Hey {{first_name}}

Last week my whole household caught a cold. That is a fair result for a family where one member, Stephanie, has just run freshers week at her university. It involved a party for 10,000 people, some of whom may conceivably have brought germs as a house warming gift.

A cold is the most efficient distribution system I know. One super-spreader event, ten thousand carriers, and it reaches my kitchen table without anyone writing a press release. Clinical evidence needs rather more help than that.

This issue covers Layer 4 of the Evidence Stack, Distribution. It is where your proof assets leave the building and reach the people who decide whether to buy or invest, to increase your R>1.

Previous edition: L3 Proof Points

The best distribution I ever saw happened at a TEDx conference. My company had just published a paper in a medical journal about patients with ALS who ran their own clinical trial over the internet. I sat down at a hotel breakfast table and the man next to me had the story open on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

A thousand data points I had worked on were now a physical piece of newsprint beside my coffee. I struck up a conversation, and it turned out other people around the table with no prior interest in ALS had read the story too! Watching a study travel from data to print to breakfast chatter was the most real thing I have ever seen happen to my research (and if you’re interested I got up afterwards to give this talk).

This brings me to what many Founders grapple with: You want your evidence to be interesting enough that people stop each other and ask whether they have seen it, and what they make of it.

Layer 4 is the work of making that happen on purpose. Most teams neglect it, but not to worry… this is the layer we specialise in at ProofStack! It builds on the proof assets from last time: your posters, preprints, peer-reviewed papers and white papers, made accessible to people who are not scientists, or who are scientists with no time to read the literature all day.

I sort channels by how much control you have over them.

You have the most control over your personal LinkedIn. If you are the CSO and you want to post, you post. Next comes the company page. After that is your website, though many digital health companies, despite being technology businesses, have no quick way of updating one. What I often see is companies that hired an agency that did a big redesign a couple of years ago, with no live content management system, and new material taking weeks to appear.

Third-party sites come next, meaning anything other people say about you—the good, the bad and the ugly. That covers Wikipedia and the biography you submit every time you speak at an event. This also covers any press coverage (even ‘bad’ press being ‘good’ press is a topic for another time). You can also draft press releases with partners and send news over to the next-door blogger who writes about you ‘unprompted’.

A poster at a conference is seen by the people at the conference. That is a small audience for months of work, so we ask: how can we use every part of the buffalo, nose to tail?

Six weeks before you travel, write a LinkedIn post announcing what you will present. Check whether the conference prints an abstract book in a journal, because that makes your poster citable in the scientific literature. On site, take a selfie with the poster and tag the organisers, your co-authors and everyone who worked on it. Afterwards, build a portfolio on ResearchGate or Figshare and upload the PDFs, so anyone searching can find and cite them.

Roll the poster into the next asset if you can. A poster that becomes a publication keeps all the hard work you have already done.

An oral presentation leaves you with finished slides. Record the talk as a webinar and put it on YouTube, run it as a workshop for someone else, or turn it into a podcast conversation. If you’re struggling for time and systems to do all that, give us a call.

Aim for at least one post a week, so the algorithm can learn what you are relevant for and decide you are credible. Posts from the CEO or CSO draw much higher engagement and impressions than the corporate page. The corporate page still needs feeding, because prospects and investors do go and look, and it’s what prospective employees will look at too.

Impressions on LinkedIn have fallen sharply over the past twelve months, even for creators with tens of thousands of followers. A median post from someone publishing consistently is landing at around 1,000 impressions at the moment, down ~40% on a year ago. We have also learned that comments, sends and saves count for far more than likes and reposts. Go quiet for three months and your next post will land with a whimper, not a bang. Show up regularly and react to other people's news, so the algorithm sees you as someone plugged in and worth listening to.

For clients, we audit the LinkedIn activity of the corporate page and the senior team, then set it against a handful of competitors. The anonymised version below covers eight competitors over twelve months. It plots posts per month and the share about conferences, new data, fundraising and hiring. That gives you the temperature of the field, and shows whether you are keeping pace before you have something important to say. Competitive intelligence deserves its own issue, so I will hold the detail for then.

Some businesses should experiment with paid ads to boost reach. For that, we recommend James at Evergreen Growth. If you want to build your own profile first, Joe Gannon's free personal brand course for LinkedIn is worth your time.

