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Elevator Pitch

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For patients / general audience

Pitch

Hi, we're OrthoFX! 👋

The world is a better place when you smile and we are on a mission to make you smile more confidently. The dirty little secret of the aligner industry is that an all-day aligner is serious damper to your social life with all the restrictions that come along with it. With our NiTime aligners, OrthoFX transforms your smile with just night time wear!

With OrthoFX you can have your cake and eat it too. Interested to know more? All it'll cost you is a smile :)

Rationale

• Starting with a slightly cheeky sentence to make them feel good
• Then comes a little bit of why they may not want to go with a regular aligner and why OrthoFX is better
• And all of this, is aimed at the listener individually

For customers (Doctors specifically)

Pitch

Hi doctor, we are OrthoFX. 👋

Do you have aligner patients who's treatments never seem to go on track? You and I both know that's probably the same problem that aligner treatments have had from day 1 - non-compliant patients with erratic wear times. Here's how we can help.

With OrthoFX's compliance friendly NiTime aligners, you can get the same results you can expect from aligner therapy with a reduced wear time of just 9-12 hours.

OrthoFX is an aligner company started by a bunch of ex-invisalign executives (including Loc Phan, who invented the very first aligner polymer) and OrthoFX NiTime is the first and only FDA-cleared aligner for reduced wear time.

Would you like to schedule a time to learn more about what OrthoFX can do for your patients?

Rationale

• You may have noticed in the doctor pitch that we moved away from the “night time” messaging into a “compliance friendly” messaging. There are 2 reasons for this:
• • Docs are not the once wearing the aligners, so it’s more impactful to hook them with the issue that they find annoying - reputational risk from non-compliant patients
  • Docs have been taught in training for years that “night only” aligner treatments don’t work. From my experiences talking to them, bringing that up upfront leads to instant disbelief and a lack of willingness to engage deeply about the rest of the messaging
• I’ve also included some background about the company and the founders to give a trust factor which I’ve found is very important for docs. Typically in sales pitches, I’ve seen a visible change in demeanour when I start talking about the founding team.

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Understand your Product

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The aligner market in the US

We’ll start with a few qualitative things to understand about the aligner market in the US.

Key stakeholders

• There are 2 types of dental doctors (that is worth considering in this context) in the US.
• • GPs or General Practitioners that are your regular dentists you may visit for an oral check-up, cavities etc
  • Orthos or Orthodontists who are specialists who have gone to school for an additional few years to become the specialists for treating malocclusions (misalignment). These doctors focus pretty much exclusively on correcting alignment using various devices such as braces, auxiliaries (like palette expanders, TADs etc.), and aligners.
• Refer to the Understanding the users section for other stakeholders such as practice managers, hygienists etc.

Some important events in the timeline of this industry

• For the longest time, (1997-2017), Invisalign was pretty much the sole player in the Industry because of their patent portfolio
• When the Invisalign patents expired, there was a huge boom in the number of aligner companies, and among them a new trend - direct to consumer aligners
• DTC aligner companies like SmileDirectClub, Candid etc started to cut doctors in the process and went directly to the patients.
• The DTC companies also started making wild claims about teeth straightening such as night-wear correction (when they didn’t have any real solution for it)
• For the first 3-5 years, the industry was kind of the wild west.
• COVID came as a big booster to the teeth straightening industry because now people were constantly on camera on Zoom calls and people started to notice that their smile looked off.
• Then people started noticing all the issues with DTC companies and people had a lot of bad experiences (even up to people’s teeth literally falling off due to incorrectly planned treatments).
• All this resulted in a very strong backlash from doctors, consumer advocates and so on and companies like Smile Direct Club ended up filing for bankruptcy last year, and companies like Candid switched back to a doctor led model (with their Candid Pro offering).

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The company & the product line-up

I'll start with how I was pitched the company by the founder.

​What this means is that we have a view on becoming an all-in-one wellness solution but are starting with aligners.

Our core business right now, so, is the manufacture and sale of aligners for teeth straightening. From the start, OrthoFX was clear in our approach that while we may generate demand from the patient side, our treatments will always be with a doctor in the loop because we believe that is the only way to deliver healthy results to the patients.

Our primary customers are hence the doctors that deliver the treatment, but our end-beneficiaries are the patients that use the aligners.

Core Products

The core product line-up includes 3 types of aligner polymers.

