How AI Is Humanizing Digital Healthcare | Adam Pivko, Direct Meds | The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast

Today on The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast by Left Brain AI, we sit down with Adam Pivko, Chief Marketing Officer at Direct Meds, to explore how AI is helping redefine healthcare - making it faster, smarter, and more human.

Adam shares how Direct Meds uses AI agents like Emma (for customer support) and Oliver (for sales) to handle over 90% of chat coverage, streamline compliance, and enhance patient experience - all while keeping empathy at the center.

He breaks down why AI isn’t replacing people but instead removing the admin burdens so clinicians, marketers, and founders can focus on meaningful work. From startup culture to compliance challenges, Adam’s insights show how Direct Meds scaled from supplements to a thriving online pharmacy by treating AI like an intern with infinite energy and zero ego.

Full transcript below.

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⏱ In this episode, we discuss: 

 00:00 – Intro 

04:25 – How AI agents like Emma and Oliver support patients 

10:30 – The power of personalization at scale 

15:50 – Why the next billion-dollar telehealth brand will look more like Netflix than Pfizer 

31:20 – How AI enables humans to be more human 

34:38 – The truth about company culture and execution 

41:24 – Why Adam believes in 1% improvement every day 

45:32 – How AI empowers people to manage their own biology

🔗 Adam PivkoLinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampivko/

Direct MedsWebsite → https://directmeds.com/

LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/company/directmeds/

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Episode Full Transcript:

Kyle: All right. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Brainiac Blueprint, where we discuss the intersection of AI and how it impacts business and the world around us with our esteemed guests. I'm Kyle Lambert, founder of Left Brain AI and Action Hero Marketing.

Today's episode discusses some, it's called direct meds, how you can purchase a lot of different supplements. Very easy. Sorry, I messed up my notes there while doing the intro there. Sorry about that. We have Adam Pivko, CMO of Direct Meds. Great start here. Yeah. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure to be here. Yeah. How are you? So Adam, please do a better intro than I just did. I completely biffed myself there. So please jump in for me.

Adam: Yeah, no problem. Direct Meds, where am I currently? And chief marketing officer is an online pharmacy telemedicine business. We provide predominantly medications and pharmaceuticals direct to consumer online, making it easy, simple, clear pricing to get the medications that you wish to have for your body.

Kyle: Incredible. 

Adam: Predominantly, I would say, our number one biggest seller right now and what's really obviously taking over the market is the whole realm of GLP-1s, the weight loss shots, or as President Trump likes to call them, the fat shots. Yes.

Kyle: Awesome. If anybody wants to see more or find out more, the URL is directmeds.com. Pretty easy to remember. So check them out there. And thank you for putting that much more eloquently than I did. I was reading through my notes and completely lost my spot there, of course, right off the bat here. So I appreciate that.

But Adam, I really enjoyed doing my research on direct meds and kind of talking to you and learning more. There's so many interesting things that I think for us to dive into here. But as I mentioned to you, I always like to set the stage with the prompt I think AI is. So if you don't mind finishing that for me, we can jump into the rest from there.

Adam: Yeah. I forgot to think about this, but I think my take on AI is it's like an intern with infinite energy and zero ego. And I think that's the way that we use AI. I think that's just where we're currently at in the landscape and our adoption of the tool in a wide variety of different use cases.

But we treat it like an intern. We give it very clear instructions of what we want it to do. And it's got, like I said, infinite energy and doesn't take offense when it does a bad job and just corrects. So yeah, I think AI is like an intern.

Kyle: That's awesome. It's good to have that right hand man helping you get more done. So for anybody watching or listening here, when Adam and I first connected, Adam, you shared an article with me that's put on on the Financial Post, kind of outlining some different numbers and the way you guys use AI.

I just wanted to read out a couple of things because I think it's very interesting and I think it, again, sets the stage. So according to the article, AI agents reduce customer service staffing by 50 percent, cut live chat load by 30 percent and drive scalable operations as your company exceeds five million dollars a month.

Those are big numbers and great percentages. And I also think it's awesome that you guys have in this article called out several real-time engagement agents. So you guys have Oliver, you have creative names for them, you have Emma, you have Tara. I'd love to kind of dive into all of those, but I'm curious just how this journey has been for you. And I know you're the CMO, so you're not necessarily involved with creating them and developing them. But obviously, it's been huge to your growth.

Adam: Yeah, that article is what in a while ago, I would say those numbers have improved pretty dramatically on not only the revenue front, but also just our adoption of AI since then. Yeah, it's been exciting. It's been exciting for us. And we've been clearly implementing it in key areas of the business that really, really help our patients, help our staff do a better job. And we're excited about continuing to develop that kind of- I don't want to call it infrastructure, but to a certain extent it is- but I want to call that the vision of our company is something that we're considering continuing to invest in and continuing to grow as we're reaping the benefits and rewards from it.

Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. So I do want to jump into the agents and everything, but before we get down to that path, I think it's important to talk about your background a little bit. You had created a brand prior to this that was acquired by Direct Meds. So you've kind of had an interesting journey into this path. So could you tell everybody a little bit about that and just why everything has come together the way that it has?

