Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Nothing Matters as Much as Execution and Iteration: Interview with Wyndly CEO Aakash Shah

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

In this episode of Medsider Radio, we sat down with the exuberant Aakash Shah, co-founder and CEO of Wyndly, a telehealth startup that helps people overcome their allergies with personalized, at-home treatment plans. Aakash was part of the Y Combinator W21 batch. As the CEO of Wyndly, he’s led the company from early inception through product development and eventual commercialization. Aakash holds dual degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia. Outside of Wyndly, he often presents on healthcare, telehealth, and startups, advises entrepreneurs, and hosts the Founders and Builders podcast.In this interview, Aakash shares insights on simplifying healthcare access by meeting patients online and emphasizes the importance of learning by doing to accelerate personal and business growth. Aakash also talks about the power of storytelling when engaging customers and investors, and how to leverage video-based social media to reach both consumers and decision-makers effectively.Before we dive into the discussion, I wanted to mention a few things:First, if you’re into learning from medical device and health technology founders and CEOs, and want to know when new interviews are live, head over to Medsider.com and sign up for our free newsletter.Second, if you want to peek behind the curtain of the world's most successful startups, you should consider a Medsider premium membership. You’ll learn the strategies and tactics that founders and CEOs use to build and grow companies like Silk Road Medical, AliveCor, Shockwave Medical, and hundreds more!We recently introduced some fantastic additions exclusively for Medsider premium members, including playbooks, which are curated collections of our top Medsider interviews on key topics like capital fundraising and risk mitigation, and a curated investor database to help you discover your next medical device or health technology investor!In addition to the entire back catalog of Medsider interviews over the past decade, premium members also get a copy of every volume of Medsider Mentors at no additional cost, including the latest Medsider Mentors Volume VI. If you’re interested, go to medsider.com/subscribe to learn more.Lastly, if you'd rather read than listen, here's a link to the full interview with Aakash Shah.

Everyone thinks they can learn how to run a business by listening to like podcasts. But no one would say you can learn how to cook by watching food TV. No one would say you can learn how to do woodworking by watching like carpentry shows, right? There's just so much little nuanced bits and pieces that you really only get by doing. The experimentation, it's just, it's you get to choose how quickly you want to learn. Welcome to Medsider, where you can learn from the Browell. the brightest founders and CEOs in medical devices and health technology. Join tens of thousands of ambitious doers as we unpack the insights, tactics, and secrets behind

the most successful life science startups in the world. Now here's your host, Scott Nelson. Hey everyone, Scott, in this episode of Menzider, I sat down with Akasha Shah, co-founder of Wendlia Telehealth companies specializing allergy immunotherapy that he started with his cousin, Dr. Manan Shah. also participated in the Ycombinator W21 batch. As the CEO, he's led the company from early inception through product development and eventual commercialization. Akash holds dual degrees at computer science and cognitive science from the University of Virginia. Outside of Wendley,

he often presents on health care, telehealth, and startups, advises many entrepreneurs and host the founders and builders podcast. Here for you the key things that we discussed in this conversation. First, focus on streamlining health care processes while adhering to changing consumer behavior. Digital health is a right market where you can provide convenient, accessible solutions that align with modern consumer demands. Focusing on reducing barriers, be it financial, geographical, or logistical. Second, experiment constantly and learn by doing. Practical experience is invaluable. The nuances of any endeavor, including business, are best understood on the fly rather than through theory alone.

Third, craft a simple, straightforward pitch to convey what you're doing and why it matters to your customers and investors. Don't use technical jargon. it's often confusing for your audience. Continuously refine your narrative based on your experience with how it lands. Storytelling is a skill that can be learned and is vital for a CEO to attract customers, inspire a team, and persuade investors. Last, these days leveraging social media, especially video content, significantly amplifies your reach, even B2B markets. At the end of the day, you're engaging with people and people are decision makers in your target enterprises. Before we jump into this episode, I wanted to let you know that the latest edition of MedSiter Mentors is now live.

