Dr Anu what's your backstory?

I was born and raised in Palmerston North, New Zealand — a small town of around 80,000 people. Life was quiet, comfortable, and fairly sheltered, shaped by a strong sense of family and cultural heritage. At school, I was your classic all-rounder: academic, active, and always juggling cricket, soccer, and whatever other sport I could squeeze into my schedule. I came from a family of engineers. My older brother — four years ahead of me — studied engineering at Canterbury University in Christchurch. Naturally, I looked up to him. But I also felt like I grew up in his shadow. So when it came time to choose my own path, I did what many ambitious 17-year-olds do: I chose something that felt impossible.

Medicine wasn’t a lifelong calling for me like it is for many others. It was a challenge — something hard, different, and a way to carve out my own identity. I got into Otago University and gratefully accepted a place in medical school. But I always had that entrepreneurial bug. During med school, I ran a small tutoring company called CrashMe — hosting day-long intensive sessions that covered entire papers. I'd pack out library rooms with prospective med students, and the business grew quickly. until I moved to Christchurch for my clinical years and had to let it go.

In my final year, I teamed up with an engineer friend to build a medical device. We worked on a concept to power a defibrillator using a mobile phone. We got to the patent-pending stage — but eventually scrapped the idea when a faster, cheaper version hit the market.

In 2020, I moved across the ditch to Australia to continue my medical career. I landed a job in emergency medicine at the Northern Hospital in Melbourne — the busiest ED in the country. It was intense. And while I learnt a lot, that year broke me. Whether it was the pace, the pressure, the isolation of moving countries during COVID, or just the overwhelming weight of the system — by the end of 2020, I was completely burnt out. I didn’t just want a break. I wanted out of clinical medicine altogether.

My partner convinced me not to give up but to step away, travel in 2021, and try my hand at being a locum doctor. A locum doctor fills in shifts, usually in rural and remote hospitals, which don’t have enough full-time staff to cover all their vacancies.

2021 turned out to be the best year of my life. I worked across every state, in lots of different hospitals. I felt a sense of work satisfaction and loved being a doctor again.

But even in this new chapter, a fresh frustration emerged: the locum process itself. The endless paperwork. The waiting. The lack of transparency. The contracts that locked you in. The agencies taking huge cuts while doing the bare minimum. It felt outdated, inefficient, and unfair — for both doctors and hospitals.

That’s when the idea for StatDoctor started to form.

What does StatDoctor do, and how did you come up with the idea?

StatDoctor is a platform that connects doctors directly with hospitals and clinics for locum work — without going through a locum agency.

Hospitals can post shifts, doctors can apply instantly, and all the credentialing, communication, and hiring happens in one place. No phone tag. No PDFs. No 20-email threads. Just a faster, simpler way to work.

I didn’t want to build another agency. I wanted to build a proper marketplace — something that actually worked for doctors and hospitals.

Now we’re live, helping hospitals hire faster and helping doctors take back control of their careers. And we’re just getting started.

How did your experience in healthcare influence the development of StatDoctor?

In every way. I've experienced firsthand every pain point I'm trying to fix.

For doctors: Lengthy onboarding, paperwork, outdated communication, payment issues, restrictive contracts

For hospitals: Costs 15-30% on top of the expensive doctors, outdated communication, no autonomy in hiring, restrictive contracts, and no ability to entice doctors full-time.

How did you acquire your first 20 users, and what strategies worked?

In 2022, when I first came up with the idea, I didn’t know much about starting this type of business. So I signed up for the Hyper app accelerator program. This gave me a good grasp of market research, idea validation, and creating an MVP.

Through this, I knew we had a product that both doctors and hospitals wanted. We kept these on a waitlist until we had a product — and that gave us our first 20 customers.

After using the waitlist, we’ve mainly grown through word of mouth, organic social media content, cold outreach, and presentations at medical conventions.

What key metrics or user feedback confirmed that you were achieving product-market fit?

So much positive feedback, and paying customers.

