The Good, Bad, & Ugly of scaling a B2B healthcare brand in 2024
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Hospitalogists,
Today’s edition is a Hospitalogy brag letter, where I talk about the Hospitalogy brand, what happened in 2024, and where we’re headed in 2025.
As always I’m showing you the real numbers so you can get a glimpse into how the Hospitalogy operation is faring!
Also - thank you to everyone who helped support the Zorya Foundation. Zorya raised enough money to give out another five full-year childcare grants to struggling women working in healthcare. They had originally only planned to raise three - then upped their goal all the way up to five. Hospitalogists were a part of that success, so thank you guys so much.
Growth - a mixture of both paid and organic acquisition - has been solid for 2024 but honestly I wanted more. I had a soft goal of hitting 50,000 by year and and a lot of not getting there falls on me, in my opinion. I didn’t do a super great job of repurposing my newsletter content for social media and I wasn’t consistent in posting that content. This is a struggle for me!
Unique, Confirmed Opens:
1/1/2024: 14,262
12/31/2024: 20,373
42.8% growth
As a creator, I obsess over the quality of my content. So much so that when I saw the open rate drop that every other newsletter biz saw in 2024 I was freaking out. Turns out it was some sort of structural change on the back end or something. Anyway, open rate - and to a much larger degree, reply rate - are my north stars for growing the brand. I can write for 40,000 Hospitalogists but if none of you want to open it, then I’m quite literally shouting into the void. Luckily you guys keep coming back for more, so I’ll still have a job…for now.
One more thing I’ll say about the open rate trends throughout the year is the dropoffs in late August and during the holidays. Holidays are to be expected of course - I personally don’t really read anything during that time. But I’m pretty sure the August drop was related to some audience fatigue with sponsored posts. How do I know that? Because I myself was struggling with them.
In 2025, we will be much more careful about the cadence of sponsored deep dives and will do no more than one a month. In general as Hospitalogy grows, my open rate shifts lower a touch, but then it gets cleaned up on the back end by knocking off dead-weight subscribers.
Community Growth:
12/31/2024 Total Members: 380
7/7/2024 Total Members: 57
Total Growth: 567%
Alright, so the topline community growth looks really impressive and it’s exciting, but it’s also terrifying. You should know that this is total community membership among free and paid members. I don’t have the exact breakdown of those tiers for you so I can’t share them here. I will next year!
But regardless, membership is the next phase of growth and sophistication for Hospitalogy, and I personally pour dozens of hours into trying to make it an incredible value for anyone who joins. We made some significant changes to the Hospitalogy membership this year, lowering the price point, custom building a platform, developing products like my Delphi clone (for AI-enabled Hospitalogy research), and implementing an applications process so that the members, network, and content can focus exclusively on hospitals & health systems, and within those folk, health system strategy, transformation, and corporate development.
I’m very proud of the caliber of person the membership has attracted, and I have major impostor syndrome in trying to provide the best possible programming / content for you guys who are in the membership platform. So far the reaction and feedback has been good, but I also think I need to chill out a little bit. People join something like this to connect with others, so I don’t need to be constantly working myself to death to facilitate that. We can just throw up a new member meet and greet on the feed and that’ll do just as well. I will say though, that a ton of underrated work goes into building and maintaining a membership platform.
So in 2025, I’m working on fostering meaningful connection in my community and not just creating a research platform where everyone consumes. I really want the Hospitalogy membership to be a place where people have conversations to change healthcare and find career advancement, etc.
It was also pretty difficult to pare down the community ICP and turn away folks who did not fit that profile. But it’s all in the name of curating a high quality experience for those it’s purpose-built for.
On to social media.
LinkedIn Follower Growth:
1/1/2024: 14,000
12/31/2024: 21,743
55.3% growth
X Follower Growth:
1/1/2024: 13,000
12/31/2024: 15,353
14.5% growth
As you can see, LinkedIn was a much better platform for me in 2024, growing 55.3% this year, which is kinda bonkers. I look at that 20,000+ number and it’s pretty crazy to think about. The LinkedIn algorithm really likes my content for being original and visual-forward, and it feels good to be rewarded with attention. LinkedIn was a significant acquisition channel for the Hospitalogy subscriber base in 2024, and I hope to remain more consistent on the platform.
