BoneChat #95 - Pitch Sink update after 1 year.

This is Bone Chat 95. This is a continuation, uh, I don't know how many people remember, uh, Stephen Flutie, uh, presented Pitch Sync before he even launched it. He kind of tested the idea. It was February 2024. And incredible, time flies. So, and now it's live and it's working and he's going to share lessons learned and kind of the where it's going next. So take it away, Stephen.

I appreciate it. Thank you. This is going to be more of a, a discussion more than a presentation with a demo at the end of, of the platform, everything we're working. And it's good to see a lot of familiar faces, Kyle as well, which is a PitchSync member. So yeah, February 2024, lessons learned, where we're at, conversation with Tiger, we decided, uh, we wanted to leave the corporate job and go on this entrepreneurial journey called PitchSync. Here at PitchSync, started out as a medical device innovation platform really aimed on helping physicians address the, the corporate slow no, which I think so many of us have seen. The courting, wine and dine period, 6 months later after Stryker or so-and-so is taking you to dinner, and it's just, we can't, we can't do anything for you. And a lot of physicians didn't know where to go. There's great programs out like Kyle and Priority Medical, uh, First Priority Medical, what you guys are doing. But a lot of physicians didn't know where to go, and that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to be a place where you could log on and say, hey, I need an attorney to help me figure out, you know, what's, what's the IP landscape look like, really anything that's needed fractionally to help navigate the development process. When we started that, that was the main mission. That was the goal, is to help physicians But what we realized were a lot of them wanted us to pay for what was going on. And being a bootstrap founder, we just couldn't afford to do that. Wanted to help everybody, but it was just honestly too challenging for what we were doing. And we had some great wins. We had some great clients. Honestly, Kyle, you had one that was going all the way to the end that was gonna be a big win, but they just pulled back last second. And so we also wanted to do was find a way that to, to, to expand the scope of the physician side. We were kind of hitting a roadblock there. So we expanded into the startup world. We started working with some startups, similar problems. There are a lot of economic headwinds the past couple years. And please stop if you guys have questions along any of this process, but there are a lot of economic headwinds through this process. And we were seeing a lot of them saying, well, we need help here, we need help here, we just don't have the money to do so, so let's stay in contact with each other. And so we did that. We've had about, uh, 60 startups that have joined, some that have gone through of getting ready to book something, whether that's regulatory, engineering— again, I'll show you how easy it is— but the regulatory, the engineering, and they've all had to pull back. And what we've also realized was a lot of them were failing when they were getting to market too, saying we're just going to go with what we have. And the data was really scary on this. There's about 60 to 70% of startups, medical device startups, fail while coming to market. And a lot of that is because of lack of clinician feedback early, um, or we've talked about this, Tiger, and please chime in on this point. You as a startup sometimes only think about the digital key opinion leader or the key opinion leader that is in your space, and they sometimes only view products through the lens of their area, their practice. You're not getting a variety of views. We talked about the last slide, Tiger, when you ask a doctor, would your friend use this down the road, what you developed? And the answer a lot of times is, well, no, they like things this So that's why we believe a lot of these startups are failing. But we thought this process— this problem started even earlier. We started— we thought— we believed it started in the investment process. And so we wanted to go down that route of what is— what is the data behind this? And so we went down the FDA database. We built all our little AI agents to go scrape as much data on this as possible to see, well, how many doctors— how often are doctors being utilized in the due diligence process?. And the data around that was even more alarming than that 60 to 70% failure. Only around 20% of investment firms actually utilize physicians in the due diligence process. And that was extremely frustrating for us to see. So we started reaching out to them, some of the physicians of, well, why aren't you using doctors? Wouldn't that help your, your investment rates, your success rates go up and bring that failure rate from 60, maybe down to 40%? And there was just no mechanism in place to do that. So we took a little feedback, took a little break of trying to go after the startups, came back and said, okay, well, let's build, let's build a model around this that makes sense and let's try to brand it something fun too. And we kept calling it inside our venture toolbox. We didn't know what we wanted to call it. And so we just decided, you know what, this is fun. This is like a toolbox that a venture program could look into and get whatever they need, you know, engineers, things like that. What we also did was partner with Stanford Biodesign, the consulting arm for HSS, which is HS2. University of Miami, about 100 different physicians across the country to be able to give those start— sorry, those investment firms on-demand access to all these physicians to say, hey, I'm thinking of investing into a new meniscal repair device. So let's get an academic, academic physician feedback. Let's get someone in private practice. Let's get someone that's focused on it before. And so you could bring all these physicians in on demand for a subscription. You don't pay any additional fees except directly to the, you know, to the physician that you're working with. So that's what we wanted to do. We wanted to build a platform that helped in the investment process, but also what we wanted to do was turn that investment firm— say Buford Ventures— who they buy into a subscription, they get a private login. We wanted to also give those startups access to the same resources for no additional fee. So Buford Ventures now provides more than just capital. To their startups. They provide really a full-blown venture studio through a very cost-effective platform. Scalable efficiencies is really what we're trying to build, and the subscription is less than most booths at a conference. And that's what we also decided— we can't do something that is— I don't know if anyone's aware of PitchBook's pricing, but it's like $26,000 per user. It's ridiculous, but such an amazing tool. And so many people are priced out of using that. And we said the opposite. We are tech-driven, which means we have a higher margin, so we can try to help more if we price ourselves lower, um, and try to price ourselves where it's scalable. So the Venture Toolbox model launched a couple months back, and it has been very exciting. It's been a lot of really good feedback. However, the same problem still exists—no one is writing checks. And so it's been a lot of working with these institutions, organizations, some tech transfer programs as well to try to help them out. And we've got some good wins. It's been fun, but it's also been challenging. And so I'm open for feedback of, hey, how do we kind of navigate some of those waters on the pitch sync side? We also had to do a little reflections of, is this the right model or the right platform, the right mission at the wrong time? And so those are a lot of things we've had to learn, and that's why I think this group helped us early, is yes, it was good then, maybe it's not good now, are there pivotal opportunities? So we also took a step back and said, what is the other problem that a lot of these companies are trying to fix? Access to resources from the commercialization side. So we decided to also, on top of building the Venture Toolbox, we had the team and the resources to build another platform called N-Circle. And what InCircle does is it is a rep referral-based hiring program. The Strikers, the J&Js, everybody has internal referral programs, and that's where a lot of great hiring comes from. There's not as many great Tiger Bufords out there that can do great recruiting. There's a lot of frustrating ones, and we always know that there's great candidates that come from referral-based hiring. There's arguments that could be said they stay longer, They generate more revenue, they're more likely to be hired. But the problem for the referral program, it's internal, so it's not built for scale. We wanted to externalize that and build an amazing network of reps that can pretty much find a side hustle while they're in the operating room and then make a couple extra bucks. We're talking $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 sometimes. But the other problem is I come from the distributor world. So I might be biased on this. I believe fully that distributors are the backbone of the medical device industry, of specifically in orthopedics. But trying to access them for a lot of startups is a very time-consuming and frustrating process. The great ones typically don't even have a website, so it's all who you know. So we wanted to find a way to build something like that, and we're getting ready to actually launch that in a couple weeks. We've already landed some pretty fun clients. A lot of lessons learned of Don't build a ridiculous model that doesn't make sense unless you're looking for investors. Let's get actual data and go after it. And that's where we're at now. There's been a lot of learning. It'd be foolish to say that it wasn't, but it's been a very fun process. And I'll take any questions, but I'd like to show just—

