BoneChat call #7 - Tiger Buford - digital marketing for startups

We're live and we're going to talk about digital marketing and orthopedics. So I'm go— I'm— I don't have any slides or anything, but I'm going to lay out some philosophies that I've learned, um, about using digital media, um, in orthopedics particularly. And, and then we can dive into like specific questions on, on mechanics and You know, how, how, how do you actually use it? So the first thing that most people don't— yeah, not everybody understands this, but we get all of our information on this thing. I mean, it's taken over everybody's lives. The surgeons, the distributors, the employees. I mean, people are on their phone all day long. This is where we get all our information. And so any, um, it's an opportunity for medical device companies or consultants, salespeople to reach your desired customers. You gotta do it through here. I mean, you absolutely have to do it through here. The, the, the, the question is, uh, when you wake up in the morning, the very first thing, do you check your email? Do you check your cell phone before you pee? Or after you pee. I mean, that's the, I mean, everybody, I mean, I mean, it's a decision, you know, everybody grabs their phone, right? And I mean, it's that pervasive. So, so the first philosophy that I see people getting wrong here is quantity is what matters, not quality. And so the companies that are doing it well are just pumping out tons of content. They don't care if words can be misspelled, pictures can be crappy, there can be bad audio. It doesn't matter. You've got to just pump out. Um, I mean, I, I'm just one little guy and I do a lot of social media. I will be posting 35 times today on LinkedIn, and I've got a newsletter that goes out. It's going to automatically go out to 4,000 people today at 3:30, and I'm just one guy. And with all of that, I barely even get seen. I mean, I barely even get noticed. There's, uh, the analogy I use is it's like the Amazon River of content just going by, and we're— and the customer looks in the Amazon River, they're looking for a ping pong ball, they don't see it. Okay, I— it's not there, but you've got to throw a lot of ping pong balls into the river in order to get noticed. So it's quantity, quantity, quantity. Most companies should post once or twice a day at least, you know. I mean, what the, the, the algorithms love it when you post once daily. They love it if you post once a week. They're not going to promote you up. Um, so that's, that's the first take-home message— quantity. Um, and the mistake that companies make is they, they want a perfect piece of content and they review it for weeks and they rewrite it and over and over again, and it just, it never even gets posted. Um, the second thing that I see people make mistakes is this is a trial and error this is a trial and error, um, process. It's not like, like I was talking about earlier, it's not perfection. So you have to just try. You got to throw hundreds of ideas out and see what sticks. And you have no idea. It's like the famous saying where, uh, if you talk to any famous, like, rock and roll star, their most famous song was usually one they hated. Um, and, but it just went crazy. And so we can't even judge our own work. We don't know what the surgeons wants to see. We don't know what the distributor wants to see. We don't know what employees wanna see. We have to just throw it out there and then watch, watch what's, what's gets sticky and what's not. So trial and error to, so if you were, if you're developing a medical device company and you are developing, um, Alessa's not here, but let's say you're doing a new bone screw. If you could, if you could throw out 365 bone screw designs in one year and watch the feedback, your bone screw would be unbelievable, right? Because you would, you could get trial and error, trial and error, trial. You get the best bone screw in the world if you could take 365 at-bats in a year. Year. Well, it's the same thing with social media. You, we, you gotta just constantly try new things. Try this video. Okay, that didn't work. Try this image. Try this x-ray. Try, try these word transcript from talking to a surgeon. So that's, it's a trial and error business. You gotta, you gotta, that's a take-home thing. Um, another thing is I see a lot of people make mistakes. They just think, they think branding all the time. So they, they say, let's just get as much exposure as we can. Let's get people to, you know, notice our product, notice our box, notice our logo. And exposure's okay, but what you really want is lead generation. You want a surgeon or a potential rep that's gonna carry a product or I don't know, a potential employee that, that's going to work for you. You want them to do something. Um, and so the, the— you have to drive people to a call to action. Um, every piece of content needs to have a little link at the bottom, you know, for more information, go here. I don't, I don't know how you would word it, but— and you got to drive people to landing pages for them to do something. And a lot of times it's, you know, you know, it can be a name and address, you know, tell, send me more information about your company. Uh, if it's a surgeon, send me a demo in the mail, you know, uh, ask to have a surgeon call on me. Just give me your, give me your darn cell phone and I'll have a surgeon call you or I'll have a rep call you, but you gotta have a call to action. And you have to change the behavior of the person you're trying to reach. And the only way you can do that is you have to send them to a website, and it's usually your website backslash contact or something. Or— and you should have a different one for the sales rep, you should have a different one for the surgeon, different one for potential employees, different one for patients. So you could have 4 different landing pages, and you want them to do You want them to all do different things. Um, and that's how you get— that's how you collect information and you start, you know, a relationship with these people. Also, it's the way to measure how well your content's doing. If you put out a piece of content on Wednesday, nothing happens, okay, that didn't work. Put out a piece of content on Thursday and all of a sudden you've got 5, 10, hits on your landing page, okay, that, that content seems to work, seems to fill the top of the funnel. Um, so don't— you got to think more about ex— you got to think beyond exposure and branding. You have to think about lead generation. I, I really believe in that. Um, another thing where I see a lot of people make mistakes is you have to be authentic. You got to be real. So, uh, there's a saying, I guess, if it's authentic content, then it's useful, and if it's not authentic content, it's a commercial. And that's— and, and people are smart. They can see through, um, they can see through, um, you know, a commercial. Hey, try our new product. Hey, we just launched this new thing in Texas, you know, um, Hey, we got a new patent. You know, nobody cares about that stuff. You know, you got to share useful stuff that's authentic. Show them behind the scenes. Show them how you make the product. Show them, you know, that the money shot where the device is going into the patient, you know, a 5-second video. Interview