• Regular full-time wear aligners
• • FXTetra - Our base polymer that competes in the market with the likes of SmartTrack from invisalign. This is a 22-hr wear aligner system, that’s designed for superior patient comfort.
  • Bright - This is a variation of our base polymer that includes a hint of white pigment. This naturally makes the tooth look whiter and straighter when the patient is wearing this. This improves patient compliance by making them want to wear their aligners more. *
• Reduced wear time aligners
• • NiTime - This is the world’s first and only FDA cleared aligner polymer for reduced wear time of 9-12 hrs a day. This fits in much better to a patient’s life making it more likely that they will get the results they want

Auxiliary products

Our auxiliary products include:

• Rescue Aligners - traditionally, when aligner treatments go off-track we have to bring the patient in for a new scan and then create a completely new plan from scratch.
• • Rescue aligners solve this issue by creating a special set of in-between aligners based on a patented polymer tech that brings the patient back on track so that they can continue the original treatment. This too without having to bring the patient back in for a scan.
  • This saves 3-4 weeks of treatment time, the wastage & hassle involved and the doctor’s chair time
• FXOnTrack - an AI powered remote monitoring solution to keep track of the patients without having to bring them back into the chair
• FXPay - our in-built financing platform to make aligner treatments more affordable (with a nearly 100% approval rate), and thereby increasing sales.
• Virtual Treatment Coordinators - This is essentially a virtual sales team member that can work with a practice to drive conversions and sales
• FXCollaboration - This a unique solution in the market that allows a doctor (usually GPs) who are starting out with Aligners to collaborate with a more experienced doctor (usually Orthos) to provide care to a patient. This is something that happens informally in the industry right now and in some senses this is almost like a partner program too and experienced Orthos often bring along their GP network when they join OrthoFX.

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Understanding Core Value Proposition

There are a few things that make OrthoFX stand out from the crowd

• We are one of only 3 companies in the US (of about 97 in total) with our own aligner polymers
• All of our treatment will be delivered by doctors and doctors only
• We have the first and only FDA-cleared reduced wear time (night-only) aligner polymer (almost a holy grail for the aligner industry)
• For practices using our product, we have the an entire suite of auxiliary services such as AI remote monitoring, financing, virtual treatment coordination (think of it kind of like as a virtual sales team that our doctors can use to close their cases).
• All this put together, we give our customers a one stop shop for all their aligner needs with the next-gen of polymers, giving them reliable high quality results every time.

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Understanding the Users

OrthoFX is a B2B2C business. This means we sell to doctors, but the end beneficiary is the patient.

Typically in a US dental practice there will be different types of users:

1. The doctors - these are the Orthos or GPs. They perform the treatment and in smaller practices, it's their reputation that brings in the patients.
2. The hygenists - these are trained professionals who perform simpler procedures like tooth cleaning, taking scans & x-rays etc. They are important to our business because a lot of the time the initial seed of going for an aligner treatment is planted in the patient's mind by the hygenist. For e.g. when the patient is in for a cleaning appointment, they may bring up something like "oh, looks like you are having trouble cleaning the back of your lower jaw. It looks like there's some crowding issues there. Have you considered getting aligner therapy to correct that? It can make it so much more easier to keep them clean by avoiding pockets where food may get stuck. Shall I ask the doctor to evaluate you for it?"
3. Practice manager - Practice managers are often the people in the practice that handle the financial aspects of treatments. Since aligner therapy is a fairly expensive product, often patients need financing and some hand holding to finally pull the trigger. That's where they come in.
4. Other practice staff / front office - they are often the people who end up interacting with our portal most often to do things like upload records, keep track of case statuses etc.

Understanding your ICP

B2B Table:

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For this analysis, we will be focusing on ICP 1 & ICP 2 because the way to sell to ICP 3 is much different and is more traditional in nature.

Understand Market

Competitor analysis

Market Size

There are multiple ways to size the market, but here I’ve chosen to do a bottoms-up analysis using the average trends for Orthos and GPs in the market. Another potential approach would be to look at patients who need orthodontic treatment and go from there.