We just published volume six, which summarizes the key learnings from the most popular interviews over the last several months with incredible entrepreneurs like Dan Rose, former CEO of Limflow, Dr. Stephen Michelson, founder of Ferapulse, and current CEO of field medical, and other leaders of some of the hottest startups in the space. Look, it's tough to listen or read every Medsider interview that comes out, even the best ones. But there are so many valuable lessons you can pick up from the founders and CEOs that join a program. So that's why we decided to create MedSider mentors. It's the easiest way for you to learn from the world's best medical device and health. technology entrepreneurs in one central place. To check out the latest volume, head over to medsiderradio.com forward slash mentors. Premium members get free access to all past and future volumes. And if you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. In addition to every volume of

Medsider mentors, you'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. You'll also be able to see all of our playbooks, which are thematically handpicked collections of the most insightful interviews covering topics like capital fundraising, early stage development, regulatory challenges, reimbursement, M&A, and much more. And last, considering that fundraising could be one of the most daunting tasks for any startup, we curated a database of over 700 VC funds, private equity firms, angel groups, and more, all eager to invest in medical device and health technology startups. Access to this database is a premium member exclusive, so don't miss out.

Learn more about MedSider Mentors and our premium memberships by visiting MedsiderRadio.com forward slash mentors. All right. Without further ado, let's jump right into the interview. All right, Kosh, welcome to MedSound Radio. Appreciate you coming on, man. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm looking forward to this discussion.

We have a little pre-interview rant, which was quite fun. So this should be not only an educational conversation, but it should be some lasts along the way. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio at the outset of this episode. But I was like to start here from the horse's mouth, so to speak. So give us maybe an elevator-style overview of kind of what you were doing before founding Windley. Yeah, look, what we do at Windley is we're fixing allergies. We're giving people a life without allergies. And what got me here is being a horrible allergy sufferer myself.

And I have an engineering background, but I only got into engineering because I thought that was a way of actually doing business, so to speak. My dad is a medical doctor, but he also opened up his own private practice. And that entrepreneurial spirit is something I just always saw. And I always realized that, oh, okay, you get a job and eventually you probably want to leverage that into your own business. the standard thing, I saw the social network and I was like, I'm going into computer science, right? But then I realized the inevitable draw of being the first son in a medical family and I had to come back into medicine. I partnered up with my co-founder, who's also my cousin, to digitize his E&T practice. And what we really realized is there are parts of his practice that we were able to

pull out and turn into a more consumer model of a consumer model with telehealth. And, really what ended up happening is we had enough people asking us, hey, you're based in Colorado and New York, but I'm here in Wisconsin. I'm here in California. How do I work with you? And we just started leaning into that customer demand. But at the end of the day, there's no better way of getting into an innovation than realizing that you can't breathe because you have horrible allergies, not being able to breathe for many months and then just jumping through so many hoops when you tried to fix it. You're like, there has to be a better way and I'm going to build it. Yeah, and you mentioned you're solving for allergies, which obviously we'll get into in more detail. But I got to ask, like, when you watch the social network, was it just a Timberlake's line where it's better than a million dollars? A billion dollars. And you're like, sold. I'm in. I'm into the.

No. Well, let's be honest. Let's be honest. I was a dorky little kid. And I got to see the social network was a movie about it started with a dorky kid, not doing well with girls. And then he was throwing parties that people wanted to go through. And so I tapped into my psyche. as a 10th grader at the time.

It's still a good movie, though. It's one that, like, if it's on TV and I happen to have time, which is rare a rarity these days, but I'll probably sit there and watch a little bit of it. But I think what's amazed me is, like, Mark Zuckerberg was a really young guy when that movie came out. And he's just being, like, scrutinized by the entirety of America. For me, and maybe, like, a popular act.

And he's still young. Sometimes it's hard to forget. It reminds me of, like, a really famous athlete. Like, a passion from the homes. It's like some people, the dude's still in his 20s. You know what I mean? Like, Zock, I think, what is it maybe his early 40s, like 30s? Yeah, I think he's three-wile.

