April 3, 2025 • 27 mins
After a serious spinal injury left him temporarily paralyzed, Ty had to navigate the healthcare system to find the right specialists, without reliable online information to guide those critical choices.
On this episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast, Ty Allen, founder of SocialClimb, shared the deeply personal story behind his company’s origin.
Highlights include: Finding a Gap in the Market (07:10), Validating the Market Gap (11:24), How Not To Screw Up Pricing (14:34), Customer Development and First Clients (20:30), And more…
Stay updated with our podcast and the latest insights in Outbound Sales and Go-to-Market Strategies!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
There's no feeling in the world that you, where you feel like I'm an idiot more than 15 minutes into an interview and the guest is just delivering a banger, an interview, and you're like, I forgot to hit the record button. Really? Sorry about that. Ty Allen (00:00):
Yeah, it's hard. Collin Stewart
(01:00):
stories of. Regular people that struggled and eventually figured it out and what worked for them. I think there, there was so much content that was generated by, that came from like the VC world, where they're like, oh yeah, I just raised $20 million and then, I looked at this market and suddenly I have product market fit. And so I think the messier, the more interesting stories are. Kind of what I'm shooting for and I'm not trying to foreshadow anything here, but, yeah, I'm justreally excited to, to have you on, get a chance to hear your story. So we're talking about social climb today. Where did this idea come from? Ty Allen: Speaking of messy, I think what you're about to hear would be described as very messy. So, in my career I had been involved in multiple. Tech startups and had some good and some bad sold. One, one didn't work. One was still going at the time in 2013 when I was involved in an accident and I fractured my neck. So I was a quadriplegic. I
(02:00):
was laying on the ground after the injury and had no, no feeling below my shoulders. And no movement below my shoulders. And as you can imagine, there was a, it was a life-changing experience. I'll skip a lot of the details and just say that I went through a process where I was correctly diagnosed. I had central cord syndrome and a fracture at at C four, and had to start making a lot of really difficult healthcare decisions. My wife and I had to make those decisions. So it took two days in order for the swellingto go down, enough for them to be able to do the initial surgery. I then had to start making, so I made a decision about a surgeon. I made a decision about when I came out of intensive care, where I was gonna start therapy, how I was gonna go through the process. That would hopefully, ultimately get me back in a position where I would function pretty well. I was in the hospital for about six weeks, and during that time as I looked back on it, there were probably six to eight key decisions that I had to make
(03:00):
that I felt like I didn't have the right information to make the decisions, and they were dramatic impacts on how well I would recover. So today, if you met me. In person and we were together, you, it would probably take you 10 minutes or so to notice something and you'd be like, oh, that's, he's definitely not able to do that. But for the most part, my recovery is miraculous. And I attribute that to great therapists, great occupational therapists, physical therapists, multiple surgeries from great doctors. Andlook, some of that was luck and some of it was actually hard research that I did as a patient to say. I gotta find the person that can help me with this. One thing in particular was I had a really hard time with my left hand. Learning to use my left hand, in particular, these three fingers on my left hand took more than a year. I couldn't type with my left hand for more than a year. And I had gone to three different occupational therapy groups and then I eventually found a therapy group that was a specialist
(04:00):
in hand and. The truth is they looked terrible online. Like if you, I had a friend, I had another group and another group, a friend there say, you need to go see so-and-so at this hand in therapy group. And I looked at him online and he didn't look good, looked terrible actually. But I went anyway and I found him to be an amazing therapist who literally helped me reclaim the capability to use my left hand. And this is in my mid forties. And so I got to know him really well andI said, you, you are just not even thinking about marketing. You're not even thinking about how to position your capacity to help your patients to benefit the growth of your business. And so I said, why don't I help him? And then I started thinking, this is something I could put into a platform. And it is something that I could enable. Lots of people to use who don't know how to do this and will never be excited about doing it because they're really good at their core job. So
that was the reason that I started the business and there's a lot of details from there, but I'll let you ask me questions on which, where you want to go from here, but that, that, that was the genesis. Collin Stewart (05:00):
Wow that's quite the story. I can imagine you sitting there halfway through building his WordPress and going, yeah, I think there's probably a better way. I probably shouldn't be up ripping up another WordPress install and doing something. So I love that's where the insight came from and whoa, what a story what came next? Was it a hundred percent all in on this idea? Was there, like, what else did you do in terms of like validation? Ty Allen
