Dan Sheridan (00:00)
Yeah, I think there is this term of the race to the bottom. If you are competing on price, the only way you can sort of win that client is to price lower than your competition. We don't sell ourselves on the price. We don't try to be the cheapest agency. We don't really advertise ourselves based on the cost.
We always come in with the value that we can provide and the expertise that we have.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:21)
Welcome to a new episode of the Science Marketer Podcast. My guest today is Dan Sheridan, founder of Co-Labb.
Co-Labb is a medical communication agency that managed to grow a client base among the biggest names in life sciences without having to do any marketing. Dan started freelancing while he was doing his PhD and in just a few years, he built a thriving agency.
In this episode, we'll break down exactly how he did it, the skills you need, how to land your first client, when to scale and why expertise and not marketing has been the key to his success.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:54)
Hi, welcome to the Science Marketer Podcast.
Dan Sheridan (00:57)
Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed your last couple of ones that I watched through, so it's a pleasure to be on here.
Joachim Eeckhout (01:01)
Great. So let's start with the first question. And we'll go back really at the beginning of your journey. So what motivated you to start freelancing during your PhD?
Dan Sheridan (01:12)
Yeah, so before my PhD, I worked in big pharma and biotech. I worked at Amgen as a process development scientist. So that's one of the, I suppose, the biggest biotech companies in the world. And when you're in part of that company, you do feel like you're at sort of the forefront of life science, innovation and translational science. And then when I went back to do my PhD, it's quite, obviously opposite of that. You're very early stage.
I was working on stem cell biology in the pituitary gland. There was some hope that there might be some translational aspect of this for treating endocrine disorders. But I think if that is the case, it might be 30, 40 years down the line. So I quickly felt that the PhD was almost too specialized. You're working with such a aspect of science that you lose that sort of involvement in the broader scientific field and also a more...
That's the forefront of translational science. So think even as early as my first year of the PhD, I had that feeling where I wanted to be working more closely to innovation and bringing new therapies or products to market. So I had that thought of, well, originally I actually wasn't freelancing within the medical writing. I did start working part-time in the evenings and weekends in a contract research organization in London. So they were testing vaccines.
which was just before COVID kicked off. And of course then COVID exploded and we started testing some COVID vaccines and we also did a human challenge trial where they actually infected people in a quarantine unit with COVID and sort of characterized infection. I suppose that sort of scratched the itch of wanting to work more at the forefront of science, but it was quite repetitive, lot of just blood testing routinely.
So probably didn't scratch the sort of scientific interest that I had of just exploring new areas. And I suppose that's why I sort of fell into then the medical writing. It wasn't really, I just sort of fall into it by accident almost. were, my partner at the time, now my wife, she was doing some part-time work.
proofreading thesis is for masters and PhD students that weren't speaking. So she said to me, like, should try find some this sort of freelance online work if you could. I was studying my STEM cell PhD at the moment. So just think I did a Google search for online STEM cell writing job. And I came across this really interesting position for a New York based STEM cell company. I applied for that. I got that role.
sort of opened up this whole new world of medical writing to me. you know, sort of satisfied all the things I was interested in working at the forefront of science, working on book by your projects or something new. And I thought that was great. So I that sort of sparked my interest in medical writing, freelancing at the time, alongside my PhD. And what I thought was really good quite early on is in the PhD position, even though, you know, by time you get there, you've got
maybe 10 years of experience and masters of undergrad industry experience, but you're still almost treated like a student again. where I found then when I started doing the freelance positions, again, you're treated like that expert, you know, someone's hiring you into their company for your expertise and all the knowledge you have. And I that was quite a nice, quite a nice sort of
sort of proof of your expertise at that stage, alongside a PhD where you're again treated like a student.
Joachim Eeckhout (04:19)
Did you work a long time with this first client?
Dan Sheridan (04:22)
Yeah, so believe it or not, I mean, they're still one of our clients. I've taken them with me from the early first ever freelancer to now into our agency. So yeah, I've been working with them for almost five years.
Joachim Eeckhout (04:33)
That's nice. So yeah, you answered one of my question, like how did you find your first clients? So basically looking for online jobs or online gigs. Was there any other way? mean, I don't know, like, did you find more clients during your PhD or did you go just with this one and see basically you decided to start a business?