So, yeah, and it's just maybe we shouldn't bully like a 20-year-olds for making some mistakes. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. All right, Winley, you're solving for allergies. I grew up as an allergy suffer myself, went to get the allergy shots, I think, on a whatever, like a weekly basis or something ridiculous and very onerous experience. So give us a pile of a overview of what you're doing with it. Yeah. So what Wimley does is we give you a life without allergies. And we do it by using a clinically proven treatment,

basically very similar to the allergy shots that you just talked about. It's called allergy drop immunotherapy. It's used all across the U.S. It's just when you're in someone's office, it's a little more convenient and a little easier to just give you a shot. And you probably interact with your allergist in their office anyway. Yeah, so I realize it's just there. We haven't seen this kind of C-D.

change happen on how allergies are fixed and where you address the root cause instead of just using an antihistamine. Instead, like you said, people have to go into their allergist every week for five years. I don't know if you stuck with it, but that's what the, that's what like doctors will recommend and that's what we recommend. But that's just a limitation on so many people's lives. Five years in one place is not a stability that many people have. I think the average time people are staying at their jobs are like three years. So if you're using insurance, the timeline of your treatment doesn't even fit how long you're on insurance and then you're going to have to bail on the treatment after a few years. Which is really difficult as an individual. Co-founder was doing this. He's

an EMT and EMTs are they own the airway. They want to make sure that you're able to get air from out of here into your lungs and take care of all that stuff. And they've started adding allergy onto their practice. But just because of the differences in their model, and I think he was seeing a lot of children, he realized that, look, you know what? I'm not going to be able to get a kid in here to get a shot every week.

Try out this allergy dropping in a therapy. Let's see if it works. And we started seeing just it being taken up a little more. And that's when we started saying, okay, look, this is working with people that are coming into our office directly. Can we talk to people and acquire people online? And the answer is yes.

And so now we're rolling out a dual strategy of, yes, we talk about it online. We build a consumer following, but we're also enabling other doctors to layer us on to their practices. Got it, got it. And you broke a really interesting point because automatically because I had allergies when I was in there. I thought about the owners just experience. And it's hard to imagine. Actually, I did this for such a long time. But I remember literally after school walking to the allergist or I think it was, I think if I remember correct, the allergist,

That was partially close by, like sitting there and waiting in the waiting room to get my allergy shot. But you mentioned a really good point. Like, fast forward to someone who's maybe in their adulthood working at some job. And it's like their insurance is going to change every whatever, two, three, four years or something like that. And that's slightly going to impact any sort of regimen here that we're talking about. It's really interesting point. But I'm on the website right now, Winlay, which is W-Y-N-D-L-Y for everyone listening that doesn't get to the show notes. It's Winley.

W-Y-N-D-L-Y. You've got like a simple, how does this work? work three-step process. I get the test. I presume it's shipped to me. I do the test, send it back in, and then you connect me with a provider, right? Via telehealth. Is that kind of geno-speak, how this works? Yeah, exactly. And you can start, you can bring their own existing allergy test. We see people are doing that. Some people prefer to start by talk to one of our doctors first, but we see the vast majority of folks. They come onto our website. Actually, the vast majority of folks, people are taking health into their own hands.

Everyone wants to be the guardian of their own health. And it's really interesting how that's happened. It's because access to medical specialists is so difficult. And the amount of hoops you have to get to jump through just to get a question on doc, I was playing tennis and I tweaked my elbow. What do I do? You know, the options for most people are like take a day off of work, go wait in a doctor's office for 25, 30 minutes, pay a $2530.30.

co-pay, spend three to five minutes with the doctor who just due to how the system is set up, is not able to provide the same bedside manner they were able to 20 years ago and leave with just like a prescription of a pill probably or like some cream or physical therapy. It really feels unhelpful, honestly. That's what we hear from our patients that like when they try and go use the, try and go see a doctor in person, sometimes they're just left feeling like great. I didn't actually get to explain what was happening to me. I didn't get to give context of care.

