How MedTech Entrepreneur Scott Nelson Uses Social Media Influencer Marketing to Grow Revenue

You can't replace part of the brain. Like, you treat them the same. The source of truth for the medtech industry coexists with the profits. Robot understands things automatically. Number one show in the medtech industry. So Stryker got ahead of that and changed in the $90 billion company that held up high a lot of things. State of MedTech with your host Omar M. Khatib. What's going on everybody, welcome back to the show. Let's face it, In the medtech industry, I think we can do a lot better when it comes to how we market our products. It's part of the reason why I started my own company to do this. Always looking for other founders and entrepreneurs who are doing a really good job of this, and this is what brought me to Scott Nelson. Now, Scott Nelson is a longtime entrepreneur in the medtech space. He's also founder of Medsider. Medsider is a digitally native media company that's focused on essentially getting key insights from medical device and health technology thought leaders. So be sure to go and check them out. Scott is now the co-founder and president of Fastwave Medical, which is a privately held early-stage med device company focused on developing intravascular lithotripsy devices that are safe, efficacious, and cost-effective. But in this episode, we talk about his experience of one of his other companies that he co-founded called Joovv, called, uh, spelled J-O-O-V-V. I actually knew about Joovv for a long time because they are first medical-grade full-body red light therapy systems designed for in-home use. Really beautiful products. They promoted, and this is how I find out about them, by people like Dave Asprey, who's huge biohacking world. Scott was the co-founder of that company, and so he did a fantastic job, uh, getting those devices to be adopted by early adopters and influencers, people like Dave Asprey, Skinny Confidential, Ben Greenfield, Aubrey Marcus, and many others. And I think when you listen to how he went about doing this, it can give you some great insights as to how you as a med device company can use social media influencer marketing for your devices, because let's face it, a lot of physicians are on social media. They're using Instagram, they're using LinkedIn, and technically, forget about key opinion leaders. I always talk about digital opinion leaders, and that's pretty much a social media influencer. So in this episode, you're gonna learn all that and more. Couple shoutouts to our sponsors. Number 1 is Clary. If you're a company and you're using Salesforce, you're, you're putting your investment at risk by not using Clary. Clary bolts onto Salesforce to do 2 really big things. Number 1, automates the data going into Salesforce. So your reps love it because it makes their life easier and you get clean data in there as a revenue leader. The second thing is that using their AI and algorithm, Clari plugs into Salesforce and starts giving you predictable insights on your pipeline, on revenue, on where you should be focusing deal-wise. And so it's a fantastic company, a great SaaS product. If you want to learn more, check out Clari.com, C-L-A-R-I.com. And lastly, you know, when it comes to finding early adopters, it's really important to be able to get access to data, data on their procedure volume, prescribing habits, even their social media. Now, if you've raised that much money, you can probably afford, um, one of the, uh, sales intelligence platforms out there that provide these things. Problem with those platforms is that a lot of times they cost a lot of money. And then the second thing is that they're a little bit difficult to use depending on which one you use. You can't just hand this to a sales rep. This is why I like using Alphasophia. Alphasophia is is a sales intelligence platform, uh, for med device companies, specifically startups. Um, I've used it actually in a lot of my commercial engagements. So I help a lot of companies commercialize their products. I use it to target early adopters to find their procedure volumes, their email, social media, and more. And the best part is that it, it really doesn't cost a lot of money. It only costs $300 a month. And so anybody can afford it at that price. Now, AlphaSophie is doing a special where if you're interested to learn more about their platform, they're going to give you 3 free searches for free. So go to alphasophia.com, that's A-L-P-H-A-S-O-P-H-I-A.com/Omar. You'll see my face on there and you'll be able to get a free demo. But in that demo, come with the specialty— specialty, or maybe even the surgeons or physicians that you want to look up, and they're going to give you a free search, 3 of them. So go check that out. Now let's get on to our episode with Scott Nelson. Enjoy. Welcome back to the show, everybody, and, uh, joined by a good friend, somebody who I've known about through the industry for a while now because he's the founder of MedCider, which is a digitally native media company in our space. They do great interviews with medtech CEOs, but our guest is also a medtech CEO. He's currently the co-founder and president over at FastWave Medical, which is a lithotripsy company. But today we have Scott Nelson joining us to talk about, uh, Juve, which he got to $20 million in top-line revenue without a sales force using, uh, digital channels, which is— if you guys know about it or you follow the show at all, I dunk in our industry all the time about this because we spend too much money on traditional sales channels that don't work. And so Scott, thank you so much for joining the show. How are you doing today?

Uh, good, good. Omar, yeah, appreciate you having, having me on. And we definitely won't talk about how we leveraged offline conferences to grow revenue, right? Uh, you know, that wasn't, that wasn't part of the plan.

No, no. Yeah, exactly. I mean, look, uh, some people think I'm like anti-in-person stuff. I look, I love conferences. Conferences are great. You know, I think if you can go and meet your customer in person, everything, all the better. The problem though is that they're not going to conferences like they used to, or at least they're choosing very regional ones, number one. And number two is, you know, even if you see your ideal customer at a conference and they come and talk to you for a few minutes, like there's the rest of the year where you gotta stay in front of them. And you know, and digital and social media is really the only way to do it without, you know, annoying them. right?

Yeah, yeah, totally. It's interesting, and I'm sure we'll probably dive into this in more detail, but I spent a short cup of coffee at one of the largest like marcom agencies way back in the day that kind of prided themselves on being, you know, a digital-first or digitally native like agency. And I remember working on some projects where it was like relatively low, you know, like straightforward asks or initiatives, right? Like paid social, paid search. And it's like, we had to scrounge to find, you know, freelancers to help come in and solve some of those issues. So it's just funny how, how, uh, how slow, right, our space is to adopt some of these things that have been around for quite some time.

And I don't know, like, you know, I still can't figure out what it is. I don't know if it's like there's not enough fear of the future or what, because there's not a single person, even if it's like your traditional med tech board member CEO, who when I say like, you know, you should be using, let's say, social media and digital to sell and market, No one disagrees with me about that. But when it comes time to implement these things, there's so much scrutiny around it. Like to spend $5K on some campaign. Meanwhile, you go to a conference and it's like, yeah, let's spend like $10K on putting our logo on a, you know, hotel room key or something.

Right.

You know, it's just really, really ridiculous. And I don't know, I, I've become a lot more like vocal about it, but I just have no respect for CEOs who are like, yeah, we want to generate like you know, $10 million in pipeline. And the way we're gonna do that is we have a marketing manager that we're gonna pay $80K a year plus an intern. And they're gonna kind of figure it out as they go. Maybe we're gonna— like, I just, it just doesn't make any sense.

Right.

You know?

Right. I think you nailed it on the head of like these phrases, right? Whether it's digital or social or whatever, like they're popular to use, but when it comes down to actually executing against them, like there's such a big gulf there, you know, within our space. Easy to talk about, right? But, So few that are actually doing it, but the few that are, I'm sure you come across this, right? With like, you know, your business, the few that are, are like seeing really good results.