the surgeon right after the case and say, you know, how— what did you like? What did you not like? You know, that's authentic content. Uh, let me try to let some more people in here. Okay. So you gotta be authentic and, and it's, it's just gotta be real and you gotta share the warts and the hair with the good stuff. Show them the, show them the mechanical test that failed. Hey, we're doing mechanical tests every week. Look at this one that just exploded in the, in the lab. Let, let me show you the video of that. Um, so that's authent— authenticity is the only thing that travels well in social media, and people can see, see through it in 2 seconds. Uh, let's see, another thing that's really important is, and I, I've coached companies on this, is every— if you have a 1-person company or a 10-person company, everybody in the company is in charge of content capture. Okay, when they interview a surgeon, when they are out in the, in the hospital, they need to have, um, they need to have their cell phone going. They need to ask permission to interview people. They need to take pictures. They need to take notes. They— everybody in the entire company, the board members, the CEO, everybody should just be constantly collecting real-world, uh, content. And uploading to some, you know, depository in the company. And most companies put one person in charge of cap— of creating content, and it's usually a marketing person, and they're not in the field. And the best content is in the field. I mean, there's just gold mines of great stuff every day before surgery, during surgery, after surgery. Wheeling the kits in. I mean, you— there's just endless, uh, content potential that you can share on social media that is not being captured because you got to anoint everybody. In fact, one company, um, I know of is giving a $100 spiff to anybody in the company that sends a piece of content in every day. So You know, you— hey, hey, Doc, how was that case? Tell, you know, tell us, tell us what you like, what you didn't like. Can I record this? Okay, let me ask you a couple questions, you know. Okay, thanks, Doc. Send it in, text it to the company, $100. Um, let's see, ask questions anytime, guys. I'm just throwing out philosophy here. Uh, there should be only one person in charge of posting in the company. Because you've got— there's editing going on, there's a little bit of judgment, you know. I don't want— the big companies are impossible because they've got a compliance department and a legal department and a regulatory department. They can't even— nothing gets through their filter. But in a small company, you can put one person in charge, and they should have the authority just to post anything they like. Any— they could They could post it as is, they can trim it, they can make a transcript, whatever, whatever it is. They should have authority to— you got to trust that person. Um, another, another fallacy. So people— so you go to surgery in Oklahoma City and you get some great content, and a lot of companies think you got to post it right now. Okay, oh, we got this great content, and they, they either rush it or they spend way too much time. No, you don't. You— content, most content doesn't have a date and time stamp. So you can go to a surgery in Oklahoma City and get a great discussion with a surgeon, a video, pictures of x-rays, everything. You can get 10, 20 great pieces of content. You can queue that up to go on LinkedIn or, or somewhere a month later. The, the cut, you know, the people viewing it don't know when it happened. And so you have to have this rhythm of just constantly, um, capturing content and then a rhythm of, of rolling it out every— like, I like once a day. So, you know, there's a, there's a content plan for today, the 21st, there's a content plan for the 22nd, and so on. But that the content may have come from 30 days ago, and that's okay. It's totally okay as long as the content's useful. People don't care if it was today or, or last month. They just don't care. Um, all right, ask— I'm gonna ask questions, guys, because I feel like I'm blathering. Um, So when— if one of the things you've got to do on the very front end is figure out who your target audience is. And there's— and I, in my mind, there's three. There's surgeons, you know, you want to find new surgeons obviously to try your product. There's potential distributors or agents or reps, which is really important. People overlook that all the time. You're always recruiting new sales and distribution people. And they've got to know about your product, how it works, what problem it solves in the operating room. And the third one is patients. So patients is really hard to do. There's a few companies have done it well, like Therese and Osseo have just— are really killing it with direct-to-consumer. But it's expensive, and you've got to have a pretty large surgeon, uh, finder network a surgeon locator for them to go through. And it's, it's a lot of work, and it's not— direct-to-consumer is not for everybody. Um, so I'd like to focus on— most companies are going to use surgeon target— target surgeons or target reps. Um, so let's talk about platforms. So, um, the— I strongly believe the two best places to have a presence are LinkedIn and YouTube right now. Um, TikTok's probably emerging. I mean, there's a lot of business stuff on TikTok now. Um, but LinkedIn is— a lot of surgeons, a lot of hospital people, you know, reps are hanging out on LinkedIn. Uh, but once again, it's the Amazon River going by, so it's hard to get noticed. Um, And then YouTube is probably— I think every company should have a YouTube channel. I mean, I've, I've got a YouTube channel. I'm just one guy, right? It's, it, it's, it's free. It's not hard to do. You can go, you can, when we hang up the call in an hour, you could have a YouTube channel. You can call it anything you want. Doesn't matter. You can call it, um, You know, Spine Fusion, you can call it anything you want. You can own a piece of YouTube, uh, and then you, you need to post daily on YouTube because the algorithm really promotes you well when you do that. Uh, the, the amazing thing about YouTube, it's like, it's the greatest search engine in the world. It's the second most searched platform in the entire world, and it's obviously driven by Google. And so it's connected to Google searches also. And so the way the— so I, I just learned the other day that, um, there's hundreds of brain surgeons that watch brain surgery on YouTube every day. But you and I don't see that because we're not, we're not on YouTube searching for brain surgery. But once you start searching for brain surgery, then the YouTube algorithm says, well, hey, you like that video, you might like this one too. Oh, and by the way, the company just, they just uploaded another brain surgery this morning. Take a look at this. And so you get sucked into this world really fast. Um, and you can use that to your advantage. You can own a piece of the YouTube world and And the algorithm, once people watch 1, 2, 3, it's just like your Netflix account. It starts to recommend things that are really right on target, right? Or Amazon with books, recommending books. So I think YouTube is really underrated. Underrated. And you can, you can own that piece. Hey, Tiger. Yeah. Who's first?

