Wanted: advertising salesperson
June 03, 2012
At DocSpot, our mission is to connect people with the right health care by helping them navigate publicly available information. We believe the first step of that mission is to help connect people with an appropriate medical provider, and we look forward to helping people navigate other aspects of their care as the opportunities arise. We are just at the start of that mission, so we hope you will come back often to see how things are developing.
An underlying philosophy of our work is that right care means different things to different people. We also recognize that doctors are multidimensional people. So, instead of trying to determine which doctors are "better" than others, we offer a variety of filter options that individuals can apply to more quickly discover providers that fit their needs.
June 03, 2012
As we iterate on our business model, we're looking for help to sell online advertising space. Know people who might be interested? If so, tell them to
We think it'd be a great opportunity for the successful candidate to grow with the business.
May 27, 2012
When we launched DocSpot publicly, we reserved some space for advertising. Since advertising revenue was always supposed part of the long-term business plan, we didn't want consumers to be surprised when we started to rely on it. However, since the traffic started out small and we had a lot of other things to work on, we didn't spend much time figuring out how to maximize revenue -- we just participated in the advertising network that is probably the easiest one to use. Over the last year, our traffic has grown substantially enough that we're starting to give this formerly neglected area of business some more attention.
If you know of good advertising networks or are familiar with the direct sales model for advertising, we'd like to hear from you. We're still early in our process of figuring out what path to take, but we'd like to explore some options.
May 19, 2012
We're thinking of changing our logo. That's rather unfortunate because we actually like our current logo. It turns out that the caduceus (currently used in the logo) is actually a symbol for commerce, and not originally meant for medicine (see Wikipedia for more information, especially the section on "Contemporary views"). What's interesting is that the majority of hospitals surveyed used the caduceus rather than the rod of Asclepius. This is likely in part because the caduceus seems more aesthetically pleasing than the rod.
Another issue with the current logo is that it looks very similar to some other logos (for example, take a look at certain lines of Crest toothpaste or some varieties of Head-and-Shoulders shampoo). So, if we do change our logo, we'd like something more distinctive.
Figuring out a logo is one of those tasks that take far longer than it seems like it should. If you have any ideas of what our new logo should be, please let us know.
May 12, 2012
As we continue to develop new features, we're also considering how to make this site useful for doctors. For example, suppose a doctor opens up a new practice; such a doctor might want to advertise his services to build up his base of patients. Coincidentally, many visitors to this site are looking for doctors, so we could help both the doctor and the patients looking for doctors.
Many sites help achieve this match by offering what are known as premium profiles that highlight certain doctors to visitors. As we consider what a DocSpot premium profile should look like, we're curious what doctors out there think would be useful. If you have a thought, please let us know.
May 06, 2012
Last week, I mentioned that there are a number of improvements that we've been working on that are not immediately visible to users. One of these background improvements that we're still in the process of rolling out is a faster page load. There are certain landing pages that users will visit from search engine results that now load faster than they did previously. These pages look a lot like the normal search results pages and the acceleration is done by pre-generating the pages (otherwise known as caching). As a result, what is visible in those landing pages will sometimes be out of sync with what is presented in the search results pages. As we finish implementing this feature, however, those landing pages should get automatically re-generated over time and should not differ too much from the search results pages at any given point in time.
And yes, we plan on improving the speed of generating the search results page so that all users can benefit.