Validate your idea and generate sales by pitching a webinar!

Josh: Hi, I'm Josh Ledgard. And this is the On Growth podcast from KickoffLabs. In today's episode, we're talking to Dr. Sham, he's a doctor with an entrepreneurial streak. You'll learn why one of his first ideas failed and how he changed his marketing playbook to include KickoffLab for his most recent success. What I love about today's story is how he didn't validate his idea by asking, would you be interested in my eventual product? He created a validation campaign that asked people to come to a helpful webinar, where he was going to present some solutions people could use right away. This strategy is something anybody could do if they were concerned with putting up yet another wait list page to build their audience. If you enjoyed this episode, please search for KickoffLabs on growth in your podcast app of choice and give it a subscribe. Enjoy the show.

Josh: Hi everyone. I'm Josh Ledgard from KickoffLabs. And today I have with me, Dr. Sham from WellMedic. WellMedic is a company that has now helped over 10,000 doctors pass their postgraduate exams within the last 18 months since their launch. Before they launched, they connected with KickoffLabs, and we're certainly going to talk through that. First of all, like to get a little background on you. So thanks for joining us today and sharing what you've learned with our audience.

Dr. Sham: Thanks for having me.

Josh: Yeah. So could you tell me, do you have a technical background? Obviously you have a doctorate. Are you a doctor primarily? How would you describe your own background?

Dr. Sham: So I'm a doctor with a strong interest in creating communities. So I qualified as a doctor in 2013, and I effectively went through a huge amount of burnout as a doctor in the first two years of graduating. And I was looking for anything to leave being a doctor. So I had got married at that point and I had quite an awful experience getting married, well, planning my wedding, not getting married. And I effectively thought, well, this is a horrible process, so I'm going to try and improve the wedding industry.

Dr. Sham: And as naive as I was, I went down the route of creating a tech startup for weddings and I learned lots through that. Unfortunately, it didn't go to the plan that we thought it was going to go through. And following that, I just kind of rekindled my love with medicine and went back into practicing as a doctor. And I'm now doing the equivalent of what's called family medicine, or general practice in the UK. So I'm, I would say I'm primarily a doctor now, but I now use my skills as a doctor and the skills that I gained from my startup journey to now help doctors who were in my position a couple of years ago to get to that stage where they can qualify from their post-graduate exams and then practice as as a family medicine doctor or a general practitioner.

Josh: That's great. So let's go back. You mentioned you started a business, a startup about proving the wedding experience. Can you tell me what that was specifically? And we were talking earlier, you mentioned, like, I think I did everything wrong in that business. So could you kind of walk through that for our audience?

Dr. Sham: Yeah, of course. So it was a business called Perfect Planner and it was an online marketplace which helped connect couples to vendors of their choice based on their individual requirements. So what we hoped to do was to try and curate suppliers or wedding vendors based on the budget that a couple had, or their specific religious requirements or the number of people that they wanted to invite to their wedding. We set up a system which worked on a kind of initially it was very traditional in its setup in the sense that we asked people for monthly subscription fee and they can advertise, and we had different packages. And at the very beginning we really struggled to recruit wedding vendors rather than couples. So we were trying to build like which side of the marketplace do we build up first, and we really struggled with that.

Dr. Sham: So we went back to the drawing board and thought, okay, well, we need to be really niche in what we are doing. So we went down the route of being very specific around Asian weddings. So you've probably heard of like your big fat Indian wedding, for example. And we really narrowed down on that community and we found that there was some specific pain points within that community. And then what we did was we built up the other side of the marketplace and we set up kind of loads of Google ad campaigns, which were relatively easy because it was a competitive keyword. We set up some Facebook ads as well at the time, it gained quite a good number of couples that were using the website. And then what we said is, look, we've become the experts in the Asian wedding market and we now want to secure like a percentage profit instead. So that's how we built up the business.

 

 

Dr. Sham: Now, the big mistake that we made was we didn't quite think about this intermediation and how we were going to process payments. We didn't really think about the user journey at the time. So from planning your wedding to getting married is like an 18 month period. So we didn't quite think about the logistics of how we were going to be paid. So we just ended up with a massive bed and unfortunately we had to close the company down.

Dr. Sham: But yeah, that's the journey in a nutshell, really about how the wedding business went.

