Tables are turned in this week’s podcast as guest Kim Abernethy, CCO of PC Alliance, interviews Griffin Jones about the origins of Inside Reproductive Health and his journey as a fertility entrepreneur.
Throughout the interview Griffin talks about:
How he built IRH without any outside funding (And if you should do the same)
The “Rising Stars” in the fertility field (And who he believes will be the big winners)
The complications of nailing product-market fit (And how doctor’s expect us to provide value)
What advice he would give to fertility entrepreneurs looking to make a name for themselves.
Kim Abernethy LinkedIn
PCA LLC LinkedIn
Griffin Jones LinkedIn
Transcript
[00:00:00] Griffin Jones:
Stop taking outside money. The learning curve is longer than is accommodating of having to return investment money, you can pile on tens of millions of dollars and they still don't have the product market fit to where it's scalable, reproducible, huge customer satisfaction and profitable by the end of that investment
Should fertility companies stop taking outside money. That's the theme we eventually get to in this conversation where I am not the interviewer But the interviewee. You might know Kim Abernethy. She's been the chief commercial officer for the PC Alliance for the last two years So she's still on the pharmaceutical slash pharmacy side of things, but she was with EMD Serrano for a very long time in a field where people sometimes jump around a lot and she's gotten to know many of you during that time.
Kim asked me why I chose the fertility field, how did I build my company with no investor money, no money from family and friends, and not even a commercial bank loan. She asked me about the direction of Inside Reproductive Health. How we're building a trade media company for everyone director level and above in the fertility field worldwide.
She asks me, which was more fun building an earlier version of my company or the version I'm building now. And I tell her. Oh, she asked me to name two interviews where I was totally caught by surprise. And even though I was totally caught by surprise by that question, two interviews that I've done did come to my mind.
And I tell you who both of those doctors were. She asked me to pick some rising stars of some of these companies that are growing and emerging in the fertility field and who I think are going to be the big winners. I am no fortune teller by any stretch of the imagination. But I name names. And as I promised, right after the interview, I thought of a couple more that I probably should have said, and I'm not going to say them now in the intro because I'll still think of more after this.
I'm sorry that I left you out. Keep kicking ass and I will be less likely to forget you next time. Finally, Kim asks me what advice I would give to fertility entrepreneurs. really trying to take their place in the field. And I wonder if the answer is to stop taking outside funding. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong and I'm not arguing it categorically, but I put forth a counter argument against taking outside funding.
Just bootstrap your damn business the old fashioned way. I tie it in to broader advice about how hard it is to provide value to fertility clinics and providers. How long and complicated it can be to nail product market fit in the fertility field. And how seriously doctors and others... Expect us to be able to provide value.
And of course, there's some fun, cute questions along the way. Thank you to Kim. She's a wonderful interviewer. As far as I know, this is the first time she's ever interviewed on a podcast. So if Kim, send her a LinkedIn message, send her an email, send her a text, tell her she did a great job as an interviewer and enjoy this episode where Kim Abernethy interviews me.
[00:03:04] Kimberly Abernethy:
I'm Kim Abernethy and today I will be interviewing our special guest Griffin Jones. It wouldn't be Fertility if we didn't mix things up, wouldn't you agree Griffin?
[00:03:13] Griffin Jones:
I think so. This is the second time that I've been interviewed on my own show that it was four years ago that my friend Stephanie Linder did this and I was interested when you proposed the idea, hopefully I can make it interesting enough.
[00:03:29] Kimberly Abernethy:
Tell us, how does it feel to be in the seat of the interviewee after conducting so many interviews?
[00:03:34] Griffin Jones:
I am hoping that it will be useful enough because I try to make the interviews useful to the audience who's fertility docs, execs, and I've gotten much better as I've gone along about making each interview more specific and I don't know if we'll go like an Oprah route today and we'll do like a Griffin human interest story.
You and I talked a little bit before we did this interview Or if we are able to tackle enough business to make it Transferable to the people listening. That's my pious. Hope that I can still do that even as a business owner in my type of business.
[00:04:17] Kimberly Abernethy:
I think that it's always important when you are in your type of business to make sure that you never lose touch with the personal aspect of things.
So if we do go a little Oprah, I think your listeners will want to hear it. I've been talking to a lot of people since you and I originally spoke about doing this interview. And it's amazing to me how little most people know about you.
[00:04:38] Griffin Jones:
What made you decide to want to do this? Because you proposed the idea to me, and I thought this is a cool person.
And that's sweet of her to think of me. What made you interested in doing this? In interviewing the host.