(06:00):
Yeah. It took almost 18 months after the accident for me to be in a position where I was then able to start. So then I went to one of the smartest guys I've ever known. He was one of my employees. I hired him when he was 21. And and I asked him if he was interested in doing a startup with me. And so we laid out a an MVP basically for what features would we need. To get this guy who was the therapist and a couple of other doctors who I had gotten to know all of which had something to do with myrecovery features that would make a difference for them. And so we defined an MVP and he talked me into one other engineer that could join the team. And we built something in two weeks that started the basis. We of course rewrote it five times, but. We started the basis of where we were gonna go., I'm really the sales guy. I'm not the engineer. I have an engineering degree, but I'm not the engineer. So I also started reaching out to a lot of other people who had nothing to do with my recovery, just to
assess what they were doing. And I got a really good sense of that. The market was there, there was a gap. People didn't know what they were doing. People didn't even know what I was talking about. Half the time I'd explain, have to explain it to 'em, and then they'd say, oh, I need that. Collin Stewart (07:00):
Help me understand that piece. 'cause that's. I think that's one of the pieces I really wanna understand is the, you found a gap. What did it look like? What did it feel like? What did it sound like? Ty Allen
(08:00):
ads and I can't really tell whether the ads are working. So I went. They're not even really enabling him to win search. Like the easiest thing to do would be what can you do to win more searches in the Las Vegas area for orthopedic needs and therefore drive more traffic to your practice? That's the very basics and now we look at it, it's 2025 and we're like, well, people were not thinking about search marketing in healthcare. It always trails. So even though search marketing was legitimately athing in 2013 and 2014 most healthcare organizations didn't even have it on their radar. And so that's when I said, well, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna focus on healthcare. My MVP's gonna be focused on healthcare. I, that's what I was passionate about because of my recoveries and my injury. And so I really got into the weeds of how patients are trying to find, how much freedom does a patient have to choose, what kind of restrictions are there on that. So I found that the independent practices were
frustrated because the hospitals would suck the good cases outta the market. Independent practices would often have a difficult time. They'd also be dependent on, in some cases, the hospital for parts of the care cycle, the surgery, the other things. And so I saw this trend where independents were trying to say, okay. I can maybe own my own destiny and not let the hospital dictate everything to me. It's the lay of the land that I found. Collin Stewart (09:00):
I wanted, I'd love to zoom in on one of those interviews. Do you remember, was there a specific time where you remember, oh, there might be something here, like a specific conversation or the way somebody said something? Ty Allen
(10:00):
the sports guy, he wants more. The hip and knee guy and the spine guy are where we make the most money. So I was able to talk to some of those, group, those guys and understand. And what I found was a lot of these guys were doing their own marketing on the side. They were part of a group. They had a group website, they had brand, and then they were building their own brand on the side. And they were paying a marketing guy on the side to do other stuff for them. And. They were competing against each other and their partners in thesame practice. Yeah. And so I listened to what they thought was valuable in the stuff they were doing on the side and said, why don't we, why don't we build that back into a suite that's really easy for your core team to to contract for the whole organization. Then you get synergy instead of competition. You're not causing your costs to go up as you compete with each other. And that to me was like, well, this is a need. I knew it was a need 'cause they were spending significantly on it. But nobody had built anything that made sense to
aggregate into a core thing for a large group or even a hospital group. Collin Stewart (11:00):
I love those moments where you, somebody says something and it just doesn't make sense to you. You're like, wait, you have a marketing team, but you also do your own marketing on the side. That's insane. Yeah. And they're like, and they didn't even know. Some of them Ty Allen
a bunch of customers we were, 'cause we just kept adding features and learning more. But we built something after maybe a good 10 or 12 deep dives that was valuable enough that people would start paying us. Collin Stewart (12:00):
Really interesting. I wanna follow up on the validation stage took longer than you think, but I wanna maybe ask the question now. How long did it take to get that first customer and who was it that dropped first? Ty Allen
(13:00):
