Transcript
josh MacDonald: Hi, I'm Josh McDonald.
Miranda Materi: And I'm Miranda Materi and we are Hand Therapy Academy.
josh MacDonald: We are this fall hitting our 10-year anniversary, which seems like it's come way faster than I expected. um But we thought we'd do a couple of podcasts about kind of the process of making Hand Therapy Academy and what this whole journey has been for us.
Miranda Materi: Yeah. So I think this started at a really interesting time for both Josh and I, because we were both running these really dynamic outpatient hand clinics that got purchased up by someone else. And we had the choice to either stay on and continue to work for that new company or the person we were working with offered us an opportunity for us to start our own clinic. So we started, I think Josh was really the first one because I had didn't even know what Instagram was. And he was like, we got to start marketing on Instagram. And so I think that's when you made your our first post, correct?
josh MacDonald: Yeah, yeah, it was, um gosh, I think it was maybe either end of October or very early November of that year. And it was, we needed to start making marketing things. And I thought, well, we were in this very dynamic clinic that had all kinds of everything, when flexor tendons and deglovings with ATV rollovers and all kinds of very unique looking things. And I thought wherever I end up is probably not going to have as many like unique looking things. So I started taking videos.
josh MacDonald: of and pictures of as many patients and things as I could, wounds and splints and the splinting process, it really to market the startup clinics that we were going to have. And we started getting a following and realizing Instagram isn't a great marketing avenue at the time for local business, but it was great for just therapists to come and learn how to do stuff and we could share ideas. and Yeah.
Miranda Materi: Yeah. So it really started with, you know, people would be seeing our posts be like, oh, that's a great idea. And then we would start looking at others and getting other ideas. So I think, um, at that time I was listening to a podcaster, um, Amy Porterfield, and she was always talking about these online education and these schools. And I felt like we were already putting in all this work into marketing and Josh and I had done a lot of teaching, um, in the community and we were doing a lot of teaching, you know, going to conferences. So It seemed like kind of a natural fit for us to move more into that realm. So we're like, okay, well, let's try making a course.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, and making an online course is way more complicated than anybody has any idea. We started, we bought this little teeny tiny camcorder and put it on a tripod and recorded it. And I took it to a buddy of mine and I said, hey, tell me what you think about this, because he's in the field. And he said, Josh, this is, you're trying really hard and this is garbage. No one's going to watch this. He said, the sound quality is horrible. Your video is awful. You need to stand behind a prop. And so he kind of took me under his wing and taught me all this stuff about video production and video editing and sound and all kinds of. He let me borrow a bunch of equipment that we ended up buying. And and so it was like a crash course in what should a course actually look like and what are people going going to want to look at and what makes it not just talking heads, but entertaining and dynamic.
Miranda Materi: Right. So Josh kind of took on that role of being in charge of filming and editing. And then my role was to try to find the platform and come up with how we would integrate it onto a certain platform. So at that time, there was a bunch of different ones and we ended up going with this one called Thinkific. was our first one, but to make it match what Josh was filming, we had to meld those two together. So sometimes it'd be looking up like, oh, you have to write code for this one. So, and we didn't have, i mean, we had some, a lady that was doing our website, but she wasn't producing our content. So it was very much this, where we'd, spend i would spend hours just trying to figure out how to insert something very simple. I think now it's a lot easier, but at the time it was really challenging.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, yeah. And it was a flexor tendon video. And so it was 10 years ago and flexor tendon has changed a ton, but we wanted to put in like videos of how to make a splint and what the splint would look like, but we wanted to show it from different angles. And so we would like film things multiple times and the camera he gave, he let me borrow for a while, had a zoom lens on it. And you couldn't get close enough. So in the clinic I was renting space, this PT clinic, I had to put the tripod like 20 feet away because it was on a telephoto zoom lens. And it was the only way to make this thing not look weird was to put it ridiculously far away.
josh MacDonald: And we had, do you remember our, instead of a teleprompter anything, we had those giant sticky post-it note things.
Miranda Materi: Yes.
josh MacDonald: And we would hang it next to the camera. And so we would read off the post-it note and then we'd pause and someone would yank it off real quick and read the next one. And yeah. Yeah.
Miranda Materi: Yeah, and we'd have like basically this bulleted list of what we wanted to talk about in front of us. And so now we are much more sophisticated, but it was very rudimentary at the
josh MacDonald: Yeah.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, yeah. But it was great because it was just us trying to find a way like we just wanted to create content to share ideas with people. But the whole Instagram thing just took off like we had no no idea how big a deal that was going to be. And there really wasn't much else out there for therapists to like see ideas and post things on. And we tried to like put up ideas of, you know, show us a picture of your favorite splint or what's a splint you really struggle with. And we did Monday morning lives that we would talk about things from our clinics and we would be, you know, trying to manage two phones in different locations.
josh MacDonald: And yeah, it was just a kind of a ah crazy time of trying to make all of this stuff seem way more professional than we were about it.
