Founder Spotlight: Romanos Fessas (Jukebox Health)

This week, I had the privilege of interviewing Romanos Fessas, co-founder and CEO of Jukebox Health. Jukebox empowers everyone to live safer, healthier, and more independent lives at home. Grab a coffee and join me in diving into the origins, challenges, and vision for the future of Jukebox!

— Sarah Richard

P.S. - If you’re an AgeTech founder, investor, or operator based in the NYC area, please consider joining us live at the AgeTech NYC #TechWeek event in June.

Romanos, can you give us an overview of Jukebox?

RF: Jukebox helps older adults and the people with mobility challenges stay safe and healthy at home. We provide our clients with home modifications like grab bars, light and stairlift installations and services like mold and air quality checks. We sit at the intersection of two very different worlds: healthcare, which is large, national enterprise-grade compliant, and home services, which is historically very low-tech. Home services tends to be two guys in a truck with a pad of paper. Jukebox bridges the gap. We like to say we’re providing bureaucracy arbitrage, helping manage healthcare’s auditing and compliance requirements for home services. 

What motivated you to build Jukebox?

RF: During Covid, I reconnected with a former coworker, Seung Bak. We were both struggling with the same issues with parents aging in places ill equipped for safety. We connected with Oren Shatken, who had experience building networks of contractors for the business. The first 6 months, we were testing a lot of different experiments. I wish we’d moved faster to identify our exact customer segment during this time, including who pays and how we acquire them. For example, cashpay isn’t for everyone. The Medicaid LTSS program and product are fundamentally different than what we’ve built for our cashpay clients, so we had some misplaced marketing earlier on before we decided our focus. 

Things really started to take off when we ended up connecting with the community, we got 9 client conversions from 10 occupational therapist referrals, with each buying about $3K of product. That’s when we knew we were onto something.

What did you learn during the early days of Jukebox?

RF: We learned the veto power of the older adult in the sales dynamic. Trust is everything with this demographic. We’ve needed to make sure that the client knows we’re not trying to make them leave their house. We’re working with the occupational therapist to support the older adults’ stated goals of staying in their house safely and independently. We might have a client who loves to garden and they work with their occupational therapist who suggests some modifications to make their stairs to the garden safer. 

Within the available modifications, we’ve had a couple of key learnings. First, there’s a really long tail of products. All of the occupational therapists we work with have their own database of SKUs (products), so everytime we start working with a new occupational therapist there’s an expansion of the SKUs we want to offer. Second, there’s strong aesthetic preference from this demographic. We might think we offer a lot of products if we have 20 grab bars, but then you consider that these older adults have distinct preferences for shape, color, and finish so we have ended up building client preference into our product experience as well. 

Looking ahead, what excites you about the future of Jukebox?

RF: We’ve identified an unmet need to support Managed Medicaid  programs and support the broader community of mobility-restricted folks. Some think of home modification as a cost center, but in truth 70-80% of homecare aide time is spent addressing issues that could be supported with home modification. Home modification has a 7x return on the investment in reduction of long term care costs. We’re actually able to prove our value immediately as our clients elect for home modification with a reduction in hours of homecare aide out of their authorized maximum. Based on the strength of our value we’re able to prove upfront, we’ll be announcing a couple of partnerships I’m excited about over the next couple of months. 

Looking to the Horizon

Romanos and his team at Jukebox have not only identified a critical gap in our ability to support older adults and the mobility-restricted, but they are actively building Jukebox to be the platform and services business that resolves this gap. By seamlessly blending healthcare compliance with home modification services, Jukebox is setting a new standard of care. As they continue to expand their offerings and prove the immense value of home modifications, Jukebox is making homes safer and more accessible. Stay tuned as Jukebox continues to revolutionize the intersection of healthcare and home services, one home modification at a time.

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