Adam: Yeah. So I was a co-founder of a direct-to-consumer vitamin and supplement company by the name of Autumn DNA. It's still active and operational today. It's funny, even right now, I just called it by habit a vitamin and supplement company when realistically, it isn't. It wasn't. It isn't now. Truly, it was a proof of concept for personalization at scale.

When that company, we started that company in early 2021, and the whole concept was that people should not need to guess what vitamins and supplements they need to take. And instead, we would do the personalization for them. But personalization was still early then. People weren't super confident or trusting of it. So really, it was how do we prove that personalization at scale works? And that's exactly what Autumn sought to accomplish. It wasn't built just to sell vitamins and supplements. It was built to prove that that personalization could really outpace the commoditization of supplements and the busy shelves and shelves and shelves of vitamins and supplements that exist today.

It was a really exciting business. And, you know, to have an exit under your belt is amazing as a founder. So shout out to that. But it's interesting because I don't think we were ever chasing an exit. Most founders, especially ones that I talked to, and I talked to tons of founders these days, but like most founders chase exits. I think we were chasing experiments, or at least I was. I was chasing experiments that would teach me something super, super fast. And I think that's where AI and also even just the power of paid media and advertising really comes into play. So it's kind of that intersection that I found really interesting about being a first time founder on that thing and learning as fast as I could.

So now, having since been acquired, I would call it almost an aqua hire. Both myself and my co-founder remained on the Direct Meds teams. We rolled in equity, so we're owners and whatnot of the Direct Meds ecosystem. And it's been exciting. It's been a great journey. Lots of learning, lots of growth. Having an awesome team around us was something different that we weren't used to. So pretty small little team when we had Autumn. So now being at Direct Meds, it's nice to have a much larger, broader team kind of managing a whole wide variety of infrastructure.

Kyle: Very cool. And I definitely commend you on both having the exit as well as not necessarily looking for that. I think there is some- you're right. Most founders are kind of looking to get out, kind of get that payday. And I don't blame them whatsoever. But it's very cool that you had this mentality. And I think it shows again, if you do the right thing, you do the good work, you put a valuable product or service out there, then the customers are going to come and then potentially that exit will happen anyway.

Adam: Yeah, I've always found that I'm not addicted to building businesses. I'm addicted to seeing how fast I can learn something. That's honestly what really motivates me these days. So, you know, every business that I've been a part of, I've always thought about, like, what's the fastest way I can learn and level up the game of this business?

And in a previous role, like way back in the day, shout out to being a chief champagne officer. My job was winding and dining customers and clients kind of all over the world. You know, the thing that I really took away from that one and like a fast learning, how could I explode kind of mentality was really just understand the biggest problems my clients had, solve them for them and roll those solutions out to more clients. Like that was the MO that I got from that business. And yeah, carrying that forward, I feel like I'm just addicted to learning, but also the speed of learning needs to be really, really quick for me to keep me excited.

Kyle: So I would assume that in the last couple of years, your process for learning has changed with AI coming out. So can you tell us about that? Like you want to obviously learn the right things and you want to be able to take that and put it into actual action and things like that. So what tools are you using today? What does your process look like for that speed of learning? How are you making sure that you're not overlooking something important or, you know, just, I'm curious about your process here for learning.

Adam: Yeah, there's a lot there. A lot to digest in that line of questioning. I would say, you know, AI didn't replace our team, our marketers or anything. It just kind of forced us to level up. That's like the best way that I would put it. So the ability to analyze large swaths of data way faster is super integral to what we do. The way to find nuance and differences in a much more aggregate or systematic way is really, really time consuming and challenging to do in the marketing realm. So having AI tools to support us on those fronts has been extremely eye opening.

Then on top of it, we have all of the AI infrastructure that we have with regards to supporting customers and patients, if you will. Making it easier for them to do things, being more intuitive about their needs based on where they are, how long they've been a customer, what page they're even on on our website to just be more personalized, in my opinion, it's personalization at scale, but personalization to the one on one level, like where that customer really is. I think that's been instrumental for us to provide good quality customer service, not AI that frustrates users or feels inadequate, or even responds too quickly to questions without understanding the full picture.

All of those things combined, I think AI is as good as you train it to be. And if you know what you're looking for, whether that's in marketing or customer satisfaction or problem solving or auditing or whatever, all the different ways that we're currently using AI, as long as you know what you're looking for and you can give clear instructions, I think that's where the power of AI really comes in. Being blind and just saying, solve all my problems, AI, or make this better is, you know, you'll get mixed outputs. So it's really cool that we have like this AI team that's really focused on our prompt engineering and our databases and knowledge bases, really structuring everything in a way that makes our AI learn super fast and be able to adapt and roll with the punches much quicker and easier.

And then I think you asked about tools. Oh my God. Our tool is massive. So of course we have the basics like ChatGPT or Grok sometimes or Claude that we use for writing or coding or all sorts of different things. But we're pretty heavily using like the N8n infrastructures of the world, multiple LLMs, local LLMs, because we're also a HIPAA compliant and have to remain a whole bunch of compliance aspects. Need to be really persistent within our organization and our business. So definitely some local environments of those things as well, just to ever complicate the solution. 

Kyle: Can't have things be simple, right?You kind of read my mind in your previous response about all the data. I wanted to jump into the personalization. Again, you're a marketer. I think we all today realize that when you can kind of speak to the person specifically, you're going to be able to build that trust like you were talking about and provide a better solution or a service. And you guys have several products listed on your website, based on your revenue numbers, I'm sure you have a considerable amount of customers and data points and stuff. So, I'm curious what has, if there's been one or two things that have really stood out and led to incremental success for you guys.