Let me summarize this for you. You're going a mile a minute and there's a lot. I apologize. So last year, Stephen launched PitchSync and it was supposed to be a marketplace that put experts together with orthopedic companies. You need a regulatory expert, whatever. And that's, it's a hard model. You need, you know, thousands of people in the database to make it work. But he stumbled on two other business ideas that looks like it has legs. The first one he's talked about is the Venture Toolbox. So if you're working with your KOLs, to design an implant system, you're probably getting biased information. You're not getting, you're not really testing it in the marketplace. So what Stephen does with the Venture Toolbox is he can bring an assortment of physicians to review ideas and products that aren't biased. They give, so that's the first Venture Toolbox. The second one is called Encircle, and it's a rep hiring kind of matchmaking, uh, system. It's like dating for distributors and reps. So anyway, which one do you guys want to talk about first?

We've got both here. Okay, I'll go through a demo if that's fine. If you guys want to—

yeah, yeah, keep going. Don't be shy, raise your hand.

The Venture Toolbox is really focused on working with early-stage investment. It's really made to make that 60% failure rate, bring that down to 40%, make invest smarter money decisions through the entire process, then give access to resources like an on-demand venture studio, pretty much. And so the goal was to make it on-demand as easy as possible, build out an amazing network of consultants and individuals, everything fractionally company needs. We didn't go with a you need thousands, we went with because there's a competitor out there that went with thousands. And we've talked to a lot of physicians who in 2.5, 3 years never got a single job off of it. So we said, let's make a smaller, hyper-focused network of individuals that share the same excitement. So this is what it looked like to post a project, to be able to connect with someone. You have design, design development, research and ideation, and scaling the team. This is more fractional employment. Think engineering, regulatory, quality, all those fun things. Commercialization strategy, then you have the physician advisors. So we'll go ahead and just post a project for physician advisors. When do you need the project to start? Immediately. You click next. You know, what is this needed? Investment advice— oops, if I could type, that'd be good— needed for sports medicine product. You know, whatever you want to put in there. What type of product— what type of, uh, project is this? Again, this is investment advice. This is a fractional medical officer startup. We'll go ahead and click investment advice. Click next. Project description, all the deliverables that you want. We also wanted to make sure that we, uh, when you meet with someone, I can make this bigger if you guys need to. That's better. Yeah, good. So what we wanted to make sure the first conversation was one of substance instead of, hey, I'm going to meet with someone, we're going to beat around the bush a little bit, then we'll sign some NDAs. We've included that in the entire process. But in the description, you'll do, you know, whatever, you know, whatever information you want. And then you can click additional project files, which is then covered by an NDA. We've provided an NDA for you, or you could use your own by uploading it here. But you could simply click yes, and before someone even looks into the information, they have to sign the NDA via the platform. We'll click next. What are the specialties? We'll go ahead and say, you know, this was an orthopedic product, so MSK-focused. Well, I need an orthopedic surgeon. I want someone with sports medicine experience. Next. Um, you know, this is an equity-only position. We don't help with that. That's fully executed and negotiated on your own. But transparency is— visibility is what we wanted to do. You can either do a fixed-price project, 25% deposit is put into an escrow account, um, or you can put somebody on a retainer. So we'll go ahead and say pay a fixed price. My budget range is between $3,000 to $7,000, and then I need this— this project's gonna last in a month. You click publish. This is a demo site, so these are all fake people. And then we would go, let's find the right consultant. Um, you know, we can go to sports medicine right here, Dr. Jordan Michael, and you would look at their profile, their CV, all the fun stuff. Um, You can view the CV directly here, which we have built out a fake version of it. If this wants to load, here we go. This is what it would look like. How many, you know, here's a physician with their average hourly rate, what are their specialties, their education, all that fun stuff. We'd go back and say, you know what, I'm gonna invite Dr. Jordan Michael to the project. The last project that you presented would be the first project here. Click invite. An email goes directly back to their email, and then you guys would be in contact from there. But that's, it's as easy as that to connect with somebody. It's the same process for any other on-demand, you know, consultants as needed. Mark.

Maloney, got a comment question.

How do you vet the physician advisors?

