Founder Stories

    Doing the Work That Does Not Scale: A Week of Face‑Time in Mexico City

    heva Team
    July 22, 2025
    4 min read
    Doing the Work That Does Not Scale: A Week of Face‑Time in Mexico City

    Building software is only half our job at heva. The other half is understanding the real lives of the doctors and staff who use it. Numbers tell one story, but body language, clinic rhythms, and casual side‑comments often tell the rest. So last week we left our dashboards behind and spent five days on the ground in Mexico City.

    Why We Went

    We went to Mexico City to understand the real challenges that healthcare providers face in their daily operations. While our software can solve many problems, there's no substitute for seeing workflows in action and hearing unfiltered feedback from the people who use our platform.

    What We Actually Did

    • Breakfast before sunrise – One provider could only meet before patients arrived, so we shared coffee at 8 a.m.
    • Coffee runs across town – Two providers invited us to their offices. Each trip meant forty minutes of traffic for ten minutes of conversation—but those ten minutes were face‑to‑face.
    • Dinner with a doctor and his spouse – Away from clinic lights, we heard the unfiltered stories about hiring struggles and after‑hours admin work.
    • A small networking dinner – We gathered several providers around one table to trade notes on international patients and administrative pain points.

    None of these moments will show up in our CRM as a closed deal—at least not yet.

    What We Learned Anyway

    Workflow pain looks different in person

    Watching a receptionist juggle paper files while answering WhatsApp messages gave us clearer specs than any survey ever has.

    Personal context drives product context

    Over dinner we learned that building an online presence is critical for provider success. We committed to helping them with that.

    Trust compounds offline first

    A ten‑minute hallway chat did more to open future pilot conversations than a month of polite emails.

    The ROI Question

    Will these meals and miles convert into revenue? We do not know yet. What we do know is that every minute spent in a provider's world sharpened our empathy and, by extension, our product decisions. In a market built on trust, that feels like the right bet.

    What Comes Next

    • Log the workflow observations and feed them into the next sprint
    • Plan a follow‑up meetup to keep the conversation—and the community—alive
    • Accept that some returns will show up only after many more coffees

    If you have ever invested time in unscalable, in‑person work, what did you learn? We would love to hear your stories of uncertainty and insight.

    Doing the Work That Does Not Scale: A Week of Face‑Time in Mexico City | heva