Dan Sheridan (04:52)
Yeah, so I mean, that first client was almost hard to find because I didn't even know that freelance medical writing existed as a job. Now I'd know to search for freelance medical writing positions in stem cell or regenerative medicine. At the time, I didn't even know what that search phrase was. So I was just Googling away for almost online jobs. So that's how I sort of fell into that and found that client almost by mistake. Now, of course, you know, there's
a lot more of a correct route that you can use for finding clients on LinkedIn, things like this. You can actually target customers, marketing managers, hiring managers, directly in the companies you want. So after I worked with our first client, then I said, okay, there's actually a whole career field here. There's a whole industry around medical writing and freelance medical writing.
So pretty quickly after that first client, picked up some clients. Now that I knew what to search for, how to offer my services and my expertise. So I think that was probably in my first year of my PhD. I started with that one client, slowly grew. My wife, Ellen, she was also, as I said, doing some online proofreading, but she also has a degree in health sciences. She also started doing some online freelancing work as well.
So within a year or two, we had quite a lot of clients on board.
Joachim Eeckhout (06:02)
many freelancers struggle with pricing their work at first when they begin. So how did you approach this really at the beginning?
Dan Sheridan (06:10)
Yeah, I think the project pricing, you know, even certainly at the start as a freelancer, super challenging, but you know, even, even on onwards now to operating an agency, it's always, it's always a challenge. You never want to be under pricing or over pricing. And it's, hard to get that sweet spot. Certainly as a freelancer, you know, you come into this, I had never worked in an agency before, which I'm sure probably a lot of medical writers do. So maybe they would have that understanding of some of the standard pricing.
For me, was coming up with all of this by myself. And I think as scientists, we are quite passionate about our work. We enjoy our work. And that's often why people go on to doing a PhD and a such a time commitment is for that passion and that interest in the research. And I think it is quite easy to sort of undersell yourself financially because you used to think, oh, I'm interested in this work. I don't want be charging too much. And it's important work. It has to be done.
And I think that is fine starting out to charge a cheap rate. I think more importantly for your first few jobs or your first year or even is trying to get that experience and build your client list, build your portfolio. So I think that's almost more important than trying to nail the pricing at the beginning and try to maximize your financial gain. Now it's more critical to build that client list and keep those clients as well.
to begin with, it's just come up with an hourly rate that you're happy with, you're satisfied as a scientist, meets your needs, et cetera. And then once you get that understanding for how long projects take and how much time you need to put into them, then you can move into more sophisticated pricing, pricing per project on fixed rates and not on that hourly rate. I think that's quite important.
Joachim Eeckhout (07:45)
And I think your strategy of starting early, like during your PhD is the right one because maybe you don't have as much financial need as someone who already has a career or something like this. So yeah, you can build your client base step by step and then when you're ready, basically increase the price or something like this.
Dan Sheridan (07:59)
Yeah.
Exactly. think that's one of the really good things about starting a career as a sort of side hustle, as they say, alongside your nine to five job is you don't have that financial risk. You can work evenings or weekends if you don't price a project correctly and it goes way over budget and you should have charged way more. At least you have your nine to five salary to cover all your needs. So I think it's a really good way to transition.
If someone does want to transition into medical writing or freelancing, do it alongside your existing job for a few months and then it moves. You can sort of transition into it. I would just say sort of when you do get more confident in the pricing as a freelancer is trying to move to that value based pricing. So think about it's not just purely about how much time you're spending on it. I think it is important to move away from that.
hourly based charging for projects because now if you think about it as a PhD scientist, you could have 15 years experience and knowledge and you're sort of, it's that value in your experience and your expertise that you're offering to your clients, not the 10 hours of work that you're putting into that project. So thinking about commercially, what's the value of the project that you're providing to a customer? I mean, if you think of the life sciences,
It is a high value, high ticket field. A DNA sequencing technology machine, it could cost a hundred thousand pounds. And if you're writing the more sort of marketing projects, writing the product page for that website for that product, know, they're selling that at a thousand, hundred thousand pounds. I'm not sure how many units they got to sell a year, it's a lot of value in that. So you making that kick ass.
website page for that project has a lot of value for the company and you can't sort of charge accordingly for that.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:42)
Yeah. And speaking of transition, when did you decide it was time to go from freelancing to starting an agency? What was the key indicators?
