Fertu

So today we’re chatting about Fertu and how it’s used at your company. Before we jump into that, could you give a brief overview of the company and your role there?

We’re a pediatric mental health company. We serve children, adolescents, and their families, ages 4–24, with virtual therapy, psychiatry, and parent coaching. We go to market through pediatricians and family doctors, who we engage with, and then they refer patients to us. I’m a co-founder.

What was the need that drove you to look for a product like Fertu?

We were looking for a way to engage with pediatricians and their staff at scale and at a low cost. We tried advertising to them in a variety of ways but realized that the thing that worked best for us was to cold call primary care practices, get reliable contact information from them, and nurture the relationship that way. There’s no list of contact info that’s reliable. After the initial call, we do continued engagement until we get meetings with them and they start referring patients to us.

We found it very, very difficult to run these engagements through HubSpot, because it has no capability to manage engagement over fax. Our workflow at the time was working, but it was very manual, very error-prone, and extremely hard to report on, so I needed someone who could automate the workflow for us. This would enable me to outsource my calling workforce as well.

I didn’t evaluate a lot of vendors. I knew that Fertu could design around my workflow and none of the bigger companies could do that.

Are there any other requirements you had in a product?

Fax capability was the big one. I wanted a more one-on-one service, rather than something self-serve — I didn’t want to trigger every workflow myself. And I also wanted capability around phone, SMS, and direct mail as well as fax, so that as we expanded, there would be one place where I could do all this outreach. With HubSpot, every time I wanted to add capability I would have to design it myself and put it back in the workflow through an API, and I didn’t have the time or patience to deal with that. So with Fertu, it was quite appealing for me to have one place and one team that I could entrust everything to.

How was the sales process?

It felt less like a sales process and more like a discovery process. It was almost like they were doing product discovery with me, and I just so happened to be at the other end paying for that product to be developed. They were very focused on my requirements and even helped me sharpen some of the requirements. And that kept going through the onboarding and setup process, which we did piecemeal. We rolled out capabilities as they became ready, saw how they were being used, and iterated on them over time. That’s still going on now.

What are your use cases for Fertu?

Fertu pulls from HubSpot a list of calls that I or my salespeople designed. Our callers come and dial from that list to make contact with the prospects and select an outcome for the call based on how it went. Then based on that outcome, Fertu handles the ongoing engagement and reports on it.

We also run newsletters to doctors every month: I send them the content and they assemble it and ship it out. We run monthly webinars, too, for the general population and for doctors, on mental health topics. Fertu sends the invites and the recaps for those as well.

What features does Fertu have for reporting and analytics?

We track cumulative statistics, which don’t give me a whole lot of insight: number of emails and faxes sent, open rates for emails, all the usual stuff. Faxes obviously don’t have an open rate. Most importantly, Fertu’s data is written back into HubSpot, so at any given moment, I can follow up on every single piece of communication and activity that was made with a contact, including faxes. That’s something that no one else would do.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Fertu?

I think the weaknesses are a direct mirror image of the strengths. These guys do so much hand-holding and personal service, and they’re a small team, but that won’t scale, so at some point, they’ll need to figure out another way. But, because it’s such an important part of the experience that they provide, that’s going to be a problem. How do they scale while still maintaining that people-focused user interface, which is such a unique and beneficial strength that they have? I can see them feeling that pressure sometimes, even now.

Have you had any bugs or reliability issues?

We’ve had some small bugs in the calling app and in the way data was being written. A lot of these features are being built as I request them, so it’s not free from challenges. But they’re always fixed within hours, if not minutes.

What integrations do you have with Fertu?

We have the integration with HubSpot, which is super easy. One of their engineers used to work for HubSpot so he knows the platform in and out. I can’t imagine it would be any easier even in a science fiction world! The next step that we’re scoping out now is for them to integrate with our proprietary care coordination platform, which will be more of a test of what their and my engineers can do.

How has account management and support been?

Best in class.

Do you feel like you made the correct assessment in going with Fertu?

Yeah, I think so.

Are there any areas of growth that you would recommend to leadership at Fertu?

I think they’re so custom — I see them more as a service than as a product. If HubSpot is Zara, these guys are like a custom tailor! At this point they’re still making individual suits for every client. But for future growth, I think that they’re very good at finding solutions for companies that need to reach people who cannot be reached in modern ways, whether through phone calls, direct mail, or faxes. That’s what these guys are good at, and until those audiences disappear from the world, they’ll have a good business. So they should focus on doing that.

Do you have any advice for buyers who are thinking through patient marketing or provider marketing right now?

Just general advice: any platform you use is only going to be as good as the data you feed it, and getting quality data is really, really hard.