The Story Behind Orange Carrot Media

Podcast Introduction and Mission 0:00

Welcome to Healthcare Business Growth Conversations powered by Orange Carrot Media, the show where we dive into the stories, strategies and lessons that help healthcare businesses scale. I am Rakesh and I'm Austin and together we co-founded Orange carrot Media. And through this podcast, we want to share not only tips and tactics, but real conversations about what it takes to grow in today's healthcare world. why we started, what we believe the industry was missing and how that shaped our vision.

And going forward, we'll be bringing on doctors, practice owners, and healthcare leaders for honest conversations about growth, covering marketing, patient engagement, operations, and more. Our goal is simple. Help you grow your practice with clarity and confidence. Thanks for tuning in to our very first conversation. Let's dive in. So I graduated from Lynn. I did my MBA in marketing and operations and started off my internship. In the healthcare industry, more precisely, I did my market research in a pharma company in South Florida.

And then right after that, got a full-time job into a marketing agency.

Rakesh's Background and Meeting Austin 1:28

That's where I met Mr. Austin, who was my boss back then. I got introduced to the beautiful world of media buying. Where Austin and I complemented each other, we got together very well, we worked well. I personally enjoyed the work working with Austin at the agency. We used to just buy the media millions of dollars back in 2015. Facebook was rolling out new placements and I was fresh out of college learning how media buying was and analyzing the data, crunching the numbers, getting back to the strategy.

That used everyday work and then that's how now I got into this beautiful world of marketing especially into the media buying along with Austin and one mantra that he taught me back then was he who has the traffic has a goat. That got stuck in my mind and then fast forward today, we are in 2025, a decade later, it still holds true. It's all about the traffic, the relevant traffic and how we convert and the strategies, tactics, whatever we do to get the right traffic. to any business that we work with.

That's all it matters. So that's how I got introduced to Austin. And then fast forward in 2019, Austin and I founded an agency and we started this agency without name because we couldn't find the right name. In our minds, we just wanted to get a simple name whenever we can think of a single name, We couldn't get a domain. Whenever we get the domain, we didn't like to go with CL or .IL. We just wanted .com. So I'll just leave the floor to Austin. What was the story behind our first name and then how we evolved into Orange Carrot?

Yes. Thank you, Rakesh. Um, We wanted something easy to spell. First of all, something that was catchy, easy dispel and it took weeks to come up with something that we both liked, that, we could find, uh, That we can correlate. And we stumbled upon Purple Carrot Media. It was catchy.

Founding Purple Carrot and Rebranding 4:05

it was healthy. There was something, somebody could just remember and we bought the domain. We did all the steps we thought we, could do, right Rakesh? Full force with this thing. Yeah, even till today I love the logo of Purple Carrot Media. We had clients calling us PCM and stuck with us and we built a website and had all the business logistics right, social media handles and properties and all of the stuff. And I don't know, what is it? A year later, Rakesh, maybe less than that? No, a year. Later.

Yeah. That name for a full year, we, uh, I got a third phone call. from another Purple Carrot, not in the same class necessarily, but another purple carrot who did some sort of a consulting that for some strange reason when Purple carrot was being Googled with her name next to it, our website was ranking and she was infuriated And was threatening and sending cease and desist and a mistake that we made was we didn't do the proper research on a trademark and we should have trademarked it. And we were naive.

We're just gung-ho and looking forward, it should've been trademark, but glass half full, we're able to buy orange carrot media. very similar and rebranded everything and redirected, everything, and forwarded emails and went their whole thing. And even though that woman demanded that we sell purple carrot media to her, which I don't know how, what rights she felt that she had, but she never got it. We are, we landed on orangecarrotmedia.com, orange carrot, Orange Carrot Media and fast forward five years.

We're still at it. We filed a trademark right away, we secured all the assets and you know, Rakesh, the learning lesson, right? Yeah, it's a great business lesson. These are the basics that we should be looking at. Yes, I'm glad that, we did all these mistakes right in our first year. We learned our mistakes and also that helps us consulting to our clients as well regarding the trademarks and everything. I believe we speak about the trademark with every single client whenever they come up with a new business unit or if the business is evolving.

All we ask them is, do they have the trademark? Do they own their own assets? Because it shouldn't be a surprise if the brand evolves and then it will be painful procedure for any brand to go through a rebranding just because of the trade mark issues. If the reb branding does because the business evolves, then its a different story. It's a good pain to have, but just because of the basics, not covering the basic, getting into these issues is something that any, it's not just a marketing agency, any business should be looking into.

So that's how Orange Carrot was born and is evolving into a brand in the industry, in marketing industry.

Owning Digital Assets and Building Foundations 7:18

Initially, Orange carrot's identity is just media buying agency. where Austin and I, we used to get a lot of referrals because we use to do good work. To be honest, Austin, and they are not sales people. We are just the backend people getting the work done. At some point we were doing white labeling for other agencies as well. So Austin I just loved solving problems, solving marketing problems every single day. That's how we evolved, got a lotta referrals. When we go to a point where We couldn't take any referrals because it was tough keeping up with the existing businesses because every business evolved, every industry evolved and then we had like B2B, B to C, mom and pop shop to corporate accounts.