While I enjoy the discourse on X much more, it’s just so hard to be on there constantly and build an audience, which is what you have to do to grow follower count. I’m not going to be a reply guy, or stir up unnecessary drama. Getting into arguments on there affects my mental health more than anything else I do as a creator. Plus we’ve seen some splintering of the X base, with some actually migrating to LinkedIn or Bluesky, or dropping it altogether.
What’s in Store for 2025?
People (my mom) ask me often “What’s the end game for Hospitalogy? For you?” And I really don’t know. But for now I really enjoy what I do and the flexibility it provides me. That being said, I know exactly where Hospitalogy is headed in 2025, and it looks a lot like this:
Create the best freakin healthcare B2B content on the planet
Continue to interview industry execs, cool people, and startups
Break / penetrate more into traditional healthcare media and steal market share
Grow the Hospitalogy membership platform
Do an in-person event (and yes this is happening in September - the Hospitalogy Summit with a cooler name TBD - I’m taking suggestions)
More in-person events - conference appearances, a Dallas Hospitalogy membership chapter, etc.
Potentially start a podcast or some form of limited series audio production
Scale past a $1M brand
How to Support Me in 2025
While I’m not a super flashy outgoing guy, I HAVE to be self promotional to a certain extent in this roll. Generally I try to let the content speak for itself, but in a society where everyone is shouting nonsense from the rooftops, I have to be assertive and carve out my niche!
I make money through newsletter sponsorship growth and paid community member growth, just so you all are aware of the economics of a newsletter. And I do this full time - which is freakin’ awesome.
So with that in mind, here’s how you can support me in 2025 so I can continue to do this full-time:
Join my paid membership which includes networking, expert panels / AMAs, a monthly exclusive health system focused newsletter or research, and an AI-enabled Hospitalogy research tool.
Share my newsletter as much as possible with your colleagues;
OPEN my newsletter (we cut you if you’re inactive!);
Engage with Hospitalogy sponsored sections (they are all awesome);
Find me other sponsors for the Hospitalogy brand willing to spend gobs of cash with us (it is still an underrated channel for healthcare marketers); and
Respond to my newsletter with who you are or your thoughts on something I wrote
Challenges & Bottlenecks in 2024
While we saw some awesome growth and success in 2024, there are definitely challenges - both personally and professionally - with scaling Hospitalogy into a noticeable brand. This year I felt those challenges acutely and included some of the following:
Trying to maximize my time and make the newsletter operation more efficient. As you can imagine, I’m the huge bottleneck here. This is fundamentally a business problem in general - scaling quality - but one we are slowly improving over time. Most of it has to do with me relinquishing some control.
Conferences and travel with a little one is extremely taxing on the family and hard on me as well. I really want to be present in the industry but it’s draining on many levels.
Putting time and energy into a community / membership product and solving for engagement. Again, just like I care about reply rate and open rate, I care about how much members are interacting with each other on-platform.
General content burnout and my constant internal battle between perfectionism, and shipping content. ‘publish over perfect.’ And lifestyle adjustments with a 1 year old are tough. Historically some of my highest productive hours were the early evening and late night. It has been extremely tough for me to adjust to a new schedule given those pre-existing rhythms.
Let’s Gooooooo & Thank You
If you made it to the bottom, thank you for reading all of this. There's probably plenty more I left out from the year, but I really enjoy connecting with all of you. Thank you to the Hospitalogists. Our number is growing in healthcare, and we’re gearing up to make major shockwaves in the industry in 2025.
Thank you to Workweek and everyone there working to make work fun, and B2B media actually enjoyable. Thank you to Adam & Becca for taking a chance on a no-name healthcare consultant with 1,000 subscribers (I am still a no-name).
This year marks year 3 of doing Hospitalogy full-time, which is insane to think about.
Finally, thank you to Keith who’s my partner in crime on the business development side and one of the most genuine humans I’ve had the pleasure to work with. Thank you for listening to my crazy ideas, pitching insane concepts, and keeping the business chugging along. I hope you’re enjoying being married and I’m looking forward to 2025 together.
While I won't be in Atlanta I'm hoping for the best against a scrappy, tenacious Arizona State team. I know they won't go quietly - they never do against Texas!
I hope you all are having a restful holiday and NYE. We're hitting the ground running in 2025.
Thanks for the read! Let me know what you thought by replying back to this email.
— Blake
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