A Note from Kevin on HTN’s Third Era

The older I get, the faster time seems to pass in life. I feel like I’ve hardly blinked, and all of a sudden, I’ve spent the majority of my career as a newsletter writer. I am quickly closing in on a decade since I started writing a weekly newsletter on healthcare news back in 2017 (you can see the first edition here). I think I’ve probably passed over a million words written on Sundays over that period of time.

There have been some fun milestones along the way – particularly that the newsletter has grown to an audience of 32,000+ and a nerdy community of 5,500+. For something that started as a creative outlet, I could never have predicted that. Yet at this moment in time, I am more excited than I ever have been about HTN and what we’re up to, and I thought I’d share some of why below.

One of the things I’m most proud of over the past eight years that HTN has turned from a fun side project into a cash-flowing business that sustains our team. We’re “default alive” to borrow a startup-y phrase from Paul Graham, and have never needed outside capital to get there. I’ve never really thought of myself as an entrepreneur; more of a research analyst who likes thinking about interesting problems and found a creator-y way of building a business that supports that work in an industry I care deeply about.

In taking that path, I think we’ve found an interesting and simple flywheel that supports all this work:

This third era of HTN is really all about leaning into both sides of the flywheel above and building out a team that can help scale both thoughtful research content and an engaged learning community in lockstep.

In doing that, I think we can have a meaningful positive impact on the broader healthcare community. By thinking deeply about the tradeoffs afoot and moving past visions and headlines. By connecting with others to discuss complicated matters and listening to those perspectives. By sharing our thinking with others, even at the risk being wrong. By building bridges with people with different opinions, seeking to learn from their experiences. These sorts of connections, anchored in curiosity and thoughtfulness, I think are more important than ever for us all.

We all spend so much of our time on this earth working, and I’ve come to learn that seems like a pretty meaningful way to spend that time to me.

HTN’s First Era

As I think about the flywheel above, it strikes me that HTN has grown through two distinct eras as a business to get to this point today.

The first era, roughly from 2017 to 2020, was when HTN was fondly known as “Kevin’s Weekly Health Tech Reads”. [I know, I know, I am often told I should have been a brand marketer in another life. Alas, maybe next time.] I started writing a weekly newsletter back in 2017 as a creative musing for me. I was always the person in organizations who was sending internal emails about earnings calls, M&A deals, and the like with some thoughts on it, so I figured why not do the same thing with my friends. It was my way of channeling my internal research analyst to talk shop about the healthcare innovation ecosystem. It just so happened at that moment in time there was a lot of momentum around newsletters, and I rode that creator go-to-market wave.

The work in that era was very oriented around the research content, but that content ended up in front of people who wanted a forum to discuss it. It was in 2018 when Kevin Wang was the first person who messaged me about creating a Slack channel to discuss the newsletter. This nudge from Kevin ended up kickstarting the content and community flywheel:

So I started a Slack channel for people to chat about the newsletter, setting this whole thing in motion. You’ll note something that might be counterintuitive here — while today HTN is known as a community, that community grew out of an affinity for a particular style of research content, filled with curiosity about how the health system worked. I had no real notion of building a community in the earliest days; it emerged organically from people wanting to discuss the content. That seedling became the driving force behind the HTN community. This was a group of curious nerds who cared deeply about the industry, wanted to go past the headlines, learn about what others were doing, connect with them, and generally stay ahead of the curve in understanding what was happening across the industry. HTN Slack was the perfect environment to do that.

While all this started off as a side project, it quickly began filling time, particularly when COVID-19 disrupted all of our daily lives and turned the world into a virtual place. At that time, I had quit my job and it felt quite natural to enter the second era of HTN, with Ryan Russell joining as a co-founder to help build Health Tech Nerds as a business. When we launched, only a few hundred people converted from the free Slack to the paid Community. As other community folks undoubtedly know, that transition is a daunting one. But what started off as a few hundred nerds in 2021 has steadily grown over the last few years to become the leading community in the industry with over 5,500 people in it.

As the community has grown, we’ve noticed that the polarity of HTN has reversed. In our earlier days, word-of-mouth growth was about the content, and joining the community followed that flow. That was central to the flywheel. More recently, as the community has grown by an order of magnitude, the opposite has become increasingly common, with more folks joining because they hear how great the community is. 