100%. 100%. I mean, I think, you know, some, it's, you know, it's sad. Like I have to, I still have to think about who's doing a good job of it. I won't mention them because somebody told me that, you know, the other day they're like, oh, you kind of keep mentioning the same few companies. I'm like, that's because like list of usual suspects I roll off. But maybe let's, let's, uh, kind of go back and just dive right into shop because I know a lot of founders are going to listen to this episode. So what, what did Juve do, and then how did you guys get started in terms of getting traction?

Yeah, yeah. So I'll, I'll answer that question by kind of taking a step back. So I, I grew up in the, in the traditional device space, right? Uh, primarily the cardiovascular arena. First half of my career was with large strategics, kind of back half of my career has been mostly with startups. But I've always had a sort of a bias towards all things digital, right? And so like, as an example, way back in the day, like 10, 15 years ago, I used to like consume a ton of podcasts, right? I used to just, I used to read, you know, books on landing pages, right? And how to drive traffic to funnel. It was just always interesting to me, that sort of stuff.

You were part of the early like ClickFunnels crew, huh?

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah.

I remember Russell Brunson's like, I think I have it somewhere, like Traffic Secrets, but it was like a magazine, it wasn't even a book. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Like, like some of the stuff that like, then, oh, for sure. For sure. It's, it's interesting. Like even the first website that I, like my own personal website that I built, I didn't build it back in the day. Like loosely built it, I should say, was, was this was when it was, it was a WordPress site, but it was back when, when people weren't using WordPress to actually create full sites. Right. And so I just, I don't know, I've always kind of dabbled in that space, but one of the last kind of quote unquote you know, full-time gigs I had, which was at Covidien, we sold and marketed and commercialized devices primarily to physicians as like end users. But because of the nature of the devices, they had a very kind of consumer kind of element to them. And so like part of the campaigns that we ran, although they were like kind of old school campaigns, they were more patient-centric. And so I got like the appetite for this, for that kind of space only kind of increased from there. And so So, segueing to Juve, this was kind of back in 2015, but we— and for those that aren't familiar, Juve is— we designed and developed a Class II medical device in the photobiomodulation arena, and most people know it as red light therapy. But, when we started the company, if you Googled red light therapy, you couldn't find anything online about it. You basically come— first page of results on Google would be would be PubMed results, right? No one was talking about it at the time, but there was— it appeared to be kind of a product gap, right? Combined with the fact that, you know, no, there wasn't any brand sort of like messaging around this online. It just seemed like, hey, this is a kind of a classic kind of startup story where if I take a— it's worth taking a swing at basically, right? And, you know, fast forward 3 years and, you know, quickly became kind of the most popular brand in the space. You've got professional athletes across a wide range of sports using it, really popular kind of online health-centric influencers using the therapy. So, yeah, fortunately able to grow that company quite rapidly over the course of a couple years up to north of $20 million in top-line revenue profitable.

Yeah. And, you're kind of ahead of the whole biohacking wave. I'm familiar with Joovv, I think probably through— and by the way, I love the branding of it. But I think I remember it through, I believe, Dave Asprey. Yeah. But so do you currently still own equity with Juve? Did you get— do you exit it?

What happened with it? Yeah, we didn't exit it. I wanted to position it personally for an exit. I thought it was there, especially kind of during the bull market kind of run-up through 2021, but couldn't get sort of buy-in across the founding team to position it for an exit. And so, yeah, I still own. I'm not operationally involved, haven't been for quite some time, but still own a significant kind of equity or still have a significant equity position in the company. But it was interesting because I think this parlays into kind of what we were talking about of how do you leverage, you know, KOLs or medtech companies call them KOLs, but influencers in essence, right? How do you take their influence and leverage it online? And we did, I think, a pretty good job of that at Juvie. Granted, our KOLs, or our influencers, were the likes of Dave Asprey and Peter Attia and Andrew Huberman before these guys were popular. But we largely leveraged their audience, right? But did it online versus, you know, going to an offline conference and putting up, you know, buying— you're putting our logo on some sort of banner or something like that, right? So, and it's been, you know, even kind of circling back to what I spent— where I spend my time on now, which is Fast Wave. I am actively trying to leverage like a lot of what we did at Juve and seeing, you know, what, what fits, what doesn't, right? And how can we, you know, best, best leverage some of those learnings, uh, uh, from, from kind of my, my days, uh, growing, growing Juve.

Yeah. And while, while Juve is definitely more of a, you know, it is a medical device, but it is, is more B2C. My belief though is that, you know, the physicians that you— we sell to, they're consumers as well. And so a lot of the ways that you use you know, B2C marketing and growth marketing tactics. You may not be able to sell just directly through that, you know, you still have to have meetings. Like, it's, it's gonna be hard to sell a capital equipment through just social media marketing, but the idea is like you can use that for, you know, driving product awareness and adoption at scale versus the traditional way. So what were some of the first things that you guys did at Joovv to sort of address and, and establish yourself in the market? Because when you started Joovv, you started in 2015. So like, just for people to, to know about red light therapy, like, I would say red light therapy really took off, uh, I think in 2020 is, is when it really started to take off. So you guys were really far ahead of the curve in terms of the market awareness. And so the level of market awareness was not, not very high. How did you guys get started and where did you first allocate budget?

Yeah, yeah. So the, the first couple things that we focused on were kind of more forcing functions versus anything else. So one is we didn't ever raise capital for the company, so we funded it entirely, um, you know, with, with our own capital up front, right? And then reinvested a lot of, a lot of, a lot of the profit back into the business. But because of that, it requires you to like, you know, not only move fast, but you have to be acutely like aware of kind of how you're spending, how you're spending dollars. Like, you know, to be a little bit more pragmatic, we didn't have, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars to throw at an experiment on paid social or paid search, right? Not to say that that would even work back then because there was, you know, not a lot of awareness around the therapy. And so we built the company on the backs of influencer marketing. So what we try to do is identify kind of leading health influencers and partner with them to create content together. And it went both ways, right? Like we produce content for our kind of our own channels, right? But also we would do our best to try to get on their podcasts or try to get on their YouTube channel, et cetera. So that kind of the partnership went both ways, but we really grew the company again on the backs of that sort of approach. In fact, that actually led into when we actually started to deploy traditional marketing efforts around paid search and paid social, the ROAS on those channels was so high because of the partnerships that we had in place with all of these pretty well-established influencers, right? That kind of lent their credibility to what we were doing. And so that kind of, that surround sound or like, deploying capital against those other channels really, really worked because we built the company off the backs of health influencers from the very beginning. And like I said, some of that was just we did it because it was— you could do that with a pretty lean amount of capital. But secondarily, because there wasn't awareness, wasn't much awareness around red light therapy, we felt like we needed those influencers that had a lot of trust with their audience to help us kind of establish and build credibility around the treatment itself.

