Welcome to this episode of Uploading, and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Philip Rafini, who is the head of media at Rupa Health. We're really excited to talk with Philip because, you know, Philip's been a guest on our other podcast, DTC pod, and he is an absolute content expert. He's run an agency, done over 100 million views on social, and now since then, he's moved into the b two B space, and it's just absolutely crushing it in content. So, Philip, before I mess anything else up, I'm going to let you kick it off. Why don't you just introduce yourself and talk to us a little bit about your background and what you're working on.

Yeah, so my name is Philip. Background that I think is relevant to this is used to run my own e commerce business in college. I sold it. Then I went to go be a product manager at Microsoft, where I worked on an operating system and App Store. That was the most miserable thing I've ever done. So I left, but learned a ton about product. Left to go do a startup, didn't work out. And then I spent a year and a half doing growth consulting, and I realized that companies were really bad at making organic content.

I had grown my LinkedIn to sell a course. I had grown my TikTok for fun and then was working with Alchemy, which is a web three blockchain company. They were doing really well with content. So essentially I was like, short form media, super important. You can make a TikTok account, you can get a million views. I'm going to go start an agency selling short form video marketing for tech companies. So I was basically the only former Microsoft product manager going around selling like five figure a month TikTok marketing contracts to post series A startups. So I worked with companies like Maven, Wayflyer, Drew Classic, which isn't a tech company, and a bunch of others.

And then I ran that agency for literally only eight months. And then I got to the point where I was like, what am I doing with my life? Just because agencies don't have a ton of fulfillment, you're not really going to build anything long term, and you don't really see compounding results. Because even with my best clients, one of my best customers turned after three months because it was a crypto company and us regulations changed and we couldn't do it anymore. Then Tara Viswanathan, who's the CEO of Rupa Health, is one of my close friends and her CMO, or head of growth, Kobe Conrad, was basically, like, helping me with my agency because he used to run his own. And then they convinced me to come build a media business at Rupa Health instead. So now I just do that. And at Rupa Health, I'm in charge of our magazine, which is a blog, but we call it a magazine because doctors want to write for a magazine, not a blog. Our newsletter, our podcast, and most of our social media, like YouTube, LinkedIn, and then work with someone else on our Instagram and Facebook.

And the whole goal is, how do we build an audience of a million doctors? I love that.

I think we're going to have a whole bunch to unpack here because, like you're saying when you're thinking about media, there's all these channels you're supervising. You need to build a really complex content strategy. And quite frankly, the content landscape has evolved. And a lot of b, two b businesses are trying to catch up, and we like talking to the ones that are really innovating in the space. So I know you hit on a bunch of the channels that you're doing and a bunch of the little things, but why don't we start with.

When.

You enter Rupa, what are the first items on your plate that you want to build as you think about running the head of media, what's everything that you have to get in place, and how do you set things up operationally for success?

So before I started, one of the reasons I took the job is because I think Kobe is the head of growth, is the best marketer I've ever met. Kobe was the one who started the podcast, which is going to be profitable by the end of this year, meaning despite all of our costs on, it's going to make more money than it. So pretty much my first job was basically like, go figure out YouTube. So our whole goal is we had the magazine that was doing pretty well and was like a pretty linear trajectory, the podcast. But the podcast, it's hard to grow a podcast because there's no growth channel. So my job was to go figure out YouTube. So essentially, I built a team of ten doctors that all started making YouTube videos for us. And then I had six full time video editors editing those videos.