AI, Dry Eye, and Tik-Tok? Today’s Eye Care Innovations in Action

Bethany Fishbein: Hi, I am Bethany Fishbein, CEO of the Power Practice and host of the Power Hour Optometry Podcast. And I’m excited to introduce you to my guest today. My guest today is Dr. Jovi Boparai. He is an ophthalmologist, ophthalmic surgeon. He’s an entrepreneur, co-founder of a company called CorneaCare, which is kind of amazing in itself. And he is a social media personality, influencer. He’s all over the place. And I’m just eager to hear your story on how all of this came to be. So Jovi, Dr. Boparai, thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation.

Jovi Boparai: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Bethany Fishbein: So when I started to look you up and see what you were all about, you have an incredible ophthalmologic resume. Talk about your background as a clinical ophthalmologist first, because you’ve done a lot of things just clinically.

Jovi Boparai: Sure. So it really, I think, begins from when I was in medical school. So I went to medical school in New York City, and initially I was actually going to go into neurosurgery, believe it or not. And before I made the commitment towards that, I had a chance to watch a few eye surgeries in the Cornell ophthalmology department and instantly gravitated towards that and decided that I wanted to pursue ophthalmology. Was fortunate enough to match into residency at Will’s Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, where I completed the residency, which had a sort of a wide range of clinical pathology exposure along with a very in-depth surgical training as well. I thereafter finished my residency, and from there went over to the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, which is under the jurisdiction of University of Pennsylvania’s Shay Eye Institute. And at the VA, I was responsible for teaching the residents clinical diagnoses and how to do a clinical exam, but more importantly, how to do cataract surgery. And so it was a very interesting transition from being a student myself, being a resident, to then teaching residents. And I didn’t have much time in between. It was only a matter of about a month or two months when I switched roles. But I think having completed a residency that was so wide ranging made me fairly competent in going on and teaching cataract surgery. And then from there on, I developed a really deep interest in refractive cataract surgery and took on a position in a private practice to do just that.

Bethany Fishbein: And just for timeline purposes, not asking your age, but how long of a time period is all of this fitting in? When did you finish med school?

Jovi Boparai: So that’s a great question, because obviously doing medicine takes a very long time. I finished medical school in 2017, and I was in medical school for five years. It was four years of the didactics and the clinical rotations, and then I did a year of basic science research. So I finished medical school in 2017, and then with ophthalmology, you spend one year doing internal medicine so that you get exposure to medicine as a whole. And then I started my residency in 2018, which I finished in 2021. So I guess medical school was five years, intern year, one year, and then residency, three additional years.

Bethany Fishbein: So, I mean, you’re just finishing. You’ve finished fairly recently, and now you’re full-on practicing. When did the entrepreneurship kind of kick in? Like, when did you have the idea for this company and start pursuing that?

Jovi Boparai: Sure. So that’s a great question. I was interested in entrepreneurship from a very early age, actually. And it was first in college where I had a really good friend. We were in a similar program, and we decided to start a company. And this was, what was it, like 2008, I think it was. And this is well before AI, machine learning, any of these things were even viable options. And what we wanted to do was build a clinical decision support system to diagnose communicable diseases in the developing world, things like tuberculosis, cholera, and all these things. And so I worked on that company for about two years while I was in college. We got fairly good buzz going around it. We raised a little bit of funding, and it was a great experience. But through that experience, I learned just invaluable lessons, primarily focused around the fact that when you’re doing something in entrepreneurship, building a business, there is no ceiling to it. There’s sort of an infinite learning curve in that you can continue to learn new things, continue to acquire new skills. And I did feel that, I felt that, at least in purely academics, I felt that there was a bit of a ceiling that I was feeling. And so having this other entrepreneurship aspect where possibilities were endless was very exciting for me. And so that seed was sort of planted early on.

Bethany Fishbein: Before you go on in your story, I’m just I’m curious because I have a son who’s just finished his second year of college. So you’re in college. Were you pre-med? Did you know that you were going on to medical school at that point?