Obviously, people think about personalization at the very basic level of just variables and names and stuff like that. But when you guys get to the level that you have with data, you can really start to learn some trends and everything. So I'm curious if there's been anything that's really stood out for that's built your success.

Adam: Yeah, like if you understand the telehealth industry as a whole or even the online pharmaceuticals, I like to think of ourselves as Big Pharma's hotter little sister. We're quicker, we're better, we're more fairly priced. We move more seamlessly and less clunky. And also we understand that it's still content that is the attention market of today. So all of those things combined, like telehealth is still very much healthcare, but it's logistics with a medical license. It's the ability to command inventory that goes direct to a consumer with a smooth, transparent, high speed, high compliance, high trust element. And if you think about all three of those or four of those adjectives that I just dropped, I don't know how many I just did.

None of them typically correspond with big pharma. Yeah. So to me, it's, how do we move more seamlessly in the environment that we that we're in, and deliver better customer outcomes faster, more cost effectively. And I think that's ultimately the underlying key to our success, versus the giants and behemoths of this space.

Kyle: Logistics with a medical license. I like that. I like that.

Adam: Yeah, logistics with a medical license or legit script medical license, whichever way you want to call it. But yeah, I think like if I think about growth and like the strategy and everything that we're focused on, the next wave of telehealth brands, in my opinion, and ourselves hopefully included in this, is going to look a lot more like a Netflix as opposed to a Pfizer of the world. Like the way to really command prowess and trust and grow and confidence is not only to deliver on all those logistics things but you also need the subscription psychology, the retention loops, the algorithmic personalization- to throw big words at it.

You need the true marketing prowess and not only understanding of a customer to really take this thing to the next billion dollar healthcare brand. And it won't be clinical. It will be cultural more so. It'll be entertaining and easy to use and convenient as a to give people that kind of sovereignty that they need away from the big Big Pharma brands and reliance on a doctor who's known them their whole life to give them their next prescription.

Kyle: So I- 

Adam: Go ahead. Sorry.

Kyle: Oh, no, I was just gonna make a joke. I was gonna say I can't wait for the next date night to be Direct Meds and chill.

Adam: I'm excited for it. It's an angle that I think we have in the roadmap anyways. But yeah, it's funny because I generally feel, and maybe I'm speaking from my own experience, but that reliance on those typical historical avenues to acquire pharmaceuticals or even supplements is just not optimal. And if we can make it an enjoyable, convenient and cost effective solution, I think we're just going to smash and continue to smash.

Kyle: I couldn't agree more. I've had so many conversations with people in health care, health tech, all this kind of stuff. And the theme that I keep coming back or keep hearing is people being able to handle their health care, whatever that may be, outside of the doctor's office or outside of a hospital. Right. And so, sitting on your sofa in your sweatpants, getting ready to watch a movie with a glass of wine. "Oh, I got to re-up on my supplements" or something like that. And it just seems like the natural progression for where the Internet has taken us. AI has taken us. It's very cool to kind of see you guys putting that into practice already.

Adam: Yeah, without a doubt. I think that's exactly the direction we're going to continue to go in.

Kyle: Incredible. Incredible. Well, cool. So as I mentioned, I wanted to dive into these real time engagement agents. I think it's very interesting. I'm sure you are involved with some more than others. But again, in the article, there is three that were mentioned. Do you know if that has expanded to more? Do you know what that final number is at this point?

Adam: Yeah, I think we're currently at seven.

Kyle: Seven. Yeah. Interesting. I'm going to put you on the spot. Do you know all their names off the top of your head?

Adam: I can quickly reference. I know the ones that I interact with on a first name basis. You know, we're a big organization now. It's hard to know these names.

Kyle: Well, let's jump into some of the ones that you are familiar with. I would love to kind of just hear what they are, what their goal slash output is, how they've improved the business and things like that. I think that that is going to be kind of inspiring and enlightening for a lot of people.

Adam: Yeah. It's funny, you know, like so often the conversation is like, AI is taking people's jobs or along those lines. And for me, I think it's just exposing mediocre people. 

Kyle: Sure. 

Adam: So for us, these tools and these AI personalities, if you will, that we've put in place, they're designed to research, test and synthesize data in their own compartmentalized ways that's most relevant to getting their job done. So Emma, as an example, is our customer service agent. They handle all of the easy grunt work stuff and have clear lines to escalate to supervisors or on-call customer service agents.

We didn't deprecate our existing people or teams. We just brought down the amount of times that they're needing to be engaged. So that's Emma's job is to mitigate the amount of human interaction required, but still make it super available, still have really clear and easy lines and engagement avenues to connect real people with real patients and customers. It's not meant to be a barrier. It's meant to be assisting that process.

Kyle: So is that, sorry to cut you off, but I wanted to ask, so is that your measurement of success for Emma? Kind of less human interaction or less, you know, maybe incorrect orders. I'm curious as to what looks like success for you guys there, just to, again, measure the effectiveness.