Yes, let's dive a little bit into that more, you know, because I think the first thing that most people hear, like in our industry, when they hear about what you just described is to say, oh, we partner, you know, go partner with people to make content about your product. And that's not what you guys did, right? It's more around like problem education, right? Because if you, Essentially own the education and the problem, by proxy own the solution, and that solution can be attached to your product. What was the type of content? First of all, how did you go about identifying influencers? Was it just purely who had the most following? You know, like how did you go in identifying those, I guess, influencers/KOLs? And what was the agreement on the content creation that you guys came up with?

Yeah, I'm glad you asked the question, right? Because you hear that word around, we partnered with someone and it's like, really, what does that exactly mean? And so just to be a little bit more pragmatic, and I love getting into the weeds because I think this is important for other entrepreneurs. So early on, one step is obviously just to identify the right people. And I think, you know, now there's probably, there's a lot more software like platforms that you can do this, but I still kind of fundamentally think there's a fair amount of manual effort to go, you know, you may use software to help you find a list of 100 potential influencers to work with as an example, but you still need to do the work to say, let me go to their YouTube channel. Let me go to their Instagram channel. Let me see actually, if people are really engaging with their content, right? And what type of content are they producing? Is it like quick-hitting TikTok stuff? Is it more long-form? What type of content? 'Cause all of that information will allow you to reach out to them in a more kind of prescriptive way with the ideal response being that you get some sort of engagement, right? So that's really what we did early on with Joob is, you know, very manual kind of approach. To finding potential influencers to work with. And then secondarily, we didn't want to, our ask to them was not, hey, we want to get on your thing. We want this, we want that, we want this. It was more like, hey, can we do it? It was a very simple request, right? To create a fun sort of educational interview that we thought a lot of brands at the time weren't doing. right? So we try to find a bit of a unique angle, ask a relatively simple, you know, thing, and we kept it very simple. We didn't want to ask them for everything under the sun. It was like one simple thing. And then presuming they were open to it, right? And this is how we begin to work with, you know, folks like Ben Greenfield and Dave Asprey and the Wellness Mama, Katie Wells, is this sort of approach. And then by opening up that dialogue and that relationship, that gave us a chance to tell them a little bit more about the science of red light therapy or photobiomodulation because most likely they weren't aware of it. Right. So it kind of served two purposes. It allowed us to create kind of some content for our own site that added a little bit of legitimacy to the brand because it was a fledgling early startup at the time. And then secondarily opened up the conversation with these influencers to talk with them a little bit more about the treatment because it was— there was a lot of science to support it. Like that was undeniable, but we just needed an outlet to actually have that conversation. And so that was kind of our approach and it worked extremely well. Again, for the first 2 to 3 years of the business, we did the classic triple, triple, double, double. So tripled our revenue online 2 years in a row and then doubled it 2 years in a row. And that wasn't, I mean, I'd have to go back and look at numbers, but as an overall percent of our budget, we'd allocated a very, very small number to traditional kind of paid search and paid social. It was largely this type of collaborative approach with health influencers.

Yeah, and I think the key that I think every company should be asking itself, and we'll use MedTech as an example, is where's our audience spending time online consuming content and then how do we insert ourselves wherever that flow of content is like a river? So that way we kind of like a riverbank, we're able to sort of transact that. When you did these sort of engagements, did you have to pay anybody a certain amount? I mean, how did you manage your way around that?

Yeah, early on we did not. No, it was not a pay. Now granted, I think the landscape has changed a bit right now, you know, where a lot of these, especially these bigger influencers, I mean, it's definitely more of a pay-to-play. I mean, like number one, they've got to actually trust your product. And then secondarily, yeah, there's usually some sort of monetary exchange in the beginning. Early on for us, no, we didn't. It wasn't pay to play at all. In fact, it was completely free. And so, and I think, you know—

Why did they do that with you then? Like, was it because you guys were doing the heavy lifting on creating the content for them and everything? Or why do you think that was?

Yeah, so like one good example. So again, things have changed a little bit, but how I go about this now is I wouldn't go ask the top influencers now. I'd work up the chain, right? I'd start with small, like micro to like mid-tier influencers. And then leverage that as you kind of, as the company kind of grows and evolves. So I think there's, I think that the approach still applies. There's no doubt. But our ask in the early days and why there was no monetary exchanges, it was really simple. It was like, can we do this like short 10 to 15 minute interview, right? And for someone that didn't want to type out their answers, it was, hey, we'll just record the short interview and transcribe it and edit it down. Like, all we need is 10 minutes from you, right? That's, that was it. So it was a really, really straightforward ask. And then if they were open to it, we'd say, hey, by the way, this is what we're building, this is what we're doing, there's actually some cool science that supports it, happy to send you a free, a free device, right? Um, as sort of a secondary thing. We didn't lead with that though, which I think is important, right? Because most brands would say, let me send you the free thing, and then right away the influencer, uh, or KOL, whoever you're trying to reach, is Wait a second, I don't want one more thing like clogging up my mailbox. And so I think that you have to think about the approach in the right way.

100%. I think that this is an important key, which is to try and understand like what's important for that other party and then use that engagement, you know, whether it's inviting them on a podcast or interviewing them for your blog or I mean, whatever, you know, invite them to whatever it might be. And then using it as an introduction to say, hey, like, this is what we do. Would you be interested in learning more about it? I think that's, I think, I think too, more often than not, people miss the mark on understanding like, how do we cater to this KOL's interests, right? Have an educational conversation and then like, then you can kind of move that relationship forward. And I think that the industry, it's almost like, it's, you know, it's like a paradox where we have like these really long sales timelines. But then when it— but then we don't like to admit that and we try and like act like we have a short sales timeline, just go straight for like, hey, here's a product, like, are you interested? You want to buy it?

Yeah, 100%. And I'm a huge believer, even in startups, right, that you need to start early telling your story in the public domain, right? And one of the easiest ways to do that is to create like online content. Like I know you offer as an example, right, through your company. Is to— and it serves like multiple purposes, right? One, the obvious one is that it allows you to kind of cast your vision and tell your story in the public domain, right? And see who's interested in kind of following along. And then secondarily, it allows you to kind of start engaging with your community, right? And there's going to be all kinds of learnings through that experience. So your approach early on is likely going to change, right? As you, as, you know, as kind of your startup evolves over 6, 9, 12, 18 months, et cetera. But it's going to evolve hopefully in the right direction by sort of engaging with the community, learning from them, tweaking your message, et cetera. And I think that's part of the process. You know, as an example, we're doing that even right now with Fastway where it's like, we, yeah, we could maybe talk a little bit about our devices, which we do, and our systems that we're building, I think is important. But more so, a lot of the content we create is hopefully valuable, right, for the audience that we want to reach. And we're trying to take a little bit of a unique approach and differentiated approach to doing that. Doing that. But, you know, hopefully by, by, by, uh, producing and then disseminating content, you know, maybe some of it hits, maybe some of it doesn't. It's likely going to change over time. But all of those learnings we wouldn't have realized unless we were actually kind of engaging, I guess, with, you know, with the community and learning, uh, learning from, you know, the people that we're trying to, trying to reach.

