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Geeky Medics 9th Birthday!

It has now been 9 years since I launched Geeky Medics as a VERY buggy self-hosted Wordpress blog. I wanted somewhere to share my medical school notes with other students easily, regardless of their location.

In some ways, it's hard to believe I'm still working on the same project I started as a 22-year-old student. I'm not quite sure where Geeky Medics ends and I begin anymore. I do know that I still enjoy working on it as much as I did in those early days (despite the exponential increase in admin) and in a lot of ways, I feel like I'm only just getting started.

If I had one piece of advice to people starting out, it would simply be to work on something you'd feel happy doing, even if no-one else showed up.

P.S. Here's my first sketch of the Geeky Medics website that my mum discovered recently (I couldn't bring myself to refer to it as a wireframe). 🤓

https://imgur.com/a/kcc1l7t

  1. 2

    I just checked your website. It's so cool, even though I'm not a student (nor a medic), I love medicine/anatomy/etc., and definitely I'll read plenty of the articles on geeky medics.

    I like the friendly interface too!

    Now, I feel a bit ashamed that I didn't know about this website a few years ago when I started to become interested about how human body works.

  2. 2

    @ilew123 I wanted to drop by and say that I love your website. I checked it out and the design is awesome. I love how much attention to detail there is in what looks like custom graphics for everything?

    How'd you manage to stick with it for 9 years. Was is just a grow it slowly kind of thing over time? Did you code it yourself? Did you hire writers? Curious for more details :)

    I'm in the process of building a community-centric product now and I'm looking for some tips on the above. Have you written about this in detail anywhere?

    Nonetheless, fantastic job! Keep going!

    1. 2

      Hey @MattEhr thanks for the kind words, I really appreciate it! Yeah, I'm a big fan of pixel art, so that's always been part of the design. When I started out, I created a pixel art version of each major organ (i.e. heart, liver etc) and combined them to create diagrams and blog post cover art. A few years ago, I replaced most of my pixel art with nicer versions created by freelancers, which is what you see today.

      It never really felt like I was having to "stick with it", it was just something fun I enjoyed working on in the evenings whilst I was a student and later a doctor. It grew slowly via organic search traffic and word of mouth between medical students. The only marketing effort was to post in a few medical student forums at the time about the site. I probably had a few 100 views in the first year and then maybe a few thousand in year two, things started to pick up more pace after that.

      Nope, I didn't code the website from scratch, I set up a self-hosted Wordpress blog and then found a premium theme I liked for like $30. I then tried to customise/hack the theme to fit my requirements and ended up regularly visiting the Wordpress forums to ask for help from actual developers when I got stuck. I had no budget for development at that point, so it wasn't really an option. I'm still using Wordpress today, with a premium theme that I've paid a freelance developer to modify, so I owe a lot to Wordpress!

      For the first few years, I wrote all of the posts. Whenever I felt like I finally understood a medical topic, I'd write a summary article, which was useful for consolidating my own learning and also good content for the site. I also filmed and edited all of our videos (and still do). After a few years, medical students started to email, offering to write an article for the site and things grew from there. These days there's always a large backlog of content submissions, so my job is mainly reviewing submissions, assessing quality, finding editors and publishing other's contributions. I still film and edit all of our video content however and do all the other stuff that comes with running a small business.

      Hopefully, those extra details are helpful. Good luck with your own community-centric product!

  3. 2

    Awesome work and fun post. Here's to the next 9 years!

  4. 1

    Hey Lewis, congrats for sticking with it!

  5. 1

    Happy Birthday doc! Physician here as well. Amazing to think how many clinicians you have reached through your site compared to normal classrooms, rounds, conferences, journals etc.

    Have you ever thought of utilizing another ad network besides adsense? I haven’t played with it yet but I’ve heard on multiple podcasts that their rates are trash compared to others (mediavine comes to mind- you should be well above their traffic requirements).

    1. 1

      Thanks! Yeah, I've thought about other advertising networks and even tried a few. The adverts they were showing were not the kinds of things I wanted our brand to be associated with though (super scammy stuff largely).

      1. 1

        ahh thanks. Somewhat disappointing to hear. I would have guessed from white coat investor et al that physician directed ad network might be tasteful and lucrative (refinancing ads / job placement).

        Did you also take a big hit with google in May? We lost about 1/4th of our traffic and dropped almost 200k in alexa rankings. We're only now starting to recover to prior traffic levels, it's been frustrating.

        1. 1

          Yep, we got hit too, although more in January. It’s scary the power that Google wields when it comes to search algorithm updates.

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            Yep. Was very demoralizing for a bit to see so much traffic vaporize. Always neat to connect with other physicians on here. We're still a much smaller site than you guys but let me know if you'd be interested in collaborating in some way. 👍👍

  6. 1

    Hey @ilew123 congratulations on the awesome milestone. It's incredible and refreshing to see a passionate project become a business and operate for 9 years strong!

    I've come across Geekly Medics in the last few years while working on a few mental health projects for the NHS. I must admit Geeky Medics is one of the best medico informational platform out there currently.

    Out of curiosity, how do you monetize the website and app currently? Would also love to hear what plans you have coming up now that you've gone into this full time.

    1. 2

      Hey @Nakkeeran, it's awesome you've previously come across Geeky Medics! So we generate revenue in two ways, the first is via advertising on our written content and Youtube videos (Adsense) and the second is via in-app subscriptions. The geekymedics.com website is completely free, whereas the app requires a yearly subscription fee of £8.99 to access all of the content. I release our latest videos to the app first and then later to geekymedics.com (I'm trying to find a balance between providing lots of free high-quality content whilst being able to generate enough revenue to continue improving the business). Now that I'm full time on the business, revenue has become much more important (i.e. if there's not enough, I can't pay rent). As a result, I've been working on something for the last 18 months that will provide us with a brand new revenue stream once launched. I can't give all of the details right now, but it relates to geekyquiz.com and I'm hoping it will be live in the next 6 weeks (I'll be back to announce it!).

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