Dan Sheridan (09:53)
Yeah, so I mean it was quite organic and you we
I did build Co-Labb into a sort full-fledged agency even within my third year of my PhD. So I was still doing my nine to five PhD job while running this agency with my wife. So it wasn't really that sharp, you know, the sudden movement or sudden time where I said, okay, now we need to quit our other jobs and start this. It was quite sort of slow and organic, but I think the time that we...
I knew we sort of had an interesting business model and something that could be successful above just being an individual freelancer. It was just a sort of success that we were having with our clients. We weren't losing any clients. We were sort of snowballing. We kept getting referred from the clients we were working with, we're telling our colleagues or networks. And we were providing sort of that unique offering of a sort of very specialist.
scientific expertise, but sort of small and personable and agile. We don't have layers of management, you know, so we can work really closely with our clients. And I think I just realized that the clients were really sort of valuing this service we were offering and we could sort of expand this and offer it to more clients through an agency. So as the demand kept growing, you know, it just got to the stage where I realized we either had to turn down projects or
or start to hire people to satisfy that demand. So now we started that off slowly with we had some part-time freelancers working for us. And then it got to a stage where we had to hire full-time staff.
Joachim Eeckhout (11:21)
Okay, that's really interesting. think we'll go back on hiring a bit later. So when you made the jump basically to full-time, so I guess after your PhD maybe, what were the first steps you took to ensure you had a sustainable business?
Dan Sheridan (11:36)
Yeah, so I suppose we were certainly full-time as an agency even before I was, which is probably quite funny. You know, I was the only part-time person in the company. Even before I finished the PhD, I think we had five full-time staff. you know, I had to make these choices even before I went full-time with the agency. But I think the most important thing for sustainability early on is just trying to keep your costs down.
minimizing the costs that if you do have a quiet month, there's not many projects that you want to minimize your outbound costs. we sort of avoided all the expensive software, project management software, CRMs, all things. We just kept it spreadsheets essentially, Word documents, Google Doc folders, really focusing on the sort of free or cheap software and tools.
I think that was quite critical. And a lot of the tasks ourselves. Certainly the first few years, you I built our first website on Wix, super cheap, it's so easy these days. I was our own accountant, I filed our own end of year tax returns for the company, all this, which probably isn't advisable, but going back to what I said earlier, it's just trying to minimize all that cost. So if we did have a slow month, it wasn't risky.
But also more importantly that we could know all the revenue that we were coming in, could invest that into our team, our staff, really trying to focus on expenditures that actually improved our service offering to our clients. And that's always been about trying to hire the best staff possible. So every one of our writing team are all PhD experts in their own field. And I suppose we've been able to afford that by cutting our costs elsewhere.
through marketing or sales or expensive softwares. So I think that's certainly the most important thing is starting early, know, keeping it lean, cutting or reducing the costs where aren't essential in our sort of project facing. And then really also focusing on sort of customer service, you know, trying to provide exceptional service. So even
Maybe when you're first starting off and you don't have so much experience that if you do, maybe you don't hit a project quite right the first time, the client isn't going to leave you or be unhappy if you provide a really good service, friendly, personable, responsive. I think that's also critical when you're early on.
Joachim Eeckhout (13:44)
Yeah, so you've been mentioning basically, your marketing cost was zero or close to zero. So what's been the driver to your revenue? Like how do you find new clients?
Dan Sheridan (13:55)
Yeah, so we only we only hired a marketing manager about six months ago. we did about four years before that with with no marketing or only what I was doing on LinkedIn, which certainly wasn't very wasn't very important for what we were we were doing. Now, our success and our growth and our value offering is certainly built on the expertise of our team. As I said, you know,
our writing team, we only hire PhD experts. And it's not necessarily that I think PhDs, PhD guarantees that you're going to be great at dealing with clients or super essential for us as a medical writing agency. But for the niche services that we're offering and the sectors that we work in from neuroscience and oncology, we're confident that we have the highest level of expertise.
And that makes, I mean, that's sort of the bones of marketing is just absolute confidence. I'm quite confident to say that we probably have one of the most specialist agencies in the UK, just based off our team. And as a result of that, we almost didn't have to do any outbound marketing. Clients came to us, they found our website, they saw the team we had, they saw that we can bring that value to them and that expertise. So that's really been...
but our marketing and our growth has been built on.
Joachim Eeckhout (15:12)
So people found your website easily online when searching for medical writing in UK, for instance. So you were ranked well in terms of SEO maybe.