It was becoming tough for us to keep up. Is not just Austin and I has to up keep with these changes, it's the team that has go through all the pain dealing with different clients, different size of clients from different industries every day. So that's when... We decided to niche down and then we were just looking at different niches. By then, we working with handful of doctors and I always enjoyed working the doctors. As soon as I had a conversation and we decided niche-down into healthcare. Yes, We put that as an umbrella of healthcare because we not only help doctors but also we do have companies, brands that sell supplements on Amazon and And then we are helping few manufacturing devices companies.

So anything under the umbrella of healthcare, we're helping those businesses right now predominantly looking at helping doctors and the ecosystem around it. Yeah. That's a good synopsis, Rakesh. Yeah. So I just wanted to share the story behind it, the lessons behind, and then wanted it to have this honest conversation about the marketing growth and especially the entrepreneurship, which is not easy. It's not. Easy. And kind of going back to some of our mistakes that we made of not securing assets of trademarks and maybe we'll just dive a little bit deeper in Rakeh because you and I, I think over the last 10 years and Plus in my 15 year plus, we are able to look into the backend of thousands of businesses digitally.

And we understand that a business is an asset and digitally those assets come with all sorts of accounts of from Google business profiles to Facebook ad accounts and Facebook pages and website domains and hosting. And it's always just a slew of logins of a dozen to a couple dozen log ins that are these business assets. Rakesh, you tell me nine times out of 10, we speak to client, and we kind of look underneath the hood. What do we see with these assets? It's a mess. Always a mass. We have to untangle the mess, put everything in the structure, and then teach the client that you've got to own your assets.

Not only own, but secure them. Who has access to these? Who is the logins to your GoDaddy or your hosting or Facebook account? The list goes on. And it's not like this has happened once or twice. Nine times out of 10 or 95 times of 100, we see this, some sort of leak of inconsistency in the assets.

Marketing Strategy, Positioning, and Brand Growth 11:16

Yes. It is a mess that we deal every time and then it is something that try to untangle. And a lot of times it's a frustration phase because whenever we on board a climb, the first 90 days are important and we have to look into the quick wins to gain the trust. Instead of looking at quick ones, we try to fix foundation. I'm glad that most of the clients understanding that we are trying to help them out instead of just looking for quick wins to please them because a foundation is a Foundation and then you can build.

You are as strong as your foundation. If not, if you keep on building on top of it, it is always fragile at one point it breaks. Yeah, I think that's where Orange Carrot is different from the others in the market. We consult the client. We just don't focus on deliverables on A, B, C every day. We try to understand, but we just do not do marketing activities every. Even before marketing activity, we try understand the market for the client first. Then positioning is something that we always emphasize on, because you've got to position yourself right in the marketplace, then only the win comes.

If not, if you go and try and compete with the person in market, there is no way that you're going to beat the best in the market and if you just go and compete with the one who is 10 steps below you it is always good for you because the numbers looks great so and then if we get a traffic of irrelevant search terms to the website and month over month if the traffic goes double or triple, it looks, the graph looks great, but what is the search behavior, right? Like, and why people are coming for you, what they're doing.

So these are all the things that matters a lot even before working on ICO or running a Facebook campaign or doing an email market. So that's where now we have this framework that we always try to apply to most of our clients unless a particular client come to us and says they need only Google ads or only Facebook ads. We have few such clients who has absolute clarity of. what they need from us, and then we are good at implementation. So that's the marketing way. That's The Orange Carrot's marketing.

Fixed the framework. Don't just look at marketing activities. Look marketing as a whole and try to combine offline, digital, everything. The messaging comes before activity. And then the medium, like now you choose Google or you chose Facebook or choose YouTube, or do you use a billboard? Right? And then back then, I remember, Austin, before helping a healthcare client, we used to help a client from an event industry where they used put the billboards and the posters in the New York subway. And we use to see a lot of Google search spike once those billboard goes away in New-York.

Then we'd use it to capture the Google traffic, and then we would use them to do the remarketing. We used it sell those tickets to them. So that's where I learned, now it is not digital versus offline. It is marketing as a whole. You've got to treat. Now it's one unit, you've gotta run it like a well-oiled machine. Then any business would evolve. So after a decade, I think, everyone talks about brand, right? Like, this is something that I want to touch today. in our intro session, after a decade of experience working with businesses, now, most of the clients say, if I want to test this, what happens to my brand?

What happens my to brand value? In reality, it is not a brand, It is just a business. Everyone thinks that it's a Brand. And then, whenever we speak with new business clients, they say like, oh, we got to build a I don't think brands are built just like that overnight. I think businesses are build and brands or evolved when businesses keep their promises. So that's how brands in the, in, the whole world are evolved. No brand is just built like. That's something that I learned. The key thing that they learned, I, think in a decade, a brand always evolves.