Yeah. So great question. Um, we talk to everybody that joins. We get, we get a profile beforehand. We interview them. Also, most of them are coming, most of our orthopedics are from HSS, uh, Dr. David Kaye's groups like that. People that have no entrepreneurial sides of the industry, not just like a key opinion leader. We want someone that's been either a founder or worked in early stage startups, um, in some capacity.

So look Yeah, let me re-ask Mark's question. So what, what would be a knockout?

Like if you— yeah, I think there's a, there's a good amount of them. We've kind of got FICAP physicians, scrub capital. We're really going after the groups that are involved in the investment process to try to get those on board. We have about 100 and we're maxed at that. We don't want anybody on board if they have not really been involved in a due diligence process. If they haven't been involved in early-stage companies, they just don't qualify. And the reason being, we don't feel like you're going to get the proper information from there. Now, if you've gone through some MBA program or you've been part of a venture studio in some capacity, like, yes, I think that's someone that would qualify. But we need someone that is understanding of this. Again, we don't want the biggest network. We want a hyper-qualified, very, very engaged platform of individuals.

Okay. Al? Yeah. Did you—

I'm sorry, Stephen, my air conditioning kicked on. But did you say you're surging network right now? You've got like a group from HSS?

Yeah, we have HSS, Stanford Bio, Michigan, University of Texas.

We've got some fun institutions on board. And so I'll make a statement and then maybe you can clarify. And I know many— I know somebody on this group that he and I have spoken about this a lot, but I don't know in today's environment that what I know about HSS— just, this is just some advice. I will tell you that many of us steer clear, far away from HSS. Uh, not just because they're inundated with conflicts and capacity, but also you— the residual benefits you're supposed to get by engaging surgeons, and whether you can do it directly or influence or whatever, uh, historically it's just not a place that I would go. Yeah, I've been through it a couple of times.

Message is heard. They have an internal consulting and investment arm that we partnered with rather than the hospital, and that's called HS2. So that's the group that we're working with. So we get away from essentially the hospital issues.

I'm familiar with that. I'm telling you, like, it's— you probably have had success, so you've got some data around it. But just as a person who's been through it, who's gone recently through it a couple of times, Like, it's just, I never would be interested in doing anything with an HSS surgeon.

But then we have Rush, we have Duke, we have others. So I hear what you're saying 100%.

Yeah, it's just, you know what I'm trying to say. It's just like they're— and it's not a— you guys have built an unbelievable— I'll go into another part of it when we get there, but I don't want to take too much time. Yeah, I mean, just from a reflex, like, oh, like, like, no way am I dealing with HSS. Not the hospital. I'm talking about the surgeons.

Yeah, I hear you. I agree in some capacities. Some I've worked with versus some not. When I was doing Striker Marketing, a lot of the physicians we had were there, and I hear what you're saying 100%. But again, that's why the variety was really something we wanted to do. You know, the Dukes, the Rush groups like that. So message heard. I appreciate the feedback on that. Yeah, just a comment.

Emotional, yes, definitely. Yeah, thanks.

Okay, John. Hey, um, my question really revolves around, uh, with those surgeons at very prestigious, uh, universities. A lot of times those, uh, universities will have, you know, IP tie-ups for those surgeons. So how do they, as your you know, your folks that are subscribed to your service are now engaging surgeons at these institutions. How do you wiggle through that so that now, you know, Duke doesn't now lay claim to those ideas?

There has been a lot of back and forth with legal teams. It's been really challenging and really frustrating, which is a lot of learning through the process. But yeah, that's been a lot of back and forth with legal of all they're doing is giving investment and due diligence advice. IP must remain with the company, with the person coming to that. It was challenging, we'll say that. Some of them said, yeah, yeah, some of them went too long and we said, forget you, sorry, we're moving past you. Speed is something we want and that's how some of these legal teams did.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I, uh, I completely share that. I do some work with the University of Illinois, or have, and, and was, was going to be an adjunct professor there, but it, it all of a sudden, because with my status doing that, then all of the work that we do can be, you know, it gets a little bit into the gray area. I didn't like it. And then the, yeah, I had one real quick add-on to that. So it sounds like, just so I understand, is it's like really this is what you've created are these platforms, these networking platforms that people subscribe to. And then they can dive in and get to the resources that you're really funneling. So you guys don't really do the development, but you tie them up or link them to the folks that can do it and they're part of your subscription.

Correct. Correct. Our goal was to build a full-service ecosystem. When you think of the product that you want to develop, we can connect you with an attorney. When you need to get feedback from clinicians, we can help you with that, connect you with engineers, and then now bring you all the way to when you need to find a sales force and you're going distributor mode, we can do so. If you need to bring somebody out for marketing, we can help you with that as well. There's another platform that we're quietly working on that's focused on working with tech transfer and, uh, business development. So that's another one, but that's going to be more of like a deal flow version that launches into crowdfunding in one day. Um, but yeah, the goal is can we help everybody cost-effectively through the entire duration. We want to say when you think about it, then when you get acquired, we'll wave goodbye and exciting, and then just invite us on your yacht later.

Yep, yep. No, I get it, I get it. Sorry, I'm a little old, so sometimes these, uh, these new things I need to explain to you. So thank you, I appreciate it.

Yeah, the fun part that we did is, again, I bootstrapped most of this. It is free to join every platform. You can engage and interact with everybody. You don't get access to the physicians on the free version, but you can engage and interact anybody you want to, to say, yes, this person fits or not. And if you do that, there's a small fee. There's a very small fee, or you could pay a subscription if you're going to be doing a lot of jobs where that completely reduces that. But scalability is what we wanted to do, cost effectiveness. And I will never do— because it was challenging to find funding for us— I will never do something I couldn't do or ask somebody to do something we couldn't afford to do. And that's why we also priced our, our Venture Toolbox model less than a booth.