Dan Sheridan (15:23)
Yeah, so we've never really done any SEO. It is something we're actually investigating at the moment. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how new clients found us, to be honest. It just seemed to happen. It could be through sort of referrals from other clients or recommendations. One way we have sort of acquired new clients is if you work with a marketing manager or hiring manager in one company and that they move somewhere else.
We generally keep our contract with the previous company and then the hiring manager will take us with them to our new position. So certainly, the first few jobs are the hardest and then as people move around and your network grows, it's easier to get new clients. But yeah, I'm not exactly sure early days how people found us, whether it was LinkedIn, whether it was our website or just word of mouth.
It was quite organic, the growth.
Joachim Eeckhout (16:14)
That sounds also very healthy. Even if you cannot pinpoint it, it's certainly a mix of what you said, like word of mouth, referral, etc.
Dan Sheridan (16:22)
Yeah, and
I think it's just a byproduct of focusing on those two main values of ours is just that, you know, the exceptional expertise and then just really good customer service. I think that just satisfies everything and people are happy to recommend you.
Joachim Eeckhout (16:36)
So let's talk about pricing again in medical writing and maybe in scientific writing in general, there's quite a lot of competition. So
Is there any kind of pressure on your pricing? And if so, how do you manage it? How do you manage the competition with other agencies?
Dan Sheridan (16:53)
Yeah, I think there is this term of the race to the bottom. If you are competing on price, the only way you can sort of win that client is to price lower than your competition. us, going back to what I said earlier, it's just focusing on the expertise of our team. We don't sell ourselves on the price. We don't try to be the cheapest agency. We don't really advertise ourselves based on the cost. We're never saying.
hey, we're the cheapest agency or we can do this for less than a competitor. We always come in with the value that we can provide and the expertise that we have. And I think if you are...
If you are pitching yourself and pricing yourself off the expertise, then you're not competing on speed or cost. But of course you do need to have that expertise. can't say, no, we're experts in the field, but people check out your team and your operations team and they realize it doesn't actually stack up. So I think, you know, we're confident in our team. We're confident in all the experience we have.
sectors that we work across and now with the high profile clients that we work with we don't get into that race to the bottom. If people come to us, as I said, most of our leads that come in bounds, if people come to us, if they start saying, it's too expensive, you know, we sort of know that they've come to us originally because of our expertise. So we don't really need to start competing on that price. And we're just confident now in the
across all the projects we've completed and the sort of the growth that we've helped our companies achieve, our clients achieve, that we're really confident in the value that we provide. And I think I said it earlier, but not just focusing on the time requirement of the project or the final deliverable, but also factoring in the years of expertise we have as a team. Now each of our...
scientists writers, you they might have 15 years experience each. So that's a lot of value in that alone. We understand the products, we understand the science, the companies we work with, we understand the target audience. So when we bring that all together, you know, we're doing sort of our sort of marketing projects, we can really sort of target specific niche scientific audience and get really good results for our clients. So yeah, I think.
If you're pitching yourself off your expertise, you can avoid that race to the bottom, but you do need to have the confidence on the team to back that up.
Joachim Eeckhout (18:59)
Yeah, let's talk about the team because that's also a very interesting point in the scaling up of your company. So how do you hire? You mentioned PhD level people, but is there anything else behind it?
Dan Sheridan (19:13)
Yeah, so we've grown, I suppose, quite slowly and organically. One of the reasons for that is being pretty cautious of hiring the wrong people. We're still a small team. So if you had someone that didn't quite fit correctly into that, would, as well as hinder the whole team or the whole company.
So, you we do focus on the PhD expertise just because of these then we know you're an expert in your field. It gives you that credibility for that expertise. But again, when you move from sort of academia and academic research where actually the PhD is awarded into these more commercial projects, particularly around sort of content marketing and more marketing based projects, the PhD certainly doesn't offer you much.
experience in that sector. And we have found this with some of the PhDs that we've trialed or freelancers that we've had, they just don't grasp that sort of commercial or marketing aspects. So it is quite difficult to find those PhD experts that also has a bit more of a commercial mindset, marketing mindset, understand that we have to interweave the science into sort of marketing techniques.
