Physician Builder Spotlight: Alex Mohseni

We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet Alex Mohensi, Founder of ClinX Academy, a CME course that teaches physicians how to get paid non-clinical roles like medical director, pc owner. You can connect further with Alex on LinkedIn.

1. Alex, what inspired you to become a physician entrepreneur? I was an entrepreneur before being a physician. In college, I sold ties through dry cleaners and installed ethernet cards that we imported from China (mind you, this is before Amazon and Alibaba existed) across campus. Later, I used my med school loan to buy a HUD home and rented out the rooms to other students. The inspiration came from a combination of the typical immigrant hunger and a desire not to feel shame for being less well off than my peers.

2. Tell us what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve. ClinX Academy is a learn-on-your-own asynchronous mini healthcare MBA program designed to help physicians grow into leadership and entrepreneurial roles. We provide graduate-level training on the following topics, which we think are critical for any person wishing to become an executive in healthcare:

• Medicare, Medicaid & Managed Care — how the system works, how money flows, how organizations succeed
• Value-Based Care & Risk Models — MA, ACOs, delegated medical groups, payment models, and risk contracting
• Healthcare Operations — UM/CM, credentialing, audits, RCM, compliance, payer contracting
• Physician Entrepreneurship Pathways — concierge medicine, clinical contracting models, collaborating physician roles, friendly PC owner
• Regulatory, Legal & Emerging Trends — CPOM/MSO structures, interoperability, and AI/automation in healthcare, key healthcare statutes

The problem we are solving is that physicians are never trained on the above topics and even actual healthcare MBA programs don’t provide the depth that is needed and that we provide. So, without this sort of training, physicians become passive participants in a broken system instead of being leaders of positive change for the system and for their own careers.

3. What's your advice to anyone who's thinking about entrepreneurship or a nontraditional career in medicine? Just start doing something small. You may fail, that’s ok. You have the most amazing back up plan of any entrepreneur — you can just pick up shifts and make good money. As Tim Ferris says, what’s the worst that could happen? That you’ll eat just beans for a while? You’d rather just be miserable?

Don’t be cocky — there’s a lot to learn, so be curious, talk to folks, ask lots of questions, seek out folks who have succeeded and get their mentorship. Pick up projects. MAKE YOURSELF USEFUL to others and good things will happen.

4. How can a physician get over the "start" problem and overcome their biggest fear to start a company? Well, I’m not sure starting a company if you have zero experience and exposure to the business space is the optimal path for many folks. What might be easier but still a great learning experience is to find a couple startups to start helping and get involved in as much as you can — product, UX/UI, billing/coding and other RCM work, data analytics, and especially sales. Sales I think is the most important experience to build because most of the companies that I see fail don’t fail because they had a bad product, rather, they fail because they lack distribution.

5. What's the #1 lesson you've learned since building your company that wasn't obvious to you before? I have 3 important lessons:

1. Always create a detailed pro forma before you decide to start a company. Force yourself to model out the income and expenses, both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios. I would say almost 100% of the time you will learn something about the business that you had not considered and you may decide to build it a different way or not at all. This takes only a day to do but so many folks don’t do this and then they end up building a business in a way where it’s nearly impossible for them to earn a real margin (like a restaurant with too few tables).

2. Go way deeper in your understanding of the buyer and the market: Do deep dive interviews with a bunch of buyers and domain experts; ask each domain expert who they think knows even more than they do and then go talk to them.

3. Start small and hyper focused, then iterate: Solve “the problem” for 1 or a handful of buyers manually as fast as you can with whatever basic tools you have available — you will learn so much that will inform how you should actually build the “real” version of the product later. This is much easier with today’s AI and automation tools than it ever was before.

6. Name the top resources you found most helpful to get going as an entrepreneur journey that others would benefit from?

• “Zero to One” by Peter Thiel (link)
• Atlas Shrugged (if you hate me for this, come fight me)
• Podcast: My First Million
• Subscribe to YouTube - IMHO the best $20/mo you can spend, learn any technical skill
• Learn how to use Make.com or n8n to build basic automations, or learn to use Replit to build quick prototypes — most of the things you want to build you can prototype in a few days using one of these tools.
• Obviously, if you want to learn the business and operations of healthcare on a deep level, I recommend ClinX Academy

7. How can other physicians support you? Are you open to connection/investment/user feedback, etc? Yes, I’m happy to chat with any physicians who are on the entrepreneurial journey: alex@clinxacademy.com, Calendly.com/mohseni. Or find me on LinkedIn.

AI Bonus Questions

Just for Offcall members: We're making available Alex's answers to 3 questions about AI:

1) What's an actual prompt you're feeding to GPT that's been helpful to your clinical work?

2) What's the AI tool/use case you can't live without?

3) What are your top AI resources to get going as a physician?

See his responses below after creating an Offcall account.