Josh: Yeah, that's really fascinating. So you guys, you start this business and you chose the most hard route, which is I'm going to build a two-sided marketplace and then you started out and you said, we're going to make it a general audience on both sides at first. And so we're going to make it doubly hard it's for everybody.

Dr. Sham: Yes.

Josh: And then once you did niche it down and start building up the audience on both sides of a niched side of it, then it sounds like your issue is just not thinking through like, okay, there's a timeline, these customers want a set amount and then they churn like, how are we being paid over time for all this, and that became a challenge for you guys.

Dr. Sham: Yeah, pretty much. That was the biggest challenge at that point. And I guess like the difference between that business and this business is this business I really understand the user in that business-

Josh: So now we're talking about WellMedic?

Dr. Sham: Yeah.

Josh: And so with WellMedic, obviously can you give... I think you gave your pitch already. So you're high helping doctors pass their postgraduate exam so they can start their own family practice?

Dr. Sham: Pretty much. Yeah.

Josh: And so when I go to the WellMedic website, the first thing I see is like our highly successful courses help GP trainees pass the MRCGP, which I assume to your customers means a great deal. Obviously, when I read it from the US, I'm like, I don't know what that is.

Josh: So you're doing something better nicheing down to your customers here.

Josh: You mentioned before we were talking that with this business, you did a customer validation before you got to the point where you've had 10,000 doctors pass. So can you talk to me about how you did the customer validation besides just knowing that for you personally, it might have been helpful.

Dr. Sham: Yeah. So again, this again feeds back on the mistakes of the previous business, doesn't it, in terms of there wasn't a huge amount of validation that we did at that point. We had an idea and we thought it was great. So when it came to this business, we had an idea, we thought it was great, we thought we could help people pass their MRCGP. But I was just hugely reluctant in building a product and doing a whole amount of the tech side of stuff this time.

Dr. Sham: I just thought we need something that's going to be really quick that we can test some of the assumptions that we have. And the biggest assumption that we had was that there is a challenge in achieving this qualification. Like that was the biggest thing for us and how we went about doing that was effectively where, as you mentioned earlier, KickoffLabs came in for us as the way validating our assumptions. And we just wanted to do something really quick, where we could test to see whether people really had a pain point in passing this exam. And that's where the campaign really kicked off from.

KickoffLabs came in for us as a way of validating our assumptions. And we just wanted to do something really quick, where we could test to see whether people really had a pain point in passing this exam. And that's where the campaign really kicked off from.

Josh: Talk to me about the campaign, because I think that this campaign was interesting because while some people are setting up and using KickoffLabs to validate an idea by essentially just pitching the product that doesn't necessarily exist yet, you were pitching something to that audience that was helping them solve their problem, but not necessarily like the product itself that you were doing.

Dr. Sham: That's true.

what we did as a team was we set up a webinar that was our hook or our validation as such.

Josh: So talk to me about what specifically you were offering as part of this customer validation campaign through KickoffLabs.

Dr. Sham: In fact, if you had a 15 points strategy in my mind, in terms of how they could pass this qualification, that's what I had. That was my product. And what I did was, or what we did as a team was we set up a webinar that was our hook or our validation as such. And we just wanted to see how many people were interested in attending a webinar, which would help them pass this exam.

Josh: And was this a paid webinar or a free webinar?

Dr. Sham: No, this was a free webinar.

Josh: So you're giving that away for free that you were going to have this webinar in terms of helping them pass. And was it sort of an overview of the course you were eventually wanted to sell or was it like a module of the course itself?

Dr. Sham: So it was an overview. So we had this 15 point strategy. And what we did was we summarized it into less than an hour. But what I did this time round, which I hadn't done for other businesses was within each point, there was almost a reason for why people would want the course. So for example, there's lots of medicines that we need to use, drugs that we prescribe, okay, and part of the exam is really understanding the intricacies of those medications, when they're not suitable, what happens if a patient is pregnant, what happens if a patient is breastfeeding and you need to know all of this information.

So we knew that by just sharing these little key pieces of information throughout this webinar, that when we then come to the end of the webinar and we sell the product, that the conversion was going to be higher. 

Dr. Sham: And one of the things that we had done in our own preparation for this exam is we had built up that into a big table already. So by just using that table, you are going to save yourself about three weeks of revision time.