So it certainly can be difficult. And another challenge we found with hiring from academia is the sort of speed or efficiency of projects. When you're working your own PhD, you could have four months to write your research paper or longer, as long as you want almost. When we're working with clients now, we obviously have fixed deadlines. They're paying us to get a job done quickly and efficiently. So there is a big step up and...
writing speed and efficiency. So that's also something we need to test for. So our hiring process is usually, we often have hired in freelancers that we've worked with. So we might trial a freelancer for a month or two to get that understanding of how well they fit with the team. And then we offer them a full-time position after. And that's worked quite well for them. can sort of, you know.
You can test a person how they fit with the team and the culture before making that first time hire. And that's two of our staff currently, Sarah and Hope. They're our first employees and they're still working for us now, which is great. Sarah was finishing her PhD while she started working for us part time. So that was great. sort of helped her finish her PhD and we could also gauge her fit for the team.
Also with Hope she was working as postdoc at the time working part-time for us And then with that contract came to a finish she joined full-time so I think opportunities like that where you can test them on a part-time basis is great and you know, we've We just had our Christmas party last last month in Poland. We took a lot team away and one of the one of the best things that I like to from that is that all the
staff or the team that we had from the previous Christmas party. We're still there this year, so we haven't had anyone leave us yet. So hope we have a good team and a good culture and think that is down to choosing the right people to have on the team.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:01)
That's very positive. Do you work remotely with your team or do you have an office?
Dan Sheridan (22:06)
No, so we're still fully remote. And this goes back to something I mentioned earlier about trying to put all of our finances and revenues sort of back into, back into aspects that directly increase our quality of the work that we provide to the client. So we don't want to be spending money on an office in the UK that's going to cost a fortune to run. We'd rather keep that money to be able to hire the most exceptional staff and team as scientists.
Yeah, so we kept it fully remote. I think since the last few years, how the workplace has changed, I think a lot of people prefer that too.
Joachim Eeckhout (22:35)
especially in this field of medical writing or writing in general. And I think for you, it makes more sense also to hire because if you are looking for very specific talent, you cannot tell them, come here to our office. You have to relocate. It doesn't always work.
Dan Sheridan (22:51)
Yeah. Yeah. So all
our team is quite spread out. The bulk of them are in the UK, but we have Owen is in France, Catherine is in Ireland. So we are spread out, you know, but we do try to keep some connection. So we do have a team call every, every morning. And we're still at a small size that we can have that team call, but everyone on and we can all talk about our projects and the challenges or how to address things.
know, when you get too big, you couldn't have 30 people on a call talking about one project, you know, it be a good use of time. So think we are still at that sweet spot. And the name Co-Labb actually came around from like the collaboration originally between myself and my wife. was a sort of healthcare expertise. I was a scientist. But now we've grown, we still try to keep that collaborative approach where we can all sit down each day, talk about our projects and how to, how to provide the best quality work.
Joachim Eeckhout (23:40)
now let's talk a bit about your clients and the way you work with them. What's your strategy for building long-term relationships with your clients?
Dan Sheridan (23:49)
Yeah, I think that has been one of our, I suppose, strengths in scaling. Our agency is having that long-term relationship. We very rarely lose clients. We actually haven't lost any clients due to them not being happy with the work. whatever, clients might hire someone else to replace the service we're providing, but we've never actually lost a client.
And I think that is down to just providing a really good customer service. Again, it is about providing high quality signs and content and writing, but just being friendly, responsive, make them enjoy. If you're having a client call that they're actually enjoying coming speaking to you, it shouldn't be a chore that they're paying us. We need to be providing them exceptional service in every sort of all aspects of the offering.
So yeah, friendly, responsive, again, meeting or exceeding deadlines. I think that's one of the major issues that can happen for freelancers or people starting off is they don't project manage correctly. They don't gauge the length of the project. And as a result, maybe they won't meet the deadline. And that can be, I suppose, one of the most harmful things to a client relationship is
is not meeting those deadlines. You don't know on their side what deadlines they have to meet further up the chain. So if you delay on your delivery, that can cause them major issues further down the line. So always being super on time or even for us, we always try to be ahead of the timeline that we promise upfront. I think another thing, as an agency, it's easy to sort of fall into just being sort of project, you
client comes to you with a project, you take that off, give it back to them when you're finished. We try to have more of a sort of consultative approach. Now we really try to get involved with our clients. So if we see new trends or forecast any issues for them, we'll try to bring this up to them upfront. So having more of just a client pleasing service and actually more that sort of consultative expert where we're thinking of their needs, their challenges and how they can grow, how we can support that.
So that's quite important.