of a big network. National network that's in 43 states where they aggregate, they get together every multiple times a year, share best practices. They don't compete with each other. So it's a, it's an association that allows them to share best practice with each other. And they started connecting me with, their friendlies and buddies in that area. And so we picked up customers in Arizona. And that Tennessee and I couldn't get in that, I couldn't get in that group as a vendor that national group for aboutanother year. But now almost all the people in that group use us so that networking effect and orthopedics is definitely still one of our better sub, one of our better specialties. I Collin Stewart: love it. And so it seems like if we think about Dave McClure's pirate metrics, right? You were able to acquire them, activate them, and retain them. And it sounds like, and obviously like the retention turned into the referral, I know I skipped revenue, but when I'm thinking about product market fit revenue is the,
like, is it check mark and not like a measurement when you're looking at this kind of thing, especially in the early days. And so it seemed really, seems like that referral coefficient was huge for you Here I. Ty Allen (14:00):
Yeah, and it worked because we worked with the group in Las Vegas to the point where they started seeing month to month measurable increases in patient flow and revenue. And so when they would connect us with one or two others, they would say, these guys are, what we're using with them is actually growing our revenue. And the cost is tiny. Collin Stewart
(15:00):
is that. I always am seeking the next layer of innovation. So we now have in our suite really four areas that we can sell. I just described to you the first one, which is managing listings, driving reputation building, which seems like a commodity now, but at that time it wasn't. And so I love to sell, but I also. Love to innovate. And so instead of just saying, okay, we got one thing and we're gonna, we're gonna now try to run the table with it I like to spinup a process where we have multiple threads. One that's doing that and one that continues to innovate and listen to the customers go deeper on what's the next feature That's. It's connected or ancillary to what we already do, but would really then continue our differentiation in the market. And so that's my passion actually. Like the stuff we're doing now with ai in helping these practices is the most fun I've ever had. And it's leading, it led we, I sold this
business in October of last year, and one of the reasons we sold it is because of the innovations, innovative stuff that we've been doing with ai. Collin Stewart (16:00):
I love that. And I'm, I'll follow up on that in a minute. For anybody who's listening going, oh, ask 'em that question. But I want to, I wanna stay on the kind of product market fit journey 'cause, so I think so much, so many founders get this advice where they're pressure to sell. You gotta sell right away. Not in terms of sell the company, but you gotta sell as many units as you can as fast as possible. But you hung in there and it sounds like you didn't really jump into sales and marketing as hard as you could. You tried to strengthen. The product to the point where you were getting that referral coefficient. And I have this like hypothesis that the stronger the product market fit as measured by your referral coefficient. So the percentage of folks that come through your pirate metric funnel and then end up, as giving you a referral is a one of the best measures of product market fit. And the stronger that number is, the easier your go to market.
(17:00):
Is gonna be, and I see a lot of founders and I've helped a lot of founders make this mistake. 'cause in my previous life I ran a demand gen agent or lead gen, a sales development agency. And I've seen so many people waste tons of time and money on inefficient go-to market because they didn't do this thing. What gave you that confidence that I need to continue strengthening when everybody else in the world at this time must have been. Raise as much as youcan. Spend as much as you can on sales and marketing. Ty Allen: So I gotta give some credit here to my my CTO, who really is a co-founder with me in the business. He's the young guy that I told you about that I first met him when he was 21, and he's an, he's an amazingly self-made guy, and he's super practical and what he wanted to do was cr make the product so well. Run so well managed that our expenses to roll out a customer, to implement a customer,
(18:00):
and to deliver really high quality, super high availability of our platform. That's, he's so passionate about it and so he. My tendency is a bit to, to go, as you've said let's grow as fast as we can. I also love to innovate and he's the guy that says, okay, we're gonna innovate, but we're gonna build it the right way. And so he kinda kept me grounded. He was like the counterbalance to my craziness a little bit. And I would say that's a big portion ofwhy we've been successful is. I would lean to be too aggressive and he would lean possibly to be too conservative. And the balance helped us find the right mix in there of investing in the platform versus purely just selling whatever we could sell. Collin Stewart: It and it sounds like there's a lot of credit due to both of the founders here for playing this kind of the balancing act. 'cause I could totally see somebody who I hired when they were 21
joining me as a co-founder. I'm an experienced entrepreneur. Now, I could very easily dominate that relationship. Not that I would, but you could see how those power dynamics would play out. It sounds like that wasn't an issue for you. Ty Allen (19:00):