How have you taken, I guess, some of the, the learnings from, uh, sort of influencer-led marketing and KOL-led, you know, content over to, let's say, FastWave Medical? So FastWave, it's, uh, it's, you know, for lithotripsy, so you're dealing with interventional cardiologists. Um, how do you guys kind of translate some of these content strategies over, and how has it worked out?

Yeah, so I think, I think at a high level, um, what we're trying to do is take, you know, classic KOL engagement, right, and bring it kind of online. Um, and it's, it's, um, um, you know, I wouldn't say it's necessarily rocket science per se, but like there's, there's a number of like, you know, different, different, um, kind of, you know, aspects to this. So like one example would be the most classic approach for a startup is like we want to produce this data, get it published, and then get it on podium at a conference. So I would say yes, if that makes sense for what you're doing, like pursue that, but find ways kind of in the interim to like repurpose a lot of that content online. And you know, I, I don't want to offer like prescriptive advice per se, because it's, you know, everyone listening is probably going to be doing a little bit something a little bit different. But I would say overall, find those sort of intermediary steps that could actually scale online while you're still kind of following that offline path, if you will. And so like one good example, because I know you're, I think you're friends with him, Chris over at Refine Labs. I think he's no longer there.

Oh yeah, Chris is a very good friend of mine. He came from the med device. Med tech.

Yeah, I think which is interesting.

Yeah, I'm the only guy who stayed in the industry, or at least I left and came back. We always joke about that. He's like, man, he's like, you know, he's like, you're dealing with a really tough market because he started out here. And fortunately, like, there's some med tech companies are starting to use Refined Labs, which is great. It's great news early on for the pitch. But sorry, finish your thought.

No, I think they have a pretty— and there's more to this, and I don't want to make it sound more simple than it really is, but like, there's a pretty they laid out a pretty, pretty nice blueprint, right? Which is, you know, try to create, uh, content, right, that is— that you're— that's going to resonate with your audience, that is helpful, that they find valuable, right? And, and when, when in the process of disseminating it online, whether it's through LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., um, you'll, you'll quickly discover what's popular and what's not, right? And the— that, that content that is resonating, that is popular, that is getting a lot of natural engagement Well, then you can put some paid behind that, right, to help amplify that particular piece of content. And that's— there's a bit of a flywheel approach there. But I think that sort of— that approach will work for almost any medtech company, right, that's largely leveraging offline conferences. We'll take some of that, take some of what you're already doing offline and just repackage and repurpose it online, right? And there's a lot of different ways to do that, right? But I think The ability to ensure that your content can be synergistic both offline and online is really, really important and speaking— be thinking about both at the same time.

No, 100%. And I think like a lot of companies, they overcomplicate this. Like I'm on FastWave, I'm just looking through your guys' stuff. Like you guys don't have a podcast or like an Instagram channel. There's a lot of things you don't have, but you're creating nice content. Like you have some quotes from physicians, you have some— your fellows series where you're having different— you're tagging physicians and having them just use their iPhone to talk. Talk about their experience, right? And you're posting that, like, you know, stuff like that goes a really long way. And I think the other thing about it is that, is it, is it nice for a company to have like an Instagram presence and TikTok and Twitter? Totally. But maybe I think the basic is just like start with LinkedIn, because probably of all the platforms, physicians are using that the most, maybe behind Twitter. Um, they're easily— easy to find them because everybody lists their titles. And then content goes pretty far, at least organically, and you can do paid targeted content on there. And that's like a great place to start, right? And I think that when it comes to the adoption curve, you know, not everybody's going to be an early adopter, but you have to find a way to stay in front of, let's say, the chair of, I don't know, Cedars or something, right? Over time, so they can see the adoption happening, different physicians being engaged and everything. And then, you know, something's going to click where they say, yeah, actually, I kind of, you know, I want to have a second conversation with this company, right? But that's not going to happen unless you stay in front of them. I always tell people that when it comes to persuasion, you have to get attention first before you're able to persuade. And getting the part is the hard part, which means you have to do it like— I mean, look, Coca-Cola— or forget Coca-Cola. I can't think of a better brand than Apple. Can you think of a better brand? Personally, I can't. Yeah, right. Best products on planet Earth. They still spend money putting billboards up. Like, you know, there's no market. You know, and so, and for those— sorry, this is like a sticking point. Someone left a comment a long time ago, and I always read— there's, there's some startup, some snarky medtech founder who's like, oh, but what about Tesla? Tesla has the most marketable CEO of all time. Tesla markets too, by the way, because that's, that's the— that's like, oh, Tesla doesn't market their product. I'm like, yeah, they do. Are you kidding me?

Right, right. No doubt. But your point though, you made such a great point about in order to be effective at conversion or persuasion, like, like people have to be aware of what you're doing, what you're building, right? And take Elon out of the, out of the question, out of the equation. But like one of the best, one of the best kind of like, you know, frameworks I like to use is that let's, let's presume you're following a traditional offline path where you want so-and-so doctor to present your data on a podium at conference, right? Great. That's great. I'm not saying don't do that, right? But the key question is, when that doctor goes out with his friends at dinner that same night, do you want to be a part of that conversation even though you're there? You're not there, right? I think most people would say yes. That's actually where you're going to like impact, probably have the most impact in terms of, you know, persuasion and conversation is if you're not even in the room, but those physicians are talking about you, right? And so how do you effectively get there? I mean, I don't think this traditional offline path is necessarily going to be like, you know, the key. I think you're going to have to find other ways to do that, right? And scaling that awareness online is one of the most straightforward ways that you could, you know, at least help get you there.

Yeah. And like, I mean, just, I always try and make it as simple as possible. And again, I have the most respect for founders who don't have a lot of money, but they're just trying, right? And I tell medtech CEOs all the time, like, look, you're going to these traditional sort of offline engagements, right? A conference or something. So, like if you're— I know, I'm going to use the cardiovascular, right? So, let's just say you're in the cardiovascular space. You're going to go to TCT. Let's just pretend you can't even afford a ticket to go inside. Hang outside, outside the exhibit hall, look for people and try and just grab physicians and say, "Hey, do you mind if I just interview you 2 minutes just for our LinkedIn post and everything?" Ask them like some questions about like what's their most exciting technology or what did they learn from TCT and everything. Document And then literally take a selfie with them and post it later, tag them, and just put what they, you know, like, that's, it's that simple.

