With no money or experience to start a business, the then-21-year-old Booty left India after his internship and returned to the UK to join a consulting firm. He would spend six years in the industry while saving up money, brushing up his knowledge of the healthcare sector and building Reach52’s website on the side. Once the website was up, he pitched his idea to people, including government officials and business leaders. 

When he felt confident about the amount of savings, knowledge and positive feedback he had to start Reach52, he quit his job and bought a one-way ticket to Singapore.

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Within a year of its founding, Reach52 secured its first contract. The deal came unexpectedly, from a chance meeting that Booty initially had no intention of taking.

“It’s a funny story. We were about 11 months [into the business] and I was thinking we should have had our first contract within six months. It was Christmas, I hadn’t gone home for the holidays. I was in Singapore, in a pissed-off mood, sitting at [the shopping mall] Plaza Singapura, with all the fake Christmas trees and it was hot. 

“Then I got introduced to this guy who would go on to start a venture capital fund that subsequently invested in us. But he told me he wanted me to meet another guy from pharma, who wasn’t in the right team but was nice. I didn’t want to go to the meeting, but since I had nothing better to do, I went. This was December 17, we met for coffee and he told me, “This isn’t at all right for my team, but I absolutely think this is what the pharma industry should be doing. I have $50,000 of budget left for the year, if you can send me a proposal today, I can get it into our system tomorrow and get the budget cleared because I’m going to lose it anyway.”

The next month, Booty moved to the Philippines to launch Reach52’s first market.

Reach52 gets affordable or discounted products from its partners and sells them to rural pharmacies, clinics and stores. “We’re doing sales, marketing and distribution of essential medicines in communities where traditional distributors would just want to serve the cities.”

A fundamental part of Reach52’s business is improving the health literacy of these communities. One way is by training health workers. “You will only buy a nutritional product if you’re aware of the concept of nutrition,” says Booty. “Solving the supply of medicine or health or nutritional products won’t help unless people want to buy them with some of their limited income. So we focus on education, screening and working with doctors, never pushing products.”

With partners like Sanofi, Pfizer, Novartis and Johnson and Johnson, Reach52 has impacted over 2,500 communities across six countries, including Indonesia, India, South Africa and the Philippines. 

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In the years since Reach52 started, however, the number of people without basic healthcare has gone up by the hundreds of millions. This was exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Attracting private investments into the space remains challenging while existing players with the ability to create major shifts in access have proven unmotivated to change.

“It’s a tough space,” says Booty, adding that numerous people initially dissuaded him from starting Reach52. “There’s no specific reason why people said [the business] wouldn’t work. It’s just hard, with comparatively low [profit] margins and high costs. There is also a lot of vested interest, with entrenched industry players who won’t necessarily want to act in a socially responsible manner.”

His commitment to helping solve the global healthcare problem, however, remains unwavering. “I just think it’s the right thing to do,” he says. “I try not to base any decisions on money because I think that [would] sort of corrupt [them].”

“Every night I try to think about my purpose. And I like that if I were to die today, I know that I have done everything I could to change something I think is not right. That’s important.”

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For the first few years of Reach52’s life, Booty financed the company entirely with his savings. The reason wasn’t because he couldn’t raise any venture money, but he chose not to. “I think the more cash starved you are, the leaner you become. The worst thing we could have done was raise money too early and build a big flabby team,” he says.

He adds that the deliberate effort to not raise money and keep lean “forces you to think about your business model”, which he says he’s become “pretty obsessed” about.

Reach52 raised its first, pre-seed round of funding in 2019. The next—and last—time it raised was between 2020 and 2021. This, Booty says, is possible because the company is profitable. 

“If I was to do this all over again, I would avoid venture capital money upfront. It makes you lazy and it means you have to focus on certain things. It is accelerating, but it shouldn’t be the only way to build a business,” he says.

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When asked about the biggest challenge he is currently facing, Booty pauses to think for a while before saying, “I don’t know if I’m just not thinking about it or if I’m immune to it, but everything is a challenge. And for some founders, you learn to like challenges.”