[00:04:56] Kimberly Abernethy:
All right. So you're not supposed to be interviewing me, but I will answer this question for you because I do think it's interesting. I've been in the fertility space for 24 years and I remember when you started your business 10 years ago.
And it's actually leading into one of my questions for you. What on earth were you thinking when you had no fertility experience? You ran a media company, a social media company for three years. You'd worked in the media industry for nine years doing different sales executive roles. So what made you wake up one morning and decide I'm entering the fertility space and I'm going to be a subject matter expert in not only marketing, but the industry as a totality?
[00:05:38] Griffin Jones:
Do you ever see the movie Lone Survivor with Mark Wahlberg? I think it's, I think it's called Lone Survivor. It's about four army rangers, I believe, in Afghanistan and they are surrounded by Taliban and they're under fire and at some point they, they just have to jump off the cliff. It's not a good idea to jump off the cliff.
They just don't have any other option. I'm certainly not comparing myself to an army ranger. But from a career standpoint, I was at a point where it was like, I have to choose something. I was a D student growing up. I worked in radio ad sales, maybe as a result of that, I didn't learn anything in college.
I went to a state college that I would blow my nose with the degree that I got in. Communications and that found me in a 100 percent commission only sales job, which I got good enough at paid off my student loan real fast. I learned a little bit about the real world and talking to business owners and learning how to sell things, not just for myself, but for other people, for my clients.
So I got a bit of that experience over five years, but it was radio is 26. It was not. Something that was growing, like how the tech space is, and I could see the corporate ladder vanishing before me, and this is prior to the advent of remote work as we know it now, and there were very few advertising agencies in Buffalo.
There are zero fortune 500 companies headquartered in the city of Buffalo, where I'm from, and I knew that if I wanted to stay in my area that I had to. Sub specialized, or at least specialized, and so it was more about I, I knew that I had to find a niche and I had to go deep into the niche rather than I had some really bright idea.
The niche happened to be fertility because I started working with a fertility clinic in my area and and got some good results from them doing some really rudimentary organic social media and and got to know them a little bit and got to know a little bit about the field. But I was working with a number of different categories and because of the nature of when you're successful helping fertility clinics, they're successful helping patients.
That's pretty meaningful. And I talked to a number of patients that were very grateful that I was even trying to learn about what they're going through. And so I just said, okay, this one. It felt good and it made the business criteria of, it was high growth, it was recession resistant, and I knew that I needed to sub specialize.
[00:08:23] Kimberly Abernethy:
Alright, so you're working with a fertility clinic in Buffalo. You see some success, I'm guessing new patient visits are up, you're doing some social media, and you think... Recession proof, I get it feel good. People are getting through the door. There's a lot of surrounding areas in the Buffalo market that don't have a fertility clinic.
They have to drive to Buffalo to see a fertility specialist and you decide you're going to jump off the cliff. And you do, what do you do from that point, though? Because that's one customer in Buffalo. There's maybe four clinics in Rochester, maybe one or two at that time in Syracuse, maybe not. Like, how do you take that?
I'm jumping off the cliff. And being able to support yourself, specializing in marketing for fertility specialists who really weren't thinking about it 10 years
[00:09:12] Griffin Jones:
I think I had already jumped off the cliff. I think jumping off the cliff came in 2012 when I quit my job in radio ad sales and then I went and started traveling here and there, went to Ireland for five weeks and later that year went to Japan for three weeks.
The things that I think a lot of people should do in their mid twenties. And I. Then moved into a studio apartment, the cheapest apartment I ever lived in, and lived like a pauper, and made the least money that I had made since I graduated college, and I moved to South America for a year and a half, and it was it.
It was while I was in South America that I started working with that fertility clinic in Buffalo, and that's what taught me Oh, I don't have to physically be in this person's area And so I knew that I could do that with anyone then and so before I started Before I even moved back. I started working with another clinic, which I think I can say is was Dr. John Fratarelli's practice in Hawaii. And so with two fertility clinic clients, I could say we served fertility clinics from New York to Hawaii. And that was in 2014, moved back to the U S in 2015 and just started cold calling. And so you asked, how did I support myself? I didn't, I made hardly any money in 2014 because I was living in South America.
I made, I don't know how much I made, like probably made 15 grand that year. And then probably something similar to the half a year that I moved back and then started. After that started really cranking and building the business.
[00:10:48] Kimberly Abernethy:
So when you look back, so you're talking, 20, 2012, 2015, that era, like when did you decide, Oh my gosh, I'm going to make this work.