Adam: It's funny, like while we're at this, I'm just gonna pull up like this whole spreadsheet that we have. I'm gonna pull up something in particular that I think is really interesting and it's exactly how- like what key performance indicators are we measuring for each of these bots, if you will. Most importantly, like starting with Emma, from a customer service standpoint, we wanted to just be faster. So speed is really important to a lot of customers and a lot of patients that we service.

And having access to all the information and being able to synthesize that information and report back information faster was one of the main goals of the AI coverage. So not only is there like an AI chat coverage metric that we're looking at. And most recently, it looks to be hovering around 83%, which means that AI was capable of engaging and responding and closing the ticket all by themselves.

Kyle: 83% of the time?

Adam: 83%. That's kind of what it's actually looking at a 30-day average. It's 91.5% of the time. Wow. Then we have like a ticket success/ticket failure rate, how many conversations they're having. What else do we have here? Let me just scroll really quick.

Kyle: So in theory, that number, that percentage that you mentioned there, in theory, you guys will continue to optimize and that will get higher and higher, closer to 100%. Or is there like kind of like a you don't think it's going to exceed a certain amount?

Adam: Yeah, I don't think it'll ever. I don't think it'll ever go significantly higher. I think we've already made like- again, we started this program, I want to say, four months, five months ago, and we have a lot of data on the customer and patient interaction side. So in terms of the responsibilities of when Emma gets engaged, I think we're at the high end of how effective that's gonna be right now. And really it's just about resolving those issues as fast as possible, answering those questions or escalating appropriately.

So Emma chat coverage is 92%, you know, 91.59% of the time. And that's not necessarily complete ticket resolution. That's just chat coverage. So how many times are people engaging with our AI and, you know, versus people in immediately clicking wanting to email support or call support. So people are choosing this option, which is really exciting.

Kyle: Very cool, very cool. And when you and I originally connected, these are all tools that you guys have an AI engineering team, a development team, right? That is customized and built this all from the ground up. Like this isn't some off the shelf solution that you guys purchased.

Adam: Correct. We built these ourselves. These are homegrown, optimized with our own resources and our own environments. So, you know, there's a whole element of that HIPAA compliance that I was touching on earlier. This information isn't going out and being shared into multiple places. It's all private and resolution based. Correct.

Kyle: You keep reading my mind. The next question there I was going to ask is about HIPAA. So, you know, is there kind of a, you know, someone who reviews this type of stuff and says like, yes or no, like, is there like a HIPAA expert or, you know, I don't know, someone at the government that you have to reach out to and like share this to? What is that process? Or is it just like guidelines that you have to follow kind of like give you these things? What was that like?

Adam: So it's a combination of both. Not only did we do some consulting around that and like, got consulting opinions about that, but we also have like just internally a compliance, very focused compliance person. So alongside of just how in the way in which we're interacting with these tools that we've built, as long as it's not going out to the broader internet and it's using like our own resources to resolve issues, like that's ultimately the goal and how we keep it in-house and how we keep it compliant. So really sheltering the system from personal health information and optimizing the system for, you know, quick answer retrieval and results.

Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. All right. So we got Emma handles a lot of customer service type of stuff. I know we have again, I was in the article. I saw Oliver and Tara. Did you want to jump into those or were there other ones that you you like to bring up?

Adam: I want to grab the whole list of names. Now I'm feeling guilty for not knowing all their names. Oliver is more so on our sales side. So he's consulting with new potential customers, helping them curate which products or solutions might be best for them, answering inherent top of funnel or bottom of funnel level questions around pricing, around side effects around any questions that people are having, kind of shepherding them down the path to ultimately getting started and making a purchase with us, as well as what that path looks like. It's capable of communicating what that post-purchase customer journey is all about. So it's an important aspect for our business in terms of selling pharmaceuticals.

People have questions and we don't expect anybody to be doctor level self prescribing this stuff. We don't feel the need for people to still have to go use Dr. Google or even their own AI tools to get an opinion around pharmaceuticals. Instead, it's trying to be as clear and transparent as we possibly can. That's a benefit about working in the healthcare and pharma space, for my opinion, is that our products work. We can just be confident and straightforward with them. We don't need to lie or pull marketing tactics in order to convince people to buy something. It's, "Hey, is this going to solve some of your problems? Is this safe for you? Cool. Let's go." So for us, it's kind of a unique use case for AI as sales, whereby you know, it doesn't need the marketing fluff. It needs the clinical data.

Kyle: Very cool. 

Adam: It's an advantage for us to have access to all of that in a sales tool and quickly and accurately answer people's questions with real data that we're feeding it, not that the broader internet or Wikipedia or first 10 responses on Google are feeding it. So yeah

Kyle: That's always so dangerous when people are just going out there and doing that. That Dr. Google, like you said, yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Cool.

So just so everybody knows, Oliver is an acronym. It's On Demand Lead Intelligence and Virtual Engagement Representative. So again, that lead intelligence and virtual engagement. Very cool. Emma was engagement, monitoring, messaging and assistance. So again, supporting patients, customer service type of stuff. I love that you guys have kind of built these into acronyms that help you to kind of remember what everything is.

Adam: Yeah, they all are acronym based. Man, I wish I had all the names of them really quick. Let me see if I can dig it up.

Kyle: Yeah, no worries.

