This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jasmine Bhatti, CEO of Navi Nurses. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Since I was in college, I always knew I wanted to make an impact in healthcare at a big level.
At the time, my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and needed 24/7 care. I learned through her experience that there were major gaps in the current home health system.
I became a nurse and was reminded of this problem again. So many of my patients would pull at my scrubs and ask if they could pay for me to come home and support them.
That was the seed of Navi Nurses, a premium, nurse-led alternative to the limited home health services offered by insurance companies. People I looked to for business advice told me the next step would be to validate my vision and prove that people would be willing to pay for this, so that’s what I’ve been doing for the past five years: We hit $7 million in revenue last year while building a model that benefits nurses and patients.
I sold my services before I had everything figured out
Early on, I heard the founders of the mattress company Tuft & Needle share how they sold their concept online before they had one mattress made. That really stuck with me. Even though I didn’t have a team yet and was still working full-time at the hospital, I had a clear vision for what I could create. I started pitching myself in local Facebook groups in late 2020. Within a month, I landed my first few clients.
I looked for other spaces where I could meet my target customer, and started volunteering at a community organization that allowed people with home healthcare needs to borrow medical equipment. That was where I met our third client — a woman who needed 24/7 care for three months, which changed everything for me.
That client helped me accelerate my team, going from three nurses who could pick up shifts to a team of 20+ nurses who could work around the clock to support her. The money allowed me to walk away from the hospital and turn this into a full-time endeavor in April of 2021. From there, we’ve grown almost entirely by word of mouth, only starting to run our first Google Ads in January of this year.
Fractional staff has been instrumental, but I needed an in-house team to really push forward
Outside of our contract nurses, my internal staff remained lean for most of our growth — we had only two employees at the end of 2024, and finished 2025 with 17.
Before I could afford to hire people full-time, I relied heavily on fractional support to fill voids in my expertise, and still do for some roles. Even 10 hours a week of their guidance helped me keep pushing things forward. Our part-time chief of staff was especially instrumental because she had built a company before and could anticipate things I couldn’t. Her guidance allowed me to structure the team and manage the hiring process even when she wasn’t the one executing every single task.
That said, when it came to building our custom patient management software, bringing that work in-house turned out to be one of the most important decisions I’ve made. Having a team that stays closely connected to our nurses and patients has been transformative, allowing us to move faster and more quickly adapt to changes that arose.
Outside funding would help us grow faster, but my values are more important
Besides a few grants, my business has been entirely bootstrapped, which I’ve wrestled with at times. If someone gave me $50 million tomorrow, we could reach more people faster — but at what cost?
A study published late last year found that hospitals bought by private equity have higher emergency department mortality rates. Yes, profitability is important, but I’m not willing to do that at the expense of the quality of the nurse or the patient. I never want to partner with someone who doesn’t put the human being first.
Ultimately, I don’t think I would change anything about how we’ve grown. We’ve grown an average of 80% year over year, and it already feels like things are constantly breaking. If we’d grown faster, I don’t think it would have been done as thoughtfully as it was. Right now, we’re working towards expanding beyond Arizona — eventually, I’d love for us to be an international company.
Looking back, I’d tell my younger self to just keep getting back up: Things will not always go the way you had hoped, but they’ll go the way you need them to be.
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