Dr. Sham: So considering that when you take these exams, you're working at the same time and you're working in very busy environments in the hospitals, for example. So we knew that by just sharing these little key pieces of information throughout this webinar, that when we then come to the end of the webinar and we sell the product, that the conversion was going to be higher. And actually the conversion was really, really good for the product, and that's how we kind of used that webinar as another extra poll in addition to everything that we were offering as a reward within the campaign itself.

Josh: Let's talk about the campaign a little bit in more detail. So how did you find KickoffLabs?

Dr. Sham: Oh, I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Really easy to use and yeah, it was the feature of just having the landing page on there and just having a landing page builder. For someone who's a non-technical founder, that was great.

Josh: So you liked the simplified landing page builder. So you just built a signup page for the webinar within KickoffLabs?

Dr. Sham: Yeah, pretty much.

Josh: And how did you go about marketing that signup page? Because a lot of people can figure out like, okay, the builder's easy enough, I can get a page out there and then there's like crickets.

Josh: And so you had, you told me 800 doctors had signed up for this webinar. And so how did you go about marketing to doctors to the point where you got 800 people to sign up?

Dr. Sham: Interestingly, you're absolutely right. You build a page and think, okay. So I built the page first and then retrospectively, well, not retrospective, but after building the page, I thought, okay, but what I'm going to do now? I have this page, I have this webinar that's coming up, how are we going to get it out there?

Oh, I loved it [KickoffLabs]. Absolutely loved it. Really easy to use and yeah, it was the feature of just having the landing page on there and just having a landing page builder. For someone who's a non-technical founder, that was great.

Dr. Sham: I remember reading a book called "Traction", which is like, I can't remember who the author was, but it was like kind of the different types of ways to kind of get traction effectively to this landing page. And I just selected kind of three ways that we thought we would do it. So the first way was that I had an email list of doctors that I had worked with already over the last kind of eight years or so since I qualified as a doctor. I just kept everyone's email in a separate list and I just sent a mail shot to everyone saying, Hey, by the way, this is something I do. If you know anyone who's taking this exam please, please send it to them. So that was kind of the manual way that we did it.

Dr. Sham: The second thing that we did was I set up some Google ads because I had quite a lot of experience from the previous business on using Google ads. So I set up an ad campaign and so I initially I had to set up a test on some of the kind of generic words or generic exam phrases that we were using, and then just kind of iterated the campaign over a couple of days until I found what I felt people were clicking onto the website and signing up with and then I just kind of improved that campaign. And we spent not, not a huge amount of money to be fair. It's not an overly competitive space on Google.

And ultimately the success from the campaign actually came from a kind of handful of people who had signed up that then did most of the sharing forwards using KickoffLabs.

Dr. Sham: And then the last thing we did was we went down the kind of Facebook ads route and just created some nice graphics. I used another kind of tool called Ad Espresso, which I've used previously and just changed that to different ads, just with some different copy and then we used that.

Dr. Sham: And ultimately the success from the campaign actually came from a kind of handful of people who had signed up that then did most of the sharing forwards using KickoffLabs.

Josh: So you had, of the 800 people that signed up, a lot of them were coming from people who would turn out to be influencers that you discovered through KickoffLabs?

Dr. Sham: Exactly. Exactly that. Yeah.

Josh: And were you offering them anything for sharing or is it just like Hey, if you know somebody sign up for this as well because they might find it useful.

Dr. Sham: So interestingly and something that I've come to learn about my community is that they almost want our business to be their best kept secret because you're directly in competition with the people that you're trying to help.

Dr. Sham: So when you're taking the exam, then you have to have almost like a... You don't need to, and this is a possibly a misconception, but we are naturally quite competitive as doctors so we don't naturally help each other when it comes to exams, because if you think about trying to get into doing a doctorate, it's very competitive.

Dr. Sham: So we found that actually sharing isn't overly straightforward. However, within this campaign, what we did was there was a mystery around what we were offering and the initial mystery was solved by one of our eBooks.