Yeah. I had enough wisdom. I don't know how much wisdom I have, but I had enough wisdom to listen to him. And he's also such a hardworking guy that he may do with, we, like, I funded the startup, like we didn't take any seed funding. This is I funded this with my own winnings from a previous business. And we resisted taking any outside funding until we were at a metric that we felt was, we were comfortable with. That took a little longer than we wanted, but we decided as a team that was okay. Amazing. And I, so I, sorry, I don't know that I have a really solid data for you on when to make that decision. Yeah, I think it had more to do with our team dynamics and just reading the market, how big we thought it was, and the ability that. We
(20:00):
had to, we didn't have to have hypergrowth. We knew that if we did the right things, we'd get to that point at some time. And building the platform was one of a, one of the things that high quality platform was one of the things we wanted to emphasize. And in the end, that high quality platform was the reason we got acquired. When the diligence process ran from the group that ended up buying us, they looked at two or three competitors and they came back and said, well, your platform's like 10 times better than any of them. They have great sales and marketing, but we can see how we can take your platformat scale. To do really interesting things. Collin Stewart: Amazing. How did you, so you got your first customers from the customer development process. Talking to folks that you had met talking to folks that, those 12 other groups that you'd interviewed, it sounds like the next group was that, was it straight to referrals from there or was there any other channels in the in between, like, I'm trying to figure out where did that next cohort, was it right to referrals and referrals the whole way, or what came next? I. Ty Allen: So we started joining associations exhibiting at events. And that next
(21:00):
chunk of business, which was still in orthopedics by the way. We spent the first two and a half to three years only in orthopedics and related things. So therapy, occupational therapy, most of it was word of mouth, but there was a layer that we started to add in of traditional marketing activities. So we added some, a co a, a group who, a guy who would call outbound to these groups and did the little traditional marketing. We didn't have a lot of budget, but we started getting customers outside of our referral networkto add to the. To the mix. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. And maybe I'd love to describe the moment where you realized, 'cause you said it, it took a while for you to continue to invest in the product. And you feel like you didn't find, you, didn't you? You found product market fit, but it wasn't where you wanted it to be. I'd love you. It wasn't complete. It wasn't complete. Describe the moment when you realized it might be complete. Ty Allen: Well, I still have other ideas. We're working on some other really cool stuff,
(22:00):
but but I knew we had a suite of tools that was good enough when, large hospital groups who got connected to us came in and said, wow, we could use this and we could, we can cut three vendors out of our customer, out of our vendor base. Put your platform in place. Get the ROI tracking that's built into your platform to help us measure all marketing dollars that we're spending, and we now have full grasp of what our dollars in healthcare marketing arebuying us. That was that. When I had a big hospital group tell me that, I went, wow, that's a story I should be telling, and I have never even said it before. Collin Stewart: It's amazing when you're doing something so new and your customer's words are so much more powerful than, yeah. All the gobbledy gook that's going around in here. Ty Allen: Too many words in my head. I heard this customer say that. I wrote it down and we started trying to use that
in our storytelling Collin Stewart (23:00):
tattooed all across the website. Of course. Yep. Talk to me about what comes next. Sounds like you've, the, you required last year, you're focusing on, you've got some other things coming down the pipeline. What's next for Ty and Social Climb? Ty Allen
(24:00):
predictive models that can telemarketer in their geographic area. Who's trending toward certain types of care or who's likely to be trending towards certain types of care. So instead of marketing to the million people in your area who you feel from an age perspective are the right people to market, to just market to these 20,000 people. The response rates to that type of marketing is like. 10 x over per dollar. So just a return on investment when you mark it with a knowntargeted audience is so much better. And so that's our, that's the last feature set that we built. And we layered on top of that, the ROI tracking that opened the door for the acquisition by a company called RL dx, which most people wouldn't know. R Ldx is. They're headquartered in the uk but they've got quite a presence in the US and these guys are asking us to do something similar to what I just described. But to get smarter about patient safety. So nobody's yet in the market,
(25:00):
done, and I'm getting really nerdy here, but nobody's done patients patient experience, data collection and understanding and patient safety analysis. The scary thing is. When you go to the hospital, you have a 6% chance of having something negative happen to you an infection, a mistake by someone. It happens that needs to get improved. How can we improve that? How can we learn from what patients are telling us about their experience in reviews and surveys combined with all thedata that we have about patient harm incidents that do happen? And build a machine that identifies what patterns are going wrong in these hospitals and make suggestions on policies and procedures to diminish those incidents and make it safer, make it better for everyone. That's the theory behind the acquisition of my business into rl. So it's not marketing anymore. It is. Of course, there's a marketing layer of that. Once you tell the story, once you know that you're better, of