So instead, what we're seeing is the vast majority of people. The first thing they do is they Google their symptoms, or they ask chat GPT, or they look on TikTok to see who else is experiencing this. So that's how most people find us, right? They find us online because they're like searching and figuring out, like, why do I have post nasal drip? Why do I sneeze so much? Am I having an allergy attack?

That type of stuff. And from there, they've been like, Okay, cool. Windley is who I want to work with. They're incredibly legitimate. Their co-founder is on the academy and very well regarded. And from there, people just say, cool, I'll just buy the test because people are used to buying things at home nowadays. Amazon has told us you got to get stuff shipped to you. And then people are used to telehealth too.

So yeah, that's basically how it goes. We try and remove, we try and make it very clear where you are at every step of the process so that you get to know as a patient, like what to expect. So we're empowering our patients by giving them, by telling them what to expect. Because last time I went to a doctor's office, I'm like sitting there. I don't know when my doctor is going to see me. Okay, cool. My doctor saw me. Okay, I have no idea if I'm going to see this doctor again.

Yeah. Or if this is just a one-time thing. And I think it's like a tragedy that our current healthcare system is so impersonal. And so we try and make it more personal by being so focused and being so accessible. One thing I do want to touch on is you do get as part of this, if you come on to our treatment, It's not just the medicine. You actually get unlimbed doctor time. And our doctors, the funniest thing is we book our sessions in like 30 minutes at a time.

And our doctors will be like, we'll follow up with a doctor being like, hey, how did patients so and so do? And they're like, yeah, they came in for 10 minutes and then dipped. So I'm hanging out. I'm just doing charts. It's funny. It's funny because the patients themselves feel like they don't have to fight for doctor time anymore. Because we've made ourselves so available. And again, I think that most of the doctors.

This is just a hunch, but most of the docs that come onto the platform, they're like, this is so much better, so much easier way to, like, actually serve patients too, right? I don't, my hunch is that there's probably a fair amount of response. This is so much better than, like, the traditional way I've done it for years. With that sake, Davis has said, I want to go back in time and learn a little bit, literally more about the origin story and how you built the, built the platform and the marketplace, if you will. But where's the company at now?

You're at, you're in full-scale commercialization, I presume. Are you focused just on the U.S.? Have you launched this in other geographies as well? Yeah, we're fully commercialized. We are in market across all 50 states. We're working with providers in all 50 states and with patients in all 50 states. We have a lot of interest from Canada, the UK, and India,

and even Japan. There's just the regulatory environments in those countries are just so foreign to us. I'm not sure when we're going to start going after them. Got it, got it. So U.S. is the primary market at this point. Yeah, got it. Let's spend the next maybe 20 minutes or so going back in time

and learning a little bit more about how you build up Winley. And I guess the first question I've got for you is thinking about how you got it off the ground, right? You mentioned, you touched on this earlier, right, with your cousin, who's now one of the co-founder of Winley, how you digitized his practice and leaned in to this demand. Take us back there, right? Like, when you think about those early days and pivoting that experience, into what is now Winlay, were there a few things that either were crucial in, like, hitting certain inflection points, or maybe were there a few, like, major things that you did long,

you're like, I did. We got to learn from that. Give us a sense for how the early signs of what you were on to something as you tried to scale this up. Yeah, I think when it comes to scaling, once you, like, have a product that you're confident in. And for us, it's this experience, which is so much better. It's this protocol that we have that will make sure that you get to feel like you're allergy-free and without symptoms as quickly as possible. It's a question of how do we get people to that stage, right? So we tried out a lot of things. We tried out, hey, you get to talk to a doctor first.

Hey, you have to go see a doctor first in person and then everything else is online. It's constantly experimenting until you realize, okay, this is how the buyer wants to interact with what we're doing. The biggest unlock for us was realizing that people already knew how to buy diagnostic kits online. And so that was something they understood how to do. Confusion leads to churn. And so the more confusion you can avoid, the easier it is for people to understand how you're going to get them from their current state to their happy place. That idea of experimenting, right, experimentation, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of,

smart people in MedTac, right, with really good backgrounds, MBAs from top tier schools, you're smart guy yourself, engineer by training. But I still fundamentally believe that, like, ultimately when you're building a company, whether it's a venture back company or whether you're bootstrapping, this idea of just taking a lot of swings, moving quickly, and momentum is so powerful, right?