Jovi Boparai: Sort of. And I wanted to, I was actually a philosophy major in college, and it was at the University of Pittsburgh Honors College. They have a great philosophy department. And I was in the philosophy, history and philosophy of sciences. So that was my primary major. And I was interested in medical school at that time. So I wanted to take the pre-medical courses in case I decided to go to medical school. And while I was doing the history of philosophy of sciences, I took a course in the neuroscience department, and it was taught by this gentleman, Edward Stryker. He would later become my mentor, my primary letter writer for medical schools. And that class was just amazing. It was probably one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. And so I decided to do a neuroscience major as well. And yeah, so I was doing philosophy, decided to do neuroscience, and took the pre-medical requirements to be able to go to medical school.

Bethany Fishbein: And so in between classes, you’re sitting in your dorm room with your friend, and you’re like, hey, let’s come up with this app? Was it an app?

Jovi Boparai: Yeah. It was actually, at that time, apps weren’t really a thing.

Bethany Fishbein: Right.

Jovi Boparai: And so this was a desktop application, basically, rather than a mobile application, what we call apps today. And so we basically, we were in a, it was a summer fellowship program where the Honors College paid you to do a summer’s worth of research. And so we were in this program. It was wonderful. You got paid to do research. And it was basically what you would do is you would do the research, and then you would present to the other fellows, and you field questions. And through that experience, you would improve your research in terms of methodology, and then how you present the results. And during that process, this friend of mine, we sort of came over and was like, hey, look, I really want you to think about this idea that I have. Let’s sit down, have coffee, and talk about it. So from there, it was during that summer, we decided to start this company. And from there, we were able to get a lot of buy-in from the rest of the, I would say, the Honors College community at Pitt. A lot of students became interested in it. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh has a great bioinformatics department, partly because of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which is a very large medical center system, I would say hospital system. And so we got linked up with the bioinformatics department. And yeah, started building it out from there. We got, I would say, we got pretty far. And then once we graduated college, I think it was difficult to have that same level of enthusiasm and push, because everybody sort of went their separate ways. However, the idea was picked up by one of the professors there who would later on to go get a pretty large grant from the NIH. And he got sort of like a $5 or $10 million grant to kind of take what we had started to continue building on it. And so it was exciting.

Bethany Fishbein: Yeah, I like what you said about entrepreneurship really not having a ceiling. I mean, that’s something that I’ve always felt was really exciting about it as well, is that you can decide what you want, and you can just keep going.

Jovi Boparai: Yes.

Bethany Fishbein: In my world, a lot of people apply that entrepreneurial spirit to private practice, right? They’re opening a practice and then seeing how much can we build that? Can we turn that into two offices, three offices, one multi-million-dollar office? Like that’s where it manifests. So when did you start to come up with the idea for CorneaCare?

Jovi Boparai: Yeah, so again, that’s a great question. So I went to medical school. And in medical school, I had some entrepreneurial ideas here and there, but it was really difficult to materialize them. Part of the reason was because when you’re in medical school, you’re primarily focused on getting into a residency program. And so I was laser focused on that. And once I was in residency, I, again, kind of got the sense that while I loved doing what I was doing and loved the clinical and the operative aspects of ophthalmology, I did feel that there was a bit of a ceiling in the sense of the amount of learning that I could glean in a certain period of time. And I was sort of pushing up against this wall in terms of what I can learn, how I could push myself. And decided to start, again, thinking about entrepreneurship and started brewing on this idea of thinking about how to approach eye care through a new medium. At that same time, while I was in residency, digital health was really picking up. And however, it was mostly being applied to primary care and these other fields where there was really a need, but nobody was really looking at the applications of building a digital native company within a subspecialty, specifically within eye care. And so I started having these ideas and got linked up with my co-founder, who is sort of the technical brains behind the company. And together, we started to think a little bit more about the idea. We had some inklings of what we wanted to do, but it wasn’t until I finished up residency that we doubled down. We started CorneaCare, which is the company that we co-founded. And the whole idea behind it has been to build a full stack digital eye care company.

Bethany Fishbein: So can you just define for some of us, not me, of course, but those who might not know what a full stack digital eye care company is, what does that even mean?

