[rmorey]

Congrats! This is a desperately needed product. I'm really curious as to how you onboarded the 5k providers that you have now. That is a sizable number, and in NYC, the market most saturated by Zocdoc, whom you've identified as your only real competitor (who don't currently provide price predictions). I'm sure any provider familiar with ZD will have had their eye caught by "Only pay a patient booking fee when a patient books through Certainly and shows up."

[blastbking]

Thx for the encouragement! Right now we don't have relationships with a lot of these providers, but we do use the only charge when a patient shows up thing as a selling point when selling to providers - providers HATE getting charged for no shows. We wanted to list more providers (even those we don't have relationships with) because with only a handful of providers the shopping experience doesn't really work.

[rmorey]

Hmm, so you are saying, most of these providers listed on your site have no relationship with you? They don't know they are being listed?

[blastbking]

Yep, since the pricing data is publicly available, we list mostly non-partnered providers. Eventually we would want to convert all of them to partners, but that's a years long journey.

[vxNsr]

Maybe it’s changed but back when I used zocdoc, they charged a flat rate and the only issue was being downranked once someone booked with you. Initially we had all appointments going through ZD (because why not, it was free and we didn’t need to spend time/money building our own appointment booking system, plus I think it integrated with our CMS), but changed that when it became clear there was no organic appointments because we were at the bottom of the list despite being highly rated.

It’s been nearly 10 years since I was involved in that practice so I have pretty stale info

[rmorey]

Yeah, it has changed. In 2019, they adopted a fee-per-booking model, in which the flat yearly fee is nominal (like, a hundred, not thousands) and providers pay ZD a fee (varies per speciality) per each new patient booking via the marketplace (i.e. not returning patients, and not patients who book via an embedded Zocdoc widget on the provider's site) The idea being, now they grow as providers' business grows, aligning incentives. There can be issues with that model as well, including the rules around no-shows.