course, literally making. Healthcare safer is our next quest. Collin Stewart (26:00):
Did that come with a high vis vest? Ty Allen
Yeah, it's hard. Collin Stewart
(01:00):
stories of. Regular people that struggled and eventually figured it out and what worked for them. I think there, there was so much content that was generated by, that came from like the VC world, where they're like, oh yeah, I just raised $20 million and then, I looked at this market and suddenly I have product market fit. And so I think the messier, the more interesting stories are. Kind of what I'm shooting for and I'm not trying to foreshadow anything here, but, yeah, I'm justreally excited to, to have you on, get a chance to hear your story. So we're talking about social climb today. Where did this idea come from? Ty Allen: Speaking of messy, I think what you're about to hear would be described as very messy. So, in my career I had been involved in multiple. Tech startups and had some good and some bad sold. One, one didn't work. One was still going at the time in 2013 when I was involved in an accident and I fractured my neck. So I was a quadriplegic. I
(02:00):
was laying on the ground after the injury and had no, no feeling below my shoulders. And no movement below my shoulders. And as you can imagine, there was a, it was a life-changing experience. I'll skip a lot of the details and just say that I went through a process where I was correctly diagnosed. I had central cord syndrome and a fracture at at C four, and had to start making a lot of really difficult healthcare decisions. My wife and I had to make those decisions. So it took two days in order for the swellingto go down, enough for them to be able to do the initial surgery. I then had to start making, so I made a decision about a surgeon. I made a decision about when I came out of intensive care, where I was gonna start therapy, how I was gonna go through the process. That would hopefully, ultimately get me back in a position where I would function pretty well. I was in the hospital for about six weeks, and during that time as I looked back on it, there were probably six to eight key decisions that I had to make
(03:00):
that I felt like I didn't have the right information to make the decisions, and they were dramatic impacts on how well I would recover. So today, if you met me. In person and we were together, you, it would probably take you 10 minutes or so to notice something and you'd be like, oh, that's, he's definitely not able to do that. But for the most part, my recovery is miraculous. And I attribute that to great therapists, great occupational therapists, physical therapists, multiple surgeries from great doctors. Andlook, some of that was luck and some of it was actually hard research that I did as a patient to say. I gotta find the person that can help me with this. One thing in particular was I had a really hard time with my left hand. Learning to use my left hand, in particular, these three fingers on my left hand took more than a year. I couldn't type with my left hand for more than a year. And I had gone to three different occupational therapy groups and then I eventually found a therapy group that was a specialist
(04:00):
in hand and. The truth is they looked terrible online. Like if you, I had a friend, I had another group and another group, a friend there say, you need to go see so-and-so at this hand in therapy group. And I looked at him online and he didn't look good, looked terrible actually. But I went anyway and I found him to be an amazing therapist who literally helped me reclaim the capability to use my left hand. And this is in my mid forties. And so I got to know him really well andI said, you, you are just not even thinking about marketing. You're not even thinking about how to position your capacity to help your patients to benefit the growth of your business. And so I said, why don't I help him? And then I started thinking, this is something I could put into a platform. And it is something that I could enable. Lots of people to use who don't know how to do this and will never be excited about doing it because they're really good at their core job. So
that was the reason that I started the business and there's a lot of details from there, but I'll let you ask me questions on which, where you want to go from here, but that, that, that was the genesis. Collin Stewart (05:00):
Wow that's quite the story. I can imagine you sitting there halfway through building his WordPress and going, yeah, I think there's probably a better way. I probably shouldn't be up ripping up another WordPress install and doing something. So I love that's where the insight came from and whoa, what a story what came next? Was it a hundred percent all in on this idea? Was there, like, what else did you do in terms of like validation? Ty Allen
(06:00):