Miranda Materi: Yeah. And I think the interesting thing about it was like Josh and I would always like be like, is this worth it? Like we're all of our Instagram and everything. We were just spending all our evenings and early mornings developing content.
Miranda Materi: Really, we didn't really have a goal other than we wanted to make hand therapy education fun and be able to share it and a way that people would enjoy, not really thinking about finances.
Miranda Materi: You know, we were kind of like, well, I hope, you know, I hope this goes somewhere at some point, or I hope we get reimbursed for this money we're spending on cameras and things like that.
josh MacDonald: Yeah.
Miranda Materi: But I think we both and wanted something that was a good quality that people could easily consume.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, and something that was fun to watch and and not like, ah okay, I have to go sit down and watch this thing, that I can communicate all that information in a concise way and make it like interesting. And like, oh, there's a cool different angle of that splint. Now I can see what they're doing with it.
josh MacDonald: um But yeah, we we fronted a lot of money before there was any kind of like, oh, this whole Thinkific thing isn't going to really work out for us, is it? There's no there's no way to grow any of that. And now we have a whole bunch of people who paid for Thinkific.
josh MacDonald: And we have to figure out how to get them onto an entire different platform.
Miranda Materi: Yeah. And then that's what I think when we started to think about the membership options, right? We have all this content that's coming up and are people going to want to keep buying course after course that gets expensive.
josh MacDonald: Yeah.
Miranda Materi: So how can we make an affordable option for people to consume a lot of our courses?
josh MacDonald: Yeah, we did a bunch of research trying to find just the right person to create this whole website where you could watch courses and get content in PDFs. And we found a guy and we found him in the middle of 2019.
josh MacDonald: And he worked for months and months trying to figure all this out. And we said, we have an ASHT conference in March of 2020 that we're doing. It's a heart.
Miranda Materi: No, AOT was the AOTA.
josh MacDonald: Was it AOTA? Okay.
Miranda Materi: It was AOTA. Yeah.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, yeah, giant conference, thousands of people, hard launch, we have to be there for And he said, absolutely.
Miranda Materi: yeah
josh MacDonald: And we could see in January, February, this was not going to happen. We were not close. And then the world fell apart because of COVID. And that was in my life, the one way where COVID was a good thing, because we were about to, we had purchased all this marketing stuff. We had all these banners and posters and no website, no product to go with it. It was just us talking about this concept.
josh MacDonald: But the whole course got canceled, that conference got canceled because of COVID.
Miranda Materi: Yeah, and I think that led to more of an online presence as well. So the timing of COVID and the timing of us launching all these online products seemed to really, or online education products, really blended well together and and kind of was, I think, serendipitous for us launching Hand Therapy Academy and the membership platform.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, yeah. It's still hard to get people to go to on site conferences when i can stay home and watch all this online content like surgeons conferences were years before they went back in in person again. So it really worked out well eventually when we stopped going with that guy with a whole different company and we've since switched again.
josh MacDonald: um yeah it's it's just been ah an interesting journey but you're right it was serendipity that it the timing that we didn't get exposed at a conference but instead it like led well into us doing online stuff
Miranda Materi: Yeah, we we really did. And i don't I don't know where we would be if that didn't happen, you know?
josh MacDonald: yeah yeah we'd probably just be still putting out instagram content but finding a way to to monetize it um was a game changer for us that that made probably what two and a half, three years worth of work, finally worth it.
josh MacDonald: It finally started to, you know, us see some return on the effort and investment we've been making for three years.
Miranda Materi: Yeah, and the money to get the membership platform going. and And I think, you know, with AI, it's a lot easier now.
josh MacDonald: Yeah.
Miranda Materi: You know, you can tell AI and give all these prompts to do it. But it certainly wasn't like that when we started. Yeah.
josh MacDonald: Yeah, yeah. So we're going to do another one of these. We're going to talk about maybe some successes, some mistakes, and maybe some tips for people who might be looking to do something like this themselves. It's not a zero-sum game. There's room for lots of people out there doing a similar thing. And so we are happy to have people out there as you call them competitors, people out there doing similar things to us.
josh MacDonald: um There's room for all of us out here doing this. We just want to see the field grow. So If you have any questions, certainly feel free to reach out to us. so You can reach us on our social media platforms at Hand Therapy Academy.
