I wrote an eBook to help new dentist grads transition into associateship

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sloken

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First off....it's been a while since I first started on SDN. I just received a 7 year member badge!

I started this thread on DentalTown, and it was suggested that I might find a better audience over here.

So, I'm going to copy/paste what I've written on DT in this thread. As such, these first couple posts will be long. After that, I'll be crossposting the same posts on both SDN and DT forums.

___________________

Hey everyone.

This is going to be a bit of a journal for me, to help track my steps and thought processes as I get this side project off the ground. I'm a little behind but I'll try and lay out what steps I've taken since January.

I'll try to keep this as up to date as possible, but between working fulltime 5 days a week doing clinical dentistry, taking the intense gIDE implant continuum (had over 60+ hours of video to watch and study before taking an online exam) and getting this thing off the ground, I've been pretty damn busy.

Overview and background:

I read Stephen Keys' One Simple Idea about 1.5 years ago and it prompted me to create and file a provisional patent for a simple dental product. It worked fine, but costs to manufacture were too high after discussing it with some dental product manufacturers, and in retrospect, demand wouldn't be terrible high in the first place. Lesson learned.

Sept 2016: had an epiphany of an idea for a surfing apparel product. Worked like made to design, file a provisional patent, hire costume design student to make the mockup, then brought pattern to manufacturer, got test run made, and started pitching to local surf shops and bigger companies for licencing. The wholesale price to have the product made locally was high, and I could have halved it by committing to a 1000 unit order to have them made overseas. I had some genuine interest from a couple shops but they needed a lower wholesale price. I waited on it a bit. The day that I'm talking to a Ripcurl rep he sends me a instagram screenshot of a product that was just launched, right as I happen to scroll to the same photo on my instagram feed. This product happened to serve the exact same function as mine. Between getting beat to market, facing the prospect of dumping a bunch of $ into an unproven overseas-made order, pricing problems and having to worry about storing inventory, I slowly abandoned the idea, and kept the test run products for use amongst my friends and I.

Then in Jan 2016 I got hit with the idea of writing an eBook. I think I was probably listening to a mix of EOFire, DentalPreneur, 6Figure Side Gig, and Smart Passive Income podcasts at the time, and then it clicked: My target audience isn't just dentists, and not just dentist owners, but associate dentists.


So first week of January 2016 I decided to start writing. I laid out the chapters that I would write about and just went at it, hardcore for 3 weeks. The chapters covered:

  • job searching
  • interviews
  • communication
  • clinical efficiencies
  • CE
  • finance
  • legal
  • health
I started with the easy shorter sections first, then finished with the longer chapters (comm, clinical)
All while writing, I toyed with different ideas of distributing this book: kindle, amazon, print, download from own website, subscription etc. I decided to distribute from my own website

As I continued writing, I ended up creating some extra resources, one of which was enough to be its own short ebook in itself.

This is when I decided to offer multiple packages. My goal is to offer 3 tiers of products: one basic book, the book + 8 extra resources, and book+resources+ TBD.

I'm also going to offer 3 free downloads on the website: one is resource for gather important info while at an associate job interview. The second is a list of cheap, essential, and solid products to help make clinical dentistry faster and of higher quality. The last is going to be an entire chapter out the main eBook. I decided to offer this last one for free so people could "test-run" my writing and see if they think an entire book will be of the same value.

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TL;DR - i wrote some ebooks, assembled some resources, and am launching a website to help out D4's and new dentists transition to the working world. Relevant links in my signature

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Backing up a bit, my inspiration also came from multiple phone and FB conversations that I was having in Ja 2016. Multiple new dentists and senior dental students from my alma mater were asking me for advice on what to keep an eye out for when looking for jobs, how to build up speed, what common pitfalls in associateships are. I ended up writing huge back-and-forth responses with these people and really enjoyed helping them out. Since I was having these convos in such a short period of time and found myself repeating a lot of things, I figured I'd write them down and collect everything in one common resource.

Next, I contacted a couple dental students I know and asked them to distribute a short SurveyMonkey survey to the 3rd and 4th year classes at their schools. In that survey I asked students to rank different topics in order of importance and also gather ideas on chapter topics that I may have missed. I also started gathering some emails from that survey. Within 24 hours I had capped out at 100 responses, the max I could gather without paying for SurveyMonkeys service. Those results helped guide the chapter topics that I mentioned in an earlier post.

Content creation was the easy part. What I've found much tougher is getting the non-dental related work done:
-finding a company to set up a website.
-getting the graphic design work done (I used the same designer that I used for the surf product and have been quite happy)
-registering a domain name and getting hosting set up
-finding a legal business name that's not been taken and getting a corp set up
-waiting on the corp setup so I can open corporate bank accounts and a credit card
-waiting on the banking stuff so that I can register and set up my ecommerce platform

The first two have been the most frustrating as I'm the type of person that wants everything done in a specific manner NOW. Problem is, my developer and designer are both doing their work on the side as well, which means sometimes I have to wait for big updates to happen.