Yeah. It took almost 18 months after the accident for me to be in a position where I was then able to start. So then I went to one of the smartest guys I've ever known. He was one of my employees. I hired him when he was 21. And and I asked him if he was interested in doing a startup with me. And so we laid out a an MVP basically for what features would we need. To get this guy who was the therapist and a couple of other doctors who I had gotten to know all of which had something to do with myrecovery features that would make a difference for them. And so we defined an MVP and he talked me into one other engineer that could join the team. And we built something in two weeks that started the basis. We of course rewrote it five times, but. We started the basis of where we were gonna go., I'm really the sales guy. I'm not the engineer. I have an engineering degree, but I'm not the engineer. So I also started reaching out to a lot of other people who had nothing to do with my recovery, just to
assess what they were doing. And I got a really good sense of that. The market was there, there was a gap. People didn't know what they were doing. People didn't even know what I was talking about. Half the time I'd explain, have to explain it to 'em, and then they'd say, oh, I need that. Collin Stewart (07:00):
Help me understand that piece. 'cause that's. I think that's one of the pieces I really wanna understand is the, you found a gap. What did it look like? What did it feel like? What did it sound like? Ty Allen
(08:00):
ads and I can't really tell whether the ads are working. So I went. They're not even really enabling him to win search. Like the easiest thing to do would be what can you do to win more searches in the Las Vegas area for orthopedic needs and therefore drive more traffic to your practice? That's the very basics and now we look at it, it's 2025 and we're like, well, people were not thinking about search marketing in healthcare. It always trails. So even though search marketing was legitimately athing in 2013 and 2014 most healthcare organizations didn't even have it on their radar. And so that's when I said, well, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna focus on healthcare. My MVP's gonna be focused on healthcare. I, that's what I was passionate about because of my recoveries and my injury. And so I really got into the weeds of how patients are trying to find, how much freedom does a patient have to choose, what kind of restrictions are there on that. So I found that the independent practices were
frustrated because the hospitals would suck the good cases outta the market. Independent practices would often have a difficult time. They'd also be dependent on, in some cases, the hospital for parts of the care cycle, the surgery, the other things. And so I saw this trend where independents were trying to say, okay. I can maybe own my own destiny and not let the hospital dictate everything to me. It's the lay of the land that I found. Collin Stewart (09:00):
I wanted, I'd love to zoom in on one of those interviews. Do you remember, was there a specific time where you remember, oh, there might be something here, like a specific conversation or the way somebody said something? Ty Allen
(10:00):
the sports guy, he wants more. The hip and knee guy and the spine guy are where we make the most money. So I was able to talk to some of those, group, those guys and understand. And what I found was a lot of these guys were doing their own marketing on the side. They were part of a group. They had a group website, they had brand, and then they were building their own brand on the side. And they were paying a marketing guy on the side to do other stuff for them. And. They were competing against each other and their partners in thesame practice. Yeah. And so I listened to what they thought was valuable in the stuff they were doing on the side and said, why don't we, why don't we build that back into a suite that's really easy for your core team to to contract for the whole organization. Then you get synergy instead of competition. You're not causing your costs to go up as you compete with each other. And that to me was like, well, this is a need. I knew it was a need 'cause they were spending significantly on it. But nobody had built anything that made sense to
aggregate into a core thing for a large group or even a hospital group. Collin Stewart (11:00):
I love those moments where you, somebody says something and it just doesn't make sense to you. You're like, wait, you have a marketing team, but you also do your own marketing on the side. That's insane. Yeah. And they're like, and they didn't even know. Some of them Ty Allen
a bunch of customers we were, 'cause we just kept adding features and learning more. But we built something after maybe a good 10 or 12 deep dives that was valuable enough that people would start paying us. Collin Stewart (12:00):
Really interesting. I wanna follow up on the validation stage took longer than you think, but I wanna maybe ask the question now. How long did it take to get that first customer and who was it that dropped first? Ty Allen
(13:00):
of a big network. National network that's in 43 states where they aggregate, they get together every multiple times a year, share best practices. They don't compete with each other. So it's a, it's an association that allows them to share best practice with each other. And they started connecting me with, their friendlies and buddies in that area. And so we picked up customers in Arizona. And that Tennessee and I couldn't get in that, I couldn't get in that group as a vendor that national group for aboutanother year. But now almost all the people in that group use us so that networking effect and orthopedics is definitely still one of our better sub, one of our better specialties. I Collin Stewart: love it. And so it seems like if we think about Dave McClure's pirate metrics, right? You were able to acquire them, activate them, and retain them. And it sounds like, and obviously like the retention turned into the referral, I know I skipped revenue, but when I'm thinking about product market fit revenue is the,