It's actually starting to pay the bills. And I think that this is going to be. successful. Do you remember when that moment
[00:11:04] Griffin Jones:
There are two different questions because the question of I'm going to commit to this and make it stick versus this is paying the bill didn't happen at the same time. The sticking came first.
And it was like, I'm going to pick something and I'm just going to keep showing up and I'm just going to keep trying to learn more. And every time somebody says no, I'll try to ask somebody else. And and that's, that was in 2015. That was before I even moved back to the U. S. And when I came back to the U.
S., I moved back at midnight on a Saturday morning, and I started cold calling at 7 a. m. on a Monday, and I didn't stop. And so I didn't start making money until, by 2017, I could afford to Move out back out of my parents. How I moved back. I moved back into my parents house for a year when I was 30, Kim.
And that was in 2015. And then by 2016, it's okay, I'm making enough to where I can go out, get my own place in 2017. Okay, I'm making maybe what. What somebody would make in Buffalo, my age, just very middle of the road. And then 2018, 2019 is when I started. It's okay, this is, this feels pretty cool.
And at least I'm on the right track. And but I would say it was gradual. I don't think. The first was just a commitment I have to commit to this and trust that there will be a competence and the benefits that come from competence later. But the fruitfulness was a lot more of a long process.
[00:12:31] Kimberly Abernethy:
Okay. When you look back over the years. And you Monday morning quarterback yourself, what would you have done differently?
[00:12:39] Griffin Jones:
Everything. So it's it's how far back would you go? Would I go so far back to, do I get to go back to senior year of high school?
It's if I could go back to senior year of high school, then I would never have gone to college. And I would have just gone, I would have found any really good business owner. and just shadowed them. I would have done anything for them, just learned from them. I would have gotten their coffee. It would have mowed their lawn.
I would have worked for minimum wage or less and just learn from that. It's like can you go far that far back? And so if I can't go far that far back, then I just don't feel like it's every mistake that I made as bad as it was necessary to Achieve a higher level of proficiency in business.
This is a really hard game because there's so much involved. It's hard to provide value in the marketplace. And if you want to do it, you got to get good at a lot of really hard things and getting good at a lot of really hard things. The price to do so is often looking and feeling stupid.
[00:13:45] Kimberly Abernethy:
Interesting.
We're talking a lot about jumping off the cliff. We're talking about fertility bridge, like how you got there, but let's take a step back and share the vision of fertility bridge. You decide you're going to focus on the fertility space. You have success with a couple clinics and doing some social media, maybe some marketing.
When do you take a step back and say, okay, this is going to be my company and here's a vision? I. I'm assuming that you didn't just keep jumping off the cliff and there must have been a business plan that you finally said, this is what I'm going to do to make this company. Successful or maybe not, and that would be great to hear too.
[00:14:25] Griffin Jones:
That's very kind of you to give me that much credit. I, it all came in phases, but the, I really believe in the quote, I don't know if Zig Ziglar said it first or one of those. guys that one of the Ra guys that said it, or if he was just quoting someone else, but he said, go as far as you can see, and then you'll be able to see further.
And there are lots of people in this country, in this world that can't see that far. And I'm probably somewhere in the middle of the road. We have a lot of people in the audience that could probably see pretty far because they're really talented. They had really talented parents. They came from A highly competitive affluent background and they could see far and they're kicking butt now and and they're gonna get even further.
And then there's lots of people in this country that don't even know how to become a manager. at McDonald's, and I was probably somewhere in the middle of that really long spectrum, but I could see at least, okay, I can see at least how to make a client services firm. I can at least see how to make a profitable client services firm, even if I don't know how to do all of it.
I could see how we can return enough value for our clients and get people on board. And so that really just, that's, that started as a foggy vision, perhaps in 2015, 2016, and then by, by the end of 2017, it's okay, we're starting to make process, we're really starting to scope now the 2018, 2019, really refining the sales process, 2020, really refining operations and delivery processes.
And it wasn't until the end of last year where. I wouldn't say the end, but maybe the middle of 2022, where the opportunity to build a media company. So instead of Inside Reproductive Health being just a little marketing channel for Fertility Bridge, my client services firm, Inside Reproductive Health being the bigger of the two brands, being the one that scales and being the part of the company that I'm really growing.
And that wasn't until. Mid 2022 where all of the stars sort of line, it's this is exactly how it happens and the time is now.
[00:16:46] Kimberly Abernethy:
So that's interesting. So you start as a client services firm inside for reproductive health, right? Inside fertility is a smaller portion of it. It's always co existed, would you say with your larger client services?
