Rupa Health built Rupi University, a paid education platform for doctors, to embed their lab tests into medical training. Starting with free weekly talks, they evolved into bootcamps costing around $400 that drive customers to their core testing service. This partnership-derived channel generates millions in revenue with better margins than paid ads.
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So partnerships. I think this is one of the most underrated channels that most people are probably missing, is people will gravitate towards the really obvious stuff with like search and Facebook and social and whatever. But I've consistently seen startups and organizations undervalue the impact of partnerships. So for Rupa, doctors learn about lab tests not just in medical school, but in universities and programs after they graduate from medical school. Um, so what we did was we went to all these universities and we started sponsoring them, and we'll be like, hey, we'll give you a bunch of money if you will put us into your curriculum. So we did this— ooh, laser pointer— we did this with, uh, the Functional Medicine, uh, or Kalish Institute. We did this with Functional Medicine Fast Track. We did this with Bastyr. We did this with Interactive Functional Nutrition Academy. We basically went to all of these schools and we got ourselves inserted in them. I was just sleeping one day and looking myself in the mirror thinking, "Holy cow, Kobe, you're spending so much money here. Wouldn't it be great if we just owned a university like this?" What we did was we built our own university. We took this channel that we're spending paid money on and we were figuring out how can we create our own owned version of that channel. We built Roop University. It started with us just doing a weekly live call where we brought in a doctor to come do a talk about something. And then we did that every day for 3 years. And then eventually we're like, this is really great, but wouldn't it be better if they were actually going through some kind of program? So we started introducing paid boot camps. You can kind of think of this like Lambda School, but for doctors. So it would cost $400. We would bring in an industry expert. Shout out to Dr. Carrie Jones. She's like one of the world leading experts in women's hormones. and then you would get a lab test as part of this program. So this is beautiful for us because like Google Ads costs money, right? It's great to scale Google Ads and make a positive ROI. Organic search, even better because you don't have to pay for that traffic anymore. But this is profitable. This makes like millions of dollars a year with like good margin. So this is a channel of acquisition that is profitable that drives users towards our core product. So users would pay us money to learn how to pay us more money.