Mm-hmm. Got it. Well, thank you. That helps me understand more. Thank you.

Excellent, thank you. Um, I can move over to the Encircle platform if we're, we're looking.

Any, any more questions on the physician referral side? All right, we'll go to rep, we'll go to rep matching.

Yeah, so this is what the front end will look like. It does look like this is live. We're scaling pretty quickly now. We've had over 1,000 join in just last couple of weeks. Everything has just been organic, partnering with companies, bringing companies on board and getting a partnership email sent out and then a lot of LinkedIn outreach. So well connected because this is free for reps and distributors, especially with this Red Hat movement. We got the opportunity to speak on the open mic night for Joey the other day. You know, you can be in the operating room or sorry, you could be between cases. You need to focus on the operating room between cases and refer somebody and get paid for it. And that's the fun part. Or if you're a startup trying to find access to distributors, you can post a project directly on here and find someone and have full data sets of information of who are they, what do they carry, where are they, uh, you know, what surgeons do they work with before even accepting a meeting or not. So this is what it looks like on the front end. The back end, we're 99.9% done. We are just a few pages left of development, but we're looking for a mid to late October launch. So this is what it looks like when you join. You get to log in here and see all the roles. These are the new roles where I click into the sales roles, sales manager, territory associate, or marketing role. And then you've got your distribution opportunities over here. So we'll go ahead and, uh, we'll go do this, the sales role first. We'll go ahead and say this, this, uh, they got that info here. We'll go on this, the in-circle one, the sales development. This is in New York. This is what the comp looks like. All the information about the role, the insider information. If there's videos, the videos would be here of who the company is. We can build videos with you pretty cost-effectively as well. Company overview, like you see here, and then you could share, share directly on LinkedIn, or I can copy this and move and send it to somebody. This is what that role would look like when it is copied and sent to someone. The location, the salaries, the company, you know, all the information you would need, a standard job posting. And then you click join and it would bring you right to this platform. Now let's go through the mechanics of actually referring someone. So I'm going to refer Tiger Buford. Oops, sorry, there we go. So you're right, um, could be a mistake. Yeah, we'll say Tiger's working with us at Encircle. He is, um, Tiger's brand new, he's an associate with us. And then his email, you know, it's LinkedIn— whoops, LinkedIn.com— his URL, additional information. How do you know Tiger? I mentored Tiger. We'll go ahead and say that one. And, uh, you know, we collaborate on a few projects. We've all these opportunities to see how you actually— who this person is, why would they be a great fit, you know, great associate. If I could type, it'd be good. There we go. Um, picked up ortho quickly. You upload his resume, click, confetti flies. The hiring manager has now received information on who Tiger is, who the referral program was, the referral person was, their LinkedIn, where they work, all that information. So the page would look very similar to this one, but it'd be all about the candidate for most of it. And then the bottom would be all about the person who referred the candidate.. So you can see if they're actually working in a, you know, a pretty good place. Distribution opportunities are a very similar— I'll get you in 2 seconds— very similar mechanic. The only difference is we're not referring somebody. This is all their information. This is my information. Hey, it's Steven. Um, what product? Why would I be a great fit for this? LinkedIn's. And then please tell us about the different products you're distributing right now. Click Request Meeting. A very similar page that that person received would go over to a hiring manager or regional manager who's looking for the distributor. You'd get the information, click Yes, I'd like to accept this meeting request. Email goes back to the person requesting that, and they would have a direct booking link from there. Tuesday, 5 PM, boom, everything's already set up and streamlined for everybody. So it's Simple, very simple. We wanted to make it very scalable for everybody as well. There's two pricing methods. One on the distributor side is more a subscription. There is a full-blown pay up front and post as many as you want, or you can pay a little bit more, a little bit less, and pay as you go. And then it's flat rate hiring on the other side.

Al? Yeah, so coincidentally, I happen to talk to your partner this morning. Yeah. Just by chance, uh, so I'm thinking about some things because he was telling me, um, what did— this is a simple one, but what, like, the, the referring, uh, reps, you know, that they're incentivized and if somebody comes through, what do you do with the permission side of that? Um, for, well, if they're referring people that they know, right, if it— do they Do you run into it, or is it a thought that, you know, has that other person or distributor given permission to be referred?

They've signed up to the platform, and then typically you'd want to tell your friend, yeah, I'm referring you for this job. Or a lot of times, well, we've been having a lot of meetings with individuals of, well, can I refer myself? The answer is no, but you can have your friend refer you. So, you know, and if it's not someone, we have it in the email actually. 'If this is not something you were aware of, please let us know.

We'll take care of it.' Yeah, that's more what I'm just kind of wondering if that's just a quick—

Yeah, I was doing the demo earlier for somebody and the email popped up. 'If this is not something you know, please again let us know and we'll take care of it.' Yeah.

And then secondly, I will tell you that like there's from the distributor side of things, there's I guess an awareness out here with us because there's a few people who do it pretty poorly and kind of— I don't want to use terms that are too negative, but, you know, some of them are out there just kind of building databases on people, right? And then selling themselves as, you know, fractional VPs of sales and different things like that. You guys were probably aware of that. But I think that just a thought that your people, as you expand, you may run into people who are aware of that dynamic, right? Like that we are independent distribution is vitally important to many companies and sales reps, right? So it's just something, I guess, for me to say to be aware when I just got off the phone with your partner this morning, it's like be aware that there's a lot of us out there that are just kind of like, don't, you know, don't put me on your list. I'm not going to give you my information. But you guys, I think, are doing it much differently. And I think you guys are definitely on a better path than those individuals. And I mean that sincerely. I'm not just saying that because I'm on this call after talking to Steve this morning. It's just the dynamic that's out there that a lot of us talk about.