Yeah, totally. You know what's funny about this is I was listening to, um, um, I think, I think I first heard about this on My First Million, that podcast. I'm not sure if you listen to Sam Parr.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think they were sharing, I think they had actually Jesse Itzler on the show, and he was kind of, Jesse's like, you know, he had, um, you know, owner of the Atlanta Hawks, uh, sold Marquee Jets to Berkshire, like hit after hit after hit, right? And he's tried a lot of things too, taking a lot of swings. But he was describing the story around—

oh, by the way, I love his stuff.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, he's great. Um, and, and so like he was telling the story about the early days of Marquee Jets, right? And he had never done like a premium, uh, he'd never done this company at all whatsoever. He had very little, little familiar familiarity with it. But he was going out to this conference that was kind of like a TED type of conference where it's like, you know, a lot of, a lot of wealthy individuals. He's like, I don't know anyone, but this is like my— what I think is my ideal audience. They all go to this event. And so he didn't have the money to like, you know, buy a ticket or whatever. But one thing he noticed when getting there was that like there was, there was very, there's very few ways to get coffee and like a pastry in the morning, right? And so what he did is he went to the local coffee shop bought up all the pastries, right? Bought everything and then set up shop outside and was like, he was now the pastry vendor, right? And so, you know, everyone that would come in for coffee would be like, wow, like there's no food available. And he's like, well, I've got, I've got food, right? And so just that one little hack, right? Opened up a ton of conversations to your point, which, so, you know, there's going to be people that hate on what I just said and critique what I just said and say, oh, that's not possible. You can't do that. But it's like, The point here is that look for, you gotta like find like some unique edge, right? Something when you're first getting started and not having enough money is not an excuse, right? Everyone starts out, most people start out like not having enough money, but there's usually like some, there's usually something that you can do. And I love that story you just, or that example you just shared at TCT. Like that's so like anyone could do that, right? Anyone could go set up shop, have simple 5-minute conversations, take a selfie, post them online or post them on LinkedIn. And boom, all of a sudden it looks like you're doing something, right? And there's probably some nice learnings through that process as well.

Exactly.

And that's not going to cost you much.

Yeah, and I'm very big on stacking experiences together. So it's like, I'll give another example. This is probably one of my favorites because it really highlights the point, which is one of the companies I used to work for, we didn't have any money. We couldn't go to conferences except the CEO sent me to some conferences without a ticket. I was like, "Just send me these conferences." We're starting a podcast but the podcast had not been published yet. So I went to like 3 or 4 of them. I would find physicians on Twitter, like a few of their posts, send a message, say, "Hey, I'd love to meet you up and interview for our upcoming show." I meet them, take a selfie with them and post it. And I did this over a period of a couple months and then one of the posts that I put— I put up, some physician who's a, you know, at Cleveland Clinic commented, "Oh, I had no idea you're at this conference." Right? Sorry, we missed each other. So I was like, that's rare for a physician to leave a comment like that. So I sent him a message. I'm like, hey, I'm sorry, I missed you. I'd love to get on a call, just learn more about your practice and, you know, tell you a little bit about our company. Got on a call. Fast forward later, that ended up being a key clinical site for this company. And they ended up publishing a paper and helping get FDA breakthrough designation, you know, as a result of like that kind of partnership. And so my thing is like you never know through social media and content the network effect that's going to happen and who's paying attention, right? And I think not having money is the best part because it's a forcing function. It's a constraint that forces you to figure out like, okay, well, what, what can we do differently?

Right, right. And I— that example that you brought up about how it ended up leading to two things, right? Like it sounds like that was a really important site for this particular startup and it allowed them to like accelerate or get into like a breakthrough device designation in a more impactful way. And I think that those are also like really key learnings too, because this doesn't necessarily apply just to commercialization, right? Or just, hey, if you're kind of, if you're listening to this and you're like, why, I'm not going to have a product to sell for another 2 years, 3 years or whatever. It's like, well, like that shouldn't prevent you from producing content and being online and driving awareness for kind of what you're doing because there's all of these ancillary benefits that it will likely lead to, right? Whether it's, and I'm thinking about this, it's especially pertinent to FastWave, right? As we get closer and closer to our pivotal trial here this year, I want to be raising awareness for the company. So when a patient has that conversation with an interventional cardiologist that's trying to enroll them in the study, they're at least maybe somewhat aware of what we're doing. It's not some stale company that they've never heard of. At least we have some sort of presence that makes that consent that much easier, right? For interventional cardiologists, vascular surgeons to enroll in a study. So, Those two examples that you brought up, I mean, they're applicable to kind of functions or different phases of your company, even if you're not ready to commercialize.

Yeah, at least for me, while I really focus on growth marketing and take a good amount of credit because I remember at the time, nobody knew what the heck it was when I was like Director of Growth like 5 or 6 years ago. But while growth marketing is great, what gets me most excited is early-stage companies because using these network effects on social media and through content, you just never know who's consuming the content and who's gonna come forward. It's kinda like building a campfire in the middle of nowhere and making the fire strong enough and you're gonna see who's gonna see the fire and come out, right? And I think that's kind of like the more exciting thing. But, you know, again, these are the things that really scale. And I would tell companies like, I don't know, again, I'm not knocking conferences, I think you should go, but maybe one of those conferences you, you choose to have a little bit of a smaller booth, maybe send 1 or 2 less people. You know, I think companies always send more people than they need to to these conferences and allocate some of that budget not to just marketing. I think the other thing, and I want you, if you can talk a little bit about this, I think people forget and under— they do not budget for the creative. They budget for the distribution and everything. They don't budget enough time and money to the creative, which is really what's most important.

Confirmed. Yeah, 100%. In fact, that's like the main trend that's going on with pure-play e-commerce right now is it's not necessarily about how to optimize a Facebook campaign anymore or how to programmatically optimize something for paid search. The algorithm is very, very good, but what's missing is the creative. And so that's like, the onus is on most e-com companies to consistently produce new and different creative. And I think the reason I'm even bringing that up is you brought up the notion of conferences, right? You should still go, right? But sometimes it's like sending less people, right? And if you don't want to send that, if you just want to keep with the same approach, right? Maybe you're at a large company and you're always going to like, you're required to have some sort of big presence. I would say, well, what else can you do at those conferences to generate creative, right? So like, what would it take you to, you know, hire a videographer for 2 days to follow you around and have, uh, you know, interviews with physicians that are 2 or 3 minutes in length that you could potentially post on social media. I'm just, I'm riffing here and throwing out examples, but be thinking about like those ways that you could repurpose all of your offline stuff into online, right? That's channel-specific. I think is, that's all, it's all straightforward, it's all really doable if you're just kind of thinking about it, right? And so, um, I, I think, you know, that's, it's just a, hopefully a message that, you know, hits home for a lot of, a lot of, you know, med tech maybe founders that listening. It's like, it doesn't have to be complicated. Your point earlier, it's, it's relatively straightforward. You just need to be thinking about it.

Exactly. Can you tell us, you know, I like this, uh, sort of this fellow-themed series that you guys did. Um, so if you go to Fast Wave Medical's, um, page and look at the videos, you have these, uh, fellow-themed interviews where you introduce a doctor, and the doctor is— I mean, it's, it says this is like simple as it possibly gets. They're literally using their iPhone to do a selfie video and talk about something you guys are posting. Can you talk a little bit more about that series? What the purpose of it and maybe some of the results you guys have gotten?