Some of the work I am proudest of is the set of assets we have built for client websites, because they show the breadth and depth of a company's expertise. We work with your marketing team, business team and leadership to set up an evidence page in your main navigation, summarising the publications most likely to land with potential customers. Here is one example from Alden Scientific and another with Ada Health showcasing their high impact publications.

Clients with plenty to show off get a research bibliography as well like this one at PatientsLikeMe, with downloadable PDFs of every publication and poster in one place. Your business development team can send it ahead to prospects. It helps inside the company too, since not everyone has seen all the evidence everybody else has produced.

The last piece is the claims bank, which gives you validated claims with the right provenance, so your website tells a consistent story about what your product does.

Most companies underuse audio and video for research findings. The smallest version is a recorded Zoom interview, cut into 30-second LinkedIn clips that you edit yourself in Descript. A bigger version is a webinar where your science team presents the findings and takes questions, which you then record and clip.

You can run your own podcast, but growing the subscriber numbers is hard. Getting on other people's shows works better, though the invitations usually follow some press. You can start sooner by contacting the teams behind podcasts you already listen to and suggesting a story. Bringing bigger guests onto your own show helps too. Ours is Prove It! and its a lot of fun testing out how you turn your data into a compelling story that holds an audience’s attention. 

If all you have is a peer-reviewed paper or a poster, then all that has gone out into the world is a graph and a couple of numbers. We know from journal analytics that most people read only the title (hence why we recommend putting the answer there or making it interesting), a few more than that read the whole abstract, and relatively few read the whole thing end to end. Audio and video let you explain, as a human being, why the work matters to you and what made you do it. We also now know that LLMs are also reading YouTube transcripts to build a picture of your company, so a recorded talk keeps working long after you have left the stage.

Write a press release whenever you have a finding that changes the story about your product, even when mainstream coverage looks unlikely. Releases are highly discoverable by search engines and databases such as Crunchbase, which counts the interesting discoveries you share as one signal of how hot your company is. Many news services also copy press releases, with minor edits, into trade press. Magazines and newsletters for your industry end up running your story with no extra work on your part.

Time the embargo to a conference. If your CEO is speaking and you have a recent publication or result to announce, wrapping the embargo around the talk makes the story timely.

A common mistake in health tech is briefing journalists, or hiring a PR firm, on a finding that is interesting but badly timed. A study of 100 people using a wearable will struggle in a week when a big wearables story like the Oura IPO is already filling the news cycle. The editor has run three pieces on the topic already and wants something different.

Bloggers, commenters, journalists all get a lot more engagement for dunking on you than a pat on the back. Nine times out of ten, the best response is no response. The tenth time, people pick up the phone to us, and we help them make a measured, reasonable reply that corrects matters of fact on the record.

The best preparation is everything that came before this layer. Papers that followed reporting guidelines, clear statements of conflicts of interest, as much shared data as possible, well-described methods and a good journal all lower the odds of unfair criticism. Extraordinary claims still need extraordinary evidence, and scepticism is normal. We should be glad of it, since without it everybody would be taking snake oil.

Two threads need to run through all of the above:

The first is a single narrative, meaning the story of you as a founder or a company and how you are different: Why are you doing this? And have you told anybody that reason? Most companies have never worked that out for the wider market. 

The second is visual identity. For many tech companies, work on how they present to the world starts and finishes with a pitch deck and a one-off agency job that produced a logo and some fonts. A consistent identity for your data and evidence covers colours, fonts, sizes and icons, plus a decision about tone: funny, quirky, serious, dry, specific or aspirational. Too many founders sleep on this. The same people buy nice cars and notice good design in a hotel lobby, then publish their evidence with no design thought at all. Whatever goes out shapes how people feel about you when it arrives.

Next issue: L4 — Distribution.

Here's what you missed from the Behavioral Health Tech conference in Nashville.

Dr Eliane Boucher, our senior evidence consultant for behavioural health, spent 22 to 24 September at BHT2026 meeting founders, payers and fellow researchers. She put together a guide for all the attendees. And now, it is yours!

The Behavioural Health Guide to Evidence is for behavioural health companies working out which evidence payers, employers, health systems and pharma want to see. Download here!

I’m looking forward to speaking at BMJ Future Health Europe, taking place on 29–30 October at The Brewery, London.

Across two days, healthcare leaders, clinicians and innovators will come together to explore the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of health and care—from AI and digital transformation to healthcare innovation, patient involvement and the future of care delivery.

Receive 20% off the standard ticket rate using my code FHEWICKS20 at checkout.

Explore the programme and book your place!