Over time, we’ve become by far the largest and most dependable resource publishing information on CBPMs throughout the British Isles. Today, we receive around 250,000 visitors per month, with around 2,500,000 monthly search result impressions from Google alone - where our estimated ‘pages with first impressions’ surpassed 3,000 last month.
Our general public visibility and ‘SERPs’ (search engine result pages) are at a level companies will sink 5-6 figures of investment in-order to try to achieve, and we’ve achieved this without a single penny spent on marketing or advertising (unless you count a blue verified tick on Twitter).
We’ve become somewhat of a hub of information across the industry as well as the patient space, where companies recognise information being published by us will most quickly be disseminated across the industry: from new launches; to price updates; to just marking products out-of-stock - we often update information far quicker than official formularies. We’ve been the first to announce almost every major upcoming medication brand over the past few years, often months in-advance.
Bandwidth Limitations
Personally, I’ve taken on over full-time volunteer hours (normally 60-80 per week) - for multiple years, at great personal expense. For a long-time now I’ve allowed myself to build personal debt just to keep MedBud afloat, because I believe our mission is incredibly important to all patients and the greater industry - and importantly, it’s something I want to spend my time doing for the greater good. Our medical director, Dr. Tahzid Ahsan, has provided essential support at each step - stepping-in whenever MedBud could have gone without.I have admittedly long-surpassed my limit for how much I can personally deal with in a day - and our communication has been suffering greatly for it lately. Since the start of the year I’ve mostly been withdrawn from our own forums, and keep accumulating more missed messages each day. We take the responsibility to check and update information incredibly seriously, attempting to guarantee actioning within 24 hours at all times - which must always take priority first and foremost.
Our greatest success this year has come from @GrownHealth, who’s not only taken it on as his responsibility to keep up with the forums and feedback, but is also sinking countless hours into maintaining our YouTube review coverage each day. I personally couldn’t be more grateful for his support over recent months, as I feel we genuinely wouldn’t be keeping up without him at this point.
MedBud currently has no redundancy nor backup for if either of us can’t fulfil our duties.
Looking to the Future
While MedBud has come a long-way over time, with our systems and platform improving each week - I feel we’re still embarrassingly behind, with many more systems that need finalising to bring the platform to the level it needs to be at overall, for a website that effectively reflects an entire national industry:- MedBud 2.0, Mobile UI: Around 70% of all our visitors use mobile, with around 25% desktop and <5% tablet on average. To get MedBud quickly launched in January 2022, we launched with a desktop-only website, figuring that we’d catch-up mobile development in the future - and as these things go, the amount of time to revamp all pages continues to grow 3 years on. We have been prototyping a new version of the website for a long-while, though full development and testing is likely to take at least 4 weeks of dedicated full-time hours - if other responsibilities can be mostly avoided. This must somehow become a top priority.
- Full Review System: When we recently polled our Twitter followers, this came out as our top-voted priority. Patients are in many ways screaming at us to hurry up and launch our previewed review system - to better help aggregate patient feedback. The issue here is the manpower required to continually check/review/approve reviews in order to stop any artificial manipulation attempts - which we fully expect to occur.
- Per-Pharmacy Stock Tracking: Currently, we attempt to publish one authoritative distribution status per medication - this system is becoming increasingly unsuitable over time. Not only are there some brands being imported by multiple distributors, but there’s an increasing pattern of companies wiping out distributor stock, yet availability continues through select pharmacies for much longer. Unfinished preview build.
- Prescription History, Stats & Alerts: We’ve put in placeholder content for our full revised ‘prescription calculator’ launching. We recently added better support for different types of medication, with costs per milligram of cannabinoids calculated for all. This also needs to be built out into supporting multiple pharmacies per script - and saving history for prior months. Beyond this we need to enable stats/graphics for historic usage, as well as offering notifications/alerts for changes in availability.
- Automated Public Statistics: We previously published monthly viewership statistics for various listings across our site: clinics, pharmacies and numerous types of medications. Due to the time required just to compile and represent these stats manually, this has become untenable for the moment. We’re hoping to both automate and greatly improve on the statistics we publish by leveraging Google’s API to publish live at all times, but there are again extra costs involved.
- Full Editing/Wiki System: The initial intention behind MedBud was to always allow live feedback/updates right from the website by visitors - something we primarily still handle by email. While we feel stringent validation/checks would be needed to make this work, with dedicated staff, we need to at least provide the facility for companies to update their own information live on the website. In addition, we’re massively behind on medication image uploads by email - something again which should be editable directly on our platform.
- Industry API System: From companies across the industry by far our most requested feature is to build a full API where companies can stay up-to-date with our medication information automatically over time. In general we started building various APIs directly with companies for stock and updates ourselves, where we’re hoping we can act as a central hub of information to reliably relay that to others automatically each day.
Stabilising Funding
Ultimately we’re hoping far more volunteers are able to come onboard, with backups for each position, that can help contribute to maintaining the platform overall. However that in itself does not secure the future of the organisation; managing a large group of volunteers is likely to be a full-time job in itself - and something that ideally requires a dedicated salaried position. Our organisation currently barely scrapes by on covering its bills for basic operations.MedBud needs a reliable and scalable funding model to secure its future success.
We currently have two obvious potential pathways forward:
- we either find a way to make our current non-profit model work, while enabling enough funding to pay staff salaries;
- or we move to a fully commercial for-profit model, allowing direct investment - to which we genuinely would be able to raise over a million very quickly, while having to give away ownership percentages to various investors and companies (which would by-default most often be industry-affiliated).
Our initial non-profit funding plan involved commissioning merchandise and apparel, then selling that to patients - but to be blunt, we don’t want to be left trying to sell enough trinkets each month in-order to afford paying bills and salaries, and in-order to keep our information resource alive – it also simply wouldn’t raise enough alone.
Consultation Period on Advertising
We’ve now spent six long months considering it, and feel the best solution available is proposing to break our no-advertising model - and allowing continual revenue from basic banner ads in the header/footer across our website. We feel this could reliably provide over £100k a year in income for our non-profit, enough to start affording to hire staff - without offering any company influence over our organisation, nor jeopardising our overall impartiality.When we state ‘propose’ here, we mean that we’re seeking permission and approval from the greater patient community and industry by opening up a public consultation period over the next two weeks. There’s multiple regulatory concerns, such as the obvious fact medications couldn’t be advertised - but there’s a whole range of other services which could be: from vape brands and stores; to events; and even clinics and pharmacies.
Through until 23rd May we’ll be taking feedback both by replies to this forum thread, by email to access@medbud.wiki - and also more directly from those across the industry whom have my personal contact details.
Finding dependable funding allows us to properly focus on all the necessary improvements required for our platform, including many features we feel are now long overdue. It allows us to hire dedicated staff; remove current bandwidth constraints and bottle-necks; improve information reporting; and overall secure the future of our platform as a whole.
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We recently signed a cooperative agreement with CannCare, a new patient-led organisation looking to provide advocacy and support services to patients across the country. We’re also currently working on providing automated formulary updates to clinicians across the industry, as well as a training module - in association with a leading clinician body.
There’s an awful lot others want to be able to depend on MedBud for, and to ensure that becomes a reality - we need to fix our funding model first and foremost.
I have now completed over 37,000 edits to MedBud’s database. No matter what happens, I’m here to ensure our updates continue at all-cost.
I appreciate your time, and continual support.
R.L. MacMurray
Founder/CEO
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