This is Vinay.

Okay.

Hey Vinay, for a small company, what is a recommended frequency for posting on these platforms?

I mean, I like daily, you know, Vinay.

I mean, but is that too much?

No, no, no. Okay, let me, let me try to explain it again. Okay, when you post day— okay, let me, let me try to explain it in exactly. When you post, nobody sees it. I promise you. The way the LinkedIn algorithm works, and I post every day, when it— when I post something, LinkedIn shows it to 15% of my number one contacts. That's the way it works. And, and then they wait, they wait for 2 or 3 hours and they see if anybody comments or likes or— and if it starts to get traction, then LinkedIn actually goes and shows it to 50%. Of my number one contacts. So still, 50% have never even seen it. It's not, not even in— and then if it goes viral, it'll show it to 80% of your number one contacts. But the average post, nobody, nobody's going to see it. I mean, you could post today, you could go on and say, my house is on fire, I've got an intruder, call this number. And I promise you, nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna call your phone number. There's, because there's just too much noise. There's so much noise. And so it's impossible. I really, I've come to the conclusion over the years, it's literally impossible to post too much. I have, I have 35 postings today on LinkedIn.

So in terms of, uh, uh, a single post and its content, what, what, what will, what will make sure that, that it reaches beyond that 15% and 50%?

It's got to be sticky. I mean, it's got to be authentic. We talked about that. And it's got to be— it has to be useful to the audience. So, you know, I'm learning— I want to learn something new about your device or how it goes in. Or maybe there's early clinical, a case study. I don't know. But, and then, and that goes back to my trial and error comment, Vinay. So we don't know, we can't self-judge. So we don't know what's gonna work and not work. So you, that's why you have to put out 50 things and then you say, okay, these 3 seem to really get traction. And I don't know why, maybe it's a case study, Maybe it's a 30-second conversation with a surgeon, but for some reason those 3 are doing really well. So we'll just do more of that, you know? So that's trial and error is your friend.

By traction, Tiger, you mean a response, right? I mean, everything hinges on a click through or a like or a comment, right?

Right, exactly. On LinkedIn it does, but ultimately, You want to, you want to get people to your website, to your landing page and website, to the lead generation page. You want to know, um, because if, you know, Dr. Jones says, okay, you know, that was interesting, you know, that's on LinkedIn, that's one thing. But if Dr. Jones hits, hits the link, goes to your landing page and says, send me more information, that's really, that's really valuable, right? Helps you build, it's the top of the funnel, helps you build the top of the funnel and hopefully they'll be a customer one day.

Yeah, I was gonna ask Tiger, have you ever used anything like Phantom Buster? Do you know what that is? No. So basically you can have this software that APIs into I guess LinkedIn, and you can do like a keyword search. So if I wanted to focus on orthopedic pain physicians in the Northeast, you can do that and you can turn it up and turn it down. Apparently if you turn it up too high and get to too many, you get no— it beats LinkedIn out and they locked you out. But if you turn it down low, you know, you hit just enough to kind of get your content flowing, just to note.