So yeah, I would 100% hear that. Yeah, we're going about things a little differently. We have a lot of that joined, but we have companies that we're working with now that we're doing direct outreach for getting their ideal candidate profiles. We're also building a little AI rater of— in the onboarding process, you tell us in the job flow who— what is your ideal distributor profile? What products are they selling? Uh, years of experience. And then when you actually receive— where is it? This page at the top, it'll be a slider scale of yes, this is more likely a fit for you, reasons why. And that's version 1 because this is like the little private community I'll let you into in the future. We're also building an AI recruiting interviewer, essentially, if you will. I think CliftonStrengthsFinder's profile is built into it as well, where the first time you actually meet with someone, or you can actually say instead of requesting an interview, you'd like that interview to happen first so you could see it. So it's trying to give as much visibility and clarity to the whole process. But I hear what you're saying. There's a lot of people I've seen doing something different. Their retainer is more than what our entire year model is as well. So it's, it's very different. But thank you. We always want the feedback. And right now it's fun because the, the targeted outreach, like it's actually surprised at some of the clients we got this early. Some are publicly traded. It's been fun because it's been more of a manual process with them. We'll put together the profiles that they want and then provide the list that they want us to go after, and then we'll go after them in that capacity right now. Just some groups want to go a little early. That's fine. We'd love to do that because it allows us to engage and interact with each individual earlier.

Go ahead, Maloney's up.

So I'm really fascinated by what you're doing there, Stephen. You know, all information has value, and basically you're putting a lot of good information out there. Um, and when you're trying to hire an independent sales force, it's kind of hard to find, you know, who are the good ones now versus 10 years ago, or who are going to be the good ones. So I'm sure you're going to get a, get a lot of interest. Yep. Every, every rep has a day like where they have a 7:30 case and then they got nothing to do till 1:30. Yeah. And that in-between time is often just hanging out. I talked to an operating room two weeks ago that, uh, the reason I called her was that I heard that one of her rooms had 8 reps in it. And I said, do you like that? She said, no, I hate it. And I just was talking and I said, would you, would you ever, would you, would, would you have an interest in doing a business with one company that basically handled all that for you so you never had more than one rep in a room? She said, show me that company. Now, I don't have that company and I don't know that company, but You know, I think there's room on— I think there's room on both ends here. And if that company were, say, legislatively credentialed, they would be— they would be hard to beat. Yeah. And I don't know that that doesn't exist, obviously, but I'm just— yeah, kind of talking, talking about the opposite side of the forest. Yeah.

When I started, I got to work for an amazing distributor. We We were sports medicine, one main company. We had about 30 other lines in there. So one day we had 6 operating rooms in here. I had a bunion, a wrist fracture, you know, 2 shoulders pretty much going on at the same time. So you can walk through and it's, it's 1 or 2 of us in there instead of 8 reps the whole time. It was, it was nice for this group. But, um, yeah, I hear you. It's, it's challenging sometimes. But on the rep side, you said they're, they're sitting around for 8 hours. Our big push was there's so many companies taking money from sales reps. If you have to go to a hospital that has rep scrubs every single day for the entire year, you could be spending up to $2,500 just on paper scrubs. And distributors don't— you don't get reimbursed by your company from that, and some of the companies are no longer reimbursing for that. So our mission was how do we provide How do we fix a problem on both sides? You need qualified hiring capabilities, candidates. That's what we can do with this platform. But we can also build a rep side hustle so they can make some more money while they're kind of waiting between those cases. You know, fun. And we're open to any feedback of, hey, on the distributor side, please include this. And that's what we're working with our companies that have joined now is we want more data behind who the distributors are. Alfredo can come talk about as well. And like, tell us more about them. What hospitals do you work with? What doctors do you work with? So we, we're looking for, you know, those, those companies that want to build what they want, and we could do that with them.

And that's been really fun. Yeah, Patrick, you— and Stephen, you can take your slides down now.

Okay, sorry, apologize, I forgot it's still up.

So in, in this type of setup the, the manufacturers are paying you, right? The manufacturers are considered your—

they're considered your customer, right? Yes. Who do you—

like, it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario, and I could see the argument for either, either setup, but like, you get more manufacturers if you have more salespeople interested, and you get more salespeople interested if you have more manufacturers., you know, involved?

Who do you sort of go after first? The fun part with this is it's both at the same time. And the reason I say that is because the companies that we're working with, it's, yes, we'd love to work with you, but we need to send an email out to your network. We partnered with this group to be able to provide more opportunities for everybody involved. If it's a company that works with distributors, there's two, there's two value props for this. Distributors get a higher referral bonus if they, they come on board and refer someone. They can hire someone at a discounted rate. Also, this is where you can find that next product to fill your bag, just to keep the territory, you know, keep competitors out of your territory. And so it's been scaling a lot that way. And so it's, it's been kind of easier than we expected on this one. I learned the lessons learned on scaling PitchSync, we brought over this one, and, um, it's been fun. You also LinkedIn has been so easy for us. I mean, it's, hey, we former rep built the side hustle for you, would you be interested in joining? Great, can you also send your friends? So it's been pretty helpful. And then in the early stages, right now we have, I'd say, 5 companies we're doing this with. It's direct targeted outreach to distributors too. So like, hey, yes, we'll do this. It's a cheaper way for us to do what we wanted to do. We'll go about this way. It's been pretty pretty helpful as well. Okay. I'm open to any suggestions, any recommendations.

No, I don't know the, I don't know the, I don't know the, I don't know the answer. That's why I was asking because I can see the arguments on either side. Yeah.

