Interview With Keith Schorsch, Trusera Founder and CEO

I’ve written about several health startups including iMedix and NY-based OrganizedWisdom. Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak with Keith Schorsch, founder and CEO of Trusera. Trusera is a Seattle-based startup attempting to make sense of health online.

Keith explained that Trusera helps people share real world health information with others. The idea for Trusera came to him when he was ill and doctors in Seattle couldn’t figure out why. A friend in New Jersey suggested that it might be from a tick bite and it turned out that it was lyme disease. Once he told his doctors of his friend’s suggestion, they were able to treat the illness and get Keith back to full health.

When I asked Keith to sum up what Trusera is in one sentence, he replied, "It’s a site for people who want to take hold of their health". The site allows people to post questions and answers along with a content section similar to a blog. There’s a social network and a Facebook-style news feed showing the latest content posted on Trusera.

Trusera officially launched in June with a beta period from March. The company has 15 employees and is currently angel funded. Keith wouldn’t share any user stats with me.

Regarding their business plan, Keith noted that they are running some ads and are launching an ad network on site in the coming week. There’s also a variety of premium services coming soon and he also says there’s value in the platform. This is similar to OrganizedWisdom and their white-label solution.

Trusera features good health related content and could become a strong health-related social network over time. Keith asked me for my thoughts on the service and Web site and this is what I shared with him.

• I don’t get what the site is about or offers when I come to the home page.
• I would move the signup/membership widget off of the right bar – it’s distracting and since the majority of people will only browse, use that space for better messaging – do you really want your visitors’ first impression to be a captcha?
• The search goes to a typical search results page (which didn’t provide many relevant results) – my suggestion would be to create topic pages for the most popular terms – Keith talked about focusing on search engine optimization and topic pages would certainly help with that
• The site design needs to be much warmer – the logo colors are warm but the rest of the site isn’t – health is nothing something people look at unless they have to – make people feel at home and comfortable
• The site feels way too loose – as if they stuck on thing after thing without considering integration

Thanks to Keith for spending some time with me yesterday.