Especially in the early, and just trying a lot of different things, there's only so much you're going to learn, right? From listening to podcasts like this or reading some really great books that you've, heard other people talk about, but until you actually start taking swings, like, you just, there's not going to be, you're not going to see the unlocks, right, that you just mentioned. Is that kind of, is that been your kind of experience with Linway?

Yeah, I think it's so funny. Everyone thinks they can learn how to run a business by listening to like podcasts, but no one would say you can learn how to cook by watching food TV. No one would say you can learn how to do woodworking by watching like carpentry shows, right? There's just so much little nuanced bits and pieces that you really only get by doing. The experimentation, it's just, you get to choose how quickly you want to learn. That's really what it comes down to. So if you try something new once a month, great. You're going to learn 24 things in a year, right?

Sorry, 24 things in two years. If you try to do something new every week, you're going to learn 100, and 104 things in two years, right? And two years is the amount of time that you can commit yourself to an idea before getting exhausted without any progress. That's what your emotional runway runs out. So the way I see it is just from a pure numbers perspective,

you need to be taking more swings. A lot of people hear that and say, I just do so much for each swing, I don't know how I can increase that. You increase it by doing less. do less and do it more often. And then the other thing which I think people miss out on is your learnings compound, right? So actually, the difference between 104 and 24 learnings is not just that linear difference,

but it's also all the compounded growth you're getting on top of it. I don't know if you had any financed people, but I think they would say like the biggest thing in compounding is how often you accrue. And so you like literally as an individual, you get to choose. how often you get to compound on your learnings. Yeah, and you want that to be as short as possible. And those numbers that you just threw out, even just thinking about those like that, that two-year window, right,

104 swings versus 24, that doesn't account for, right, that compounding. But you know, the learning that's going to take place after each swing, whether it's a bun single, maybe it's a double, maybe it's a strikeout, etc. There's that learning aspect, that compounding aspect between each swing, which I think is, which I think is so crucial. And I remember like this period of time, like, from gosh, I'm dating myself, but, maybe, oh, 2007-ish through maybe 2012, right? It was like a five-year stretch, right?

I felt like all I was doing was consuming podcasts and reading popular books like the lean startup, et cetera. And don't get me wrong, like that sort of stuff maybe helps build and aligns and thoughts, right? But until I started actually taking legitimate swings, I would say the company I sounded back in 2015, Jude was really the first hit. I would say real hit anyway.

But there was so much I had no idea, right? You can think back and start to connect the dots, but it's like you don't, There's so little I knew how to actually do until I started to actually doing it. And that analogy that you mentioned earlier, you're going to watch a bunch of cooking videos and all of a sudden know how to cook. No, that's not going to take place. And so you actually start messing around with pots and pans and recipes.

So, yeah, it's really good stuff. Yeah, exactly. You can't learn how to cook without getting your hand serving. Yeah, it's a really good analogy. Let's talk a little bit about fundraising. And based on that kind of our notes, it looks like you raised a couple million bucks last year. I'm not sure if there's been any fundraising activity since then. But you're, I think you're initially part of why.

combinator, which obviously is one of the arguably the most famous incubator, an accelerator, if you will, however you want to define it. So I'm sure a lot of people that have raised a lot of money. What's been your experience like raising capital and maybe either frame that up with the RAM that I just mentioned or how you're thinking about it moving forward? Yeah, fundraising. There's so many different types of fundraising that on the outside before you get started, you think, oh, it's only venture capital. And it's only, because you're very early, it's only seed stage venture capital. But fundraising changes. It depends. depending on who you're fundraising from and what you are trying to accomplish, right? You can raise

