#StartupsEverywhere profile: John Corrigan, Founder and CEO, Journimap
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Mapping Experiences That Matter
Journimap L3C is a social enterprise startup and cloud-based application that uses qualitative research methods and ethnography concepts to map out the experiences and journeys of patients, customers, service workers, and others. We spoke with the Founder and CEO of Journimap, John Corrigan, to learn more about his startup’s work, how the pandemic has affected his business, and why net neutrality and social business models are important.
What in your background made you interested in becoming an entrepreneur?
I started my career with a global consulting firm and I’ve worked in or near the technology sector pretty much ever since. I’ve always been interested in innovation, bringing new ideas to market and solving complex problems.
After working for a combination of large, medium-sized, and startup tech companies, I joined the education assessment nonprofit ACT in 2011. I enjoyed the work at ACT because, as a large nonprofit, ACT focuses on helping people with the research and data generated by its programs. ACT was my first experience working for a nonprofit, and I initially served as sort of an intrapreneur for the organization by building free college and career planning tools online that were used by millions of students. Ultimately, I became the Vice President of Customer Experience, and that’s how I got into the world of mapping “journeys”—ethnographic research to better understand the experiences of others—and striving to measure the voice of customers in a nonprofit setting. I found that work quite inspiring because the more you know about a student, especially a student from an underserved background, the more you can try to help.
When I left ACT, I knew that I wanted to do something to help people, and I felt it was the right time in my career to launch my own startup. By combining my skills from the for-profit technology world and the nonprofit education sector, I decided to take the typically expensive model of handcrafted journey maps and work to simplify the process using cloud-based platforms, new algorithms and my insights as a customer experience executive. And that was the genesis for Journimap.
Tell us more about Journimap. What is the work that you’re doing, and how does your online application help measure patient journeys and the experiences of other workers?
Journimap is a social enterprise startup that produces actionable insights based upon the experiences of patients, customers, and others. We’re a cloud-based application focused on bringing to light people’s feelings and emotions. Traditionally, companies do this type of work by hiring expensive researchers to do custom ethnography. Ethnography is a type of research where you work to gain empathy and understanding for someone’s experience from their perspective. So it’s a bit different than traditional market research done in other sectors.
Instead of companies spending money on expensive consultants and full-time staff members, Journimap has the necessary research and survey instruments embedded within the system. Companies and organizations can put their own scenarios into the application and then deploy a number of surveys. All of the surveys are returned right back into Journimap to then produce a visual journey map and other findings for a patient or customer. Outputs from Journimap start with pictures and then the underlying data is also accessible. Journimap’s customers put a face and a name on the project so they can represent the people they’ve surveyed. Many times, a journey map is first conveyed via a data dump, or, at best, a Gantt chart, and it’s not unusual for eyes to glaze over just looking at these types of results. So we create images first—such as visual pictures across an x-y axis—showing the ups and downs of someone’s journey. This is the “map” part in Journimap. We also deliver empathy and emotion findings specific to each journey. Whether it’s parking access at a big hospital complex or logging on to see a doctor via a telehealth visit, it’s important for health providers and other companies to understand these experiences from the patient’s (or customer’s) perspective. When exploring social determinants in health care, journey maps bring to life a much broader view than the traditional survey systems often used to measure patient satisfaction.
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business, and how are you responding to the ongoing outbreak with your services?
Due to COVID, multiple Journimap projects were either paused, delayed indefinitely, or cancelled. But because of some COVID developments, like the growth in telehealth services as a result of the pandemic, we’ve been able to focus on new scenarios that need to be explored. For example, understanding people’s experiences while accessing and using telehealth services is important. Adoption of telehealth services is usually a far different experience for a teenager than it is for someone like my 81-year-old mother. So we are in some new territory here, and there are new conversations going on at Journimap right now because of COVID. However, building a new customer pipeline due to COVID disruptions has been a slow process, which is especially tough for a startup.
There are also people working in other areas of health care—such as medical devices, clinical trials, and quality measurements—that haven’t been completely disrupted by the pandemic, so the insights Journimap offers are still relevant. As a startup, our main job right now is to find those places that Journimap can provide value to during this pandemic.
Are there any steps you believe policymakers should take to support startups like yourself that have been affected by the pandemic?
When the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) came out last year, it was fairly clear that Journimap would not be able to receive any help from the program. I don’t have a lot of employees and our revenue cycles have been those of an early-stage startup, so these factors are definitely challenges when it comes to accessing PPP. However, I spend locally by working with a local team of technical developers and I also hire local contractors and others to assist with marketing and business development efforts. So, because of business conditions during the pandemic, this type of local spending by Journimap has either slowed or stopped completely. And the impact of this reduced spending was all local here in Iowa City. I don’t expect the government to just give me a blank check and allow me to do something extraneous with my business, but startup-friendly criteria for forgivable loans or additional assistance from PPP or another program would have absolutely allowed me to continue spending with local developers and contractors. Without any further options, though, that didn’t happen.
I’m not a policy expert, but largely focusing on companies that already have a significant payroll aspect to them—while I understand the logic—cuts off help to early-stage businesses that are bootstrapping their operations.
What are some of the startup-related policy issues and concerns that you believe should receive more attention from local, state, and federal policymakers?
For startups, net neutrality is key when it comes to reliable, fair, and affordable access to the Internet. Here In Iowa, there is a very significant and important discussion underway about expanding broadband access to rural areas of the state. But some lawmakers are positioning expanded broadband access as an either/or decision when it comes to net neutrality, and that’s a false narrative. From just a growth economy mindset, I don’t understand why net neutrality was repealed. I think a level playing field with fair access to the Internet is something everyone should support in a nonpartisan manner.
Also, I think that the topic of social enterprises deserves increased focus and consideration. Social entrepreneurs are committed to both doing good and doing well and we’re usually happy to embed that commitment in articles of incorporation as a legal entity is formed. I explored both nonprofit and for-profit business structures when I started Journimap. It was surprising to me that setting up a social enterprise can be far more difficult than you’d think. As a startup, establishing ourselves as a B Corporation was too onerous of a process. Much of the work to become a BCorp is fantastic in intent and practice, but can be too much to tackle for many startups. Even though you may be aligned with all of the factors that go into being a BCorp, there are only so many hours in a day to go about doing this—especially if your product isn’t even built out yet. Journimap is an L3C, but there aren’t L3Cs in every state, and I ended up seeking legal counsel outside of Iowa in order to set up my social enterprise. I had to set up two legal entities that span two states to get started. Many startups can’t afford this extra work, so socially minded entrepreneurs can be deterred from establishing a social enterprise. More accessibility to social business models with a greater emphasis on ease of adoption would be a great place for policymakers to focus their efforts.
What is your goal for Journimap moving forward?
As a social enterprise, Journimap will continue to focus on our mission of helping organizations and businesses better understand the experiences and needs of the people they are trying to serve—because the more you know, the more you can help. Journimap has already produced findings related to social determinants of health and I expect that—as well as other improvements in health care—to be our focus moving forward. I believe we can make a positive social impact as we provide sophisticated, yet affordable, tools enabling new approaches to patient experience and customer experience work. There are so many ways to help people in this moment of crisis, and that’s where we want Journimap’s focus to be.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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