He’s even got a few tattoos about failure, which he says he prefers to succeeding. “Succeeding is just a way to reset your goal to something bigger so you’re behind again,” he says. “I absolutely love the pressure and [dealing with] difficult stuff because it makes me feel more.”

When it comes to actually having to navigate a difficult situation or deal with pressure, his method is to “dig deep and not quite go rouge, but be on your own. Be on your own, breathe, have a beer, don’t stop yourself from going on holiday, don’t stop seeing your friends, work out and try to think about the next best move you can make, get that clear and then execute.

“Maybe it’s like solo founder syndrome, but at the end of the day, if you’re the founder, you have to get your head straight and then learn how to drive yourself and the team.”

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Did he ever wish he had a co-founder to share the burden with? “Sometimes. But all experience is formative, right? I’m happy with the way things have gone. Maybe it could have been different, but meh, that’s all in hindsight, you know?”

In the next few years, Booty hopes to expand Reach52 to 12 countries including growing its foothold in Africa, particularly in East and West Africa.

During the interview, we also asked Booty a series of questions to get behind the mind of an entrepreneur.

The best advice you’ve ever received?

Edward Booty (EB): The best advice was from a book, Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of A16z, talking about his lessons in building businesses. He says that for startups, you always have a move no matter how bad or good things are.

Running a startup is like playing three-dimensional chess. You can move up and down in multi-dimensional ways and always get yourself out of a bad situation. That’s definitely resonated. There have been tough times at Reach52, but you learn from that piece of advice that even in your darkest times, you always have a move that can get you out of it. 

What’s your favourite tattoo?

EB: I like the word “matter”. You know, like a physical being. It’s like the matter within the universe, which is the fundamental makeup of us as humans, like atoms and quarks, and the matter that makes up life.

It also has a double meaning of purpose such as does it matter? Why do you matter? Why does it matter? I constantly reorientate around the word “matter” because it grounds you in the fundamental physical being along with purpose.

In the early days of Reach52, before the company secured its first contract, you set for yourself a rule. Tell us about it.

EB: Yeah, I was mad. I was an intense person. I had this rule where I could only sit in front of my computer before 9 am and after 9 pm, reaching out to people on LinkedIn and trying to get meetings. The rest of the time, I had to be out pitching. So the KPI was sort of 12 hours a day of meetings. I repeated this for nine months.

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Would you say this is a typical life of an early-stage startup founder?

EB: I’ve spoken to other early-stage startup founders as well and it is what it takes to build a business. You have to speak to a thousand people and nine out of ten won’t be interested. For the one out of ten that will be, you have to do proposals for or take the conversation forward.

Building a startup is [all about] determination, passion and grit. Grit is my favourite word. Every day, you must wake up and be enthusiastic about what you’re doing. And don’t slack off, get things done.

What’s one of the craziest things that has happened to you?

EB: When I first moved to Manila, I had never been to the Philippines before. I went for a walk around one of the touristy areas and got chatting with this 50-year-old bloke in a suit, who seemed nice enough. We went for a beer with his friends and I think they put something in my drink because I don’t remember anything from that night, and they maxed out my credit cards.

My mum reported me as a missing person to the embassy because I didn’t go on WhatsApp and was gone for like 40 hours. I only remember being woken up by policemen in my Airbnb. When I asked the Airbnb’s security guard what happened, he told me a minivan pulled up, opened its doors and pushed out this guy. He thought I was just drunk.

What’s one thing you believed five years ago that you know now not to be true?

EB: There are different ways to build a company. There is this mantra rhetoric based on Silicon Valley tech startup models that people try to apply to everything. That’s just not relevant to companies like Reach52.

Money is money, get money in and grow your business. That can be through sales, that could be through grants, anything, I don’t care. Grow your business, find money and don’t just go to accelerators and let them tell you some generic startup playbook. Work out what you’re trying to build, who might buy it and focus on revenue. If you don’t have to raise money, that’s the holy grail.

VC money wasn’t quite the right type of capital for what we’re trying to do. So a non-standard investment and growth journey is probably one of the biggest learnings for me. 

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