funds from a bank. It's called raising debt, but trying to close like a $10 million debt line is, it's still fundraising. You're still trying to get access to those dollars. And you can fundraise from private equity, right? They'll buy like 30, 40 percent of your company, but it's still fundraising. Venture capitalists are a very obvious one. And then a lot of people start by talking to their friends and family. I think the difficulty I see with most people who are getting started and haven't done it before is they don't really know what they're trying to say. They're not good at articulating why someone should give them $10,000. This actually goes back to what I said about confusion causing churn. If you may it easy for someone to understand what's happening,

they'll be more likely to do it. Um, look, We used to go to people and say, we're sublingal immunotherapy at home. Like, dude, that didn't work at all. What's sublingal immunotherapy? Oh my gosh. People just get confused. They'd be like, I don't know if I want to do this. And they'd get out of there.

Permanent lifelong allergy relief, that is immediately understandable to the hundreds of millions of people that have allergies, right? That's how you want to, I would say when you start fundraising, you want to remove as much confusion as you can from the story you're telling. And then it's just a numbers game. If you talk to 500 people and you're not able to get a check, then you're like probably doing something like really wrong. Yeah. That's oftentimes like I can't remember exactly who brought it up, but they mentioned that if you're, yes, fundraising is a number scheme.

But if you literally talk to 50 straight investors, whether it's annual investors or maybe traditional VC's and you literally get almost no and like firm knows, not maybe let's set up another. meeting, like you're literally getting no and then everyone's saying no to even a second follow-up meeting. Maybe a good sign, right, like that you're not onto something or something's, I should say. But even there, we can see like the application of getting as many learnings and compounding as much as possible, right? If you're like, don't tell the same story on meeting 10 as you did on meeting one. You should be changing your story every five meetings. And then at the end of the 50th meeting, you've done 10 iterations.

You've improved 10 times. So what you see a lot of the times is there's a lot more nose at the beginning. And then towards the end, you're just closing like big checks very quickly because you know what you're saying. And so that's just the like how many learnings do you want, how much experimentation do you want to do? So sundlingual immunotherapy, I think maybe if I pronounce that, that was the earlier on in any of you pitches and you're like, people are like, no, I don't have that disease. I want that. So it's like going to breathe the instant. We just spend so much time.

You get 30 minutes with someone. You spend like 15 teaching them how to pronounce sublingual and not quite what you don't have you did. Is that one word? Is it hyphenated? What's going on here? But joking aside, but that theme of swinging, right, taking swings, that obviously just applies to what you just mentioned, right? Like, you just got to take a lot of swings. And with each swing, you're going to learn a little bit more about, like, how someone's responding to your messaging, what things, what tweets you need to make.

And I feel like I've been fundraising forever with Fast Wave, right? And we've closed a significant amount of capital. But each sort of pitch, if you will, or follow-up meeting, there's always a learning. There's always something that's, ah, ah, I see where the question is coming from. I need to do this to the slide or something along those lines. And so that learning is so crucial. And that learning is only comes from cooking, man, from carpentry. Actually doing the carpagery work, as you mentioned previously.

This got to do it. There's no better way to learn than do it. Yeah. It is such an accelerator. It really is. And the most fun part is it feels good to get better at stuff. So just get started. And then you'll start getting better.

And it doesn't matter because at the end of it, you'll be like, awesome. I now have skills. I didn't know I had before. Yeah. Yeah. So true. Let's transition to using social in order to, whether it's to acquire customers or to raise brand awareness. I think, and it seems strange to say this, but like most people and I would say traditional met tech, they start leery of like how to use social, how to engage online socially, whether it's with traditional, whether it's to engaging with traditional kind of healthcare providers or to consumers. And, you know, Wynley, obviously, you guys have a strong social presence. I'm sure that's probably have can probably attribute a fair amount of revenue from your social kind of activity in

general. But give us a sense for maybe what's worked for you and maybe help other MedTech folks who are still like sitting on the sidelines here, maybe help them understand like why they need to maybe engage a little bit more, even if they have a traditional B2B type offering. Yeah, I love this because it's so funny when you see to me because I think if you're selling to people, which most of us are, than anything that reaches a consumer, anything that reaches the end person is probably a channel worth going after. And we've seen so many new marketing channels

pop up in the last 20 years. SEO didn't exist in 2000. Facebook and social media didn't exist in 2000. Like podcast advertising didn't exist in 2000. And I'll constantly hear from folks being like, oh, I'm a B to B company. This doesn't make sense for me. I am totally willing to say, okay, maybe from a price perspective, it doesn't make sense for you.