Building marketplaces and this is— It's more what the challenges like of the existing behavioral patterns of, you know, through LinkedIn. And others. It's like distributors referring distributors, distributors going to small companies and saying, hey, Patrick Jamnik, I'll help you out, I'll get you a couple other distributors, but I want a little bite out of it, right? Or, um, I mean, that's just a challenge. I guess you're going to do that. Somebody says, well, I don't, I don't want to go into insur— I would rather do it on my own, I got a big enough network, or whatever. And it's, it's inherently poor. My response to those people would be That's not a great thing to like for me to put myself, insert myself in that, because then if you're, if you have any type of ethics or you give a shit, you're going to feel bad if you refer crap to the company, right? You're going to feel like, well, I guess I wasted your time with that phone call, right? For what? So you can get a piece of the pie? Like, it just depends on how, uh, what the people you're dealing with in that situation. But that's, it's a challenge because I get calls all the time and I can just sniff it out the second where I know the person who's calling me is probably getting a bite out of the apple. And it just inherently makes you feel like it just immediately pushes back. You're just like, nah, no, no dice. Like, no, just out of that. Maybe even if I want the product, it's just like, nah, you stick up.

Yeah. I would love this group's feedback because this is a feature that we are debating putting in. And it's, I think, controversial in our team. Rating systems that are private for both rep and company. Companies can say, this person didn't sell my product, they were a nightmare. Or they— I've heard of a couple of guys in New York, they sold our products directly and didn't pay us, you know, and they're not answering our calls. So this would allow essentially for a rating program of, you know, this individual. I'm going to pick on Tiger again. Tiger's got a distributorship now. Tiger requested a meeting for your product out. But it comes with the reviews of the companies that have worked with Tiger. Same thing, Tiger can see the reviews of your company, of the reps that have worked with your company. What is, what is the thoughts on that? I mean, it can go a couple different ways of there's a bad— there's one bad review versus some, you know, a bunch of good reviews.

Be a long, long course for data I think to gather enough data on it. I mean, you, I mean, you gotta talk about months and months of experiences before you'd probably have somebody who would be qualified to give a review on either side, right? So I mean, it's something that you could track on your own without making it a qualified value for your platform until you've got enough data around it, right? Just you can internally do it to you just finding out and keeping it, you know, keeping track of it. And then when you feel like you got something to really show some consistency there and the timelines that you've got, like if you start a company at 6, 7 months in and you start to get those reviews. Yeah. You know, because everybody's got a ramp up period. Well, I gotta get my guys trained and I gotta do this, all this shit that Patrick hears, including from me. Exactly.

Exactly. Never from you. Only from everybody else. No, I think it's that, like, acknowledging that there could be, like, it could go badly. I actually think it's more of a positive than a negative, the reviewing, um, thing. Like, I, I could see all the ways it would go, um, I can see all the ways it would go poorly, but I, I, I think, I think it's, I think it's slightly a good idea.

Yeah, that's where I'm falling back as well. It's good to see visibility again of maybe it's not rating, but it is, we build out the ideal client or distributor profile in the intake process. And so then that is put together against some type of algorithm that can say on a sliding scale, yes, potentially good opportunity rather than just rating somebody.

Or yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe it's not like, you know, 4.5 out of 5 stars, but it's like, here's what other distributors are saying about this company. 1, 2, example 1, 2, 3. Here's what other manufacturers have said about this distributor. Example 1, 2, 3. Something that's a little bit more like that rather than like a purely sort of like, you know, 1 out of 10 sliding scale type of thing.

And the hard part on the distributor rating side is sometimes that's a great distributor, but your product, they've showed to 1 or 2 doctors and it didn't actually hit. They weren't able to get something out of it. And that's where I'm thinking it could go wrong of, well, it wasn't my top of mind anymore. And you're always as a, as a company with distributors fighting for mindshare. And it wasn't top of mind because the two doctors they thought just didn't carry or didn't want to use it. And so they let the contract expire or something. So that's the other hard part that we're trying to figure out of, you know, a company could be pretty upset that the world's been promised to them and by that distributor and nothing happened, but it was just because the doctors said no.

Yeah. Yeah. The, yeah, the rep's just one component. The product's got to work. You know, there's lots of other things, pricing.

All right, John, and then Mark. Um, yeah, just quickly, I was thinking that, um, I can't remember what the— I don't ever go there because I never want to read it, but there's, there's some bulletin board that turned into like gossip central in our industry. So I'm blogger. Yeah, something. It was so I could see it go bad that way, but what I was thinking is If, if you could have some— you as an independent group could have like a verification process. So like, you know, Amazon says verified purchase, or you could say this is a verified company or a verified distributor. As a somebody who's not making the judgment and people are willing to put their names on their reviews, then it becomes a lot more valuable, right? Because it's just not Cafe Pharma— that was the name of it— whatever, like just some crazy, you know, National Enquirer because, you know, people are very aggressive in our industry. And, um, so if you guys had some way to control that so that those reviews could be legit and could be in a way that are somewhat, uh, you know, not inflammatory, that, that could be a very valuable tool.

No anonymity. Yeah, yeah.

I'm guessing if there's like a, hey, there's 10 bad reviews on this person, we can just kick them off too at the same time. But, uh, you know, we kind of keep them internally of what's going on. That's good. Yeah, that's good feedback.

So, uh, if I get a referral from, uh, say a group like this or somebody that I've known and that I've known delivered and I trust, uh, I always honor that referral 150%. If it's— they ask me to interview somebody, I will, and I'll make it a priority. On the other hand Online reviews, like restaurants. Yeah, I don't put any value in those. And I really don't think that very many people in our business, which is such a— it's almost more art than science, would put their name on a bad review. Because, you know, the old saying, you know, one 'ah, shit' wipes out 100 'atta boys.' That one bad review could be devastating to that person. And, you know, um, you know the old saying, you learn more from a failure than you do a success. Yes. And, uh, you don't know what they took from it. I just— that's just my two cents. I— yeah, I love the idea of a referral all day long, especially from somebody, uh, who is experienced and trusted. But the online referral thing gives me the willies.

