for Wellbe, LLC · August 2026The app is effectively complete and the backoffice is live in production, but it has not been formally taken to market yet - deliberately, and on your call. What this document is about is what happens when it is. Recruiting the first clinics and putting the first patients in front of them is a different job from building the platform, and it needs someone whose whole week is pointed at it.
Clinician supply first, patient demand second, and the gate between them is density - not a date. A patient who searches a metro with four clinics in it gets a bad answer, uninstalls, and is gone for good - a download you only get once, spent on an empty result. Density is what turns that risk off.
And density is measured per care area, per metro - because people look for care where they live. Somebody in Memphis needing a scan will not use a marketplace that is strong in Denver, so a national install count means nothing. What means something is one procedure, in one city, with enough places to choose between.
So patient marketing stays switched off until a specific care area in a specific metro clears a threshold you set together in the first month. Then it goes on hard for that pairing - creators, a research article and a cost-of-care press release, all naming the service and the city - and moves to the next pairing as it fills.
Run patient acquisition nationally, or in any metro that hasn't cleared the density bar. Paid traffic into a thin marketplace buys uninstalls, and the six-month clinician trial means you'd be paying to fill a market that isn't earning yet either.
Pick one metro. Fill it with clinicians using outbound and partnerships, which are the two channels that work at low volume against a list you can name. Then open the demand channels in that one metro and let it become the template for the next one.
The named list of every practice in the first metro worth contacting, and the tracking that ties what gets spent to the clinics that actually sign.
Recruiting runs against that list and against the organizations those practices already trust. Care area by care area, the market gets dense enough to be worth showing to patients.
Patient demand opens where a market is genuinely full. The method that got it there is then known rather than guessed at, and it gets pointed at the next metro.
The first market is the expensive one, because the method is being worked out while it runs. Every metro needs its own list built from scratch, so what carries forward is not the list - it is the playbook. How to build and score that list, what research earns a practice's attention, which kinds of partner actually move clinics, and what density has to look like before patients are invited in.
How long one metro takes depends on the metro, and it may be well short of a year. A year is what makes the second one worth having, because that is when the method stops being an experiment and starts being repeatable. Stopping after the first market means paying to build the playbook and never running it.
The specific plays behind each stage are in What we'd run first, and what each of them costs in team time is on Build your team.
The same way every seat on your team is billed. No percentage of your ad budget and no management fee stacked on media spend - an agency paid a slice of your spend has a reason to tell you to spend more, and your engineer doesn't.
It enters with a number attached and a result that would tell us to kill it. When the number comes back the channel either scales or shuts off, and the budget moves.
A channel you have ruled out is worth nearly as much as one you have found. Both tell you where the next dollar should go.
No advertising budget is proposed here. Paid channels are deliberately the last ones to open, and what you spend gets set with you in the first month against your own economics - what a subscribed clinic is worth, and what you are willing to pay to get one. The only spend you are committing to here is the person.
Before anything ships we say what we expect it to do, and we name the result that would tell us to stop.
One hypothesis per variant, so a result points at a cause instead of at a guess.
Every stage of the funnel has one governing number, agreed at the start rather than chosen afterwards to suit the result.
What clears the bar gets more budget. What doesn't gets stopped, and the money moves to whatever is working.
"The whole job is deciding who we bother."
A list short enough to defend name by name, researched one company at a time, then reached through whichever door that person would actually answer - email, a call, a message, sometimes something that arrives in the post.
Earns a slot when you can describe your buyer precisely enough to build a list of them by name. Judged on real conversations with people who match that description, never on opens or clicks. The honest limit: it cannot fix timing - you are arriving on your schedule, not theirs.
"Be a helper, not a shark in the lobby."
Rank the organizations that already have your buyer's attention, show up as a useful participant rather than as an advertisement, then build something together worth their audience's time.
Earns a slot when your buyers already gather somewhere and somebody else is already trusted in that room. Judged on partner-sourced conversations, on a longer window than any other channel. The honest limit: it is slow, and a room you burn is closed for good.
"A gate is a decision with a price on it."
Lead magnets people actually use, guides that finish the question, research nobody else has, webinars you own the list from, and placement in the publications your buyers already read.
Earns a slot when there is an argument your market keeps having without data behind it. Judged on named people per asset, not pageviews. The honest limit: the volume is small by design, and part of the timeline belongs to an editor.
