Nimbo: how we grew and scaled a SaaS business from zero to hero
Managing a business is hard. Managing a healthcare business is incredibly hard. As a healthcare business you have to comply with regulations, treat patients, be on top of healthcare best practices, and all the other things a normal business has to do: from growing sales to managing costs and profit.
Historically, software solutions have been more of a burden than an ally. It’s been expensive and with long time periods for implementing the software (and hardware); usability hasn’t been friendly for the physicians, nurses and clinical personnel so it never get’s used for making decisions for clinical, management, and financial purposes; it never really adapts to the clinical and management processes.
There must be a system out there that could manage all aspects of a clinic, in a very simple & purposeful way. Nimbo is a Digital Patient Management System which helps physicians and healthcare institutions manage the life cycle of their patients, grow their patient base, streamline their processes, increase patient loyalty, enables better accessibility for healthcare to all patients, and reduces the cost of accessing healthcare. What’s great is that 9 out of 10 healthcare institutions recommend them, users love the usability, and it’s only 10 days to go live.
Nimbo is the product and business unit at Ecaresoft that I used to manage and direct the revenue cycle for. This is a great enterprise in which I learned a lot, did & accomplish big challenges, was given great opportunities, was supported and given autonomy, discovered the passion for my career as a predictable revenue profesional, and found purpose & motivation from the leaders and collaborators with which I worked everyday for 6 years. I’d like to share with you the path that we took with Nimbo to growth and scalability as a Software as a Service EHR for the health-tech industry.
The products that Ecaresoft produces & sells help hospitals and clinics manage every aspect of their operation: from marketing to patient billing to managing their medical records. They take care of the tedious work so that you have time to focus on your business strategy. They are in the business of reducing costs in the healthcare sector to help all of us have the best possible care and are committed to building the best software for the healthcare industry.
The Electronic Health-record (EHR)
In 2016 Nimbo was still on a very early stage of creation and was composed of a patient directory with basic information and an EHR. The team at Ecaresoft had learned that if physicians didn’t love the app, it wasn’t going to work for healthcare institutions and networks- whether it be clinics, physician offices, pharmacies or even hospitals . The product functionality, design, user experience and even the Customer Success team were focused on that premise. At the beginning there was a Product Team composed of 4 developers for back-end, front-end and full stack — and a Product Manger (also the Product Director of Nimbo) along with a Head of development at the time. There was a marketing team, a design team (for product & marketing) and the participation and guidance of the CEO of Ecaresoft. This was a team that could be fed with a single pizza.
Nimbo as a business unit was being directed and managed with a results only environment and a start-up like vibe. The office space in which we worked was a coworking space called El CoWork. We believe that there shouldn’t be any baby sitters and it’s not who’s right but what’s right. I already came from a previous Start Up experience and culture, so this was a very familiar space to me. I first started helping them as an outsourced digital marketing asset. At the time I had two professions: offering my profesional services (in this case Digital Marketing), and an eCommerce site that I wanted to grow (called PawBasket).
So I focused on helping them with the commercialization of Nimbo X desktop app (as it was called back when) via a launch campaign. For this I had to elaborate a Content & Media Distribution Strategy, along with my professional services terms & conditions. I had no previous experience on this so I educated myself quickly with a couple of social media marketing & business bootcamps courses on Udemy to present a business proposal for the next quarter of work. They liked it, I felt lucky.
Nimbo is a software as a service and it’s on the cloud. This means you can access your information from anywhere and any device as long as you had your credentials and the url access of the app, and you paid a subscription for enhanced functionality. The team wanted to experiment and try a new technology for web apps: Electron. Which basically had the ability of using the web app version as a desktop version. Although you still needed to maintain & update both versions.
My job was to create, manage and execute a marketing campaign for the Apple Store & Windows store launch. So first I had to get a bit technical because part of the scope was for me to upload and submit the app into the app stores. I had to do a lot of google fu to learn how to do it, I also ended up bothering Ben (Head of Dev @Nimbo) with a ton of questions. I am grateful for his patience and guidance. So I worked with the design team to plan what type of content we wanted to display on the images & banners and/or videos on the app store landing page; at the same time I worked with marketing to create an optimal version for the meta data of the app.
So with the help of Design & Marketing we complied with the best practices for ASO (App Search Optimization) when we implemented the app at the app stores. Part of the strategy was also a blogging series for the launch of the Nimbo X desktop App. We wanted to generate as much social traffic as possible through our blogging efforts into the App Stores so we could boost new sign ups. We also measured the increase in blog subscribers and how many new paid accounts were generated from this strategy. This were the campaign’s Key Performance Indicators.
For the content success metrics we focused on views, reads, the read ratio and how many recommends (likes) each blog post entry had and for the whole series. We launched 4 topics. As you can see we were measuring our funnel and channel success. For the last push, we opted for using intercom to send in-app (messages through the chat of the app)& email messages to our current users from the web browser app version. We started generating traction in social traffic and desktop app downloads, but no new paid subscriptions. We learned 3 things out of this campaign:
- Social Traffic is a good source for new users
- The desktop app was creating more visibility for Nimbo
- Users are not converting in the 30 day trial
We wondered, do users require a little extra push? Are they having difficulty finding value? How might we increase the frequency and number of new paid accounts? The management team at Nimbo decided to hire a Customer Success intern to help dive into the answers of this question. Meanwhile the marketing & product teams wanted to keep testing different acquisition channels to find the one with the healthiest ROI, best quality of subscribers, and best reach. So we worked on establishing an SEO, SEM (with Google) and social media paid advertising (Facebook & Twitter) as part of a Content Media strategy for the next Quarter.
This was also new for me so I went into Udemy and did a course on “Easy ways to increase traffic without google or linkbuilding” to learn more. The head of marketing decided he would handle de Google Ads Campaign execution but required me to help him with keyword planning and research and to evaluate the competitors keyword strategy; and that I could also manage, plan and execute the paid advertisement for Facebook Ads & a content strategy for Twitter. So for the next couple of months I worked with the design team to create content for the ads, with the marketing team to create a publishing schedule and also weekly reporting to the Nimbo management team of the results for the Paid advertising campaigns. We wanted to measure the Return on Ad Spent (ROAS), new sign ups generated, and how many new paid accounts we generated. I used tools like hootsuite for the publishing of ads and content management. We also continued creating blog entries in Medium, close to 4 to 5 entries for the Quarter.
By the end of the second quarter we had learned new stuff:
- Google Ads had the highest ROI and ROAS
- New Users did require a small push to convert into paid accounts
- Social Traffic through blog posts and social media (not paid advertisement) brought quality sign ups
So by the end of 2 quarters we started the flywheel of social traffic, blogging and paid advertisement for new paid accounts and sign ups; we learned that social media is not the best channel for paid advertisement unless we produce constant content for this social networks; Google Ads is going to be our main channel for acquisition; and that we required a Customer Success Manager to help users. Two big decisions were made internally: 1) the job-opening for the Customer Success Manager; and 2) the marketing team would become part of the Ecaresoft Marketing team. This means that there was no job & resource for the work I was doing. I’m out, no hard feelings but goodbye. Peace out.
I really loved working with the Nimbo team and their culture; it really made me feel like this was meaningful work, and I was working with people that I admired, respected and was learning a lot from. This were meaningful relationships. I just didn’t wanted to be laid off that easily.
You can read the second part to this series here: Customer Success Management: Delivering Value through Experiences.