Adam: I wish I could. We have a compliance officer that's going out and monitoring content that we're producing from our marketing team or some of our affiliate partners might be producing and coming back with any reports on compliance or marketing terminology usage or image assets that we shouldn't be using, or even monitoring certain creative that we have that has a timeline on it that we're having access to that creative usage rights. So all of those different things play into a role into the compliance officer. And it's a really useful tool. One that I don't really get slaps on the wrist too often from. I feel like I'm pretty compliant as an operator and a marketer in this space. So I'll do that. But yeah, you know, we've definitely crossed the line a couple of times. Meanwhile, there was still performance there, you know, pushing the boundaries on performance while still maintaining compliance is an ever going battle that we like to pick with that bot.

Kyle: I was going to say, I feel like you're not doing your job if you're not getting the hair to stand on the compliance officer every once in a while.

Adam: In our industry, it is very, very competitive, very, very rapidly. So it is a lot about getting those opportunities to push the boundaries on marketing as far as we can in a compliant way. And it's a fun game, in my opinion, to play one that I think AI does help us level up, you know, even from an ideation standpoint or an angle development or, you know, reading a whole bunch of our reviews. It can come up with angles and using verbiage that our patients and clients use. So a very effective another use case for AI within our business that we've spent time on and effort on to do a really good job.

Kyle: Not to use a pharma pun, but I agree with your point of AI helping you level up. It's almost like a steroid, right, for the little guy to kind of like get you to be able to do some more. I mean, you are obviously operating in a industry with deep, deep pockets, right? And so to be able to stand out even a little bit, you need to have some kind of an advantage. And obviously, AI has been that advantage. that shot in the butt if you need to kind of help beef up your muscles a little bit. It's very cool to see it in practice here.

Adam: Yeah, you know, like, I think you touched on something there. Yes, AI can be like a steroid and for- even it is a great pun. You don't have to apologize for that pun. It's also like everyone thinks that AI dehumanizes healthcare or dehumanizes marketing. Constantly there's mention of dehumanization. And I actually think it's the opposite. I think it's the opposite because it removes these admin burdens from so our clinicians, our doctors, our nurses can actually just care.

You know, the whole thing is like, we're not replacing empathy. We're like bringing it back with our human interactions, but we're anything that doesn't require that empathetic approach is just being solved quicker and easier with the use of AI. So it's enabling, like, it's weird. I think it's enabling our humans to be more human. And anything that feels unhuman is like those annoying tasks we're giving to the AI. So, yeah, it's just the weird thing about humanizing and dehumanizing and how people have been using it and I actually think it's the opposite for our business.

Kyle: I totally agree with you. I think when done right, it allows you to focus on things that you are really hired and paid to do that make you feel excitement and passionate about. You are a marketer and instead of sitting around having to do maybe like just say like keyword research over and over and over or something like that, AI can spit out a keyword build you can comb through and you can work on the ad copy strategy or something like that you know that's obviously a very simple example here but I agree like you can just focus on the stuff that you're passionate about you're skilled on you're trained on and not worrying about just like these time-consuming tasks that drain your energy and your focus.

Adam: Yeah and like to the same extent, like AI didn't change our org chart. You know what I mean? It's like we have this new AI division. So I would say there's an addition to our org chart, but it hasn't like made those massive headcount reductions or anything like that. It's just our competitive advantage isn't headcount. It's how fast. It's almost like our cadence is. The manner in which we can so efficiently resolve and move forward in endeavors, our cadence, our speed is what our competitive advantage is from AI as opposed to anything else. So, yeah, I'm very bullish on our use of AI and our desire to keep using it in the future.

Kyle: I'm bullish for you. So that brings up an interesting point. I think that, you know, I could be wrong, taking a little bit of a guess here, but I feel like as an employee of Direct Meds, there's a different culture that's that or you know thought process whatever you want to say that is that is probably different from most other organizations and how you guys are using AI thinking about AI using it to support roles and whatnot so I'm curious if you guys have like is that built into your you know your mission or your internal comms or you know what what does that look like to say like hey we're here to support you with ai we're not trying to replace you or any of that kind of stuff.

Adam: I would say like we stopped writing company values on the wall. Right. Like that's not, that's not what culture is to, it's not what it is to me. It's not what it is to us. Like, I don't think culture is what you preach. It's, it's like what people, what people copy. It's what people do repeatedly, repetitively. That's what makes culture in an organization. So for us, it's, yeah, we definitely stopped writing company values on the wall. We just make sure that behaviors we like are rewarded and they're the ones that ultimately get repeated. Like that's culture.

Kyle: Agreed.

Adam: It's all prison slogans. You know what I mean? So for us, we're much more execution based. And really, as long as you're achieving your goals and your deadlines and what everybody is expecting you to do, and if you say you're going to do something, you do it. As long as you're doing those things, you're going to get rewarded in the right ways in our company. And it's much less about what's written on the walls or our mission or value statement to a certain extent. So maybe we have growing up to do still. I think we're just exiting the startup phase and into kind of growth mode. But for now, I don't know. We're a large team. We're just around 100 employees. And we don't have the values written up on the wall that everybody comes in and we stand up all together and recite, you know.

Kyle: I'm envisioning the, the next bot sending your employees a message, like great job with your empathetic message there or something. Integrity.

Adam: Yeah. You know, reward the behaviors that we want repeated is generally my mentality around how to build a great culture.