Dr. Sham: So we created an ebook, which we gave as a very low hanging fruit. As long as you shared it on your social media page or referred kind of one colleague, you immediately got your hands on the ebook. And that was, I think, where a lot of the success came from. And then following that, once you'd had a read of the ebook, then there was a kind of follow up email sequence that we set up using convert kit. And then we said, look, the second reward is that we'd guarantee you 10% of our course when we launch it. And then the third kind of reward, which is the hardest one, was that we'll just give you the cost for free. So that's kind of how we incentivize that sharing to take place using the influences on KickoffLabs.

Josh: That's all very cool.

Josh: And so the 800 number of doctors that signed up, I think you mentioned earlier when we were chatting before this, that you were happy with the result because the audience that you thought you had was around three and a half thousand. So how did you know what the potential audience was?

we've effectively secured 50% of our audience, yeah which is massive. It was beyond what I thought we would achieve to be fair at that time.

Dr. Sham: So the potential audience is the number of trainees that take that exam per year. So we know that from the body that governs the examination. So we knew that year we had three and a half thousand people that we needed to get to-

Josh: That were going to be interested in making it easier for them to pass this exam.

Dr. Sham: Yeah. And actually, if we really look at the numbers, it was probably 50% of that were probably focused on taking the exam at that given point. So if you break it down that way, we've effectively secured 50% of our audience, yeah which is massive. It was beyond what I thought we would achieve to be fair at that time.

Josh: That's amazing. So can you tell me then since you did this launch how did you go from having this list, you have this webinar that I assume was well attended, and you said each point in the webinar was a reason to buy the course.

Josh: At the time when you had the webinar, did you have the course live then at that point that people could buy right away from the webinar? Or is that still another waiting period for people?

Dr. Sham: No, so we had an incomplete course, that's the best way to describe it. So we had most of it ready. This idea effectively took place over a four week period whilst working at the same time. So we did have, by the webinar date, we had enough to sell and we sold directly off the back of the webinar.

Josh: So you did invite the people to purchase for at the webinar.

Dr. Sham: Yes.

Josh: And you had enough to sell, meaning that you had in like the first parts of the course that you knew people could get through. And then you were saying, the second part will be posted in two weeks or something.

Dr. Sham: Exactly that.

Josh: Where they could get onto it.

Dr. Sham: Yeah. And I know of course, because it was like, it was fully ready. Like we said, look, this is like an initial introductory price, you will never get at this price at, and that introductory price always helps kind of draw in those initial customers as well.

Josh: Yep. So you're giving them something as a reward for being like early adopters, for being the influencers, for being the people who signed up for this webinar.

Dr. Sham: Exactly that.

Josh: It doesn't have to involve KickoffLabs obviously, but how do you go from 800 people signing up for this initial webinar to 18 months later, you've helped 10,000 doctors pass these exams. Because that's quite an achievement.

Dr. Sham: Yes.

Josh: And I want to know how you carry the business to that level.

Dr. Sham: It's been a real slog and I'm sure everyone who has a business will kind of agree. Probably agree with me on that in terms of trying to push the needle every time is really difficult because initially that give and then it stops and you have to reassess and then you got to give it that next push and each push for me is a bit more difficult in terms of how we push it on.

Dr. Sham: Now, interestingly for ourselves and this all stems back to kind of our initial launch, our main signups are from referrals. So people who have already used the course, they've passed and once they've passed, then they're willing to tell their friends about it. So that's the general journey.

Dr. Sham: However, we've had to do a lot of content based marketing in order to secure our customers and become a relevant body within this industry.

Dr. Sham: And the way that we've done that is we have a blog, we've ran some really interesting blogs that answer very specific questions for our audience. So just stuff that's not necessarily around the product, but around their pain points as trainee doctors.

Dr. Sham: For example, there's a portfolio that they need to complete. So we talk a lot about the portfolio. There is a big problem about how much do you earn as a training doctor, so what I did was I just shared my entire salary for three years with them, and that blog piece worked really well.

Dr. Sham: So like I literally just went through all my pay slips over the last 36 months and I just published it onto a couple of infographics and then told them how they can calculate what their salary will be. So that worked really well.

Dr. Sham: We set up a podcast which would go through clinical scenarios around the AKT and actually that's been probably our best acquisition tool outside of our kind of email marketing referral system. And rather than doing like these big podcast episodes, like 30 minutes to 45 minutes, what this may be, we created a micro podcast series, which is effectively like a four minute podcast episode. And it's enough because our retention rate on that's really high and then they learn a bit more about the business and that's done really well on Spotify. It's done really well on Apple podcast. So that's been a good acquisition tool. And then we do lots of email marketing.