So we haven't talked about— it's my mistake— we haven't— everything I'm talking about is free. So this is organic content, and, you know, we're just posting things, we're trying to get traction, we're trying to get people to, to lead pages. But there's a whole different world which is paid, and it can be very expensive. I, I've done campaigns like that. It's— I did one for a spine startup. It was 8 bucks per view for the surgeon. So we picked surgeons in a certain zip code with a certain, uh, a certain profile, uh, certain title, and they were the only ones in the, in the world that saw the ad or the content. And it showed up in their feed. They may or may not have even seen it. It was 8 bucks. 8 bucks every time it was shown. And the, the way LinkedIn and the platforms use— you can— the good news is you set a, a budget. And so you say, yeah, I only want to spend $1,000, and it's, it's going to do 8, 8 bucks, 8 bucks, 8 bucks into your— and your thousand's going to disappear really fast, like 15 minutes, right? Yeah, it can. All right, who did— somebody else have a question? We got Anthony, Kyle, Vinay.

Uh, Tiger, one question about that. Um, what would you say that that was worth it? So the, the one that you did, the paid content?

No, no, because the, because the customer was— so here, I haven't talked about this, but this takes months, okay? There is no easy, there's no easy, uh, way of, of developing your brand, getting surgeons to respond, getting people, drawing people to your lead page. This takes months and months. And most, you know, that's the problem with paid is most people don't have a budget they can spend thousands of dollars every month for 12 months to kind of to get the desired results. That's why I'm a big fan of free. I think you can do just as well um, with free. And, and when you do paid, you're only reaching the surgeon in Oklahoma City. But when you do free, you might accidentally, uh, educate a future employee about your company or a potential rep somewhere. I mean, you get, you get a lot of accidental exposure with free.

I think Tiger Yeah. Oh, I imagine that there are different methods or techniques for the type of content depending on what you're trying to accomplish from a, from a, I guess, a customer perspective. So if you are gonna be posting 35 times a day, part of what you're trying to do there is show some, show a potential future audience member, show somebody that you want that, that could potentially recognize this content is interesting. I should subscribe to this newsletter, or Tiger's very connected, he can be a source for recruiting, that you're trying to capture someone's attention in that regard. But then of course there's a lot of different ways in which any of us might be trying to, to, to, to generate leads, or those are very different things. If you're a salesperson in orthopedics, it might be that you're trying to grab the attention of the surgeon across town that has not given you a dinner or sit down quite yet, or if you are a manufacturer of products, you might be trying to captivate the attention of potential distributors as you mentioned before. How would you categorize or explain any sort of specific tactics around catering your content to the type of customer you're trying to land?

Yeah, it's, you have to have completely different content based on the audience, the target audience. So And it, I think it varies with company to company. It, the, the, the take-home message is it has to be useful. And so the surgeon, you know, you can imagine how much information surgeons get bombarded by with, you know, device companies and reps. It's gotta be useful. So you talked about, you know, I don't know, I don't know everybody's business, but talk about, you know, We've, and we found a way to reduce 10 minutes out of your case. I don't know, something like that. Or it's got to be useful. Um, you know, here's us, you can skip 3 steps in surgery if you do this. I, I don't know, you can get, you know, less, less, uh, revision. You can, we can lower your revision rate with this product. It's just got to be useful. Um, You know, that's, that's the key. And, and the only way to do that is— I keep going, keep going back to trial and error. You just have to see what sticks. And that's the thing that people really have a hard time. They think that they want to have their perfect content, they want to post it once, and the floodgates are going to open. And that just doesn't happen. Just doesn't happen. Okay, uh, let's see. All right, what else have I got here? Oh, then yeah, analytics. So, um, you know, you can— LinkedIn, you can see how many people, you know, obviously commented and reposted and stuff like that. Um, you get, you get instant metrics with LinkedIn, but with websites I mean, a free tool, Google Analytics, is awesome. I mean, every website should have Google Analytics on it. It's free. And yeah, you can get a report of where people are coming from. You know, it shows you how they found your site. Um, did they come from LinkedIn? Did they Google it directly? Um, so, uh, you gotta use I mean, it's the only thing where it's, it's the only marketing in the world where you get instant feedback. You know, if you do a, if you do a medical conference and you have a booth, you have no idea what the ROI is on that. You know, you don't, you, you got some lead generation that you did in the booth, but you have no, take months to figure out how many surgeons actually became customers with content within 24 hours, you know what's working and what's not working, so you can make adjustments. Good, good question. The 3 companies I think they're doing it the best are Osseo. Osseo is doing some really creative stuff, um, and they're doing direct-to-consumer also. We, we The thing about direct-to-consumers, we generally don't see it because they're— that's paid advertising. So like Osseo is, they're doing— if, if somebody, you know, Therese and Osseo, if somebody is on Facebook looking for bunion correction in Kansas City, then they're all of a sudden, bing, they get an, they get an ad. You know, like, uh, osseo will say, why in the world would you want to put metal in your foot? You know, that's crazy. And they go, okay, tell me more. And click. And they, and within a click or two, they're at a find a surgeon, uh, page. And oh wow, there's a surgeon like 3 miles from my house in Kansas City. What a coincidence. That's amazing. And that's really powerful. It's, it's a big infrastructure to do that. And then Treece does it on steroids. I mean, Treece has built a $200 million business with direct-to-consumer, almost with one product. And then, and then Ardalan is probably the third company that's doing really creative stuff. My old friend and employee Jansen is the guy running that. Jansen's doing a great job. But they, they just do really creative content. They did a one called, uh, they had a patient named, uh, Jesus, spelled, spelled like Jesus. And they have this whole video on, on Jesus's comeback from his surgery, and it's just, it's just gold, you know. And it's just a happy story, uh, and it was not easy to put together, but, but they, they're doing that every week. And they, they're posting daily, uh, and it's real creative, edgy kind of content. Looks different than anybody else's content. All right, any—

