How Kiyanusch Braun is building trust in the healthcare industry, where privacy matters

That understanding has influenced the company’s growth beyond its original focus. When GoRocky introduced medical weight management, Braun expected most of its customers to be men. Instead, around 60 per cent of those who signed up were women. The response suggested that the same obstacles GoRocky had sought to address in men’s health, including stigma, long waits and a lack of clear explanations, were relevant to a much wider audience.

The subsequent acquisition of select assets of Kindred Health, a women’s healthcare brand founded in 2022, marked a significant expansion. Kindred retains its own identity and its positioning as healthcare for women, by women, while drawing on GoRocky’s technology, diagnostics, delivery and patient support infrastructure. Its physical clinic in Serendra, Bonifacio Global City, also offers in-person consultations and services.

The move reflects Braun’s view that online and in-person care should complement each other, allowing patients to move between the two as their needs change. It also introduces a new leadership challenge: expanding the company’s capabilities without losing the individual attention and trust that underpin its original proposition.

For Braun, the decision was informed less by a desire to pursue growth for its own sake than by what patients were already telling the business. Weight management, hormonal health, metabolic conditions and sexual health can be interconnected, and a single entry point into the healthcare system will not always be enough to address a patient’s longer-term needs.

Still, expanding into new categories requires discipline. Braun evaluates opportunities according to the size of the problem and whether the company has the capabilities to address it at its current stage. His longer-term ambition is to deliver personalised, end-to-end care, from consultation and diagnostics to treatment, while demonstrating that it can be provided at a lower cost.

That ambition has also required him to reconsider his own role as a founder. In GoRocky’s early days, being closely involved in every decision helped the company move quickly. As the organisation grew, the same habit risked becoming a bottleneck.

“I had to unlearn being close to every decision,” he says. “At our current size, it becomes a bottleneck, and it keeps good people from growing into their roles.”

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Braun has also questioned the assumption that growth necessarily requires larger teams and greater spending. He points instead to smaller, focused teams, employees who understand the entire patient journey and the value of retaining existing customers. Much of GoRocky’s growth now comes from returning patients and word of mouth, he says, reinforcing the importance of delivering consistently rather than relying on marketing alone.

The shift places greater emphasis on his responsibility as a leader to develop the people around him. Braun describes building and nurturing the team as his most challenging and rewarding task, recognising that the quality of its work ultimately determines whether the company can earn patient trust, navigate healthcare regulations and grow responsibly.

In healthcare, that trust is particularly fragile. A poor experience can have consequences beyond losing a customer, while lapses in privacy, medical oversight or accuracy can damage a company’s credibility. Braun believes founders in regulated industries often underestimate the time required to earn the confidence of patients, doctors and regulators alike.

His advice is to treat compliance as part of the product, involve doctors as partners from the outset and resist making claims simply because they might convert more customers.

The principle extends to his broader approach to leadership: imagine the best possible patient experience, build a team with complementary strengths, and keep going. The last is perhaps the least complicated to articulate, but the hardest to sustain when growth demands that a founder relinquish control, reconsider assumptions and accept that the business must evolve.

GoRocky’s expansion suggests that Braun sees healthcare not as a collection of isolated transactions but as an ongoing relationship between patients and those responsible for their care. Its next phase will test whether the company can preserve that relationship across more conditions, more specialities and different modes of treatment.

The opportunity lies not simply in bringing healthcare online, but in making the experience of seeking it less intimidating and the experience of receiving it more dependable. For Braun, that is where a healthcare business earns the right to grow.

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