LowestMed · 2016–2018
Employee #5 to acquisition
As one of five initial employees, I helped a prescription-discount startup grow from 7,000 to 50,000+ monthly transactions and get acquired by RetailMeNot.
- Role
- Full-stack engineer (1 of 2 developers)
- Stack
- Angular, .NET / C#, SQL, WordPress
- Result
- 7x growth, acquired Mar 2018
The problem
Prescription prices in the US are confusing, and the same drug can cost wildly different amounts at pharmacies a mile apart. LowestMed helped people find the cheapest price with a free discount card.
What I did
As one of only two developers, I owned features end to end: building what product asked for, testing it, and managing releases. I worked across the Angular frontend, the .NET backend, the database, and integrations with several affiliate partners’ APIs.
The piece I’m proudest of is autocorrecting drug search. Drug names are hard to spell, and a typo meant a user found nothing and left. Making search forgiving dramatically improved how many people found their medication.
TODO: Add one detail about how the search worked (fuzzy matching? a synonym list?) and a before/after number if you have one.
The result
Monthly transactions grew from 7,000 to over 50,000 while I was there, and RetailMeNot acquired the company in March 2018. I moved over with the product.