Patrick, you can see, but, uh, Patrick has his hand up for a question.

I do. All right, Patrick.

Hey, Tiger, um, a couple things I would add on this topic, and This is the, this is sort of a topic that both myself and our company, we like, you know, step by step by step kind of get further and further into. One is that specifically as it pertains to LinkedIn, you know, the likes are great, the comments are great, but nobody should forget how many people are constantly viewing things and saying nothing.. But then they see things over and over and over again. I've had numerous people, especially distributors, reach out and say, well, I've been following your stuff, you know, meaning sort of the company. I've been following your stuff for 6 months now, and I never knew this person existed until 5 minutes ago. But they, you know, they, once they view something, then LinkedIn knows they viewed it. So then it's sort of like, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that it makes them more likely to see the next thing and the next thing. I've had surgeons comment to me on videos that I've done with other surgeons and say, oh, I saw that video that you did with Dr. Such and Such. I didn't know that surgeon was even on LinkedIn, let alone like sort of a connection or an active sort of participant in discussions. So I guess that's sort of to your point of frequency and consistency really do matter and make a difference. But there are a lot more people than I ever appreciated that are sort of just lurkers, just sort of scroll, you know, scrollers. And, and you shouldn't forget that there's, there's, you know, 10 times or probably 20, 20 times the scrollers that there are active sort of chitchatters, um, back and forth. But, but they see stuff in the exact, you know, they see stuff exactly the same way.

Yeah, exactly. There's, there's a lot of marketing studies that show you have to see something, I think, 7 times to 15 times before you act, before you buy that new car.

Which makes sense because how many times, think about any consumer product yourself, like, never in my life did it, did I, had I never heard of a product one ever in my life and then a salesman showed up at my front door and knocked on the door and 3 minutes later I said, yeah, sounds good. Like, let's, you know, let, let's buy, let alone a high-end surgical device where there's a big sort of trust element with patients and so on and so on. Social and these types of things, especially at, at a very low cost, they're a way to break down that sort of familiarity barrier that by the time a salesman actually shows up, the customer feels kind of like they've sort of half bought already. I mean, I had an interaction with a surgeon back in September where they had been seeing some stuff of ours on LinkedIn. And then when we finally had a distributor show up and talk to them, they said, okay, it sounds good. And then I came in and we started 90 seconds into the conversation. The surgeon just said like, All right. You can just kind of like stop. Like, I'm gonna, like, I'll do this. I'll use this. We, we don't, I, I, I, you know, I don't need you to go through all of this, this stuff because I've been watching some of your content and watching some of your, you know, your company posts and your messages and all of that. And I went to your website then and I figured it out all on my cell, on my own. This is, I just wanted a bit of a, you know, sort of face-to-face professional interaction before we really got going.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's why organic works. You gotta, you gotta see it in different contexts. That's the other thing.

And this is a big advantage that small companies have over large companies is the ability to act with an authentic voice. I, I saw just yesterday a post that Stryker had, and it was a, the most generic benign sort of like end of the year recap kind of like thing with a bunch of pictures from different educational meetings. And then they needed to put the, the, this disclaimer on the bottom though, This is intended for US surgeons only with a US surgical audience, as if, like, you know, all it does is just speak to sort of being so overly lawyered, you know, overcompliance. And the message was sort of bland anyways, but, you know, it sort of 10x the blandness and the genericness of it just because there could have been some surgeon in some country around the world that didn't have a regulatory approval for some product that was in the background of some picture that they posted on. On, on somewhere. Small companies, you know, it's, it's one place where they can get a leg up. The picture looks the same size on the screen. The voice can come across, you know, it's one for one. It's not, it, it's not trade show booths where there's this huge mismatch or anything like that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, I, I didn't say that at the beginning, but this is a secret weapon that only startups have. Big company, exactly what you said. Big companies cannot do this. They will, Uh, Depew will, will look at content for weeks and it has to go through all these reviews and it gets watered down and it's totally, by the time it reaches LinkedIn, it's worthless.

