founder focus: healthtech & film with nick harty

Some founders discover a single compelling problem and devote their entire careers to it. Others move restlessly from one idea to the next in search of conviction. Then there are the rarer cases of builders who seem to inhabit two distinct worlds at the same time, not out of confusion on which to pick, but because their mental architecture naturally bridges them.

Meet Nick Harty, a junior at UPenn, operating inside both healthcare and film with a level of fluency that makes the connection feel almost inevitable. Early in our conversation, he articulated the lens through which he views both industries. “I see both industries as problems that can be solved with better storytelling.”

For him, storytelling is the methodology through which he understands systems, workflows, and the human actors who move within them.

His relationship to startups began before he ever used the word “founder”. In middle school, he spent afternoons staging lightsaber duels for homemade films with his brother, then shifted seamlessly into building medical device prototypes with his best friend. It was never a tug of war between artistic and scientific impulses. Instead, he experienced them as two equally natural modes of expression.

That friend became his co founder at Medibound, a partnership that has existed for more than a decade and has adapted across states, schools, and countless projects even after both of them went off to separate colleges. Their collaboration is shaped less by formal roles and more by a shared internal rhythm.

The pitch is simple: Medibound gives clinics an automated engagement layer that handles the follow up, monitoring, and continuous communication that care teams do not have the bandwidth to sustain. Instead of relying on manual calls, scattered tools, and fragmented patient data, clinics can create custom care flows that trigger outreach automatically. Medibound’s “health agents” act as context rich digital assistants, drawing from EHR records, vitals, wearable data, and patient history to deliver timely check-ins, escalate when thresholds are crossed, and maintain the longitudinal relationships that busy staff cannot always uphold.

By reducing the number of systems care managers need to monitor, Medibound lets teams focus attention on the moments that require human judgment while the platform maintains the cadence of outreach, adherence checks, and patient-reported updates in the background.

Medibound sits inside a landscape where continuous patient engagement is both indispensable and operationally strained. Care managers face burnout, reimbursement models reward longitudinal visibility, and agentic automation is emerging as the only realistic way to scale personalized outreach. Medibound’s commitment to pilot driven learning positions them as a collaborator in a space that resists shortcuts. They are currently piloting in two healthcare systems.

Nick described Medibound as more of a connective tissue for modern care than just a tool. It is built for clinics that want to scale chronic care routines, postoperative monitoring, and at-risk patient engagement without multiplying staff. The result is a system that reframes follow-up from episodic contact into continuous, responsive engagement.

Storiara is his second startup, designed to compress weeks of pre-production into minutes by transforming any uploaded screenplay into a complete production ready plan. The platform automatically identifies scenes, characters, locations, props, and equipment needs, then generates optimized shooting schedules, budget estimates, call sheets, shot lists, and visual storyboards. Filmmakers move from script to structured execution without spending hours on manual breakdowns or juggling disjointed spreadsheets.

Storiara enters a fragmented ecosystem in which outdated legacy tools coexist with AI tools that fail to respect industry norms. The market wants a platform that honors the familiar logic of production management while introducing the speed and clarity of modern software. Storiara aims to occupy that middle ground, offering filmmakers something reliable enough for seasoned professionals yet intuitive enough for students.

Storiara is meant to elevate creativity rather than automate it away. His goal is to return filmmakers’ time and attention to the story by eliminating the logistical grind that often overshadows the creative process. For independent teams, film students, and emerging creators, Storiara offers professional-grade infrastructure without the overhead while still scaling to larger productions when needed.

Now, for the rest of the interview, Nick pivoted to discussing Storiara. It was a natural pivot (I had more questions prepared for Medibound), but he happily expressed later on that film > healthcare. Why? He described filmmaking as something he can see himself doing forever. If he ever worked a “real” job, he says it would be in film.

“I would choose film. I have always been a filmmaker. But healthcare is a moment where I know I can help, and I have no excuse not to.”

Nick’s go to market strategy begins with a simple outreach plan. The type of outreach plan where he maxes out the amount of emails that Gmail will allow him to schedule send for the day. The most natural way to introduce a new product is to meet the people who will be using it. So, Nick targets filmmakers at the moment they are learning how to make their first films through the professors teaching film classes.

I found this super creative.

Instead of aiming for large studio contracts at the outset, he meets with film professors, does a Storiara demo, and offers the professor to give their students free subscriptions for a year. His goal is that if emerging filmmakers plan their projects using Storiara while studying film, they will carry that workflow into every project they make afterward as real professionals. This bottom up strategy positions Storiara as the intuitive default for emerging filmmakers rather than the disruptive newcomer for established filmmakers.

If he can partner with even more professors at top film schools (think USC or NYU), Storiara will be used by the emerging minds of storytelling. How exciting!

The second pillar of Nick’s strategy lives inside his google calendar. He is booked and busy, with constant meetings where he runs live product demos as the technical founder of both his startups.

Nick explained that during the first touch of outreach to potential customers, he as well as members of his team always add a link for interested parties to book demos directly through his calendly.

A shameless plug for his demos…book with Nick here.

The “new media” age is here. People now follow X accounts and podcasters instead of legacy media outlets.

Founders are building audiences the same way influencers do, which means distribution is no longer just about product but about presence. Before (and still), Product Hunt was the way startups got looks. Companies like Scale AI and Notion went viral on Product Hunt giving them their viral start, but that was before X and Linkedin got taken over by our beloved tech nerds.

I really wanted to get Nick’s take on startups going “viral” for founder controversy, constant posting on socials, and what his preferred outlets of media are.

His approach to virality is intentional rather than reactive. He has found that Linkedin and Product Hunt have been most effective for generating early traction. As an avid X user myself, I wondered if he had given more thought to the platform as a use of gaining the type of “virality” we have seen with companies like Cluely. But, he is still weighing whether to invest more heavily in X, and is aware that much of the AI and tech conversation happens there.

After my conversation with Nick, I kept thinking about Storiara and what could make it truly defensible in a space that has barely changed in decades. Most of the existing tools in film production are legacy platforms that studios stick with because they are already embedded in the workflow, not because anyone actually loves using them.

What makes Storiara different is that it feels familiar enough for production managers to adopt without friction, but modern enough to actually solve the pain points they have been tolerating for years. The more I thought about it, the more it became clear that Storiara’s real advantage is that it brings innovation into a part of filmmaking where innovation has been missing for a long time.

There are a few things we can learn from my conversation with Nick:

It is rare to find a founder who can articulate his motivations with the level of precision that Nick has. It is even rarer to find one who can build with equal conviction across two worlds.

A lot of times, founders are trying to build in fields that are trendy and shiny, but Nick has a real personal love for storytelling that makes his passion for Storiara almost infectious.