Quitting smoking has never been easy. With the health risks known and a strong, negative social stigma attached to smoking, people have plenty of reasons to stop purchasing packs of cigarettes. Most fail to curb their smoking habits on the first try. Yusuf Sherwani, Maroof Ahmed, and Sarim Siddiqui started Quit Genius, a gamified cognitive behavioral therapy application to assist tobacco users in their journey to stop smoking. Quit Genius has raised nearly $2 million in seed funding from Village Global VC, Pioneer Fund, Arab Angel VC and various angel investors. All three founders are 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe honorees in the Social Entrepreneurs category.
The three cofounders of Quit Genius: Mahoor Ahmed (left), Yusuf Sherwani (middle), and Sarim… [+] Siddiqui (right).
Yusuf Sherwani
Frederick Daso: How have your past failures produced current success?
Yusuf Sherwani: We faced an uphill challenge just by quitting our careers in medicine to create a startup. Three students studying medicine is an atypical team for starting a company. Investors were continually asking us what kind of experience we had to tackle the problem of getting people to quit smoking. After getting our initial results from our service, investors frequently told us that we were too early for them, that our team is too young and untested.
The biggest lesson we learned from our start was not to expect any assistance. The results would speak for themselves. We learned our lesson early on to be scrappy and not having expectations of others. You have to do things that you are utterly unfamiliar with to produce results. Entrepreneurship is a tough journey, but being scrappy and results-driven will culminate in building something that people want to use.
Daso: It’s admirable how you and your team were able not to let those early rejections demoralize you all. What were some of the problems you faced while creating Quit Genius, and how did you find a way to persevere?
Sherwani: Our first significant challenge was getting initial investment. We probably had 50 to 100 rejects–from every venture capitalist in London. To solve the problem of rejection, we had to figure out the questions we needed to answer to de-risk what we were doing to convince someone that it is possible. The biggest problem we had to resolve was whether therapy could be delivered through your smartphone that can help someone quit smoking. Can the treatment be performed without a human in this case? Are we able to build an automated therapy program for those struggling to quit smoking?
We thought it was possible, but we had to go out and prove our hypothesis. We spent hundreds of hours with therapists, observing their interactions with patients and learning about their therapeutical work. What does a human do to another human to change their behavior? We built a simple prototype based on our research. Our prototype delivered therapy in an entirely new paradigm.
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