And now what you're saying is it's morphing and flipping and inside reproductive health is becoming. the larger of the two entities within FertilityBridge, fair?
[00:17:14] Griffin Jones:
Yeah, it's, yeah, exactly. Now it is becoming the bigger of the two and in a couple years it will be much larger and it, they didn't always coexist.
I, so it was 2014 when I first started working with my first FertilityClinic client and then 2015 when I moved back to the U. S. and started building a firm. It wasn't until Early 2019, January of 2019, that Inside Reproductive Health launched. First is a weekly podcast, and then it wasn't until the very end of 22 where the Weekly News Digest launched one news article, originally sourced, written by a journalist about the business dealings of the fertility field that also comes out weekly.
And that was, so they didn't always co exist, but when it started, it was just let me get some more exposure for myself, sell some more client services, and then the audience grew way more than than just people that were ever going to buy. marketing services for me. And that ended up being the business that more people were asking for anyway.
[00:18:21] Kimberly Abernethy:
So what do you think caused this morphosis to happen? What do you think was a trigger that grew inside? Reproductive health and inside fertility at a greater pace, like what is it about that portion of the business that's attracting people?
[00:18:37] Griffin Jones:
There's this, there's the part of where it was attracting people and then why it did.
The part of why it's attracting people is because there are a lot of business developments happening in the fertility field right now and generally no one reports on it. And so if you're an executive, you just want to be you want to be keeping up with what's happening. If you're a doctor, you want some kind of business education.
So too for nursing managers and practice managers. And so there was that void both on business education for those folks there. clinical or have scientific backgrounds. And then for those folks that have sales and business backgrounds, they want to be kept abreast of what's going on. The fertility field worldwide is estimated at a 23 billion industry, I think somewhere around there.
And there's no trade media outlet for it right now. If we were in another 23 billion industry, it's. It's very likely that there would be an established trade media outlet. And and so I could see the business model and I was at a point in my company, in my life where I thought this is, Definitely the more scalable of the routes that I could take.
Which business do you enjoy more? I enjoy building inside reproductive health more. And the reason is because I love being at the tippy top in the visionary seat. And I can't say that's the only seat in the accountability chart that I occupy. I still do occupy multiple seats. But I see myself getting out of them.
More easily and I am getting out of them more quickly. Part of the reason why I really decided to double down on this route was because in building a client services from there was no way that I was ever going to be able to take myself totally out of it. It was profitable. I never had a problem with money in those later years.
It was that it could never be something that totally functioned without me. It's too small of a niche to have both a consultancy and an implementation agency to serve, 400 fertility clinics in the U. S. Maybe 500 if you're counting all the U. S. And Canada. And whereas Inside Reproductive Health as a media company is...
Scalable. The more content I create about India, the bigger my Indian audience grows, and then the more valuable we are to genetics testing companies and pharma companies and other fertility solutions that sell in those parts of the world. And... And I can make more replicable systems more easily, and I can bring on people faster because they don't need so specialized of a background as when you're building consultancy.
If you're building a consultancy for fertility clinics, It's a really steep learning curve that is very hard to educate people on in the consultancy. They have to come with a lot of that institutional knowledge. And that's a very small pool to draw from. Whereas on the media side, on the marketing side, there's just a lot more people.
I can bring them, I can train them, I can put them in smaller seats, and we can do so a lot more rapidly. So I say Inside Reproductive Health that I enjoy more because I really feel like the business owner, Kim, like I'm working on the business, of course, I still am doing some working in the business, but I'm doing more working on than I was before, and I'm seeing the working in, I'm getting out of that faster.
With all of that said, I still do consulting for fertility clinics, and I love it because it keeps the saw sharp. I love talking with practice owners. I can give them so much value in a little hour, and I don't need to stick them on a recurring monthly engagement. They don't need to pay me thousands of dollars every single month where I've got to struggle so hard to keep up with the value that is required of that.
Instead, I can make it worth it my time because my hourly rate is high. I can give them a lot in that little bit of time. I can help them that other partners and help them put things into place without getting so sucked in implementation and without them having to be. They engaged in a big long term commitment and and they get a ton of value from it.
And I really enjoy it.
[00:23:11] Kimberly Abernethy:
Where do you see Fertility Bridge going in the next five years?
[00:23:15] Griffin Jones:
It's funny that you'd say Fertility Bridge and not Inside Reproductive Health because Fertility Bridge really is now the strategy consultancy and the content studio for the advertisers on Inside Reproductive Health.