In general, the US aligner market is valuated at $3.8 B with a CAGR of ~25% (https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/clear-aligners-market-101377)

TAM

• 10,904 Orthos + 159,265 GPs
• TAM = (10904 x 5 x 12 x 1100) + (159265 x 1 x 12 x 1250) = $3,108,639,000 ($3.1 B)

SAM

• Our SAM is mostly the doctors that already do aligners (as opposed to only braces or other devices). This is approximately 45%.
• SAM = $3.1B x 45% = $1.79 B

https://www.consumeraffairs.com/health/invisible-braces-and-invisalign-statistics.html

SOM

• Based on the second largest aligner player in the market, ClearCorrect’s market share, 10% is a reasonable estimate for the SOM
• SOM = $1.79 B * 10% = $179 M

https://www.smilesbywhite.com/patient-information/news/is-clear-correct-taking-a-bite-out-of-the-invisalign-market/​

Designing Acquisition Channel

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For this exercise, I’ll be selecting 3 experiments to run

1. Organic content by collecting more testimonials and case studies
2. Content Loop from doctors using the systems
3. Partner program via FXCollaboration

Detailing your Acquisition Channel

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Organic Channel (Patient content)

• Organic content in terms of SEO is going to be difficult to crack for a company like us with the limited resources we have.
• Our current attempts at SEO and organic marketing have generated some result, but overall it hasn’t been a very viable option for us because of the much larger and deep-pocketed players.
• A shortcut to cut through it (borrowing a few notes from SmileDirectClub, Candid etc) is to use User Generated Content to generate buzz.
• The primary goal of this experiment is to produce some demand gen from the patient side, even though our actual customers are the doctors.

I’ll split this into 3 sub-projects:

• Before treatment starts - Our AI team has recently come up with a smile simulation tool that let’s prospective patients see how their smile will look like after treatment. We can use this to generate some 1:1 sharing by the users. This could eventually even be taken off-platform (such as a snapchat filter that'll show you how you'll look after OrthoFX).
• After the treatment - We’ll use the photos submitted by the patients on their remote monitoring app (FXOnTrack) to create a timelapse video of their “glow-up”, and again incentivise them to share. This time, perhaps in a 1 to many setting.
• We can also do some guerrilla marketing by engaging as regular users on platforms like quora, reddit, etc where people already come to discuss topics like aligner therapy advice and their experiences.

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Content Loop

A major driver for Orthos is to be seen as thought leaders in the Industry. A way to tap into this to out advantage would be to make use of a Key-Opinion-Leader program to bring in expert Orthos who use OrthoFX to talk about us.

We can get them to do industry podcasts and have them be speakers in study clubs. I’ve seen in general that Orthos are glad to see an audience wanting to learn from them.

So for this experiment, the Orthos will be the content creators, with some help from us.

Distribution will happen via

• The company (of course we’ll share the hell out of it)
• The orthos itself (coming back to their inner motivation to be seen as thought leaders)
• And in the case of things like podcasts, it’ll be shared to their audience too

In this content loop, the reward is the prestige that comes along with being a thought leader.

On the other side, this is also a self reinforcing loop because another major driver for Orthos, esp the senior ones, is FOMO.

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Partner Program (FXCollaboration)

OrthoFX has a unique program (FXCollaboration) that allows GPs who may not be as well versed in aligner therapy work with an experienced Orthodontist to provide treatment.

• For the GP the major advantage is that they don’t have to send a captive patient elsewhere and risk losing the patient.
• For the Ortho, the major advantage is to treat way more patients than they could otherwise and get a slice of the pie for it.
• Also another major psychological driver for Orthos is being seen as the expert when it comes to malocclusions. This also incentivises them to engage on the platform and grow their GP network.

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The structure of the program can be simple.

Step 1: The Ortho generates a unique link to a sign up page for GPs

Step 2: They share it with their networks (and later if this is successful, OrthoFX can become sort of a marketplace where new GPs can find expert mentors)

Step 3: A GP signs up from the link and gets discounted fees for the first 2 cases done in collaboration with the referring Ortho

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This solves for a few things

• Orthos may not be the best at explaining the program and the benefits, so having a small but customised landing page for their GPs will help with that. This also has the added advantage of giving us a place to quickly try out various messaging
• The Orthos are incentivised to share because of the additional revenue they get and the bragging rights of saying they are mentoring x number of doctors
• The GPs get a chance to do cases that may otherwise have been out of their comfort zone and hence get revenue that they may have otherwise missed out on
• The Orthos also won’t be scared to share because the discount on the cases will only apply if the GP collaborates with them

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