Kyle: Agreed. Agreed. That's, that's very cool. So, you mentioned that you guys are around a hundred employees. How many are on the marketing team and are working with you guys or working with you specifically?

Adam: Yeah, we're about nine right now.

Kyle: Okay, cool. Yeah. That's a good chunk. Have you guys been, has that trajectory been kind of going up, I guess, as the revenue has been going up or do you guys feel pretty staffed right now?

Adam: I think we could always use more headcount on the marketing team. I definitely have appetite for that. Although the way in which we're out there marketing ourselves, it necessitates a pretty high volume of skills and assets. So for us, you know, we're very funnel driven, we're very performance marketing driven. So that results in needing updates and split tests and new funnels and new offers and new ad creative on a very ongoing and consistent basis. It keeps our marketing quite fresh and timely and kind of ever changing just like the landscape always is.

So it's a fun growth trajectory, you know, and we go pretty wild sometimes with ads that might read from mommy to milf or we go more generic with our marketing, whichever is more comfortable at the time or for wherever that customer is in that journey. So it allows us to be really flexible with just that amount of team and produce some pretty, pretty high volume amount of creative, which is exactly what we're continuing to strive for.

Kyle: Was mommy the mil someone from the team or to chat GPT recommend that?

Adam: I'm guilty of that one.

Kyle: Nice. Nice. I like that you like to push the boundaries. You told me about an autumn ad. I don't know if you're able to share that or not. But, I like that you push the boundaries a little bit and have a little bit of a shock factor to you.

Adam: Yeah. You know, it's the entertainment economy. Attention is the new active ingredient for us, if you will. You know, it's how can we stop the scroll? How can we continue to get people to take the action? And how can we make it as easy and convenient as possible? First and foremost, you got to stop the scroll somehow.

You know, it's an attention economy and everybody's got ADD and it's really easy to swipe your thumb from bottom of your screen to the middle of your screen and see more ads. So how do we how do we get them to pay attention to us and get our message across efficiently to the right people is definitely something that we're always focused on. But brands that learn how to do and how to market truth, like entertainment, I think is the ones that we'll continue to see in the next decade.

And for us, like I said earlier, it's like the truth is our products work. And we're not selling this kind of hocus pocus snake oil product. fix stuff things. We're selling clinically proven doctor prescribed medications. So it feels like we have a competitive advantage in that space just around truth and efficacy of our products that we don't really need to prove on an ongoing basis. So instead, we get to have more fun, like commanding attention.

Kyle: And I think that that is a competitive advantage also. Like, you know, Pfizer isn't putting out an ad like that, right? You know, like they are very, you know, to the point, like they're not stepping out of bounds or anything. So, you guys being able to be risky and bold and have some of these, you know, maybe social media type of terms and trends and stuff like that into your ads, I have to assume is a competitive advantage as well in terms of, again, just socializing stopping the scroll and getting a little bit of attention.

Adam: Yeah, it definitely, I would say we definitely have some pretty strong marketing chops on this team. I love that. And I think, you know, there are some other telemedicine or online pharmacy brands that are out there that are maybe doctor founded or, you know, business person founded. But for us to just have the marketing chops on the top executive team, I think enables us to find these pockets of success that enable us to really put the gas pedal down and scale very, very rapidly.

Kyle: Very cool. Do you have an example off the top of your head of something that maybe worked a little bit better than you kind of expected it to? Or conversely, something that you thought was going to work really well and didn't didn't quite have the impact you were hoping for? 

Adam: With regards to AI specifically?

Kyle: AI or even just marketing, maybe marketing strategy or messaging, anything like that?

Adam: Yeah, tons, tons. It's interesting because I think I personally, as a CMO, have a different outlook on marketing than most brands or perhaps even other CMOs. My goal is simply, and I say it on almost every single team call, I must be annoying my team by now, like, how do we just get 1% better every day? I love that compounding effect that that generates for the business. And it sets a really reasonable, exciting goal that my team loves to come back and say, hey, we got 1% better yesterday.

But ultimately, another framework that I think about constantly is with regards to paid media, with regards to advertising, I like to truly understand our losers. Most people, they say, here's five ads, which one wins? Great. Let's iterate on the winner. Let's make more copies and variations around that winner. I'm not done when we've found a winner. I like to have every dollar spent optimizing for something or having some type of hypothesis behind it that we can actually learn from.

And if we're learning on every dollar spent, our ability to achieve that 1% improvement every day is so much more attainable. So again, I look at media buying as buying data with patience and revenue as a byproduct and a nice welcomed byproduct of buying better and better and better data.

Kyle: I love that mentality. I'm a big fan of the concept of failing forward type of thing. What does that look like in practice? So you have this losing ad. Is it as simple as you guys kind of just get together and maybe discuss why and maybe, again, have some hypotheses? Or is there actual other kind of data points or research being done here?

Adam: Yeah, it's a combination of a bunch of that. So not only is it a structuring the test in a way that we're going to learn something, for example, trying different headlines on an ad, and each of those headlines is attached to a different type of persona, or emotion, or angle, or offer, or price presentation, or social proof, or whatever.