In the meantime, I've been busy trying to build an email list, social media presence, and figure out some minute details. Back to writing!
 
Still waiting on the website/legal/banking stuff to get set up.

I think I figured out an eCommerce platform to sell the eBook and resources on- took me a while to pick between Gumroad (my first choice), eJunkie (old and a little more cumbersome) and a host of others. I recently found out about Selz and I think it fits my needs - it was tough to find one that can automatically calculate Canadian sales tax since I'm a Canuck.

In the meantime, I registered for a few domains and set up an email account. I also started a facebook page with an email signup form thats connected to MailChimp. I've posted a few things on there and been trying to slowly build up that list. If this whole project interests you, I encourage you to check out that facebook link and sign up to the list! If you know any new dentists or D4 students, let them know too - trying to get word out has been tough. I was able to get some signups by posting the link in my alma mater's Dental student society FB group but not much else. I tried spending $7 to "boost" a post I made, but so far that's been a waste of money. I tried targeting it to people that "Like" a bunch of dental schools facebook pages, but none of those people fit my target audience. I sent an email to the pre-dental society at my alma mater to see if any pre-dents are interested in making a bit of money filling out a spreadsheet for me - I want to contact student reps at dental schools directly and give them the link to my free downloads. So far no bites from the predents, so if any of you know someone that might be interested, let them (and me) know!

One cool thing I figured out was how to send out a mass email with a simple survey/poll embedded! My last email campaign was asking if people would want a short, concise, weekly or biweekly newsletter with a simple trick/hack, interesting case or funny story. So far only about 20 people have responded but the overwhelming consensus is "YES!"

This waiting around sucks. It's like I'm waiting for my assistant to grab the correct set of forceps but can't find them....meanwhile I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs trying to look busy. I think I might try to figure out some subjects for this newsletter in the meantime.

Cheers!
 
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Made a spreadsheet of all dental schools in Canada USA and Aus. I sent an email last week offering a a job to a pre-dent student to populate this spreadsheet with contact info from each school, but to no avail.

So I'm doing this myself - googling every damn school, scrolling through their website for contact info for student services, and asking to be put in touch with a senior student rep. I'm offering this student a sample chapter from the book and am going to be asking what they/their class is most worried about when they leave school. I'm also goign to be summarizing the main topics/concepts I cover in the book, and then comparing this with the feedback from the students. I want to identify any gaps in the knowlege I provide, as my initial survey only included 2 dental school

I've had a pretty poor response rate so far from USA schools (Canadian ones are batting 1.000) Little did I know that some American board exams are running this weekend, which would explain the lack of interest and response. I'm hoping things pick up next week!
 
If anyone out there is currently a D4 (D3's can help too), I NEED YOUR HELP!!
See the previous post (#4). I'd rather cut out the middleman dental school admin staff, and communicate with you directly. I'm wanting to find out if there's any knowledge gaps in my resources and how I can help fill those gaps.

If you're interested, please send me a PM/inbox/whatever it's called on SDN nowadays.

Cheers!
 
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Things I've finished since last post:

-put together 3 free downloads: "15 products to help make your clinical work better and faster" (with thorough descriptions and pics), an Interview Cheat Sheet to gather and organize important info during associate job interviews, and the entire "Job Searching" Chapter of the eBook

-received final PDF's back from my graphic designer - they look sweet! Lots of hyperlinks are included in the CE chapter to handy websites, blogs, podcasts, courses, etc
-found an eCommerce platform - ironing out the tax kinks in that right now
-sent out a couple newsletters and gathered feedback on important topics to cover
-found out the website is about 95% done!
 
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Got some printed copies back to use as free giveaway promos!

On another note: are there any D3 or D4 students on here? Please comment below on issues (outside of what you learned in school) that you would want to know more about, most likely in a monthly newsletter format!
 
Haven't written here in a couple weeks. Since last post, I hosted a giveaway for one of the hardcopies to a lucky dental student to try to drum up some buzz. I spoke with an accountant to determine how taxation should work - for now, none (since I'm considered a small supplier). I've also dabbled into facebook ads, and managed to install Google analytics on my own onto the website.

I also figured out how to get Mailchimp integrated into the site - now when you enter your email either on FB or the website, you are automatically emailed some free resources (the Interview Cheat Sheet, top 15 products, and sample chapter from the book)!

A few days ago I ran a test sale to see if everything was working and managed to iron out a couple bugs. It was such a wicked feeling seeing the emails on my phone that said "Congratulations, you've got an order!"

Tomorrow we're launching for real at 7am PST. Things to do tonight: get a photo and facebook post ready to post for first thing in the morning
 
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