Dr. Sham: Like I can share some stats around our email marketing, I'll just bring-

Josh: No, I'd love to hear it because I hear people as we do this all the time, say like, why do I want to collect leads email address? Why don't I just connect with them on Facebook, and won't that get me enough customers.

92% of our email list have engaged with our content in the last 30 days. So that really helps kind of reassure us that our email marketing's working.

Dr. Sham: Yeah. Yeah. I see exactly what you mean. So our average open rate in terms of all time rate is 65%. Our engagement rate, if we look at it over the last kind of 30 days, because Convert It let you do that kind of engagement rate based on stars. And 92% of our email list have engaged with our content in the last 30 days. So that really helps kind of reassure us that our email marketing's working.

Dr. Sham: And initially when I did the email marketing, it was very like here's our product, this is what you need to know about our product. And we've completely shifted away from that. And we've now gone to just informing, because it's a very personal brand, it's very much around my journey. So I just share things about what my practice is like at the moment, what my pain points are like at the moment. And I think that helps kind of just build that kind of personal relationship with people. So I think that's been quite cool.

Why don't we set up these little podcasts that people can hear when they've got a couple of minutes...

Josh: No, I can see like going through your website, I've been going through as you were talking, you've built up a tremendous wealth of content in a short amount of time. And so that's, I'm sure, driving a lot of your traffic coming through from people signing up. I love the idea, the kind of micro content and the micro podcast. So where did you come up with doing like, oh instead of these... Because that's the opposite of what you hear, you hear like, oh, you should have really long content. You should have like 10,000 word blog articles or you should have a 40 minute how to pass this test podcast where it's all answered in one episode that people can just listen to.

Josh: So what drove you to doing this kind of micro content like this?

it was just really understanding that pain point and how it adds to that journey.

Dr. Sham: I think understanding our customer and having been through that journey myself. I know that when I... So you know how we have to work in the hospital at the same time of preparing for this exam, sometimes you only get maybe five or 10 minutes in the day to actually sit down. And when I was preparing for the exam, my initial thoughts were okay, I need to do something within this 15, 20 minute period that I may have now, if it's a little bit longer, I'm going to do some revision. And then I thought, okay, great, why don't we set up these little podcasts that people can hear when they've got a couple of minutes there and that's exactly where the idea came from. And so it was just really understanding that pain point and how it adds to that journey.

Dr. Sham: And now I get quite a lot of messages about, oh, Sham on the way to work, I just have your podcast on repeat, because it just keeps going through different clinical podcasts. So we have almost like people reusing the podcast and then what it does is that it kind of shares because what I do in the podcast is I share a clinical scenario, but then I follow up with the theory behind how the episode was made. So this has come from this guidance and this is the information that you need. And if you sign up to our course, we'll teach you about how you can is for every clinical scenario that you encounter.

Dr. Sham: So it's almost like a bit of a tease in terms of like I've done these podcast episodes, but you can learn everything, but for your day to day practice, as long as you follow these techniques and that's effectively where the course is coming.

Josh: Another question about the podcast, so are these scenarios that you're doing the episodes and I'm looking at scenario 45, the fit test here, are these scenarios they're really specific and I assume there's sort of an unlimited number of scenarios that could be on the exam that you guys see in sample exams. And so you could keep doing these forever. And then what you're pitching to sell, if somebody at the end of the podcast is like, Hey, if you take the course, we'll walk you through like how we come up with these answers.

Dr. Sham: Exactly that. Exactly that.

Dr. Sham: And if you go to our most expensive course, which is our mock course, which is a kind of 200 question podcast, well, effectively it's 200 questions that they can do, and then we have like a small podcast episode just explaining how we came to create the question, but also how we found the answer to that question.

Dr. Sham: So effectively we just use the same podcast format to then build another course as well, which has worked really well.

Josh: How do you have the time to generate all this content? Do you have people on your team that are helping with the blog posts, and it looks like you're doing the podcast.

Dr. Sham: Yeah. So we have a team of three people. So it's a very small team. One of our co-founders is my wife who also works as a family medicine practitioner. So we do it together and yeah, it's okay in terms of it doesn't require a huge amount of effort for us to develop these scenarios because this is just our day to day practice.