And really understanding in that compartmentalized test where there's only one variable being changed, not only A, which ones were better performing, but Y is kind of where we also leverage AI to give us that insights above and beyond just our own team's hypothesis testing framework. So it's a combination of both ideation with the use of AI plus a human element. And it's a combination of human element structuring of the test with the results being generated along, you know, from a human as well as AI perspective. It's that integration that I think is what makes it really interesting.

Kyle: I'm so glad you mentioned the structure and the setup because it, as a marketer, drives me crazy when I see people being like, oh yeah, we're going to test something and there's no isolated variable or like understanding. It's like, we're just throwing it out there with a bunch of stuff.

Adam: It's like those people are shooting from the hip, swinging for home runs and your likelihood of getting 1% better every day is greatly outweighed by maybe getting 10% better in 60 days. 

Kyle: Sure. Absolutely. Awesome. All right. So I wanted to jump in. This is always kind of a hard question to ask, but I'm just curious in terms of where you see kind of AI going with health care, what changes? I know you already mentioned kind of like the Netflix approach of getting your supplements and everything. But I'm curious if you have any more predictions or thoughts or things that are going to fall to the wayside, whatever it may be.

Adam: Yes. People don't want a doctor. They want control. And I think that in our industry and healthcare in particular, AI will let people manage their biology like they manage their stock portfolios or their grocery list. The idea is to make it so simple and so easy and give people the insights that they deserve on how that's working for them or not working for them so that they can make better biological decisions for themselves.

Biology is a deep and not, I would say, not 100% understood process within the body. Being involved with a genetics-based business prior to this, I can tell you, genetics is evolving like crazy and there's there's new findings and new studies and new understandings about biology almost every other day. And to be on the cutting edge of that as a single person is hard enough. But then to make it available as a business and enable patients and customers to take advantage of that information without needing to become an expert, I think that's got to be supported by AI. Not a doctor per se.

Although there is support by a doctor that you need for safety purposes and doctors now even have their own AI tools. Heck, there are doctors graduating university right now that had access to chat GPT.

Yeah. Wow. We should all probably start eating healthier.

Kyle: Yeah, right. Time to go throw out my chocolate cake over here. 

Adam: But like at the same time, empower yourself or empower your patients if they can't empower themselves for themselves with the use of AI and that type of technology is definitely something that I see as the future of health care and its sovereignty, not reliance on the health care system.

Kyle: Yeah, I love that idea, that concept. I think that it kind of puts a nice bow on what we talked about earlier with personalization, right? Like we can say men are more conducive to getting these conditions and everything, but you as an individual person have your own trends and habits. impact on your life and your health and everything like that. So having that AI be able to personalize and say, you know what, you actually probably don't need to worry about cancer A, but maybe cancer B, you know, is there, that's a great concept and it'd be interesting to kind of see it in practice.

Adam: Yeah. Like we don't want to, again, I think another thing that comes full circle now that I'm thinking about the future of AI is like, we don't want to humanize AI. We want to like, algorithmically understand empathy better. It's not change the way, it's teach the way to do it better. Again, thinking about AI as an intern for me is the simplest way to dumb it down. It's how I talk to even my close friends or family who don't or haven't felt the need to adopt or use AI yet. I was like, it's your own personal assistant. It's your own intern that you need to train. You want to put in the effort, you'll reap the rewards. But if you don't, then don't. Don't just hop in there and ask it silly questions.

Kyle: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Awesome, I appreciate that. We're getting here closer to the end. So I wanted to jump to the rapid fire section here, Adam. We have five quick hit questions for you. So first I'd like to ask everybody, I just think it's an interesting kind of question. You are an AI guy and a marketer. I'm curious if you could click your heels three times right now and there'd be this huge, fully built out automated process, what would that look like for you?

Adam: Oh my God. Click my heels and I have a fully automated process that I don't have access to right now?

Kyle: Yeah, that you don't have access to right now. Yeah.

Adam: Oh man. I think it would be at scale asking customers questions without me even knowing. Collecting that information and then combining it with you know, potential customers who are currently on the website and are being incentivized to answer a question, combining all of that insight to automatically generating overarching ad campaigns that include video that we can ultimately put out there.

Like marketing is just behavioral science with a credit card. Let's be real. So the better you understand your patients, your existing customers and your potential ones, I think is how you stand a really good chance of continuing to support and help more people.

Kyle: I agree 100%. I have thought about that exact concept in a kind of a funny personal way that I've since expanded. But it's like, I wish some way AI would just know like what music I want to listen to or like what I haven't like, you know, learned yet or listened to, you know. And it's exactly like, what don't I know right now that AI can just like get for my marketing campaigns and tell me I should be doing? Like, that'd be so awesome.

Adam: Yeah. I feel like Spotify has like a, based on what you listen to a lot, you might like these.

Kyle: Yeah. It's still just like in the moment having to decide, you know, what I want to listen to for this workout or something, but cool. Okay. Question number two, knowing what you know today, what is something you would have, you would do differently if you could kind of change something?

Adam: Oh gosh. Yeah. Not really the type of person to have like regret, but if I could have done something better. Oh man. I think, I think I would be on the side of rebellion sooner than I was on the side of like, making all ads look like what everybody's used to seeing.

I think I would have jumped faster into instead of looking like a medicine commercial. As an example, I would have looked like a rebellion, look like something completely antagonist much sooner. And I think I would have done that much sooner in my career, not even related to medicine or even that type of advertising. I think it's more compelling of a story to be the standout than it is to be one that fits in.