"You can't train ChatGPT."
Start from what people actually type, put the answer where an assistant can lift it and name you, publish on a fixed cadence, and re-ask the same questions every month to watch the answer move.
Earns a slot when people are already searching for what you do. Judged on new users and which pages get cited, by engine. The honest limit: it takes a quarter to read - and it is the only channel still working a year after it is paid for.
"The platform will always tell you it worked."
Instrument the funnel inside the product before a single click is bought, then change one thing at a time - the visual, the copy, the page, the offer - each running its full window before anyone calls it.
Earns a slot when you already know who your buyer is and want to find out quickly whether your message moves them. Judged on cost per paying customer, never cost per lead. The honest limit: it stops the day you stop paying.
"Followers are the number that never comes back."
Two or three platforms rather than all of them, a calendar planned a month out, and everything else the plan produces given a second life here.
Earns a slot when you have something worth amplifying and somebody willing to put their name to an opinion. Judged on who subscribed and who was reading, never on follower count. The honest limit: it rarely shows up as an attributable lead source.
A named primary and secondary buyer, and the proof behind every claim you make to them, so every experiment after that points at somebody specific.
The registries, associations and communities your buyers gather in, ranked, each with a route in. Events get judged on the same terms as every other channel.
Cost to serve, contribution per sale, and the ceiling any acquisition cost has to stay under. It is the number every experiment gets judged against.
A prospect list built out of that map and enriched, living in your accounts with a documented way to refresh it.
Tracking codes for every channel and asset, wired through to your CRM, so a click can be followed to a customer rather than guessed at.
Every experiment closes with a number instead of an opinion - including the ones that did not work.
Outbound, partnerships and original research come first, because the people you need are a finite list you can name. Search and social follow on the patient side once a market is full. Paid media is deliberately not on the list - it does not recruit clinics, and pointing it at a thin marketplace buys uninstalls.
The national provider registry lists every clinician and organization in the country with a specialty code and a practice address, state boards confirm who is still active, and federal facility files cover imaging and surgical centers. That is the spine of the list, and it costs nothing but the time to assemble it.
The ones worth contacting are the practices whose economics already depend on patients paying directly - direct-care and membership practices, cash-pay specialists, independent imaging, surgical centers. Those are separately listed in direct-care directories and free-market medical association rosters, which is where the first pass of the list comes from.
Cash-pay orientation, practice size against the plan you actually sell, specialty, and whether they publish any prices today. Size matters more than it looks: the Basic plan is shaped around a single clinic with a few clinicians, so solo and small practices are the cleanest fit and larger groups are worth sizing on their own terms.
Decide up front how many clinicians across how many specialties a metro needs before a patient search returns a real answer. That number turns an open-ended recruiting effort into a target you can burn down and report against every week.
Most marketing starts by guessing who might be interested. Here you can skip that, because the population is finite and public - every practice that could be on WZRD in a given city can be named before anyone is contacted. Find the finite population, score it, work it one name at a time, and don't invite patients in until the supply side is worth showing them.
Hospitals are federally required to publish machine-readable price files, and independent facilities increasingly post cash rates. Pull one city and a handful of common procedures, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest provider for the same scan is routinely several times over.
To a patient it is the argument the product exists to make. To an independent clinic that prices well it is proof they beat the hospital down the road, and the research becomes the outbound message rather than something sitting next to it.
"We measured what this procedure costs across your market. You are well below the regional average and none of your patients can see that." That is a message a practice manager reads, and it cannot be sent to ten thousand strangers. The list gets cut until every name left on it could receive one.
Clinics that want to be in the next edition ask to be included, which turns a study into an inbound queue. It also earns local and trade coverage, which is reach on both sides of the marketplace that no advertising buys.
Each clinic gets a message built from what was found about it, reached through whichever door a practice manager actually answers - email, a call, a message to the person who runs the office rather than the clinician who owns it.
The read: conversations with practices that match the profile. Opens and clicks decide who hears from you next and never count as a result on their own.
Free-market and direct-care associations, state medical and osteopathic societies, medical billing companies and practice-management consultants who already sell into exactly these practices. One relationship can carry a dozen clinics, which is a very different curve from contacting them one at a time.
The read: a longer window than any other channel, with the same hard stop. A partner that is going to be a dud is usually clear by month three.