And the most risk-averse person in the room always wins those discussions at big companies.

Uh, yep. That's why little guys, we can just, you can just throw anything out there. Don't even ask permission. And I've had companies say, well, You know, I, you know, the surgeon, you know, he's an employee of the hospital and I really need to get, you know, that okayed. No, if the surgeon, if you hold your phone up and say, hey doc, you just had a great case, can I just ask you two questions, uh, on and, and video your answers and, um, and I'll, I'll send it to you afterwards and, and let me know if we can post it. They're gonna— their ego is gonna— they're gonna love that, right?

Yeah.

I've done a couple of those at your recommendation on first cases, and there's some of my highest viewed, like, personal, um, you know, things that I put out there.

That's gold. I mean, that— you're doing it right. Um, I mean, I've seen the Episurf thing travel all over the world. I've seen those little pictures, you know.

Yeah, I take pictures of the— that was inspired by my daughter. They've got these— she's, you know, they— I've got an elementary school daughter, and they have those, you know, those stuffed animals that move around the the, you know, they go from kid to kid to kid week after week after week, and they all take pictures. And by the end of the school year, those animals have lived like the most extraordinary lives you could ever imagine. So I started just taking pictures of our implants and all these interesting locations. And pretty quickly, you know, the implants are on the Atlantic Ocean, then they're on the beach, and then they're on the, you know, they're in all of these different, they're in all these different, different places. And, you know, it's just something that looks a little bit different that, you know, there is this cliché like stops the scroll. You people should always be thinking about what can I do that stops the scroll?

Stops the scroll.

Thumbs like what, you know, a generic post from Stryker or J&J stops no one's scroll. Even if it gets 100 likes from 100 company employees, it doesn't matter. Like nobody, like it, it, nobody cares.

Yep. Yeah. I mean, that's the other thing you've got. You, you, you hit on a topic people are looking at content for 2 or 3 seconds maybe. Yeah. I mean, you have such a short amount of time to grab them. And it's got to— and that's why it's got to be authentic. You know, if they see— tell me about the post-surgery interviews that you posted. Tell me how you did that and then the results.

So it was, you know, relatively simple. I, you know, it's something I try to do with as many, or I'm going to try to do with as many first-time users as possible. We ask them ahead of time and say, listen, this is— once you got a couple on board, it's a lot easier because then we can say like, this is something we've been doing with other first-time users and they don't feel like, you know, they feel a bit, you know, included. And, you know, we say, you know, there's a couple of questions we want to ask you. It's the same questions. I came up with a couple of questions, you know, just sort of like What got you interested in this technology in the first place? What do you think intraoperatively that you're able to do now that perhaps you weren't able to do before? What would you say to a new surgeon who's interested in evaluating or taking a look at something like, like this? And they like it.

They—

it sounds so corny and clichéd, you know, sort of cheesy sometimes, but they think it's kind of cool. They've watched 500 million football games and basketball games where the coach gets interviewed, like walking to the locker room afterwards. And they kind of think of it in a bit of that mind frame, especially in orthopedics where there's such kind of this, you know, sports-ish mindset. They think it sounds, you know, they think it's, they think it's pretty, it's pretty interesting and it's, it's promotional and it's live. Like we can do it right away. The distributor holds my phone and records it and we're done in 90 seconds and it's up by that, it's up that day and You know, if J&J did it last year, it'd be lucky to make it next year on the feed. So the feedback has been really good, both in terms of just like the surgeons liking it. And those are some of the video stops, you know, video stops people scroll in a way that images don't and purely text.

And video, LinkedIn promotes video. To the— yeah, way, way more than— and, and YouTube, has got this new thing called YouTube Shorts. And so if your YouTube video is less than 60 seconds, it turns it into a YouTube Short. And that— those, those have legs also. They get watched a lot. So how long was the video, Patrick?

Somewhere between 90 and 120 seconds, probably. You know, just surgeon.

And did you—

I say virtually nothing. I say, did you chop it?

You know, You chop it into pieces. Did you make a transcript out of it?

Okay.

Yeah, we, yeah, the office then, like, you know, we have the, you know, the original file sits on my, on my phone and then I send it into the office. They throw captions on, they put captions on underneath it. That's an important thing. Make sure to turn the, if your office is gonna put captions on it, make sure to turn the LinkedIn captions off. Otherwise you'll get this sort of double thing. But my office turns, puts the captions on it then, and then we chop it up into separate questions. And then we have, we even, there's even, we even, we, we, we have a, we have versions of it that wipe me out of it completely. And we just sort of put like a, like a bit of like a, you know, a 1-second slide that states the question and then just shows the surgeon answer. Then there's versions with me asking the question. So there's, you know, it's, there's, there's at a minimum 4 or 5 different things and at a maximum almost 10 different individual.