Yeah, I'm with you on that. And that's why we keep going back and forth though. Yeah. How do we do— I mean, this is the other thing is it is really a small community at the same time, small industry. We all really kind of know each other in some capacity or not. So You know, there's— you can be working with one distributor that knows the other distributor, and you, before you take the meeting, say, hey, CrossLink, what do you guys think of this group over here in Tennessee? You know, you can do a little due diligence on your own, and maybe that's something we build out with the partners through time. But I'm leaning more towards on the no side because I could see it going pretty bad, or maybe we just keep it all internalized. Kyle?

Yeah, I think Mark hit the nail on the head there, Stephen. I think you've got— you either allow for an endorsement or you keep your mouth shut because the negativity will be of no value to anybody. It's either going to look like it's going to be a stain on the reviewer. It's going to be— and, you know, if you don't have the chance to respond, it's just no good. Either can say this was an amazing experience or you can simply move on.

Yeah, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, uh, um, got some goldmine on it. Um, endorsements, like something like that. Yeah. Awesome. Good to know. Yeah, I agree. That's great feedback. I appreciate all that. Again, we were going back and forth on the ratings, so ratings can work if you have a lot of volume, you know, like, like Yelp.

We just moved to a new city and we use Yelp all the time, but, but the algorithm at Yelp cuts out, you know, it'll trim the lowest responses and trim the top responses. It'll give you a more, uh, give you a better reputation score probably than, than just free for all. I don't know.

Think about it in terms of if, if you were giving your references, right? If I'm giving my references for a new job, it's people that I know they're gonna say good things about me. Now, there may be a number of people that are gonna say bad things.

Those aren't, those aren't people that are going on my list even though they exist.

Yeah. To that, believe me, in recruiting people, you know, a lot of hiring managers ask for referrals and I say, you know, if you let the candidate pick their referrals, it's totally useless. They're gonna pick 3 people that love them. Let me do, let me do some real background checks for you. But yeah, reviews are, are usually fake. Yeah.

I was gonna follow up with candidates have asked to apply for jobs and that's not how our system's working or set up for it. But if we could build it to where they could actually apply themselves, but they have to get endorsements, you know, like you kind of said, but they're gonna be good endorsements because they're handpicking them. Then the endorsements split the referral fee type thing. Is that what are, what are, what are our thoughts on that one? This has been great, by the way. This is the conversation I have with myself and my whiteboard every day. Thank you, everyone.

Reframe that last part.

Yeah, on that one, Steve.

Yeah, so candidates have asked, hey, if I see a job that I like, can I just apply for it myself on your, on your platform, on the full-time hiring? And our platform is set up for referrals. But if we built a method where they can they can apply, they don't get the referral, but they get endorsements by 2 or 3 colleagues that have to send an endorsement over, referral over. Is that something that's of interest to anyone or no, the referral, the way that it's set up, stay that way?

I don't see a downside to it. I mean, it's— there's no, there's no risk in that. If you, if you got— it's all, it's all going to be about how much, how much of a network you build and how much of a community you build, right? That, that you'll get those. Endorsements or, you know, like you said, this community's small, right? So your thing is Stephen is going to be building this thing out that, um, that the small community sees value, um, that they're gonna, you know, the referral fees are nice, but, you know, are they going to be a lot of the younger, you know, less engaged, you know, kind of reps just looking for an extra buck, or are you going to get the quality of people involved? And, um, you know, I just think that's going to be something you're going to build out. Like, like, it's you know, low risk, right, for you to continue to build this community and then see how it plays out.

Um, that— I agree. Someone has us.

Okay, Al brought up something that I hadn't thought about but is, um, I think important for you to keep in mind. And this is like my own experience, so maybe it's, it's, you know, unique and others have different ones, but my opinion, there's like, maybe it's always been like this and I just get like, I've gotten older, but like the people have always been there. There's just, there's a lot of young reps floating around who all think they're supposed to be making way more money than they actually should be. And like you run the risk with this, especially the tech savvy, you know, they're all like younger, so they're like, you know, stereotypically speaking, they're more technically or technologically savvy. Some screening tool for like that you're not like just just attracting nothing but, you know, semi-resentful, you know, inexperienced reps that just like are just, you know, are putting their whole careers at jeopardy because they're, you know, they're in breach of Seven contract by just, you know, sort of signing up with you like that. Those people, like, they're out there and they're more populous than I think sometimes people appreciate. It's just like a keep that in mind or be wary of of that. And maybe those people have always been there and I've just gotten older, um, but, but they're out there for sure.

Get off my lawn type person mentality now. There's just—

I mean, I just, I run into— I've just run into way too many 30-year-olds who have, you know, who are counting their, their industry experience in months and then are immediately just spewing hate that they like— their boss makes twice what they do, you know. It's just like, it happens for sure.

Yeah. Um, that's why we have an application joining process where we can kind of triangulate Who are they? What does their social media presence look like? Things of that. So it's not open to the masses really. Uh, but yeah, I mean, especially on LinkedIn, you're seeing some of it and it's, it's, I agree with you, but yeah, that's why we do have like, we do take as much information of them as we can before giving them access to it. Yeah. Typically a day or two to say, yeah, you know, this person, they aren't saying some ridiculous things on social media. They, you know, then, then they've got some good connections, things like that.

Or the opposite where they've been doing it for a few months or have job jumped 4 different companies for 5 years. And all of a sudden they're out there coaching people. I want to come through the screen and like choke them and be like, you know, anybody can look at their LinkedIn profile and be like, let me see, you're on your 4th company. Yeah. And how, oh, you generated $20 million in business in 3 months in this company and they let you go. Oh, right, right, right.

So now you're here.

Now you're here to coach me and do a video that how I'm supposed to engage a surgeon. Like I, I literally want to kill them.

I poked the hornet's nest with this comment.