The moment a practice says yes, somebody has to enter their services and prices. Doing that with them is what turns interest into a listing patients can actually find.
A monthly note showing the searches that surfaced them, profile views and calls placed. It is what turns the conversation at the end of the free trial, when a clinic decides whether to start paying, into a report rather than an ask.
The Basic plan is shaped around a single clinic. A ten-site imaging group or a surgical center chain is worth many times that, and agreeing what those cost opens a class of deal worth chasing deliberately.
Clinicians in a city know each other, and the second clinic in a care area is far easier to sign than the first. One well-known imaging center or surgical center is worth more than five anonymous ones.
The real barrier to joining is a practice manager sitting down to enter services and prices. Doing that work for the first cohort removes the reason most of them would stall.
Practice-management and medical-billing companies already sell into these practices and do not compete with you. One arrangement there puts WZRD in front of a list that took them years to build.
Self-insured employers decide once a year and take advice from a small, findable set of benefits brokers. That is a real deadline to sell against rather than an open-ended pitch.
Primary care sends patients to specialists and imaging every day, and those relationships already exist offline. Giving a joined clinic an easy way to bring the practices it already refers to turns each signup into more than one.
The recruiting work will turn up practices larger than a single clinic sooner than you expect, and the answer to what they pay is better decided in advance than in the middle of a call. It is the decision that sets how large a deal this work is allowed to produce.
Recruit clinicians metro by metro, and watch each care area fill inside each metro. The moment imaging in one city has enough facilities that a search returns a genuine answer, imaging demand opens in that city only - even if dermatology in the same city is months away, and even if imaging in the next city over has not started.
Every lever below then names the specific service and the specific city, because a claim that narrow is one the marketplace can actually keep. It is also what makes the marketing cheap: a creator, an article and a press release aimed at one procedure in one city cost a fraction of a national campaign and convert far harder, because the reader can check the claim against a clinic they can drive to.
Local voices and health-cost creators, briefed to talk about the care area that just filled rather than the app in general. A creator sending people to a search that works is worth more than one with ten times the following sending them to an empty result.
The price report for that city and that procedure, published as a real piece of work with the spread in it. It is the reason a patient believes the app is worth opening, and it is the same asset that recruited the clinics in the first place.
Local outlets cover what a scan costs in their own city, because their readers pay for it. The findings are the story and WZRD is where the story is checkable - which is coverage no advertising budget buys.
Categories, listing copy and a review prompt are free, they are owned start to finish by your engineer, and they set the ceiling on everything else. Patient-side search pages for each cleared city and procedure follow the same gate as the three levers above.
Advertising does not recruit clinics, and pointing patient spend at a thin marketplace buys uninstalls rather than users. If it opens at all it opens late, tightly bounded to a care area that has already cleared the threshold.
Company network access - where an employer's people see only that employer's negotiated doctors - is already scoped on the development roadmap. Self-insured employers in one metro are a partnership motion that brings both sides of the marketplace at once: the employees arrive as demand, and the employer's existing provider relationships arrive as supply. It is the only play here that fills both sides of the marketplace at the same time.
Product Owner halftime, a backend and a frontend developer full-time, quality assurance halftime and a designer at 25% - $30,625 a month. Every configuration on this page is measured against that number.
| Configuration | Team | Per month | vs today | The plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base case designer off, growth on |
PO 50% · Backend 100% · Frontend 100% · QA 50% · GTM 100% | $37,625 | +$7,000 | All 12, full pace |
| Today | PO 50% · Backend 100% · Frontend 100% · QA 50% · Designer 25% | $30,625 | - | No growth work at all |
| Consolidate the developers growth costs less than today |
PO 50% · Fullstack 100% · QA 50% · GTM 100% | $27,625 | −$3,000 | All 12, full pace |
| Consolidate, growth halftime | PO 50% · Fullstack 100% · QA 50% · GTM 50% | $22,875 | −$7,750 | All 12, half the pace |
Add to the team, or rebalance it. Keeping the developers as they are, taking the designer off and adding a full-time growth engineer comes to $7,000 a month more than you spend today. Consolidating the two developers into one accountable full-stack owner instead pays for that same engineer and still leaves you $3,000 a month below today's bill.
Development carries on either way. The difference is whether the growth function is funded by new budget or by the shape of the team.