Yeah. Yeah. So, we're in a position at FastWave where it's like we're still a year, 2 years maybe away from commercializing. So, we can't— I mean, due to certain constraints from a regulatory perspective, we can't sit there and talk endlessly about our products and what they're doing and what they're treating, what they're solving for, nor maybe would we want to necessarily do that at this point. I think we'd probably be a little bit more aggressive with our messaging strategy there, but, you know, we just can't, we just simply can't. It's not a, it's not a, you know, a cleared or approved device. So, but we do want to be, we do want to sort of be in the public domain, right? Generating awareness for what we're building, what we're doing, kind of our extended team, et cetera. And so, you know, one of the ways to do that is through, you know, that we're exploring, right? This may evolve and we may pivot eventually, but it's still a series that's ongoing is these interviews that we're doing with, with, with KOLs, with, with, you know, physicians that are pretty well known and they take on a little bit more of a fellows kind of residence theme where we're asking them questions around like, take us back 10 years ago when you were early in your career. Like, what do you wish you would have known at that time? Right. And I don't think there's like a lot of that content in the space that's, you know, kind of geared more towards like helping younger physicians in the field. And a lot of these, a lot of these docs, whether it's a vascular surgeon or interventional cardiologist, they actually, they really enjoy helping younger physicians, right? And so they're a little bit more open to producing this kind of content with us. And I think, you know, I think based on the response so far, a lot of, a lot of fellows and residents enjoy it as well, right? Because they get to hear from, you know, people they admire around kind of interesting topics that they wouldn't have otherwise, you know, kind of discovered. So it's, again, it's a way for us to kind of engage with the community, generate content that's helpful, hopefully helpful and valuable. And then while, you know, kind of raising awareness for what we're developing, all against the backdrop of kind of being constrained with what we can, you know, can and cannot talk about.

Yeah, and I think what I like about this is that it leverages a network effect in a really, like in a very good way in the sense that, you know, you're not commercial. And so none of these people are users or customers of yours, right? But you're engaging them in a thoughtful way, getting them to create content for you, you're posting that, tagging them, they reshare that to their network, which that network is going to see your logo, your image, everything. So it's a little bit more recognizable when they go to conferences and everything. And then you're able to, uh, you know, like on some of them, I think I saw a few of the videos where other, uh, physicians, uh, liked, uh, like the post. And so like that gave you your brand exposure to those other people, you know. And I think that that's, that's the thing that people need, you know. I'm, I'm not against brand marketing, but I think you have to do it in a way where you have to think like, what's What's the end goal here? And I think the end goal for you guys is that we need to drive more awareness about our brand and what we're doing so that it makes it a lot easier to shorten our time to value to find those early adopters who are gonna be willing to work with us on everything. First, I feel like the old way, this is something, it's like a really, I'm wondering what your thoughts on this, something that are in another stupid thing our industry does is this obsession with hiring I think hiring on the sales side, specifically someone who's got experience in that specialty, right? And then that person comes on with their own biases and they hire their buddies who they worked with, which there's nothing wrong with that, but they have their own biases. And now you have a sales force that's costing you half a million to a mil in salaries hitting the market with their own biases as who they think they should, you know, talk to to adopt the product. Right. And I just, I always feel like that's always a big miss because, you know, rather than starting with a real hypothesis to like, here's an experiment we're going to run and here's what, let's see what happens. It's kind of like the industry hires people with biases and jumps to conclusion and spends all this time chasing like a few key targets in the most traditional sales channels and strategies as possible. Right. And then they wonder like, oh man, like, like, why is it that it's so hard for us to raise money?

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that you bring up— you're using like a Salesforce as an example, but I think the same thing applies to other, other functions too. And, and one of the, the recent guests that I had on, on Medsider— I think it was probably more so like 6 months ago— is Joe Landolino with, with Cresilon. I'm not sure you've ever heard of that company, but which— Cresilon, I think it's C-R-E-S-I-O-L-O-N, I believe.

Um, no, I don't know about that.

Kind of an innovative product. They actually started off off by intention in the veterinary space to kind of prove, um, sort of prove efficacy there, and then are, are moving into, into humans and into patients. But kind of an innovative approach, and they've done, you know, really well raising capital, etc. But, and he's a smart— he's a young, younger guy, smart, really smart, really sharp. But he mentioned that we were kind of talking about how do you, how do you identify, um, you know, consultants in these key functional areas, whether it's clinical, whether it's regulatory, etc. And he brought up something very similar to what you said, except applied it to regulatory, right? He's like, what I like to do is I actually, I like to find a conservative regulatory consultant that's basically going to tell me this is the straightforward approach. You're not going to get really a lot of pushback from FDA, et cetera. And then he's like, then I actually like to find a consultant on the exact opposite end of the spectrum that is a little bit more like a cowboy and will give me like a very atypical kind of contrarian approach. That, hey, maybe if executed the right way, if you, you know, if you have the right review team at FDA, maybe you have a shot at this alternative approach, right? And he's like, you know, ultimately we typically land somewhere in the middle, right? But I think most medtech founders would just take that conservative approach and be like, this is the tried and proven way. And again, I'm not saying that's necessarily wrong. I'm saying kind of stretch your thoughts, right? Stretch your brain a little bit about this in some of these key functional areas, because it's likely going to lead to some sort of learning, right? If you intentionally pursue kind of both ends of the spectrum, you're gonna pick up on things and you're gonna glean insights that you likely wouldn't have otherwise picked up on if you just follow, you know, the classic kind of like conservative approach.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, the one thing that I try and like, at least the sales and marketing people who go through my programs and get mentored by me, I try and teach is just like, On one side— and so now, let me beat up a little bit on SaaS. The problem SaaS has is that they have— it's very engineering-led, especially the way they do marketing, which is good. They focus on scale and running experiments and everything. But sometimes there's some common sense tactical things that you can do. For example, in the event of co-creating content and let's say talking to people. So, part of that is to see are they a good adopter and maybe they turn out not to be. You know, I think aside from getting insights, great voice of customer, you can also start building out a, a mind map of a network and just like literally asking the person you just created content with, hey, totally okay, who can you recommend who fits this psychological profile? Like, you know, is into these things, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? And just shortcutting your way. And I think that a lot of times, you know, marketers, they try and act really smart with their strategies and their campaigns and sometimes Sometimes you just need to go straight to the source and just be really good at like interviewing and asking questions and sort of connecting the dots, you know. So it's almost like I feel like the best, the best commercial people these days do a combination of traditional sales and marketing, let's say like talking one-on-one with customers, going to conferences and everything, but at the same time like coming up with really creative ways to drive awareness and, you know, use a network effect. Again, like Jesse Itzler's story you shared is a great one.