We build a business. So, that's where Orange Carriage always, always thinks about how to build a business that evolves as a brand. And then, lately, I'm listening to a lot of other podcasts as well, learning a LOT, and that is where recently I started attending expos in India, especially the healthcare expos. I'm fortunate to get a speaking slot and after that I got attention to a lot of doctors and entrepreneurs in the healthcare industry and then having a lots of conversations with them. And that's where this whole idea of launching our own podcast came into my mind.

There is a reason we wanted to help entrepreneurs, clinics and marketers think differently about growth. Everyone is different, everyone's vision is difference. That vision actually leads to a strategy and the strategy leads to the growth. So it's all about how badly a leader wants to grow their business and how different they want. It's not about just different, right? Like, you know, every human being is different. Everyone has their own way of thinking about business and that itself is different from one person to another person.

And putting every business that we get into one template of doing SEO or running just a Facebook ad or putting a couple of posts without understanding them is just waste of time. That's where Orange Carrot comes in. Understanding the business, not just the market as a business.

Why the Podcast Exists and Future Guests 17:28

understanding your vision. Seeing through your lens of the business, coming up with a strategy and then taking that business into the market, evolving that as a brand is where Orange Cat's strength lies in. So that's my personal experience and I want Austin to talk about it. Yeah, it's hard to top that. I'm just going to go off of what you said. You and 25 years of experience doing this combined and I wanted us to just being able to get our Knowledge out there and speak to people and like you said you and i Unfortunately, we're not the sales guys.

We've always been the back end guys putting the system together Running the media, configuring the CRMs, making sure all the data is clean, figuring stuff out and kind of venturing more into the front end. I would say in the last four or five, six years is I see it. These brands, these businesses that are involving into a brand or people think that they have a. It's usually. in an identity crisis. Rakesh, I know that you kind of come across these identity crises all the time and maybe give us an example that and i think we can kind of bounce off of that which one you're talking about i get i i guess which is in your mind i don't know i want to call you when i know see the identity crisis is like something that like for example i'll just go off with uh Recently I met with a doctor.

They're running an OBGYN and a pediatric clinic. So it's a couple who are running the clinic I went there and then I saw like a huge list of other services that they are planning to provide like ENT and general surgeries and they have cardio, neuro, and they even listed other laboratory services. I went in and then I asked them to show around the whole clinic. They have, it is around 15 bed, a small hospital kind of a clinic, so. And then, I ask them like, you know, your an OBGYN and the other setup is a pediatric setup.

But where is the scope for an ENT or where the is a scope of a cardio or a neuro? And then they just like, you know, they were like now we get a lot of patients here. They, we want them to come here for all other services as well. We want to treat this hospital as a multi-specialty hospital. But in reality, it is just an OBGYN pediatric clinic. So that's like an identity crisis in their mind. That they are just trying to aim for something, which is not for real. If they go deeper into. whoever they are and then get the identity right.

they would kill the market. I just felt like it is more of a FOMO and also it's more as I was talking before doing the marketing activities, the messaging has to be right, positioning has be to right. So I think that's where they got it wrong. They were just suffering from that identity crisis kind of thing in their mind saying that we need people for all these departments. In reality, they don't even have a setup. They should just stick to truly who they are and just focus on positioning themselves as a leader, just as an OBGYN and pediatric.

That is what I told them. And, um, and then they really appreciated whatever I tell them and they were like, yeah, you know, I think you're right. We are just trying to target the wrong goals here and getting ourselves frustrated. Trust me, now their OP was full and now they don't even need marketing because they got enough word of mouth and and then they're doing good I think it's just I just told them like if you if You just focus on your infrastructure and I'll make it better and definitely you will get much more name in terms of The quality and the premiumness the perception in the market would go high.

So that is just one example, you know like stick to who you are truly, rather than just going behind. Now, I would say every shiny object in the mark. I know that's the thing. That's one example, and then I can go on and on with many such examples. Yeah. What else did you want to cover in this first episode, Rakesh? I mean, we can in a hundred different angles. And I wanted to save some gold nuggets for later on, really cool, exciting guests. Yes. As I said, our goal is to help entrepreneurs, clinics, and also marketers who think differently about marketing, about the business, the growth.

Definitely we want to bring in more guests in the future podcast, like doctors. We want bring entrepreneurs. Everyone from the supply chain. Talk about it. One of the major components is the compliance. like in the HIPAA compliance and then from country to country and from state to state it is different. And then in US it's different and in India it different, and I think every state has its own laws. I'm not sure yet, I need to figure out that. But as a whole, One common denominator is healthcare industry needs to stick to compliances and then we need to work through the framework.

So I think bringing in professionals from compliancies, bringing professionals like from the devices, from manufacturer side and the doctors, doctors who turned into entrepreneurs, the hospital managers. So these are all will be our guests moving forward. And then our goal is to give you the holistic view of healthcare business and how you can think about growth in healthcare. So this is just the beginning. If you enjoyed listening, follow the group podcast that we have today. The way we talk about the growth, it is all about that.

We talk and it's the healthcare Business Growth Conversations podcast. So we'll be back soon with more stories, insights and guests. Awesome. See you guys next week. Thank you.