Joachim Eeckhout (25:48)
And something, guess, in writing that is also hard to manage, maybe client expectations. So for instance, let's say you're working on a draft for a client and for some reason they're not happy with it. how do you handle this kind of situation? Like if you have to go back to the drawing board, how do you handle this?
Dan Sheridan (26:10)
Yeah, I think the only time you'd ever get issues with sort of client expectations is if you don't understand their project fully at the beginning, their timeline, what exactly they're looking for. So think that really underlines the importance of having a strong onboarding process and really trying to understand the company, how it works, their technology, product, the signs, what exactly they're looking for in the project and the end product.
I'm trying to build all that into a detailed scope of work. At least then if you have everything in writing, exactly what they need, what you're going to provide them, when it will be done, timelines, et cetera, that can reduce the risk of having any problems later on. So that's probably a good point for freelancers or people starting off is really trying to forecast issues and plan the project correctly from the very beginning. It can't be easy just
Now a client might send you a half completed brief and you obviously want to please them and start working straight away. So you just jump into it and that kind of causes issues. So I think if you had that onboarding process and a good scope of work, can avoid issues. Of course, I mean, no, we're not mind readers. There will be cases where we misinterpret a client and what exactly they wanted or they didn't provide enough information or it be from...
for my various reasons, but if the first draft of a content or a manuscript or anything we do, is enough to scratch. Now it is the first draft, it's not meant to be the final draft. As long as you're just super willing to, here's the first draft, please review it, let us know all the information, all the feedback. We always like to have a sort of post first draft call with the client. we...
We all come together, we can talk through exactly what's needed, how to improve it, how to change it. So I really think there's no issue if the first draft isn't perfect. You just need to be willing to and offering to do that second draft, third draft, whatever is maybe needed. The main thing is that the client is fully satisfied at the end rather than trying to provide the work and the least amount of work possible.
Joachim Eeckhout (28:07)
Did you already have to manage difficult clients? For instance, I've been also working in this field and from time to time you advance the project and you arrive almost at the end and someone else jumps in the process from the client side, maybe a boss, the boss of the manager or something like this, and they want to change everything.
Dan Sheridan (28:25)
Mm-hmm.
Joachim Eeckhout (28:28)
Did you already have to face this kind of situations?
Dan Sheridan (28:31)
We did certainly, we have created a bit of a process now that can sort of avoid that. I think the issue is if, you know, people coming later on, as you say, later down the line, provide their feedback that weren't, that who weren't involved at the earlier stages during the brief creation or the onboarding. So we now try to avoid that. One is, no, telling the client when we are doing that onboarding.
we always create a pretty in-depth project brief for each project. We have to make sure that every person on your team who will be reviewing the work later on the line reviews this brief so that we don't get any of surprises later on. And then when we do, if we do deliver a first draft, there are cases where we'll deliver a first draft. Maybe one or two people from the client's team will review that, feedback.
Then the second draft, know, two new people come in to review it and they have conflicting opinions or feedback. Yeah. So when we do deliver that first draft, now we do ask clients, make sure that every person on your team who will be providing feedback provides it on this first draft. We won't, we won't continue to work on the second draft before all that feedback is in. So, yeah, I think just, as I said earlier, it's sort of forecasting these issues.
and building it into a bit of a system to avoid these problems. Yeah, it can be essential for avoiding any miscommunication or failed expectations with the client.
Joachim Eeckhout (29:52)
Do you cap the review to a maximum? Maybe like two reviews or something like this?
Dan Sheridan (29:58)
Yeah, we usually say two major reviews and then maybe a third minor review. I know there is a big focus in the agency world to scope creep where a client just keeps asking to change or add things to our project. It is important, but at the end of the day, we always focus on just trying to please the client as much as we can, make sure that the final work is as of high quality as it can be. So if there is a bit of scope creep,
falls into that, I think sometimes it's better just to allow that to happen rather than causing problems with a client just because you're, you say, this is outside the original scope, we need to charge you extra for that. That can cause problems. So if it's only gonna be a minor amount of extra work just to get that project across the line and satisfy the client, I think often it's worthwhile.
Joachim Eeckhout (30:43)
Okay, let's finish with some questions about the content itself. the content you're creating. Scientists are known for being a bit skeptical How can companies can create content that actually convinces scientists?