Kyle: Nothing wrong with a little chaos.

Adam: Yeah, I like to stir up chaos. So I would have started doing that earlier in my career. Let's put it that way.

Kyle: Very cool. Very cool. Do you have a super memorable, question number three, a super memorable or favorite aha moment from your career that has kind of reshaped things or, again, just kind of like pointed you into a new path or, again, you built in your day to day, anything like that? A big aha moment. 

Adam: I think it's really important to take a step back from where you're at in the given day and really do solid brainstorming work. Like block your calendar, let your brain go free. You can use AI, but like thinking outside of the box is such an underutilized tool and should be done way more frequently than most people think it should. The amount of fresh ideas- I've also been a founder. So before I say this so blindly, I realized that at any given second, the hardest part about entrepreneurialism is that there's a million things you could be doing to improve your business at any given second.

The real challenge is prioritizing and assessing the risk and reward and cost to execute on all of these potential ideas and just to be more right than you are wrong. It's okay. But I think in part of that journey, what I understood the aha moment is that everybody around you all the time, from your boss to your boss's boss, to everybody, to your biggest competitor, everybody's just guessing. And really what it means, like nobody has the crystal ball. What that means is the faster you can move, the more accurately you can test ideas, the more likely you are to win.

Kyle: I love that. Maybe that'll be the fully automated process that I build out, something that can prioritize my to-do list to make sure I'm having the best impact I can. It's a good one. It's a great one. Question number four, what is your go-to way to relieve and manage stress?

Adam: I have a couple. I recently got into cold plunging. So I love that. 

Kyle: I love it. 

Adam: Sauna and cold plunging, I think is awesome. So that's like a health and wellness one, but also just like you can't help but think about nothing when you're freezing in a tub. 

Kyle: You're so right. 

Adam: So I think that that's, I don't know, it's a really good one. I have this rule with my wife. It's going to sound a little pretentious and I'm sorry about this, but I have a rule with my wife that we don't finish a vacation until the next one's planned. So we always, we always have something to look forward to. So for us, like always having like in terms of stress relief, like always having something that you're looking forward to, I find is really, is a great way to relieve stress and not be so pressured all the time. I don't know. I think that that's a really nice one.

Kyle: I agree. There's something to be said for that. This could be some random social media post that I saw one day, but you know, I've seen that they say sports fans are always kind of like less stressed and happier because there's always another season to look forward to or another game to look forward to or something. And I'm a big sports guy that resonates with me. I think it makes sense. 

Adam: Cool. Well, I would say those two are big on my list. 

Kyle: Awesome. Great. 

Adam: One more in this fire round. Let's hear it. 

Kyle: Yeah. Question number five. What's your go-to caffeine order?

Adam: Oh, I live in Canada, so I think it's safe to say that I'll fire back a Double Double every once in a while.

I'm not the biggest caffeine drinker, though. I'm really big on kombucha these days. I don't know why. I just prefer it. It's better for me. I get too wiry or jittery on caffeine. Like, this is me on zero caffeine, so imagine me on caffeine.

Yeah. I'm not the biggest coffee drinker in the world.

Kyle: Yeah. Good for you. Yeah, I'm not a coffee guy. I have a sweet tooth, so I've become obsessed with energy drinks. It's so bad. But yeah

Adam: Try kombucha. It's kind of like a middle ground.

Kyle: Yeah, I'll have to give that a shot for sure.

Awesome. So, we're getting towards the end here. Adam, I wanted to just give you a chance here, open forum. Is there anything that you're passionate about that you wanted to share that maybe we didn't discuss or dive into?

Adam: You know, I'm really, really passionate about helping other founders, especially in the e-commerce or direct-to-consumer marketing world.

I don't have anything to sell them. It's really just, "Hey, I've been doing this a long time." I like the challenge. I like looking at other people's businesses or auditing a landing page or reviewing some ads and giving some inspiration or ideation around it.

So I don't know. Hypothetically, I'm open to the idea of people reaching out and just shooting the schnaz a little bit and seeing if I can help people with their businesses. Nothing to sell.

Kyle: You just opened Pandora's box. I'm going to send you so much stuff to look at and give me some ideas for. That's very cool.

Adam: If my time allows, it's definitely something I like to do.

Like, as the sign on my back wall here says, "Most likely to audit your funnel at a party" is very much me.

I love to help, and if people want my feedback, I'm typically willing to give it.

Kyle: It is quite rewarding when you're able to help somebody else out. I've always kind of had that teacher mentality myself, so I definitely appreciate that.

But awesome, Adam. This has been great. I've really enjoyed talking marketing and AI with you.

As we talked about, everybody can learn more about DirectMeds at directmeds.com.

Adam Pivco is on LinkedIn. Do you have any other channels or anything like that that you want to plug and people could find you?

Adam: I'm everywhere. Fine place to start. You can reach out there and we can connect on your preferred channel later.

Kyle: Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you again, Adam. I really appreciate you joining The Brainiac Blueprint and sharing your insights. If you don't mind, just look at the camera and say, "Stay brilliant, Brainiacs."

Adam: Stay brilliant, Brainiacs.

Kyle: Awesome. Thank you so much, Adam.

Adam: Cool. Have a good one, dude. Appreciate you guys.