Medflix – How Do You Build an Engine to Hit Product-Market Fit?

The need to create something, from real-world objects, technology, art, and architecture to babies, is arguably one of the reasons for human ascendence to the top of the animal kingdom. Although, before the rise of the internet, geography and financial resources limited creators from displaying their creations to the broader community. Today, the ubiquity and affordability of the internet are paving the way for an exciting sub-economy around creators!

Without delving into the evolution of a creator, I want to draw attention to the rise of video as the primary medium of creation today. The video format, from recorded to live and short to long-form, is ideal for creators seeking flexibility, high degrees of creative freedom, and ownership of their creations. The distribution of video content has given rise to behemoths dedicated to the needs of specific categories of creators – from makeup artists to video gamers. These include:

• Instagram and TikTok in the short-form video category for fashion and travel

• YouTube and Netflix in the long-form video category for education and entertainment

• Zoom and Twitch in the live video category for conferences and gaming

The platforms mentioned above have a mass appeal and no prerequisites to signing up. However, with the rising proliferation of content, there has been a parallel implosion of misinformation and fake news. Doctors, who form a critical subset of creators and consumers, want to stay updated with the latest trends in medicine (especially during peak Covid uncertainty). However, they are turning away from these platforms due to trust issues and a poor discovery experience. To regain the lost trust of doctors and empower them to create medical content freely, Medflix was born!

Early Days – Clubhouse Phenomenon

Medflix was born out of the union of three key trends – the early success of Clubhouse, increasing internet penetration in India, and the rising popularity of live video - to become the world’s first live e-learning platform dedicated exclusively to doctors. I think of Medflix as a two-sided marketplace with celebrated doctors as creators on one side and doctors eager to learn as consumers on the other – exchanging ideas through live interactive video.

In The Cold Start Problem, Andrew Chen talks about identifying and onboarding the hard side of your network first. For Medflix, cracking the hard side of the platform meant onboarding the 1 % of doctors in the country who have risen to the top of their respective fields and can speak emphatically in their domain of expertise. But how do you get some of the busiest professionals in the country to create content?

There are three things that doctors value, over and above their thirst for knowledge and commitment to the patient, which come in-built into their operating system. The first is a sense of community, the second is a sense of brand recognition, and the third is a certain exclusivity commensurate with the effort it took them to reach their current position. At Medflix, we tapped into these core insights to productize the experience for doctors.

Community –> Clubs

Brand Building –> Live Weekly Shows

Exclusivity –> Doctor-verified Members Only

We found that if you give a creator these three ingredients with a clear path to monetization, they tend to stick around. But what about the consumer side of the network?

Calculated Growth – Be Deliberate with Acquisition

You cannot grow a doctor-exclusive platform as you would a regular social media network, where you have the liberty to flood the market with campaigns, acquire at scale, and monetize through personalized advertisements. There is a certain sophistication required in onboarding doctors through atypical acquisition channels by doing things that needn’t scale. We tapped into existing hospital networks, word of mouth through school alumni, and medical associations present in most states.

For acquiring users who have a low tolerance for friction and tightly constrained schedules, we had to demonstrate a clear value add with our communication. A simple messaging campaign allowed us to acquire users on three unique selling points, which demonstrably solved for pain points faced by the doctors daily. Our differentiation includes:

1. High-Quality Content Streams

2. Superior Aggregation Experience

3. Free Access to Trustworthy Creators

By growing the top of the funnel with this deliberate high-touch approach to acquiring users, we had a front-row seat to the problems doctors were facing. This strategy allowed us to sharpen our pitch and develop our product roadmap with direct input from our early adopters. Brian Chesky of Airbnb put it very eloquently:

“The roadmap often exists in the minds of the users you are designing things for.”

But the elephant in the room still lingers: does any of this ensure product-market fit?

How are we evaluating Product-Market Fit for Medflix?

Product-Market Fit is probably one of the most widely thrown-around phrases in the world of technology and startups. But for all the fanfare, there is no single metric or threshold to measure PMF that cuts across product categories. PMF is not a quantifiable destination, but it looks different for different segments of products and users. I evaluate PMF for Medflix through a framework of questions I borrowed from The Cold Start Problem, Diffusion, and the Superhuman blog.

1. Are existing doctors bringing more doctors?

2. Are doctors sharing your content across the internet?

3. Is engagement increasing over time as doctors see more value in the product?

4. Does the network have a high enough diversity – age, specialty, geography?

5. Does the network density facilitate a free exchange of ideas between doctors?

6. How disappointed would doctors be if they could no longer use Medflix?

We use a systematic way to track each of these questions closely. For example, we ran focus group discussions with different segments of users (power users, occasional users, and churned users) to understand their motivation behind using Medflix and what we could be doing to improve their respective experiences. In the words of the legendary Reid Hoffman :

“Passionate feedback is a clue that your product matters to someone, and one passionate user can turn to many, if you listen carefully.”

So, how does this all play out?

Closing Thoughts

The vision of Medflix is to revolutionize the way doctors access medical education in India and make the process of learning more fun and engaging than it has traditionally been. The second-order effect, we hope, is more doctors are inspired to participate actively in the creator economy of sharing and exchanging ideas, growing their brand, and actively participating in community building.

To achieve this, we must consciously evolve our mindset of scale and the metrics we are tracking for evaluating PMF. In a universe where you could potentially capture the 1 million allopathic doctors in India, we have early indications that we are on the right track to hitting PMF. However, it would be a little premature to call it before we experience its magic.

Anyways, back to building!

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Note: The views on here are my own! You can find our website at medflix.app