So I'll start with Inside Reproductive Health because where I see that going is we have an audience of a couple thousand unique listeners and readers over the course of the year, and I think that can probably get up to 30, 40, 000. I'm just looking at. How many people are director level and above in the fertility field, whether it's industry side, clinic, lab, scientific, worldwide, I suspect it's around between 30 and so I think that we can get a majority of those people as members of our audience, even if they're not the people that read every week and day and listen every week and day that over the course of the year that.
They are part of the audience and right now, if you ask people, have you heard of Inside Reproductive Health? Some people will say, yeah, everybody has but that's not true because you'll then talk to the next group and they'll say, no, I've never heard of it. And my goal is for If you're talking to someone that's director level and above in the fertility field, almost anywhere in the world, and you ask them that question in five years, if they were to say, no, I've never heard of Inside Reproductive Health, you would look at them like, you've never heard of the Wall Street Journal?
You've never heard of the New York Times? It would be that ridiculous. Our goal is to grow Inside Reproductive Health. to that level of audience to build out the daily news to build out the news site, the level of frequency will be determined by how valuable it is being consumed. And then Fertility Bridge is now the strategy consultancy for the businesses that advertise through Inside Reproductive Health.
So when an advertiser is, wants to Sell to our audience when they want to get their message out there. We help them. We help them with the landing page We help them with the copy. We help them with linking those two things and linking that marketing effort to their sales team because We one we have the audience, but two we Have a lot of their behavioral data.
This is first party data. We can see what they're doing. We know what they're clicking on. We know what they're sharing. When a news article goes out, I can see what's really popular, what executives are sharing with their teams. And while we'll never share like, people's data, what we can say is we can strategize people on tailoring their message and putting their message into a place where it's gonna be something that.
Their decision makers who are really hard to reach are reached and want to consume the message very
[00:26:07] Kimberly Abernethy:
nice So a lot of times when people are like you Very driven you're out there. You're Jumping off the cliff, I'm just going to use that analogy again. Do you ever take time to realize that you're everywhere?
And by that I mean you're interviewing CEOs, you're providing marketing support for centers across the country I've seen you emceeing at every conference or event that I'm going to. I feel like you're somewhere on stage. Do you ever take time to sit back and look at the impact that you're making on fertility Where you are today in this journey,
[00:26:49] Griffin Jones: not really.
I'm just not wired to do that. So much. I think the nature of hungry people very often is to just think about what's next. And and sometimes I can do that to a fault. Sometimes you'll have team members that they want to celebrate something big. And all you can think about is This we always have to keep moving forward, and so I think sometimes to a fault. And then also I just also want to be humble is that I'm so grateful when people do say that. I also know that any one individual's impact will it's just a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. And and I'm happy to be a part of it, but and hopefully I've, I make some really big connections happen and meaningful impacts over the course of my career, but yeah, and hopefully I'll live a long life, but at the end of it, people will probably mourn me for a couple of days, and then if that, and then they'll get back to their lives, like we all do, like when I, and so there's that part of it and and then it's yeah.
Being everywhere, I still just don't feel like we're everywhere yet. I feel like I'm, this is just a straw poll, but I'm thinking that maybe 20 to 30 percent of the field knows what inside reproductive health is and, I want it to be over 90. Okay.
[00:28:14] Kimberly Abernethy:
Fair enough. So some fun questions.
You've worked with clinics across the country, out of curiosity, which clinic do you feel your services had the greatest impact on and
[00:28:23] Griffin Jones:
why? Thank I don't want to put anyone on the, any one of the clinics on the spot. You don't need to name the clinic. I think, for among one of our first clinics one of our very first was, is still in some ways the most fun.
And that was when I was only doing organic social media, because it was like, I'm not doing anything. From a clinical perspective, but I get to benefit from the elation that's coming from their patient base because I'm just helping them get stuff on social media and then they're talking about how much they love the doctors and they're talking about, they're connecting with each other and then you see people a year after that say it.
And That are posting their baby picture. And they're like, we came in because we saw something on Instagram or Facebook. And so that's a, that was a ton of fun. There's also been a couple of times where you have clinics that are, they're just really good people. And they're in a position where they've started to lose some patients and you're like, I can help with this.
I know how to do this. And and. And those are, those have been really fun and then there's been some really big clinics that we've worked with and it's maybe they're so big that our impact is less memorable over the course of what their whole trajectory will be because we're just a small piece of it, but you do some like really awesome videos.
client that we had. I won't say who it was, but everyone knows them. And they already had a great brand. They had a really good patient acquisition system and they're just missing like some really important creative pieces that we did for them. And I remember when we watched their videos for the first time, we all screened it together on zoom and they watched from the, from their houses and.