This is an opportunity for us to lean into reorienting the community again around content — we’ve 10Xed the community since starting the second era, now how do we ramp up content to help us to match the energy across both. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that me simply trying to produce more and more content isn’t a sustainable answer. While I love writing the Sunday newsletter and have no intent of stopping that — and you’ll see me dabbling with other forms of content too — we need to build out a team of research analyst meet creator types to continue building on this work. And so here we are, entering our third era!

HTN’s Third Era

In many ways it feels quite natural to be entering this third era of HTN today. Similar to the combo of our growth and industry disruption that led from the first to the second era, this shift is one precipitated by our community growth as well as a few disruptive factors, all convening at the same time. From the technological disruption of AI to the increasingly unaffordable healthcare system, all while we grapple with the uncertainty of the political climate, there is a lot going on in the world to unpack.

There is so much change on a daily basis that it is hard to stay in front of it all. That’s true for me, and I get to spend my time thinking about it all day. I can’t imagine how it feels for folks working other day jobs while trying to stay up with it all.

In this sort of dynamic environment, it feels important to reorient the community around insightful research content that helps folks analyze, interpret and form an opinion on the change afoot. To borrow a concept from the great Ben Thompson, content is more important than ever as a totem pole for communities to build around in this world.

To that end, you’ll see us creating more content in different forms over the coming months, spending more time focused on supporting key discussion areas like policy, AI, and value based care across the community. And yes, I think it is quite important that we have humans doing this sort of knowledge-based work, focusing on thinking deeply and asking the right questions. Knowing how to think is seemingly becoming an increasingly rare skill in the world, and I think it sounds like good fun to build a team of folks who get to spend their time thinking deeply on all this. Speaking of…

Growing the team — welcome, Martin & Caleigh!

Abbey (HTN’s fearless business / operations leader) and I are quite excited to share that long-time community member and health policy nerd extraordinaire Martin Cech has joined HTN as our Lead Policy Research Analyst, focused on all things health care policy related. Among other things, Martin has been working on a new policy focused weekly newsletter, the Weekly Health Policy Briefing, which does a great job breaking down key policy topics and what they mean for folks working in healthcare.

Check out some of the first articles that Martin has been working on and sign up for his newsletter below:

Abbey and I are equally as excited to share that Caleigh Bachop, whom many of you have gotten to know as our Community Manager this summer while Abbey was out on maternity leave, has joined the team in a full-time capacity. Caleigh will continue as our Community & Platform Lead, focusing on orienting the community around insightful conversations, connections, and experiences for our members that help them stay one step ahead in understanding and navigating the change afoot in the industry.

One of the secrets about the HTN community and what makes it so valuable is members often say it’s the thing that helps them stay ahead of the curve. It does so in a way that helps members to build meaningful connections, advance their careers, form deeper opinions and insights, understand the landscape, and have a greater impact. The impact of the community grows the more members lean in and share insights from their unique perspectives and experiences. All of the other positive outcomes that can happen for members in an environment like that – finding jobs, building new partnerships, driving sales, etc – are secondary benefits of the community that all really come to life when people lean in.

We’re excited for Caleigh to continue building on top of that, as she has already started to this summer. Here are just a few examples of what she’s been working on:

Onward

As I’ve repeatedly shared with Abbey, Caleigh, Martin at this point, I feel more excited about where HTN is headed and the role we play in the broader ecosystem than ever. And so it felt like time to share that thinking externally with you all as well.  

Healthcare is a hard industry to work in. Anyone who has attempted to drive positive change in the industry undoubtedly knows well that there are challenging tradeoffs that are unfortunately a reality of the world we live. It all can feel a bit Sisyphean at times. I think we need more spaces that allow us to productively have honest, vulnerable conversations about those hard tradeoffs.

In an era where so much content – seemingly particularly content driven by AI – feels purpose-built to generate views by moving us away from each other and towards the extremes, I think it’s important to build bridges and find common ground with others. Perhaps especially with those we disagree with. I strongly believe that is the path forward, so that we can all learn how to better navigate these uncertain times better. 

I’m quite excited for this next era of HTN and navigating all of this uncertainty across the broader macro environment with you. We may disagree at times, but I think those are the best learning opportunities for all of us, and I’m excited to learn alongside Abbey, Caleigh, Martin and the rest of this crazy bunch of nerds.

I have a feeling we’ll all look back on this next era as a particularly meaningful one in healthcare, and I hope HTN plays a role in helping you navigate it all. 

Cheers,
Kevin

PS - here’s a recent photo of the team behind all the work at HTN as we gathered IRL a few weeks ago on a lovely Minnesota night!