Strategy

Health benefits

For the self-employed

Context

As with many (especially tax-focused) businesses, financial year is a perpetual concern. This is something I find I often have to balance, even when working in Horizon three and five projects. Leadership pushed us to consider bringing something to product in FY20. Benefits became a spin-off experimentation project, coming out of the research on Gen-Z and the fears they have in starting their own business. A resounding theme that we were hearing, over and over was in finding (and being able to afford) health benefits.

We spent time deep-diving existing marketplaces for health insurance, talking to many small business owners and their current health benefits, where they bought them and their experience in purchasing them. We spoke to startups that were looking to disrupt the traditional metal tier packages and partnered with HealthSherpa to bring an experiment into QuickBooks Self-Employed to learn quickly by sending our customers looking for affordable health insurance to an intuitive marketplace. This partnership and research delivered some impressive results—so much so that the partnership has since been monetized and a team has been assembled to pursue the business further.

Partner test

Plan

Recommended

Enrolled

© Dan Shallcross 2021