Hospitals were taking time out to give us lengthy feedback about what added features they wanted in order to fully commit.

What distribution channels have been the most effective in reaching your audience, and how did you discover them?

LinkedIn has been our primary source of targeting and onboarding doctors.

Hospitals and GP clinics have been through the mouth or cold outreach.

Initially, we threw stuff at a wall and saw what stuck. I posted content on all channels, spent ages cold emailing and calling hospitals, and spoke at heaps of medical conventions.

Then we reviewed where most of our traction was coming from - LinkedIn. So, we doubled down on posting and have purely focused here on doctor onboarding.

If you could only use one channel, which would you choose to reach your audience—and why?

LinkedIn and word of mouth. We’re cheaper, faster, and tech-driven — so hospitals desperately want us.

Now, we’re focused on driving doctor demand by showing the value for them. The best way we’ve found to do that is through LinkedIn.

What sets StatDoctor apart in the competitive locum doctor market?

We are the only true locum marketplace.

Everyone else is a locum agency of some sort.

Here’s the difference:

• We don’t charge a percentage of each doctor’s rate
• We don’t have contracts with doctors
• Doctors sign directly with hospitals

StatDoctor has carved out its own niche, so we’re not directly competing with the 70+ locum agencies in the market.

What percentage of StatDoctor users are hospitals vs. locum doctors?

Building a 2-sided marketplace is extremely difficult.
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Too many doctors? They lose interest as they aren't getting any shifts
Too many hospitals? They lose interest as no one is picking up their shifts.

We are intentionally growing both sides slowly so as not to lose anyone.

StatDoctor has no agency fees—how does that impact your revenue model?

StatDoctor is built to run as a B2B SaaS model.

Hospitals pay a yearly subscription for unlimited hiring of verified doctors directly to their hospitals.  As hospitals aren't paying a % per doctor, they can offer higher rates to doctors on our platform than through a traditional agency.

What’s your vision for StatDoctor in the future?

Our vision is to be a digital front door for doctors in Australia. Through StatDoctor doctors will be able to network, communicate, find shifts, CPD, and education all on one platform.

We will have partnerships with multiple different industry providers, but be the tech in the middle.  We are aiming for an acquisition in 5-10 years.

How will AI and automation shape locum staffing, and how will StatDoctor adapt?

Automating doctor onboarding would be huge for us—that’s where most of our time goes. AI and automation could handle daily document and registration checks.

AI could also be used to read rosters, pull out vacant shifts, and even predict future gaps to help manage staffing numbers.

Who are some top experts or entrepreneurs to follow for business growth advice?

I like Gary V...

However, I’ve found that despite trying to learn and study from other entrepreneurs, nothing really prepares you like making those mistakes yourself and learning fast.

Fail fast, learn faster.

What was your biggest failure or error your made in building your startup?

Not sharing my idea with more people because I thought someone might steal it. In reality, not much is proprietary, and people have probably had the same idea before. The idea isn’t everything—it’s the execution, the founder, and the will to make it a reality.

What advice do you have for founders finding the right distribution channel?

Something Alex Hormozi talks about—there are only four ways to reach clients:

1. Cold intro
2. Warm intro
3. Social media
4. Paid ads

Find the one that works best for your clients, and go as hard as possible.

For StatDoctor, we have two types of clients—hospitals and doctors—so we take two different approaches:

• For hospitals, we have a team that cold calls every hospital and clinic in Australia to onboard them.
• For doctors, we’ve leaned into social media—LinkedIn and Instagram.

What drives you to do what you do?

Anger.

I was sued by my locum agency nearly four years ago. I saw how much they were draining from the public healthcare system without offering much in return. Most (not all) are greedy middlemen.

I want to save our healthcare system—while helping doctors too.

Any quotes you live by?

You will always fail more than you win, so if you aren’t currently winning, it just means you haven’t failed enough yet.

‍Every “no” gets you closer to a “yes.”

Your links + socials

Dr Anu LinkedIn

StatDoctor website

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