Right, right. And I think you're dead on in that, in the sense that, you know, there's some people listening that would be like, well, it has to start with strategy. If you don't have a great strategy, you know, execution is meaningless. Then there's that exact opposite spectrum where it's like, I'm just, I'm just all about execution, right? Forget strategy, I'm just going to execute. And there's likely some sort of, you know, combination of both that's going to be required. But the key is that it's going to likely evolve, right? I mean, you're going to have, you're going to, you're going to you're going to take a swing and it's not going to work and you're going to pivot, but you're going to learn some things, right? And then pivot hopefully in a better direction. And I think that's the key. And that's, you know, it's one of the reasons I'm such a big believer in just taking a lot of shots, taking a lot of swings is if you just sit back, right? Let's take, let's take a startup, for example, that's like, we're, our next milestone is some sort of preclinical effort, right? We're going to do a cadaver lab or something like that. We're just going to wait to do anything and announce anything or issue a press release until we have the results. Well, it's like, well, yeah, you could do that, right? But maybe that approach is wrong and you're not going to learn anything over the course of those 6 to 12 months. Instead, engage with your community. Doing it online can be cheap and easy, right? And by sort of this combination of kind of thinking about the strategy but also executing, it's likely going to be this kind of moving thing that evolves over time. And it's likely going to evolve, or you're at least going to give yourself a better shot at evolving in the right direction because you're going to fail, you're going to ship You're going to deliver, you're going to execute, you're going to miss the mark a little bit, but you're going to learn and then tweak and pivot and then try again. Right. And that process of shipping, maybe failing, maybe winning a little bit, but learning and then shipping again is like so, so important. Right. And you don't— you can't— I don't know. I just think as hard as it is to build a startup these days, sitting back and waiting to ship something in 9, 12, 18 months. It's just, there's so much that you could be doing in that interim period and just learning a lot along the way.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I think it's a huge, it's such a huge, this is like therapy for me, you know, you should come back and film more. I think it's a huge cop-out by founders where they're like, oh, you know, we don't want to market anything because we're pre-commercial and this. And I'm like, well, I mean, the wrong time to start marketing is the moment you are commercial. One of the most important things that a founder and a CEO is supposed to do, it's really the founder, founder/CEO, it can't, this is not supposed to be a marketing person, is to become the owner of the problem and educating the market about the problem, you know? And it's amazing how far that'll go. I mean, I have reps in my own like sales course who I'll give a shout out to one of them, Venda Lamartin. She's a rep, she has a product in the gynecology space. And the last few months, literally the content, 90% of her content is just the basics of certain gynecological procedures, pathology, everything. It's just like what, what anybody would criticize or say, oh, like doctors already know that, why would they care about that stuff? But because she's spending time educating a broader public market on LinkedIn about these pathologies and procedures and everything, it's attracted physicians, right? And because they say, hey, this person is like us, she's knowledgeable about this problem, then they start getting curious about like, well, what's the solution that she has for this? And then that solution ends up being tied to a product. And she actually posted recently that she's had like a few literally in cold inbound messages from, from gynecologists like, hey, you know, I've been following your content, I really like it a lot, I'd love to kind of like have a call and like learn more about your product, you know.

And my hunt, my hunch, and again, this, I could be wrong about this, is she probably had a lot of haters early on that like, why are you wasting time doing this, doing that? It's, you know, 100%. Physicians already know this stuff, right? It's so easy for everyone to hate against that, but yet she, she, she was in the, in the game, right? She was in the mix, engaging, probably trying, tweaking her content a little bit over time, and then boom, it starts to pop over, over, you know, over, over certain, uh, you know, certain weeks and certain months. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I, uh, uh, that, that, that's awesome to hear that she's Yeah, she's seeing some success with that now.

Yeah, this is the thing about our industry that I really dislike, which is they very easily— they're very quick to jump to conclusions about things and then poo-poo things, you know. And especially if somebody's doing well, somebody's doing something that's good and like is working. And it was very clear because she was literally getting tagged in posts by like— there's a gynecological publication that tagged her in a post with other surgeons. Like, you know, like, that's a pretty big win. And I remember her, she had messaged me, she's like, yeah, you know, I kind of got some comments by some other reps, like, they're like, yo, what are you doing and everything. I'm like, don't listen to them. I was like, don't, do not. And I'm so proud of her. She's just crushing it.

Yeah, totally. You know, what's funny about that is I'll share another Jesse Itzler story too. Yeah, a little bit of a fanboy, but he was, I I think he was describing the scenario. I think it was maybe around the, maybe they were pitching, I think they were pitching NetJets actually for an investment in Marquee, I think. And anyway, he, I think they had struck out or they weren't doing very well with like the traditional like VC kind of pitch where you put up some slides, run through your story, et cetera. And I'm not saying that's not, you shouldn't be doing that, right? I mean, you should absolutely have your narrative down, your story down. You should have practiced that hundreds of times, right? Before going and pitching the best of the best. But the one thing that worked for him was, I think, one of the pitches, I think, and I think it was NetJets, if my memory serves me correct, he brought in, um, like 5 to 10, like, super wealthy, pretty well-known celebrities. He got them to actually come to the pitch, right? And they just, they didn't, they didn't do anything. They just sat and, and they got the question, I think, from, I think it was from NetJets, or the investor on the other side of the table was like, Jesse, what do you, what do you do with all these? Like, who are these people? Like, why did you bring them to your, your pitch? He was like, Oh, they're my customers. Do you know? And it was like some big name after big name, right? And I think the point, the important point is like he was creative about what's ultimately important for that investor, right? That to that investor it was like, who's using— is anyone using this? And who, who's using, right, this, this product or service, right?

And so yeah, yeah, you mentioned that. So like, uh, like, uh, this is, this is such an important thing. Too many times I think founders when they pitch, like, that's the most important thing I think that an investor sees, like, is there interest in this? Is there, is there a need? Is there a market need? And I don't know what, what's better proof than if you can send to an investor, hey, like, like, look, go, go look at our, like, let's say, LinkedIn page and look at our content and look at the engagement that we're getting. Look at the interest that we're having and the conversation driving, because it's all live in public, right? And I think that a lot of investors just want to see, like, is there attention going here?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, very positive. Because you know what everybody's going to Every founder is going to have like a deck where it's like, here's a couple of our customers, some pictures and a quote and everything. But when you can say, hey, like, go follow our page and we put, you know, we put out a piece of content once or twice a week and we engage thoughtfully with the audience, right? Like that, that's a pretty strong signal, I think, especially when you're— when a lot of these companies are pre-commercial, pre-revenue, right? So you're like a PowerPoint company at that point, right?

Exactly. Exactly right. And the reason I bring that up is because I almost guarantee right? When Jesse was like, hey, I've got this idea, we're going to bring like some of our biggest customers this pitch, people are like, what are you doing, dude? Like, absolutely, that's gonna fail. Like, no one ever does that. But he did, he tried, right? And it ended up working. And so I think the point is, is you don't know if it's necessarily going to work, but you need to take some swings, you need to take some shots. And, um, if it's, you know, if done the right way, even if it doesn't, even if it's like not a total success, you're likely going to learn, uh, you quite a bit along the way. So yeah, again, just to kind of summarize, I'm a big believer in, do not, don't listen to the haters, right? Like learn some things. Yeah, but don't let them persuade you one way or the other.

