes at 4 customers; the founder's own math put break-even at 11 years per practice [FDR]. The rule generalizes past healthcare: when an incumbent owns the interface layer (Epic in clinics, app stores on phones, marketplaces in commerce), the per-customer entry fee belongs in the unit economics on day one, not in a growth-stage budget line. Compute it before writing code. If one integration costs more than year-one revenue from the customers it unlocks, either many customers must share one connection, or the plan is dead on arrival — file it and move on.

Was it the Epic interface wall — or was the demand never there?