Dr. Sham: So for example, I see a patient this morning as an example, with gall stones, pain in their tummy, vomiting episodes. So I can use that kind of okay. But I'm going to just let's just see what the guidance says about gall stones just to remind myself. And then when I get home on the way home, I'll just write a scenario down and say, okay, well there's a scenario about gall stones and we can recycle this as some content.

Dr. Sham: So we just keep information within a Google sheet and whoever has time just accesses it, comes up with a bit of content and then we just keep posting stuff out regularly.

So really think about the delivery and the mediums in which you use to deliver that course.

Josh: No, that's great. What else would you tell somebody who's maybe going into the business of thinking about starting a business where they're selling courses, like what haven't we talked about that would be great advice you think, for somebody who wants to make either like a full-time job or on the side, make extra money selling a course about something?

I created loads of Google sheets in terms of those tables that I explained earlier. And what I realized was that's our biggest asset.

Dr. Sham: I think there has to be... The most difficult thing for me about building the course was preparation of the course about how there has to be a good structure to your course. So really think about the delivery and the mediums in which you use to deliver that course. So what type of lessons are you going to use? Are they going to be video lessons? Will some be audio lessons? Are you going to create some PDF content within there? How accessible would the content be? Are you going to allow your users to download that content onto their devices? Because with that comes they may send that content to their peers without necessarily that person being signed up to the course, you have to be very specific in what you are allowed to be shared, what can't be shared, what can only be accessed within the site itself.

Dr. Sham: So they're the types of things that you really have to give good thought to, because when we initially launched the course, one of the things that I did was I created like loads of Google sheets in terms of those tables that I explained earlier. And what I realized was that's our biggest asset. And what started to happen was I was just saying to people, okay, once you signed up, if you just send me an email, I'll give you access to those Google sheets.

Dr. Sham: And we started to realize that people were just copying and pasting the content into their own Google sheets and then sending it to other people. And it's only then when we had people coming back to us, oh, I really want to use your course, but I've already seen all your tables. You're like, wait, how did that happen? And then we realized, okay, what we need to do is we need to think about doing these as PDFs, which are not downloadable, that can only be accessed on the course itself when they've logged in. And then that's how we took back some control over that.

Josh: So if I were to kind of restate what you said, a big part of the advice is when you're saying think about the structure and delivery method is thinking through what's the content that people are paying for. What's the content that you're willing to give away. Because you give away a lot of content on your website. I mean, you can pretty much spend hours studying for this, just looking at the free content on your website. It seems like you have to make conscious decisions about like, okay, we're going to give away all of this type of content, but these are the walls we're going to have the paywall where you can only get this content while you're paying or after you've paid in this format in particular.

Dr. Sham: Yes, that's correct. That's it.

So you want to future proof your brand to allow for growth.

Dr. Sham: And I think the other thing too, that we are now considering as a business is how we move onto the next stage. Like how do we make our market bigger? Because we have a very niche community of the three and a half thousand doctors per year, for example. So what we're now thinking about is how do you allow for expansion? How do you allow for growth? And that's where we're at the moment. And now we're thinking about different communities to tap in within the medical sphere. So you've got your physician associates, you've got your medical students, you've got your advanced care practitioners. You've got junior doctors, you've got doctors who have qualified as family practice doctors, but still require some degree of support with different elements of their career.

Dr. Sham: So you want to future proof your brand to allow for growth. I think that would be another thing.

Dr. Sham: That's definitely something that we've tried to build in here and we'll see if it works in the next couple of months or years.

Josh: Great. So that answered my next question, which was what's next for you guys? So expanding within the audience of the medical field, even, probably within the concept of like people education in the medical field, like expanding the courses or the offerings you've got to some other parts of that.

Dr. Sham: Yes, that's correct. Yeah.

Josh: This has been a great conversation. So thank you for coming on. I love talking to people like you building cool content, cool courses, doing a great job marketing that, obviously the growth has been phenomenal and amazing to me that your start with it using KickoffLabs to validate that initial webinar. So it's always fun for me to meet people that have had that success from that starting point.

Josh: So thanks again for being on, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Dr. Sham: Thank you very much. It's almost bedtime here.

Josh: All right. Thank you.

Dr. Sham: Thanks Josh.