You know, though, I can't remember who it was, but there was an entrepreneur I met like who, I guess he had like 3 or 4 major SaaS exits that maybe amounted to something like $4 or $5 billion. And it was like 10 years ago almost. And he said something, he's like, anytime I hear somebody say that what I'm doing is effing stupid or crazy, I know I'm on to some next level shit. And I think it's so true. I think it's so true because I feel like, and I think even in investing, I was listening to, I want to say it was Bill Gurley from Benchmark who's talking about it. He said the thing about VC that people forget is that, you know, in order to make these like really outsized returns, like you have to not— it's not just being about contrarian. Like you have to go and make this bet on something that like a lot of people are going to disagree with and think is nuts, right? So I think, you know, in some ways, love him or hate him, I mean, you know, I have my own opinions about it, but like, you know, I can't blame like Andreessen Horowitz for putting like $300 million into WeWork's former founder Adam Neumann and his— right?

You know, totally. Yeah. Yeah. And this, this is not— I think that someone could counter this this, this kind of, this, this part of the discussion say, well, that sounds a bit reckless, right? I mean, you're just basically trying a lot of things and hoping that they stick. It's like, that's not the point. The point is you are, you're being intentional about what you're doing with the goal of learning, right? I mean, and hopefully it's successful, right? But at the end of the day, it's, it's, it's, you're going to learn something from it, and it's, that's far better than just sitting on the sideline. Um, and, and if you've, you know, most likely you're going to have some sort of conviction, and I totally agree. Like, Bill Gurley, one of the VCs of all time. Um, you know, he, he likely has, has a really, really strong conviction about something that most people are like, get out of here, that's never going to work. But he's also spent a ton of time, right, thinking about it, right, and studying it. And, uh, and so I think that's another, another important point. Like, if you've thought, if you've thought much longer about this thing than, than other people, why would you let them persuade you before you actually at least try and ship. And again, you may not be wrong or you may not be right, but the important point is like you actually tried, you engaged, you did something, you were active, and you're going to learn something from it regardless.

Yeah, I completely agree. And again, I think that's like the big like take-home theme as we kind of wrap up the episode. And thanks for coming on the show, by the way. That I think founders and CEOs need to consider is that early on, I mean, continuously, especially early on, the best thing you can do is to kind of go directly into the market you're trying to engage and sell through through, use content and social media as that vehicle to connect with them, to engage with them, and get voice of customer and feedback. And then use those experiments to sort of inform your own hypothesis as to like how do you develop a commercial model. The one thing, like persuasion tip for everybody, I think a really strong piece of persuasion is if you find a way to publicly make fun of something consistently, that's a great way to get people to stop doing it. So one of the things I just, I'm so sick and tired of hearing is it— this is such a med device thing— is like the playbook, right? Like, what's the playbook? And everybody has this playbook, right? This playbook sucks, right? Most, most of the time when I hear about this playbook, it's some playbook that was used at J&J in the 1980s or something. They're like— and so I think that more people have to, um, especially commercial leaders, um, have to be a lot more open about, hey, here are here are the— here's the hypothesis that I have, here's some experiments we're going to run. I don't know what's going to happen, right? But based on that, we're going to use some of that data to inform what our commercial plan should be, and then we're going to tweak it along the way. I think there's too much pressure.

I don't—

again, who knows why this is, where people trying to act as if they know what's going to happen, and it's like, here's the playbook, and then this is the thing we're going to do, and we're going to execute it. And then they execute it like it's this huge plane taking off and they don't, they don't change it.

Yeah, yeah. Or I think it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's the plane isn't going to falter at some point, right? It's like, what's the famous quote from, from Tyson? It's like, you don't, you know, I don't know, something until you get punched in the face or something.

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Yeah, yeah, it's something like that. But it's very true, right?

I mean, you know, when you think about it, 100%, I think the biggest thing is just like go out and engage and interact with the market and in that process, you get qualitative data, you develop relationships, and you start informing your own hypotheses. So it's not like a surprise as to why certain people do and don't, you know, adopt. So, well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can people find you? I know that, you know, I want to plug your current company. I think it's Flow— FlowMedical.com.

It's Fastwave. Fastwave.com.

I'm sorry.

We were in the flow, man.

We were just—

we were in the flow.

Yeah, you're in the flow. Yeah, yeah, sorry. Pathwayofmedical.com. And then, um, for those listeners who want to listen, uh, to Scott's podcast, it's a really good one, Medsider. Look it up, M-E-D-S-I-D-E-R. And then, uh, where can people find you online?

Uh, yeah, the most active sort of social channel is LinkedIn, right? So just, you know, Google Scott Nelson MedTech or something like that. You'll likely, likely follow me, uh, or find me, I should say, there. Uh, but, uh, yeah, I've I'm active, somewhat active on Twitter, but yeah, much more, you'll get much more interesting content on LinkedIn.

Yeah, LinkedIn is more like positive and educational. Like I always walk away from LinkedIn saying like, yeah, you know what, that was good. I feel good about myself. Twitter, I love Twitter, but it's wild. It's too wild on there sometimes.

Yeah, the best, yeah, you could either, it's like opposite ends of the spectrum, right? It's either like you walk away feeling like super depressed about where things are headed. Or it's like you find yourself laughing out loud out of, you know, some meme that someone shared, you know what I mean?

Let me tell you, meme culture on Twitter, it's just such an amazing art form.

Oh, it is. It is. It's like the best meme creators are like really, really good at what they do.

We're going into an election year this year. It's just going to be awesome.

There's no doubt. I've actually thought about I likely won't do this, but like creating an anonymous, you know, meme account on LinkedIn just to bash some of the stuff that like drives you and I crazy, right? That other med tech companies do.

LinkedIn has now made it harder to create accounts. They want you to verify with an ID all the time. But let me help you out with this. I want to do the same thing. So I actually created a meme account on Instagram from MedTech Med Sales So whatever memes you want, you send it to me, and if you'd like to stay anonymous, I'll keep you anonymous, or I can attribute it to like— you can come up with like an anon like, but yeah, no, send those. Just go ahead and send those my way because there's just too much, too much amazing stuff. Like most of those memes on our Instagram channel, All Hail Medical Sales, 50% of them make it to LinkedIn.

The other 50% stay on Instagram.

I'm just like, nah, I'm like, people know that this is me, so I was like, I better keep it on here.

What's the handle? Instagram?

It's All Hail Medical Sales. Okay, yeah, it's got like 8,000, 9,000 like reps following it. They're just wild.

These people are wild. That's funny, that's funny. That's good stuff. You have to check it out.

Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show. I want to thank our audience. Be sure to check out Scott on LinkedIn. Go check out, uh, uh, his, his company, Fast Wave Medical. And, uh, be sure to check out Medsire. I'm your host, Omar M. Kateeb, and we'll see you all next time. Thank you for enjoying another epic episode of The State of MedTech. If you're feeling inspired and love this episode, do us a favor, hit that subscribe button and turn notifications on so you never miss an episode. And be sure to give us 5 stars and write a short review because that helps more people discover this amazing community of ours. If you're a company who has an executive that you'd like to be on the show, or perhaps you want to sponsor one of the episodes, shoot us us an email at hello@kateebandco.com. Take care, and we'll see you next time.