Like maybe you don't need to run a $100,000 podcast to advertising blitz. But we have algorithms which are really good at getting your message in front of the right person nowadays. And I promise you, the first thing someone is doing when they hear your name is looking you up, clicking on your socials, trying to figure out who is this person. That is just a behavior which is natural to everybody. And so if you're talking to people, if you're selling two people, I think you probably need to have a social media presence. I think it needs to be video based because video is where we're currently seeing the ability to get real reach, especially on TikTok and YouTube shorts. Once you see what's doing well there, you can bring it on to LinkedIn.

You can bring it on to Facebook. You can bring it on to these more like personality driven, personality driven platforms. But dude, we were just talking to, we were talking to. We were just trying to talk to patients and democratize the allergy, the allergy visit experience, right? I literally just put a camera in from my co-founder and said, look, man, I have a cat allergy. I'm seeing, you're the allergist that I'm seeing. Tell me about it. And we were just recording that and putting it out.

And we naturally saw that this was getting hundreds of thousands of views. And now we're doing millions of views per year. And we realized it's because, oh, people just want access to this information. It doesn't take that. Maybe it takes you an hour to bang out a video. Get good at it. This is another thing you're going to compound with. And I would say like all of our B2B people, you'd be really surprised at how often they started as a patient themselves. They got an incredible experience. And then they're like, okay, I'd like to bring you into my 20 provider practice. Or I'd like you bring to bring you into my chain of private equity backed offices. And that's because decision makers are still people. people. So that is so true. And I think there's this, we saw this a little bit like with Dropbox, right, this kind of bottoms up model inside the enterprise where people, individual people that worked at ABC Corporation started using Dropbox and like, this is so awesome. Like, why is the entire company using it? But I, there's a guy that I follow on primarily on LinkedIn and is his last name

is his game. It's Chris. He started refined labs, but I think he's on to something else. But he mentioned something that there was some video talked about video that I saw on LinkedIn. And he was like, he was talking about this, this aspect. I'm paraphrasing here, but it's a very similar what you just mentioned. Like even in B2B, like you're ultimately selling quote-unquote decision makers, the people, most of them are like going to go checked out maybe LinkedIn or your Twitter or whatever. That's usually where they're going to start, your website. So if you have some janky-looking site that doesn't really, it's hard to like use, like that that's going to impact, right? That someone's perception, right? That lead, that quote lead, right, the perception of kind of

what you're doing. And so all of that stuff matters. And the other thing that you mentioned, too, is you started recording some videos and talking about allergies, add more scientific allergy stuff. I think most people, most B2B people, and I'm taking a guess, we'd be like, ah, no one's going to find that interesting. But you need, they need to take a step back and think about, look at someone like Andrew Huberman, how popular his podcast is. Dude, you guys have a nerdy scientists, right? But people love that stuff. If you're, even if you're B2B, whether there's allergies or cardiovascular, you typically have some pretty unique knowledge, right? You're doing some kind of in the weed stuff. Most cases, people, maybe a little bit,

maybe of a smaller niche, but people want to know that stuff, right? They want to, and if you're making it easy to accessible through short YouTube shorts or Instagram reels or whatever, like there's probably a decent likelihood that people could lead into that stuff and either consume it or share it. Hey there, it's Scott and thanks for listening in so far. The rest of this conversation is only available via our private podcast for MedSider Premium Members. If you're not a premium member yet, you should definitely consider signing up. You'll get full access to the entire library of interviews dating back to 2010. This includes conversations with experts like Renee Ryan, CEO of Kala Health, Nadine Miarid, CEO of CVRX, and so many others. As a premium member, you'll get to join live interviews with these incredible medical

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