It was like at nighttime. It was after work hours. It was like 9 p. m. My wife came and sat down with me and their kids were watching with them and they're crying. And I know it wasn't one answer, but there's been some really cool things over the years.
[00:30:38] Kimberly Abernethy:
Now think about some of the interviews you've had and hopefully you can say this one, but which one surprised you the most when you were interviewing someone and what caused you to be so surprised?
[00:30:49] Griffin Jones:
Oh, gosh, this is putting me on the spot. I can think of two examples. One was with Dr. Amy Avazadeh and I was interviewing her about why does she have this gigantic patient acquisition funnel, like her social media presence, her brand. And she's just one practitioner in a small practice in the Bay Area that, and I kept asking her like do you want to grow?
Is it, do you want to, are you trying to get a bunch more docs under you? And she's no, really just want it to be me and have my own small operation. I'm like then why the heck do you have this whole big funnel? I couldn't figure it out. And it wasn't until afterwards that I realized, I don't remember if she told me or someone else told me, or I.
A lightbulb went off like in the detective movie, and they're just walking through the supermarket and they finally figure out who the murderer is that I was like, Oh, it's because she just does self pay patients. And yeah, so she's drawing from a much larger group. And that's something that I've always talked about in branding is that the bigger brand that you have, the more leverage you have, the more choices you have.
At different points of channel conflict, you can opt not to if you're getting a short end of the stick from insurance companies or cash pay. Pay, or excuse me. Yeah, employer carve out companies. You can choose to serve a segment of the marketplace if you have a big enough brand and a big enough presence.
And so that was something I didn't realize until afterwards. And so I felt like a dummy listening to that first interview. So I brought her back on to talk about that specific topic. Same thing with Dr. Rui Jelani had her on, we were talking about her patient acquisition funnel, and I knew that it was a really good presence that she has, and she's very good at getting new patients and moving them through the funnel.
But I never stopped to ask her like, how many is that bringing? And then find out afterwards, she did 1300 retrievals last year. I was like, okay. And then I brought it, it was like three weeks later, I brought her back on. So those were two interviews where I was like I, you want to be prepared as a host and sometimes you end up discovering a topic that you hadn't originally even set out to cover.
[00:33:05] Kimberly Abernethy:
Do you still get nervous when you interview people?
[00:33:07] Griffin Jones:
Not really.
[00:33:08] Kimberly Abernethy:
Thought I'd ask. 2022, you got engaged, you're married. What's going on with the Jones family today?
[00:33:16] Griffin Jones:
Maybe by the time this episode airs, baby Jones will be here. We don't know the sex of baby Jones yet, but we're excited either way and we're loving life in upstate New York and we're family oriented people.
We try to work a lot. We both work a lot and, we both exercise and then the rest of our time is spent maybe on a couple of the community interest things we have and with family, and we really try to kill anything in the middle. There's not too much Netflix or maybe a little bit here and there, I'm not I've never watched.
Breaking Bad or whatever's popular now. I don't know what it is. I haven't seen an episode. I don't care. And I don't play video games. And I don't go out to happy hour during the week. And I don't do any summer kickball leagues. We're pretty myopic in that sense.
[00:34:18] Kimberly Abernethy:
Don't worry, that baby will change all of that.
Trust me. Yeah. Do you consider yourself a Bills part of the Bills Mafia?
[00:34:25] Griffin Jones:
It's too cheesy for me to say that. Also I think that I'm too much of a skeptic to be in the Bills Mafia. I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. I can't not be. It's not something that I really want to even be. I just am. And there was a number of years where it really made me so negative that I had stopped watching altogether and that's not something that someone in Bill's Mafia would do. In fact, I think you get whacked by Bill's Mafia if you do something like that. But I just don't like the blind faith and I was... Also, at a point in my life where, yeah, in my early 20s, it's fun to go to a tailgate and and get silly, but, by the time I was going in my late 20s, I would bring my little brother from the Big Brothers Big Sisters program because they would give us tickets and it'd be like December and raining and team would be getting pounded by Tom Brady and the Patriots and no chance of going to the playoffs and drunk dudes are like touching my little brother's hair.
It's Dude like almost like getting in fights to just like with drunk people and I'm like, I don't want any part of this. So the table stuff is funny. Like I do think it's funny. I do think that the mayor of Buffalo should do it only if they ever win the Superbowl, smash through a table like Bill's mafia does.