So, yeah. So everybody listen to that. So One quick interview, 10 pieces of content. And so, I mean, there's no reason you shouldn't be posting once a day. I mean, that's, that's awesome.

Okay.

Corey's got his hand raised. Yeah.

So months ago I was interested in learning more about Treece. So I just Googled their web, their website. That was easy enough. But the, but, but 3 questions I have. So on their website, it's— they have a— they have something you can click on. It said, are you a patient? So I clicked on that because I hadn't seen that before. And after that, I probably got, I don't know, 4 or 5 follow-up emails from Trace. And so I thought that was— that would be really effective. But, but they go a step further and say not only are you a patient, or you can be potentially a patient, but here are the 4 surgeons in the Denver area that are implanting this technology. So wouldn't the, wouldn't the surgeons be, wouldn't that be a great way to market to a surgeon?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, every, it's a, so I've been down to Treece and they've got this giant wall of, uh, awards where everybody that's put in 100 lapoplasties wins, you know, their names on a wall and then they're trying to get to 200 and 500. And I think there's a lot of that. If you're in Denver and you see another surgeon on the Surgeon Locator, you want to be there too. Yeah. There's a, there's a fear, there's a FOMO, a fear of missing out. And I help, I think it helps to drive more surgery. Yeah. I mean, they're doing everything right.

It's, well, my question is, is that super expensive to do the, the, not only the Surgeon Locator, but to follow up on with the patients and And how much would it be to, don't you, don't you have to pay Google to be really high up or on the list on the front landing page?

No, no, no, no, you don't have to do that.

Some patient says, you know, bunionectomy or bunion surgery, wouldn't you want, if you're Trace, wouldn't you want to be, you know, right away?

Yeah, so they, they, I'm sure they buy lapoplasty, which is probably pretty cheap, 'cause it's a, a made-up word. Um, but yeah, they, they, most of their patients are not coming through Google the way I understand it. They're coming through Facebook and Instagram. And, and, you know, LinkedIn and probably TikTok. They're probably everywhere now. And they, they have local television ads in some cities. I don't know if you guys have seen those, but, you know, you're just watching a sporting event, all of a sudden a lapoplasty. Ad pops up. I mean, they are— what you don't see, they're probably spending, I mean, $10 to $20 million in, in direct-to-consumer advertising. But we don't see that. We don't see it because we, we're not a 55-year-old, you know, lady in Waco, Texas looking, you know, my foot's killing me. You know, I gotta, I gotta do something about this bunion. And you're on Facebook. Oh, look, there's a Lapiplasty group on Facebook. Oh, look, what is this thing? Oh, look, people have less recurrent surgery with this. Oh, okay. There's a, there's a surgeon locator. I mean, that's, um, every time somebody sees one of those ads on Facebook, it's like the $8 thing I was talking about. They're, they're paying for that. It's a targeted, it's a target audience. Somebody that types in a keyword and then magically they see a laparoplasty ad within, you know, half a second. They're paying for that. Yeah, they're spending a fortune on that. So, but what I was talking about and mostly is, is, uh, organic content. Which is, I think, like Patrick was saying, it travels. I mean, everybody sees the organic. It's free, especially if you're a startup or a one-person company. You know, anybody can do organic. I mean, Treece, Treece did it the hard way. I think they probably spent $1 million the first year, and then they spent $2 million, and they just keep ramping it up. For those paid ads. Hey Dave, good to see you.

Tiger, great to see you. Yeah, great. This—

yeah, tell, tell us what you're doing with social media. I'm sure you're doing a lot.

Yeah. So my company is called Icarus. We make assistive knee braces. When you bend down, they spring you back up. Patel from Run Loaders. We're going down the organic path as much as possible. We probably do about $2,000 a month in paid. We're in the process of setting up this referral program. We've got it built on the backend, but we don't have it outward facing yet. But you know, this is— we're still trying to figure it out. I, I don't know, um, like how many other people on this call, um, but you know, it's for us, you know, direct-to-consumer is important. You know, it's getting to the doctors, getting to the patients, and then having everybody, and then sides from the distributors to, uh, build awareness. And so we're trying to figure out You know, what is the best platform to get to surgeons? What is the best platform to get to patients? And it's usually not the same thing. So I think we're a lot better at getting to, to patients, I'd say.

Interesting. Well, for people who don't know, Dave's got a unique brace and he's— he has two selling channels. He sells through surgeons through prescription. He also sells direct to to consumers through the website. You have two completely different channels, which makes it harder.