like, is it check mark and not like a measurement when you're looking at this kind of thing, especially in the early days. And so it seemed really, seems like that referral coefficient was huge for you Here I. Ty Allen (14:00):
Yeah, and it worked because we worked with the group in Las Vegas to the point where they started seeing month to month measurable increases in patient flow and revenue. And so when they would connect us with one or two others, they would say, these guys are, what we're using with them is actually growing our revenue. And the cost is tiny. Collin Stewart
(15:00):
is that. I always am seeking the next layer of innovation. So we now have in our suite really four areas that we can sell. I just described to you the first one, which is managing listings, driving reputation building, which seems like a commodity now, but at that time it wasn't. And so I love to sell, but I also. Love to innovate. And so instead of just saying, okay, we got one thing and we're gonna, we're gonna now try to run the table with it I like to spinup a process where we have multiple threads. One that's doing that and one that continues to innovate and listen to the customers go deeper on what's the next feature That's. It's connected or ancillary to what we already do, but would really then continue our differentiation in the market. And so that's my passion actually. Like the stuff we're doing now with ai in helping these practices is the most fun I've ever had. And it's leading, it led we, I sold this
business in October of last year, and one of the reasons we sold it is because of the innovations, innovative stuff that we've been doing with ai. Collin Stewart (16:00):
I love that. And I'm, I'll follow up on that in a minute. For anybody who's listening going, oh, ask 'em that question. But I want to, I wanna stay on the kind of product market fit journey 'cause, so I think so much, so many founders get this advice where they're pressure to sell. You gotta sell right away. Not in terms of sell the company, but you gotta sell as many units as you can as fast as possible. But you hung in there and it sounds like you didn't really jump into sales and marketing as hard as you could. You tried to strengthen. The product to the point where you were getting that referral coefficient. And I have this like hypothesis that the stronger the product market fit as measured by your referral coefficient. So the percentage of folks that come through your pirate metric funnel and then end up, as giving you a referral is a one of the best measures of product market fit. And the stronger that number is, the easier your go to market.
(17:00):
Is gonna be, and I see a lot of founders and I've helped a lot of founders make this mistake. 'cause in my previous life I ran a demand gen agent or lead gen, a sales development agency. And I've seen so many people waste tons of time and money on inefficient go-to market because they didn't do this thing. What gave you that confidence that I need to continue strengthening when everybody else in the world at this time must have been. Raise as much as youcan. Spend as much as you can on sales and marketing. Ty Allen: So I gotta give some credit here to my my CTO, who really is a co-founder with me in the business. He's the young guy that I told you about that I first met him when he was 21, and he's an, he's an amazingly self-made guy, and he's super practical and what he wanted to do was cr make the product so well. Run so well managed that our expenses to roll out a customer, to implement a customer,
(18:00):
and to deliver really high quality, super high availability of our platform. That's, he's so passionate about it and so he. My tendency is a bit to, to go, as you've said let's grow as fast as we can. I also love to innovate and he's the guy that says, okay, we're gonna innovate, but we're gonna build it the right way. And so he kinda kept me grounded. He was like the counterbalance to my craziness a little bit. And I would say that's a big portion ofwhy we've been successful is. I would lean to be too aggressive and he would lean possibly to be too conservative. And the balance helped us find the right mix in there of investing in the platform versus purely just selling whatever we could sell. Collin Stewart: It and it sounds like there's a lot of credit due to both of the founders here for playing this kind of the balancing act. 'cause I could totally see somebody who I hired when they were 21
joining me as a co-founder. I'm an experienced entrepreneur. Now, I could very easily dominate that relationship. Not that I would, but you could see how those power dynamics would play out. It sounds like that wasn't an issue for you. Ty Allen (19:00):
Yeah. I had enough wisdom. I don't know how much wisdom I have, but I had enough wisdom to listen to him. And he's also such a hardworking guy that he may do with, we, like, I funded the startup, like we didn't take any seed funding. This is I funded this with my own winnings from a previous business. And we resisted taking any outside funding until we were at a metric that we felt was, we were comfortable with. That took a little longer than we wanted, but we decided as a team that was okay. Amazing. And I, so I, sorry, I don't know that I have a really solid data for you on when to make that decision. Yeah, I think it had more to do with our team dynamics and just reading the market, how big we thought it was, and the ability that. We
(20:00):