Jovi Boparai: Sure. So it’s basically, when you look at companies, you can either service a vertical, which is sort of picking a section or let’s just say, for your audience, it would be like servicing eye care or servicing gastrointestinal care or servicing cardiac care. So you have these verticals that you can service. They’re companies that do that exclusively. And then there are companies that provide sort of horizontal solutions. So think of, for example, in all these different verticals within health care, everybody needs some sort of EMR system, right? So that EMR system would be like a horizontal company that can expand from vertical to vertical. We were primarily focused in building a vertical in eye care. And being a full stack company is really accompanying the patient throughout their entire patient journey, starting initially, you know, with a consultation leading to a management plan, that management plan leading to actual treatments, helping the patient then administer the treatments and the remaining parts of the management plan in a way that’s consistent with their daily routine, and then following up doing ongoing care management, and all of this occurring through a digital medium. And so that’s what we wanted to build. And that’s really what we’re building. So think of it as full stack, being synonymous with being with the patient throughout their entire patient care journey, starting initially with the consultation, leading to a management plan, having the real treatments, management plan and the treatments being integrated into the patient’s daily routine, and then providing that ongoing support, ongoing management so that the patient is successful in their treatment.

Bethany Fishbein: So what’s the difference between what you’re describing and like what we know as telehealth?

Jovi Boparai: Sure. So telehealth is primarily administered through synchronous eye care, or sorry, I should say, let me take a step back, telehealth is primarily synchronous, meaning when a patient wants to see a provider, they open up their app or they go on the web, and they’re linked up to a provider directly sort of face to face. While that I think has certain unique aspects, my feeling is that a lot of care can actually be delivered asynchronously. And what I mean by that is a lot of data can be collected upfront from the patient, a lot of data can be captured from ongoing management, that then gets relayed over to the provider in an asynchronous fashion. The provider can take a look at this at any time of day. If you can imagine, you know, Bethany, if you had to do synchronous consultations throughout the day in a busy clinical practice, it just would be really difficult to do. You have patients waiting in the clinic, you have patients waiting on your sort of telehealth or telemedicine platform, and it just becomes very difficult to manage both. Whereas with asynchronous care, a provider can see their in-person patients and then have a sort of a set time in which they can do these asynchronous consultations or asynchronous ongoing management. So the way that telemedicine is currently practiced is really through the synchronous kind of let’s get face to face with a provider through a digital medium. With asynchronous care, it’s where all the data is collected upfront, processed, then presented to the provider in a way that they can act on in a much faster fashion.

Bethany Fishbein: So many questions.

Jovi Boparai: Sure, sure.

Bethany Fishbein: So that data collection being done by the patient, talk about that in the dry eye space a little bit specifically, because I think for me, it’s easier to understand when there’s metrics like height and weight and blood work, like that give actual numbers, where a lot of dry eye is symptomatology or clinical exam. So talk just clinically for a minute about some of the data that is being collected.

Jovi Boparai: Sure, sure. So I guess I have to, we’re still sort of building this out. And so I’ll provide as many details as I can. So basically, and you’re right, I think to explain this in a way that would make sense is to really just use dry eyes and how that would work. And just to clarify something you said, so the data collection is actually done by the platform, right? So the patient is providing the data input, but the data is being collected by the platform that, let’s just use CorneaCare as an example. We have a platform where we collect all the data from the patient and that gets presented over to a provider. That provider can be a CorneaCare provider, or it could be you as a provider taking care of your own patients, Bethany. And so the way it works, let’s say, let’s just pick dry eyes.

As you mentioned, dry eyes is truly a symptomatic condition. It’s something where in fact, something like 20% of dry eye patients will have a completely normal eye exam, but still have dry eyes because their symptoms are so apparent. And so in my opinion, dry eyes is really something that is gleaned really from the symptoms of the patient. And so let’s take that and apply something that we all kind of use either formally or informally, ocular surface disease index, which has sort of become the gold standard for monitoring dry eye patients. And so you can create a platform where that information is collected from the patient, where they actually fill out either the OSDI exactly how it is, or a modified version of it, answer a few other questions about risk factors for dry eyes, ask a few questions about a review of systems.