But I'm, yeah I'm a Bill's fan, but I'm not as, as. True blue as those guys
[00:35:57] Kimberly Abernethy:
completely understand. So when you started your company, there were not a lot of disruptors in the industry. Progeny wasn't even around maybe 2016 they were just starting. So you were on the forefront with some of these new ventures thinking about all of the PE firms, the new disruptors in the market.
What advice would you give to those embarking on a new adventure today? New venture, not a venture, maybe both.
[00:36:24] Griffin Jones:
I wonder if the advice that I would get, that I would give, is stop taking outside money. I don't know if that's good advice, but it seems to me like the learning curve is longer than... Is accommodating of having to return investment money.
And that sounds counterintuitive, even as I'm saying it, because that's the whole point of outside money is to extend your runway, to even have a runway. If you're bootstrapping, you might have zero runway, but I, it. It seems to me like no matter how much outside money people have, at least in some cases, this probably isn't universally true, but at least in some cases, you can pile on tens of millions of dollars and they still don't have the product market fit to where it's scalable, reproducible, huge customer satisfaction, and profitable by the end of that investment.
And I wonder if people won't have to take that advice because the... era of free money will be coming to an end. It seems like it's coming to an end. I, we'll see if it actually does or not, but that probably dovetails into broader advice where I think it takes a long time. to figure out how to provide value to fertility providers.
Part of the reason why that is, is that their workflow is so complicated and so variant from one another that it's difficult to come up with scalable solutions. And many of the solutions entering The marketplace now say that's exactly what we intend to solve. We know how busy fertility doctors are.
We know how variant their workflow is, and we seek to make it less complicated. My good friend, Dr. Eduardo Harriton gave me a book called the innovators dilemma, and it talks about. Why incumbents have such a hard time either innovating or adapting to new technology. And it's because they're already in a position, they have delivery and fulfillment commitments, and then anything else, even if it ultimately will streamline operations in the future, is still in the moment.
An extremely cumbersome task to undertake, and so I think it takes a long time to figure it out and and I'm grateful that I could do that at a pace where the only person that was really suffering was me, and if a client was suffering in engagement, It's client services. I can make it up to them. I can, I, we phased our engagements that if this phase wasn't as good as the last one, then I would just stop chart.
I would just make it easy for them to leave us and then provide value, continue to provide some value to them until they felt good about the whole thing again. And and I could do that because I, Okay. Didn't have this huge outside financial obligation to fulfill. I've never taken a penny from investors, never from family or friends.
The only loan I ever took was three P during COVID. And that ended up being a grant that wasn't alone. So I've never borrowed. And so I, I don't necessarily recommend that everybody do it. That way, to a tee, but I think that one, if people take less money, outsider money, they may be in a position to where they can go longer, which is the real advice of spend that long time iterating, reiterating of finding how how to provide value to fertility clinics because a friend of mine an REI who I won't name, but after this, I'll ask him if I can say his name in the future.
He said, it feels like we've got our pie and everybody's coming in and they're just taking a piece of our pie and our pie is getting smaller. And what that means is that. People, at least at a perception level, are taking more than they're contributing in value. And perception, to some degree, is reality.
And I want to provide value I've done it, and I've not done it, and I taste the difference, and I hate when I don't do it, and I love when I do it, and I can't sleep when I don't do it, and I feel like a thousand bucks when I do it. And, so my advice is, maybe try to be independent, but certainly...
Go the long haul of figuring out this value game.
[00:41:07] Kimberly Abernethy:
I think you said something really interesting in all of that When I used to work for a manufacturer we'd have new people come in all the time and they would say no fertility is exactly like dermatology or oncology or Cardiology and we would say no, it's not wait to get involved in it.
You will learn that it's not the same and When you talked about that patient journey in a clinic, like every patient's journey is different, and the way that every clinic responds to that patient's journey is different. So there's no two patients whose journey is identical, even if they're going to the same clinic, or to the same doctor, or they repeat a cycle at the same clinic with the same physician.
It's just never the same because there's so many variables that occur every single Cycle. It's, it was, it's really interesting that it's, there's a lot of things that people are trying to fix, but the challenge is that there's no one plug that's going to fix what's broken at any one time. It's, it was just interesting.
[00:42:09] Griffin Jones:
It could be the case that. These companies finally do, especially these artificial intelligence companies, that they are able to account for all of these variables at such a scale because of AI, that they are able to streamline a lot more. And it's just so much ease that those human variables will still exist, but the AI will be able to account for them so rapidly and you will really be able to fulfill what.
