GrepMed
Clinically Relevant, Image-Based Medical Reference Search
Fun milestone. As a bonus we crossed this mark without any viral social media posts which in the past have often driven our big boosts in our traffic. Here's to hoping we're in favor with google again and we ride another few weeks of increasing traffic. It's been fun watching us climb the Alexa rankings slowly over the past few months.
Really hard to celebrate with all of the scary coronavirus craziness going on (what a clusterf$&;).. but didn’t think we’d see this milestone so soon, with traffic (all organic) literally doubling in just over a month.
We still don’t have a monetization plan but we know our audience is valuable and it’s fun for now just having something a lot of people use. Having been in the rat race of academic medicine for a bit it’s really cool building something that reaches people at scale, with so many clinicians are using our tool across the world.
Inspired by this community... really wish I could work on this and not have to go into the hospital tomorrow!
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Wow! So that's 100,000 medical professionals using your website every month? Valuable audience is an understatement. Congrats!
After spending most of the past half year fluctuating in the low 200k range we seemed to have hit a breakthrough in traffic growth thanks to our google algorithm overlords. We’ve seen a big surge in organic traffic, validating our hypothesis that clinicians are searching for these sorts of images to shortcut the information process. Hopefully this will incentivize more medical educators to post to our platform, and scale our content database, although I’m having some trouble figuring out how to sell this value prop to them on twitter etc.
Pretty neat to cross this milestone, as I still remember being so excited about the first 100 initial signups. Traffic has been growing quite nicely but hard to be 100% sure what to attribute that to.
We’re releasing new features that will hopefully make things stickier for registered users and incentivize content contribution from fellow clinicians.
https://www.grepmed.com/
GrepMed - Image Based Medical Reference for Clinicians
Catching up on medical podcasts and was floored when I randomly heard us featured as a pick of the week on TheCurbsiders- the most popular medical education podcast out there!
https://thecurbsiders.com/uncategorized/187-buprenorphine-master-class-managing-opioid-use-disorder-for-the-generalist (starts at 16m mark)
A bit startstruck to be noticed by my #meded heroes. Hoping this gave us more brand exposure to medical educators who are not on social media. In addition to the flurry of signups and traffic we experienced, this should have good long term benefits for our SEO game. There’s an outside chance we cross 300k image impressions this week, which would be a huge milestone for us after recent setbacks with google algorithm updates.
Onward and up!
Didn't realize we crossed 2000 registered users on our image based medical reference site @ grepmed.com
I still remember how excited we were when we hit 100 users, it was a momentous occasion. I used to check our database daily so didn't realize this milestone had passed us by.
Still have to figure out what to do with all of these emails. Haven't had the bandwidth to email our users but also still wary of spamming busy physicians- a fear I need to get over.
Users are increasing linearly with our traffic (thanks google) so still haven't quite reached a positive viral coefficient, or how to convert more of our users to contributors to the platform, but we'll take this as a win.
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Saw your interview on sideprojects.net, I'm not a doctor but I think this is such a great idea! I wonder if there are other professions where this idea could work.
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Oh gosh thanks so much! Yes we suffer from information overload in medicine it’s overwhelming. Each patients chart is the size of a bible now and each note is copy-pasta garbage.
One vertical we’ve discussed is Veterinary Medicine. Compared to human medicine they have far fewer online resources and all of the google stuff points to human medicine stuff.
If you know of any entrepreneurial minded vets, please send them my way!!!
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Data engineer for a health care company here. I agree with you that there's information overload in medicine, and it's likely that people aren't even seeing all of the data that really could be presented, which is crazy to think about.
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It's just impossible to keep up with, moreover so much is inaccurate! It gets a bit frustrating when patients expect us to look in the chart and don't bring or know their meds etc.
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Will do.
Yeah and I think a lot of people are visual learners, have strong visual memory, etc. which is why posters and diagrams are so popular. You can convey so much more information that is quickly digestible vs text. I think about how in textbooks most people just skip to diagrams for explanations rather than reading the whole chapter.
The problem is text is easier to search over and index, but I think the tagging system you use is effective, a diagram is only going to have a few concepts associated with it.
Anyways, congrats and goodluck!
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Yes it's a problem I believe we're probably fighting with google- how to let the crawlers know we have meaningful content when most of our data is in an image. We haven't yet figured it out why some of our images are so popular compared to similar images google buries. It's a black box unfortunately.
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Sometime's thats the way it goes unfortunately. Nothing much you can do but explore and test relentlessly to see what works.
I think in the end you will win just because you provide something useful that people will use. It can be a frustrating road though.
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OK so not quite the fulfillment of my dream of getting interviewed by @csallen , but these guys ( @sakun ) are trying to build a community around makers and side projects and are going out of their way to feature, provide UI and other feedback to creators willing to share their work on their platform. Would definitely check out their site!
We talk about our inspiration for creating GrepMed, status as a service and some of our struggles scheming out of our own chicken-egg problem of community growth.
👍👍
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Congrats. Take it step-by-step.
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Thanks we're trying! Hard doing clinical work full time to pay off those loans haha
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Looks interesting! What do you think about republishing it on hackernoon.com? i think tech community will adore it
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interesting.. have actually never used hackernoon before.. will have to check it out.
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Almost 20% growth from a month ago. Not sure how much longer this bull market love with google's algorithm update will last but hopefully we continue to accumulate domain authority love with google within the medical reference space.
Had a social media post go super viral on IG/Twitter yesterday now with 3400 IG likes and 850 retweets and growing. Was reposted by a celebrity physician (50k followers) in Mexico who even signed up for an account!
Another big milestone as we work to grow our image based medical reference search engine.
It has been a rocky past few months but things are finally going up and to the right again, which is very motivating. Still have not been able to figure out the rhyme or reason as to which images get traction with google and which don't, which is a bit frustrating. Hopefully we continue to develop domain authority with google as I feel like we could potentially 5-10x our current traffic levels if so.
This is a big milestone for us as we previously crossed this threshold back in April. At the time our traffic was growing very quickly, about 20-30% monthly until we got WHACKED by a google algorithm update that saw us lose about 1/3rd of our traffic overnight.
Needless to say it was very demoralizing and our traffic has been been up and down until we started making steady weekly gains over the past two months.
We're finally back over 200,000 image impressions a day which is a big selling point for us on social media as we try to convince medical educators to share on our platform rather than #medtwitter where the exposure is so fleeting.
We're still struggling trying to sort out what we need to do to get better product-market-fit but it is certainly much more fun to work on when the numbers are going up and to the right.
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That's fantastic! Did you do anything specific for SEO or did it just fall in place naturally?
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Honestly it's really hard to know what is paying off. We had a nice mention in a BMJ labs post, and I've been posting about our site here and there on many different sites to try to get more back links and mentions where we can. We've also been getting a lot of growth and traction on reddit, twitter and IG (lots of retweets/shares)- honestly not sure how that factors into google's SEO. We've also been growing our content database aggressively.
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