So you’re not missing anything that might be happening systemically leading to dry eyes, collect the information about the medications they’re currently using and have used in the past, collect the information about their ocular history and a few other key metrics. Obviously you want to have questions in there that help you immediately triage any serious eye conditions. There’s no reason why a patient with dry eyes should be presenting with loss of vision, right? You could have your visual clarity isn’t as great, but loss of vision or double vision, want to have these questions in there so that you could immediately triage those patients to appropriate escalation of care.

But just to step back and collect all this information up front so that it’s presented to a provider saying, hey, look, patient falls into this category of dry eyes based off their symptoms, they have moderate dry eyes. These are the certain key risk factors that may be linking to this dry eye in terms of like maybe the oral medications they’re taking, their past medical history, the medical conditions they have, the environment in which they live.

All that information is processed and presented to the provider in a way that the provider can say, let’s just say we have a patient named Diane. You know, Diane, I looked at all the information you provided, got moderate dry eyes. There are these risk factors that may be contributing to it. Here’s a great plan. Let’s get you started on that. So basically all that data is collected up front, processed by the platform, presented to the provider so that it’s very easily actionable. Now contrast that with a synchronous consultation where the provider has to get all this information while they’re talking to the patient, has to process this at the same time while they’re trying to maintain connection with the patient. It just becomes very difficult, very muddied to have like an actionable item list.

So that’s the way that the CorneaCare platform is being built where we can collect all this information from the patient, thereby improving the patient’s experience and the time that is spent with the provider. So the provider, the patient can have a truly interactive experience where it actually leads to actionable items so that provider can spend time with the patient rather than having to process all the information while they’re having that interaction.

Bethany Fishbein: You’re being a really good sport here. I know I told you this interview is about TikTok, but I speak, one of the things that I speak about on occasion is the acceptance and the role of AI in healthcare and optometry specifically. So when you’re talking about the information is then processed by the platform, that sounds AI powered. Can you just talk a little bit about what that processing looks like and what spits out?

Jovi Boparai: Sure. So absolutely right. That’s the AI, ML, computer vision component, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision component where you essentially build a model and that model, again, going back to dry eyes, right? So you build a model that says, okay, you know, within this model where we’re trying to get an idea of dry eye disease, you have a few key components. You have the ocular surface disease index, captures the symptoms, has a severity scale to it. You have the additional symptoms that are beyond what the OSDI has.

You then have the patient’s past medical history. You have their ocular history. You have the current oral medications they’re taking. You have the current topical medications they’re taking. You have their environment. You have an assessment of their diet. And you kind of can ask other questions about their, you know, sleeping environment and few other things. So you have this model that is basically being fed into what is dry eye disease.

Then you could either a priori decide the different weights you want to assign to all these different components, right? So let’s say we want to give ocular surface disease index the most amount of weight from all these entities that are being fed into what we call dry eye disease. So you can assign this weight. And so when you collect this information through an iterative fashion, depending on what information the patient has provided, it will have an output of this is what the patient’s dry eye disease severity is. And this is what the plan recommendation is, right? So that you could do that a priori. Or you can build a model where you let the model figure out what the different weights of each of these entities could be.

So the difference is between sort of supervised learning where we can assign the weights versus unsupervised learning, where you kind of let the model do its thing and try to figure out what the different weights of the system is. So then that would lead to an output. Say again, going back to Diane, Diane has moderate dry eye disease. From there, you then have a series of management plans that can be assigned to that patient.

That management plan would, comes basically as sort of like an algorithm. It’s very much how the different algorithms that everybody has in treating dry eye disease, right? Like a patient has mild dry eye disease, I always do X, Y, Z. Moderate, I always do X, Y, Z. What this sort of model allows you to do once you have the output of the patient’s diagnosis along with their severity assessment is to then, in a very algorithmic fashion, have a certain management plan that not only provides the physical treatments, but then also addresses the lifestyle modifications that would be helpful for the patient. And so that’s a little bit about how these models are built and how the output from these models can then help determine what is the optimal management plan.

