3 years ago, Courtney Hall of True Medical Spa came to @PodiumHQ and told me we needed to build for medspas. My first reaction was no. We had a couple hundred medspa customers at the time, but honestly, it wasn’t a main focus. We were focused on auto dealerships and home services and medspa felt like a stretch. Then she showed me how she was using Podium at True Medical Spa, and I was blown away. We looked at the rest of our medspa customers and saw the same thing. They were some of the most engaged customers we had, and the industry itself was growing 18% YoY. We decided to go all in on medspa and make it one of the core verticals at Podium. We built a team around the industry: Product builders, customer success, and go-to-market who work on-site with med spas every day, learning how we can best help them grow their businesses. Today, we have ~2,000 medspas using Podium. Last year, we realized our AI employees could only do so much sitting on top of legacy EMRs. To really change how these businesses operate, we needed control of the workflows and the data. We needed to own the full stack. For medspas, that meant building an AI-native EMR layer. So that’s what we did. Avery, our AI front desk employee, has booked over 134,000 appointments for them. The main reason we went all in on the medspa industry was that nobody was building an AI operating system designed to help these businesses grow while taking more work off their plates. The medspa industry is competitive and these owners have high standards. We love that, because it makes us better. Thank you to the medspa owners who have let us in and helped us learn. And thank you to Cortney for changing my mind.