That's why we provide the links and whatnot. Yeah, that's why we provide you the LinkedIn coaching. I agree with both of those comments. Those are great. It's such a— I think, you know, that I've tried to remind ourselves LinkedIn is this small of the industry. There's a very small percentage of their stuff that are on it. The bigger part of it is off of it too. So it's very, very interesting. Kyle?

Yeah, so Stephen, it appears that to some degree, maybe to a large degree, with this, what you're trying to do, your brand is referrals, right? I know someone who is great at selling products in the upper extremity. I see that a company is looking for sales reps for fingernail replacement devices. You should talk to this person I know that's great at upper extremity. Right, so it's off-brand probably for someone, for the masses, for the piranhas in the water, to just go after a job posting and then you get 1,000. But I do think that it would be on-brand for people to ask for referrals. Like, that is a thing that we all do in the networking space, right? If, if I see a position that I want at a company, one of the first things that I do is I look to who I'm connected to at that company, and I reach out and say, hey Jim, I see that you're looking for this position. Can you tell me about it? Who should I talk to? Is this something I should go after? I think you can create the same sort of environment here where it's a request a referral sort of thing that keeps you on, keeps you on brand, but doesn't let the, you know, blood hit the water for the sharks.

Yeah, yeah, it's, um, it's something, you know, V1, we're launching referral first. You know, if Kyle, you see a job you want, hey Steven, please refer me. You know, that's how it would work now, and and, you know, I'll split that referral fee for you, with you. But that's definitely something that we would want to look at, you know, in V2 for sure, because I think, you know, given the feedback, we do want to see— but to Tiger's point too, like some of these are, they're always going to be positive, you know, referrals. But yeah, good feedback. Thank you.

You know, the last thing I want to add, speaking of like referrals and this art and science that, you know, we call market making. In every distributor group, you got rainmakers, you got raincatchers. By far, there are more raincatchers than there are makers. I've never ever understood, um, why we don't separate them and make the rainmakers the elite group that you want to be in and make the rain catchers or the farmers, hunters, however you want to say it. Yeah. Who's we, Mark? They tend to get paid the same.

Pardon? What'd you say, Patrick? Who's we? Like when you say, I don't know why we don't separate them, like who's we in your mind? Like, I mean, I have my own mental models for how to do it, but then maybe that's what you're getting at. It's like, everyone sort of does it on their own.

The independent distributor industry. Okay. Find me a distributor group that separates the, the hunter killer from the farmer gatherer. Yeah. I don't know of one. And yet it's the same problem for every company trying to grow their sales. They, they go into a territory, they go with that distributor, that, that one rep that gets them initial business works with 3 doctors, 5 doctors, 2 doctors. And that's where it stops. Yeah.

I think that's the data that we need to provide to the companies for them. And that's what we've got built in. But the endorsements rather than the ratings, I really enjoy of a company saying, yes, I endorse. What do you endorse about them? Their selling, their professionalism, their speed to ramp, something of that. You know, you can put some of these at places like little badges with explanations underneath.

Just a different way of looking at it. I mean, I got a domain name, I don't know, 10, 12 years ago and never used, called Special Sales Forces. And it's just some kind of a, an idea where you've got, you know, real rainmakers that create business. Anyway, yeah, well, it's another meeting, Tiger. It's another meeting.

But inside the OEMs, they call the rainmakers, they call them business development people, right? Business development managers, business development directors, and right. But the distributors don't have such a thing. That's really interesting. They just, huh. It's, and you're right, the rainmaker is worth their weight in gold, whereas anybody can, can go service the account once, once the sale is there.

There's been a flattening of the terminology that probably works to the detriment of the manufacturers. I mean, like, like, I've been in orthopedics for 20 years, and plenty, you know, there's more experienced people for sure on this call than I have, but like, it used to be like at the big companies, like the title distributor, like that meant something. Like you were in charge of a large organization with, you know, at least dozens, but, but, you know, in plenty of times in excess of hundreds of reps, oftentimes that were direct employees of the distributor themselves, and and so on and so on. And things get more fragmented. And there's a variety of reasons. I know we're up against time. There's a variety of reasons why, but now it's like, like, everyone who's out on their own is a distributor, regardless of like, you know, organizational size or stature. It's like, I mean, it's on paper, it's difficult. You can, you can figure it out pretty quickly who's sort of giving you a line versus who's being accurate. But like, there is, there are no like commonly accepted kind of like industry definitions for like what, what kind of, you know, what sort of counts because it's like, you know, two super reps sort of decide to like loosely pair up and all of a sudden they've got a quote unquote distributorship. There's just so many different kind of like structures to it that I still struggle with this myself because I call everyone a distributor because I don't have a better word for it. But like there's definitely like hierarchies in your head of like how things sort of go.

I agree with everything being said. Our last question because Tiger, I know we have time here, um, is if there was a link to a distributor, because a lot of distributorships don't even have LinkedIn or profiles or like, or websites. So if they could use this as a website where you actually had a distributor profile, employee size, things like that, if you're a company looking for that, is that also helpful? Probably, yeah. Um, like, I sell this product, this product, this product, work in these hospitals. It's the same form they have to fill out that you're getting that info, but there's actually, I can go back and look at it. You're going to full-blown.

I think I like the idea in general, but nobody's going to tell you what hospitals they work with.

They're going to— yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah. I like the idea of when a, when a rep joins, ask them about what new business they've brought in the past versus servicing and give them, make them give examples of, I went out and, you know, brand new territory and won this business, won this account.

Everyone will say all business acquired ever has been, has been through, through nothing but sheer force of personality and, and personal magnetism.

Uh, fact check it.

Yeah. All right, we out of time.

This is Tiger. Thanks, Stephen. Thank you so much, everyone.

I really appreciate everything you've done. Thank you, Tiger, for this.

Yeah, keep it going, Stephen. Good stuff.