Bethany Fishbein: Thank you. It’s really kind of fascinating for me to hear it from your perspective. The perspective of a doctor who has fully embraced this technology and is very much surrounded by all the ways it’s going to help you take better care of your patients rather than a position of fear. Is this thing going to do my job? Will they still need me once this exists? Which is what we unfortunately hear a lot. I’m sure you do too from other providers. But it’s my job to figure this out. It’s my job to listen to the patient. I love hearing you talk about it in a way that really just shows clearly that this is going to allow the provider to spend time empathetically speaking to a patient, really listening, hearing, and treating if there’s a provider involved.

Jovi Boparai: Absolutely right. I think a good way to think about AI is as a co-pilot. You’re still primarily doing most of the decision-making and really, I guess, flying the plane, but you have a co-pilot with you that is extremely intelligent, that knows what your practice patterns are like, that understands your patients, can collect all the data so that you as a provider can both take care of new patients, but then also take care of existing patients. Let’s say we continue on this example where I was explaining what I provided earlier with that patient encounter would be for a new patient where you’re collecting all this data up front, allowing the model to figure out the diagnosis, the disease severity, and the management plan, and the provider just jumps in and says, okay, I agree with this or I disagree, let me change it this way.

Now, you apply that, but let’s say if it’s an established patient, you can only imagine how much faster those encounters would be for an established patient. You already know the risk factors of the patient, you know the environment that they’re living in, you know what treatments they’re already using, you know what their compliance has been, you know what symptoms they have primarily, you can monitor those symptoms, and all this information is collected for you up front, processed in a way that is very easy for you to understand and act on it. So that way, not only can you take care of new patients, see more patients, but provide a higher quality of continuous care to your existing patients.

Bethany Fishbein: So while all of this…

Jovi Boparai: And sorry, not to interrupt, and that’s billable, you know, if you’re providing that ongoing care to your patients. So let’s say, I would say, I think it’s important to see patients in person when needed. But I think if you can spread out those follow-up visits and have these intermittent check-ins with a patient that’s happening through a virtual medium in an asynchronous fashion, I think that would just add that additional layer of support and continuity of care.

Bethany Fishbein: So while all of this programming and machine learning and algorithms and, you know, back-end process stuff is going on, you’re also actively out there promoting this company. And that’s led to the more public face of you that people see on the outside. Look, we’re on Instagram, we’re on TikTok. Talk about how the social media piece came into this and why that’s become a priority.

Jovi Boparai: Sure. So that’s a great question. And it really comes down to building a generational company, which is what myself and my co-founder want to do. And building a generational company is about building a brand and letting that brand basically be your mode of marketing, right? I think we all sort of have brands that we trust. You know, maybe you have a brand that you like for toothpaste or a brand that you like for your daily moisturizer. And, you know, we have this sort of brand affinity to certain things that we either associate, you know, with sort of a certain level of trust and so on.

And so for us to build that brand awareness, we have to get ourselves out there. And we knew we have to get ourselves out there. And we wanted to build a sort of a trusting brand within eyecare. If you take a look at the other eyecare companies that are out there, you don’t really see a face to the company. Like, what’s the face of Alcon, right? Alcon is a wonderful company and they do a lot of great work, but there’s nobody there that, you know, one could relate to. So we thought that, you know, putting ourselves first, getting ourselves out there so that individuals can interact with us directly on social media, can have a face to the brand was going to be really powerful.

In that, you know, this company isn’t being built by, you know, machines, you know, we’re not just an AI model ourselves, right? Like we’re real people trying to build this generational company that we want patients and consumers out there to be their go-to eyecare company, right? And so I think if I was to capture the brand in a nutshell is simply this, we are trying to make eyecare a part of self-care, just like how you brush your teeth, you moisturize your skin, people should be taking care of their eyes. However, there is no brand out there that has taken that approach, right? Like you turn, so think about the initiatives that, you know, Colgate underwent in sort of their, the mid to late 1900s, where they really had to sort of build that brand image to be the go-to sort of oral hygiene company, right? And so we are trying to build that brand within eyecare where not just patients, but your average person, consumer turns to CorneaCare as their go-to eyecare company as a part of their self-care. And in order for us to do that, you have to build the brand. And in order to get the brand out there, it works best when you have a face to the brand. And in order to get a face to the brand and get it out there, using these new mediums has been pivotal going through social media. We’ve done some PR, but the social media angle has been very successful for us.