Dr. Sable talks about of instead of doing 200, 000 cycles, we're doing 2 million and then 3 and then 4. It very well can be the case. I think we also would have thought that would have happened by now. So I think in 2002 we would have, Oh, 2003 they'll have this figured out. So it is, it's hard for me to picture not having it out, figured it out by 2045.
But. Here we are now.
[00:43:00] Kimberly Abernethy:
Yeah. I'm with you. Okay. One last question. A lot of new companies in the market today, a lot of product services entering in. What are your top three?
[00:43:09] Griffin Jones:
Oh, some people are going to be grumpy that I didn't put them on this list. And you did tell me you were going to ask me this question.
So I probably should have thought a little bit harder, but I'll just go with what I've been, what I've. I've thought about it at a cursory level. One is PsychoClarity, and I'm not just saying that because they were one of our earliest advertisers on Inside Reproductive Health, but I just like the way a company like that is set up right now.
I just I like how Dr. Schnoor is a true end user. I like that so far. He's doing this on his own. He's got a really small team. I've met two of them and they're sharp and they're committed and they're young. It's man, if you can keep that, I'm not a, I'm not a soothsayer. So I don't know if he'll keep that made by the time this happens.
I don't look into the future, but right now it's like I, I, it seems to me like that set up well because of not having that investor obligations yet, maybe, maybe that's what they're out for and trying to raise, I can't speculate on their behalf, but at least what they've done at the bootstrap level so far.
And really trying to figure this out of like, how do we help, how do we get this implemented? Like we have the value, we can sell it, but how do we get it implemented to where it's easy for clinics to do? And then it just becomes part of what they're doing. I think they're working on that in earnest without saying anything proprietary.
And then I think who else? Could be a big player. I still feel like my friends that engaged MD have a lot more up their sleeves and You're just plugging it's every but I can develop advertisers there. That's it's also who I know but I tend to bet on jockeys, even if I only know the horse somewhat, and the horse, most people I know really like Engaged MD most of my clients that have overlapped with Engaged MD really like it, and so I feel comfortable enough speaking on the horse, but just knowing Jeff and Taylor, I feel like these guys are there for me.
Or the true blue, then who would be three, and so many people are going to be pissed off that I didn't give them a compliment, I think. that I'm not totally sure who would be third, but I think if some people came together, like if Dr. Rui Jelani and Dr. Eduardo Harriton did a venture together, that it would probably be unstoppable.
And so there might be a couple of people like that. My friend, Dr. Dan, has a company called a future Fertility, not to be confused with future family and I don't know enough about the lab side to speak about future fertility, but that's another guy that I really believe in. And this is the Oscar speech that I never won and was never...
Prepared to deliver in terms of all the people that you forget. And of course, I'm gonna even though you told me you were gonna ask me this question, it's I'm gonna, when we hang up, I'm gonna be like, oh crap, should have said that person or that company. But that's who's, that's who's at the top of my head right now.
[00:46:27] Kimberly Abernethy:
Very nice. Anything you'd like to add before we conclude?
[00:46:31] Griffin Jones:
I would like to say that I'm very grateful. I just listened to an episode that I did with my friend Stephanie Linder where she interviewed me four years ago, and that was how I concluded that episode, and I am really grateful. I've gotten to know a lot of people and when you have clients that invite you to their home and have dinner with their family and you have people that write You Handwritten thank you cards and and when you're in a session with somebody, a strategy consulting session and they're just lit up after that because they felt like they got a ton of value.
It lights me up and yeah, I didn't, I really felt like an outsider when I came in and I don't anymore and I'm grateful for it.
[00:47:20] Kimberly Abernethy:
Very nice. Now what's the due date so we can all put it on our calendars?
[00:47:24] Griffin Jones:
It's in August. And it's mid August. And so we'll see if this episode might even come out after that.
I don't do project management. That's part of working in the business that I don't do. And so I have no idea when this episode will air, but maybe baby Jones will already be here.
[00:47:40] Kimberly Abernethy:
Very nice. Thank you, Griffin, for joining today. And it was my pleasure to interview you.
[00:47:44] Griffin Jones:
No, Kim, it was my pleasure to be interviewed by you.
You have a knack for it and I could tell when when I first met you that, that curiosity was, it's a humbling feeling. Something I can learn from because sometimes I have it and sometimes I want to hear myself be the smartest guy in the room. And I think you have less of the latter, more of the former that genuine curiosity.
And I appreciate you wanting to apply some of it to me.
[00:48:13]Announcer:
Thank you for listening to Inside Reproductive Health.