had to, we didn't have to have hypergrowth. We knew that if we did the right things, we'd get to that point at some time. And building the platform was one of a, one of the things that high quality platform was one of the things we wanted to emphasize. And in the end, that high quality platform was the reason we got acquired. When the diligence process ran from the group that ended up buying us, they looked at two or three competitors and they came back and said, well, your platform's like 10 times better than any of them. They have great sales and marketing, but we can see how we can take your platformat scale. To do really interesting things. Collin Stewart: Amazing. How did you, so you got your first customers from the customer development process. Talking to folks that you had met talking to folks that, those 12 other groups that you'd interviewed, it sounds like the next group was that, was it straight to referrals from there or was there any other channels in the in between, like, I'm trying to figure out where did that next cohort, was it right to referrals and referrals the whole way, or what came next? I. Ty Allen: So we started joining associations exhibiting at events. And that next
(21:00):
chunk of business, which was still in orthopedics by the way. We spent the first two and a half to three years only in orthopedics and related things. So therapy, occupational therapy, most of it was word of mouth, but there was a layer that we started to add in of traditional marketing activities. So we added some, a co a, a group who, a guy who would call outbound to these groups and did the little traditional marketing. We didn't have a lot of budget, but we started getting customers outside of our referral networkto add to the. To the mix. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. And maybe I'd love to describe the moment where you realized, 'cause you said it, it took a while for you to continue to invest in the product. And you feel like you didn't find, you, didn't you? You found product market fit, but it wasn't where you wanted it to be. I'd love you. It wasn't complete. It wasn't complete. Describe the moment when you realized it might be complete. Ty Allen: Well, I still have other ideas. We're working on some other really cool stuff,
(22:00):
but but I knew we had a suite of tools that was good enough when, large hospital groups who got connected to us came in and said, wow, we could use this and we could, we can cut three vendors out of our customer, out of our vendor base. Put your platform in place. Get the ROI tracking that's built into your platform to help us measure all marketing dollars that we're spending, and we now have full grasp of what our dollars in healthcare marketing arebuying us. That was that. When I had a big hospital group tell me that, I went, wow, that's a story I should be telling, and I have never even said it before. Collin Stewart: It's amazing when you're doing something so new and your customer's words are so much more powerful than, yeah. All the gobbledy gook that's going around in here. Ty Allen: Too many words in my head. I heard this customer say that. I wrote it down and we started trying to use that
in our storytelling Collin Stewart (23:00):
tattooed all across the website. Of course. Yep. Talk to me about what comes next. Sounds like you've, the, you required last year, you're focusing on, you've got some other things coming down the pipeline. What's next for Ty and Social Climb? Ty Allen
(24:00):
predictive models that can telemarketer in their geographic area. Who's trending toward certain types of care or who's likely to be trending towards certain types of care. So instead of marketing to the million people in your area who you feel from an age perspective are the right people to market, to just market to these 20,000 people. The response rates to that type of marketing is like. 10 x over per dollar. So just a return on investment when you mark it with a knowntargeted audience is so much better. And so that's our, that's the last feature set that we built. And we layered on top of that, the ROI tracking that opened the door for the acquisition by a company called RL dx, which most people wouldn't know. R Ldx is. They're headquartered in the uk but they've got quite a presence in the US and these guys are asking us to do something similar to what I just described. But to get smarter about patient safety. So nobody's yet in the market,
(25:00):
done, and I'm getting really nerdy here, but nobody's done patients patient experience, data collection and understanding and patient safety analysis. The scary thing is. When you go to the hospital, you have a 6% chance of having something negative happen to you an infection, a mistake by someone. It happens that needs to get improved. How can we improve that? How can we learn from what patients are telling us about their experience in reviews and surveys combined with all thedata that we have about patient harm incidents that do happen? And build a machine that identifies what patterns are going wrong in these hospitals and make suggestions on policies and procedures to diminish those incidents and make it safer, make it better for everyone. That's the theory behind the acquisition of my business into rl. So it's not marketing anymore. It is. Of course, there's a marketing layer of that. Once you tell the story, once you know that you're better, of
course, literally making. Healthcare safer is our next quest. Collin Stewart (26:00):
Did that come with a high vis vest? Ty Allen
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