Bethany Fishbein: Talk for a minute about the timing of all this. I know you said like CorneaCare, as we started to ask questions into it, he said, let me just clarify, this is still in the works, we’re still building, but at the same time you’re building, you’ve been brand establishing. And I think that’s something that new practice owners, especially run into in our world, that they don’t want to put anything out there until it’s ready. But in business, it’s never ready, right? Just how do you know when to start and kind of when to push on the gas for your branding when you’re doing it at the same time you’re building a company?

Jovi Boparai: Right. I think that’s a wonderful question because I think brand is something that you try to figure out in its entirety before you put yourself out there, right? It’s like, this is what we’re going to be as a company and you try to get yourself out there with that image that you’re trying to portray. However, I think while I think that’s fine, as you pointed out, the story is never complete until you actually get input from the customer, the consumer, the patient or the person that’s out there, right? You don’t know what is going to resonate with the consumer that’s out there or the patient that’s out there. So while it’s good to have sort of a general idea of what you want your brand to be and how you want to market it, you have to get yourself out there.

And for me, my personality is to move fast and iterate, sort of the idea of move fast, fail fast, iterate faster. And so for me, it’s get yourself out there, put whatever brand image you want in front of people, see how they respond to it and then iterate based off of that, right? And so that’s how we did it. We actually, so we’ve been in market, you know, while we’re building this sort of entire full stack solution, we were actually able to manufacture our own products, which you might have seen on our website. And we were able to bring those products to market very fast. And those products have been very successful.

We have a lot of very happy customers who just love the products that we built. They were built by me and we have an expert panel of around 12-ish eye doctors that worked on these products with me. And so we were able to get our products out. But even before we had the products out, we were already doing things on social media. This is what CorneaCare is. This is what we stand for.

And then depending on what kind of feedback we received, we iterated and we continue to improve. And that’s still happening today. I think the beauty of being in a startup or in a small business is that you can iterate extremely fast. You don’t have this slow movement syndrome of these large incumbents where it’s like turning sort of a steam liner where they have to spend a lot of time to change their brand image or change their mission. For a small business or startup, you can make those decisions on sort of a day-to-day basis. And so that’s what we’ve done. I think the place where it’s been the most impactful is TikTok. Never in a million years would I have thought of doing a TikTok.

I don’t even have, actually, aside from the CorneaCare accounts, I don’t have any social media accounts. Actually, I guess I have Twitter, but I only made that Twitter because of CorneaCare. But I don’t have any other social media accounts. So not in a million years would I have thought of being on TikTok. However, TikTok is the perfect medium to get that quick feedback and iterate.

If you scroll back and see some of my original videos, they’re very different than from the videos that I do now because I know what resonates, right? And you know it right away because you get that feedback from the customer right away. And so that’s my general philosophy, which is you have to get yourself out there. It’s good to have a general strategy of what you want your brand to be like, but there’s a difference between what you portray and what is perceived, right? And I think that’s true both for individuals, right? There’s a certain image that we try to portray versus what’s perceived, and it’s equally as true for brands. And the only way you can figure out what is going to resonate is through iteration. So as I said, you want to move fast, fail fast, iterate faster.

Bethany Fishbein: I think it’s really interesting to think about social media as being kind of the ultimate way to do that in business and in life. I mean, I see my kids do it where they post a picture they think they like, and then within a few hours, they don’t get the feedback they were looking for, realize they didn’t like it enough. It’s taken down, something else is up. So there really isn’t anything else that I can think of in business that moves that fast. You’re constantly getting live in the moment feedback on what you’re doing.