Dan Sheridan (30:57)
Yeah, think selling to scientists is quite unique because we are trained to question everything, interpret the data, validate things for yourself. So, you know, if company comes to you and the marketing department saying, hey, we've got the best product, it can do your sequencing five times quicker. These claims, they're not, can't expect a scientist to be sold just on those claims.
So it's really critical to show them the data and allow the scientists to think that they're getting to the conclusion to buy that product based on their own research, because that's what we do, we're researchers. And we always say to our clients, you have to provide the receipts for your claims. You can't just make these claims, have to show them the data. And I think that's, there's a big, obviously, feel of the content marketing and your blogs and your white papers.
I think it needs to be that of technical content marketing where you are building in data, application notes, in-depth white papers, application pages on your web pages, on your website. But it does, you need to convince the scientists through data, compelling data, and let them reach their conclusions that, your product is the best or it's the best fit for them. And what's...
Probably not so conventional as a marketing technique is using some academic publications. You can validate your product, the science behind it through an academic publication. And that can be one of the most compelling marketing techniques to a scientist is, you know, hey, we're not actually telling you that this product does what we're saying or does it quicker or cheaper. But here's a peer reviewed publication and then press a journal that's shown how
wealth product works in particular use cases or particular fields. So I think, yeah, really focusing on the data and things like marketing market or manuscripts and other sort of more technical marketing, more technical marketing content pieces.
Joachim Eeckhout (32:39)
topic we cannot avoid if we talk about content in 2025 is AI. What's your view on AI in medical writing specifically?
Dan Sheridan (32:50)
Yeah, it's funny. think particularly for a medical writing or any agency, writing based agency, know, AI came along and people were saying, Hey, it's going to shut down your job or shut down your company. We actually think of it in a sort of, a new light in that it's almost in the sea now of all this AI generated content where it's just people you see companies are posting three blogs a day and you just know it's just turned out from.
chat GPT or some other AI tool. It's it's almost now it's even more valuable to actually have this expert content written by scientists with that firsthand expertise and experience and put it into that. often we're writing about topics that we're introducing experience that we've just acquired ourselves in the lab in our previous positions as scientists. And that is the knowledge that's gonna be.
available easily on the internet or from an AI tool. So I think there is a lot of value now to stand out from all this baseline AI-generated content to actually try to provide real value to a scientist, provide them with information that they can implement into their job. It's going to make their workflows easier.
And I think that is critical to have that sort of first-hand human expertise injected into that. And of course, know, AI, the tools are amazing. We do use some AI tools in our agency, so I'm not going to say there's no need for them. They certainly help us to speed up some of our tasks, the sort research, maybe fixing grammar and things like this. And there is also, you know, people just think it's only ChatGPT these days, but...
particularly for the life sciences, there are sort of life science specific AI tools coming to the market now that are really much better quality than ChatGPT or the similar tools. And we use one called Causely, which is sort of an academic research tool. It pulls all the information only from PubMed and academic papers. And it doesn't do the writing for you, but it provides you the research at a higher, no.
we can do more in-depth research on our topics sort of more quickly. So yeah, think AI tools are great for aiding our job as medical writers and experts, but I don't think they're to be a replacement for us entirely anytime soon.
Joachim Eeckhout (35:10)
Yeah, totally. Especially considering the technical side of this type of writing, I don't think it's something you can really just prompt in a chat bot and get a good result. So you need the experts, definitely.
Dan Sheridan (35:22)
Yeah, and it can almost take as long to fact check as a chat GPT generated article than it would be for us to write one ourselves. So it's entirely the answer.
Joachim Eeckhout (35:25)
Yeah.
last question. Do you have any resources or book you would like to recommend?
Dan Sheridan (35:37)
Yeah, I have one. as I said, I mean, I came into this agency world without working in an agency myself. So a lot of that sort of operational expertise, you know, I had to learn that as I go. One good book that I read was the Seven Figure Agency Roadmap by Josh Nelson. Now it is a bit corporate and cheesy and a bit
financially focused in aspects, but it did provide quite a lot of good information on how to, I'd say some of things I came across earlier, or we spoke about earlier about dealing with the client expectations, but that scope of work in place, forecasting these issues, really good customer service. I know in that book, he recommends sending like a hamper or present to every new client you get. We haven't quite gone that far, but there's some quite good practical insights for there.
in that book for people freelancing or moving into that agency. There's some good project management tips.
Joachim Eeckhout (36:30)
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