Yeah, it, it is harder and it's, and actually we're, we're preparing to come out with the direct-to-consumer version of our product that is where they can buy it outright. I mean, it's a knee brace, Class I device. And so this one wouldn't go through insurance at all. And so we've got enough data to figure out how to, you know, basically right now I think every dollar that we're spending generates $12 in top line revenue. So that's how our socials work in and that's pretty good. But then when you look at how many people it takes to, if you're going the insurance route, the time it takes, we just don't have the personnel. So, you know, our sales team is about— we have 14 people, 7 inside, 7 field. And yeah, so we're trying to figure out how to make it easier and less of a salesperson burden for the direct-to-consumer.

And where do you get your content from? Where is it derived? Is it just all from the field?

Yeah. So people who have our brace really love it. And so we're constantly trying to get these stories and capture that and get it out there. And I heard there was a, you know, somebody had a $100 spiff. That's exactly what we do for our employees. So every time and our distributors. So every, any, anytime you have a good, a happy patient, send us in a picture, a video, any information on them. And we have a waiver, of course. I'm happy to share our waiver with anybody if they want it. And then we, we try to get it out. We definitely have a lot more content than we have had the ability to, to get it out. And I think that's just kind of, you know, startup life. We haven't had a full-time person for a while. We did go the route where we paid $6,000 a month for a company to manage our social. And it was, there's so many problems that we decided to just do it ourselves. And so between interns and now we've got a new marketing person coming in. But, but like you said, you, you have to be close to the content. You have to be so inside the company, somebody who understands you know, how the brace fits the patient type. You know, we actually spent a lot of money on a photo shoot that was done across the country. We're in Virginia, this was done in Washington State, and they did this whole shoot with the brace on the wrong leg.

And so, gee whiz.

Yeah, we can't even use this. So, you know, going out there with an iPhone is so much, is so much better.

So, And it's, it's authentic too because the, an iPhone video looks real versus a studio video looks contrived.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah.

And we're, we're in the process of putting together, finishing like basically a commercial that has real patients and expressing how they felt before they got the brace, what that pain was like, and then what they can do now with it and what it's like. And so their, their real emotion comes through in that. And, um, you know, we, we see it all day long, and it's actually what helps build the culture in our company. Everybody feels like they're doing something that's meaningful and impactful. Um, but it's, yeah, trying to get those snippets out is— it kind of feels like there's a logjam sometimes because you're it's maybe like trying to be a little bit more of a— too much of a perfectionist.

Yeah.

And yeah. So, so rather than, you know, one thing I'm taking away is, you know, we got to just, just get it out, you know, just throw it out.

Don't worry about quality. Doesn't matter. It's quantity. You'll figure out what sticks and what doesn't stick. Exactly. I mean, $12 in revenue for $1 spend is amazing. That's, that's a great return. You can do that all day long.

Just go spend $1 billion.

Yeah, exactly. We'd have a lot of unfulfilled orders. But, but that's where I, I don't actually know what percentage of that is based, is because of organic and is because of our, our paid. So I think it's mixing the two.

Yeah. I could see that. It's— that's a great case study. You and Patrick are doing similar things. Any questions for Dave? It's— Dave's got a great story. I, um, he was an avid snowboarder and he had, he had softening of his cartilage underneath, underneath his patella. So he had patellofemoral pain and he literally went out and bought every brace known to man. And he sort of Frankensteined a, a brace for himself that unloaded his patella to get him back to snowboarding. And that started a company.

Yeah, it's, yeah, exactly. I, I wish I had one to demo for you guys, but yeah, it's, it, they're, they're all 3D printed based on an iPhone scan. And so, but, but in, in making this one knee brace that, that's assistive, we realize, OK, so we're controlling force across the joint in an adjustable way. And so we can apply that to more than just the knee. So yeah, we're really excited about different devices that we're making also. And it's not just— you can assist a joint. You can generate torque in a joint. You can also distract a joint, push it apart. Through a particular range of motion. And so you can, so a lot of our team, a lot of our engineers think like an orthopedic surgeon would. How do I, you know, reduce contact pressure? How do I, you know, straighten or optimize alignment? And, but we're just, you know, limited to outside of the body.

Cool.

Yeah.

So we're coming up kind of end of the hour. Any questions? Any thoughts?

Anybody? Very quick question here, Tiger. I didn't catch, uh, Dave's— the name of his company. I wanted to check that out.

It's, it's Icarus, like the Greek god flying too close to the sun and the wings melted.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

We'll have to, Dave, we'll have to have you on. Uh, we do this every Thursday for the most part, and we'll have to have you on and just present Icarus. That would be, it's all, most of BoneChat is, uh, startup early founders, um, or entrepreneurial people, some consultants, you know, experts. And I think a third of the members are CEO founders right now.

So.

Yeah, we'd love to have you on.

I'd love to meet everybody and, and get plugged in.

So that, that sounds— well, any, any last questions, thoughts? All right, well, it's a wrap then.