Jovi Boparai: Correct. And I would say I think that’s a beneficial thing when it comes to business. But I think in business, I think you have to be careful not to link your… I think you want to have your personality shine through the business. And I think most of the strong companies that are out there are just mirror images of the founders, how the founders wanted to build the business. However, you have to be careful that you don’t link your own self-worth to the image that’s portrayed out there. Because a lot of times, you’ll get feedback saying, I hate this, or what are you saying here? And if you take that personally, I think it could really affect you in a way where you don’t bounce back with the iteration needed. And so I think when you put yourself out there, you have to do it in a way where it’s still very much personal. No one’s personalized because you’re trying to deliver a message. But you need to have a certain level of distance from it so that if you do get negative feedback or no feedback at all, that it doesn’t affect you in a way that makes you question your self-worth and what you’re doing. So that you take it as a learning experience rather than as a bashing you down experience.

Bethany Fishbein: For sure. So as you’re building this, I think sometimes I see younger Docs, students even, kind of going into social media with the idea of becoming a social media personality. And the journey that you’re describing is a little bit different. Is I want people to have a face to my brand. I want to build a comfort level. I want to do some business split testing. Is that what makes it successful rather than going in saying, I want to be the next TikTok star?

Jovi Boparai: I would say yes and no. I think it’s a little tricky. I think what makes it successful is when you’re doing it for a reason that extends beyond yourself. I think for me personally, it’s as I said, to build a generational company in the eyecare space. I think there’s a real need for what we’re doing. And we want to push forward with this mission. And that’s primarily the reason why I do my social media stuff. I do want to deliver, and within that umbrella of building a generational company, I think we’re providing a real service to the community at large, to individuals at large, which as I said, we want to make eyecare part of self-care. That’s our overarching vision, no pun intended. And we want to really get that message out there. And that’s really what is always at the forefront. And so everything that I do or our social media team does on social media is with that vision in mind. And so that’s our sort of North Star. And doing it in that fashion helps you deliver content, helps you build your message that extends beyond yourself. So that if at any point, any of us would sort of, once we build this brand image, were to step back, the company on its own and the brand on its own can stand. Who’s the current CEO of Colgate? I don’t know. Do you know? But the brand itself stands on its own. And the same is true for any of these generational companies that are out there. So I think having an overarching North Star for why you’re doing something, I think helps.

However, I would say it’s the one thing I think everybody underestimates when it comes to social media is just the amount of sheer effort and iteration that’s required to make it successful. Especially on TikTok, in the beginning, it was very difficult to get any traction. I would say, I guess we did get initial win when I think that the third video that I did ended up going viral. But it was again, it was like it was small wins here and there. And you just have to keep posting consistently to really get to where we are now. And so it’s I think it takes a lot of work, too. But it’s really work that should be informed by constant iteration and work that should be motivated by a North Star overarching vision.

Bethany Fishbein: Yeah, we talk a lot about knowing that why and then that driving everything. And this is such a good example of that, you know, you know what you want at the end of this, and then all of the actions are just steps in that direction. So if someone is listening to this, and now they’re curious, and so they want to learn more about your company, they want to see you on TikTok, where do they go?

Jovi Boparai: Yeah, so we’re… so the company is called CorneaCare. And you can find us online at mycorneacare.com. You can also search for us on Instagram with the same name CorneaCare or TikTok CorneaCare. And you’ll be able to find us there. And, you know, we’re actively looking to bring more individuals, you know, along with us on this journey. You know, I think, as I said, there’s this whole notion of telemedicine, tele, you know, health, it’s really becoming at the forefront. And it’s being supercharged by the recent advances in AI ML models.

And so, you know, we want to bring along as many eyecare providers as we can on this journey. So if you’re interested at all, you know, just reach out to us, you can either message us directly on our social media accounts, or you could email us at hello@corneacare.com. And we’ll, we’ll get back to you, you know, and if you’re interested in getting involved, we’re always happy to get more eyecare providers involved in what we’re doing.

Bethany Fishbein: Awesome, Jovi, thank you so much for your time for this conversation for your going with the flow and just letting the conversation go where it went. I appreciate it so much. I learned I’m already thinking a little bit differently about some things. So thank you so much for your time.

Jovi Boparai: My pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s my favorite type of conversations that you just organically let them flourish.

Bethany Fishbein: Absolutely. And for everyone out there, thank you for listening.