After I bicycled Africa, top to bottom, I made a documentary about doing it with type 1 diabetes (that sold to Medtronic, NBC Universal, and won an award in a Broadcast Educator's Association Film Fest). I then got do to some speaking events over a few years across Canada, the US, Switzerland, UK, Ecuador, and Colombia. The idea behind all this sizzle was to promote an understanding that people with type 1 diabetes can live normal or even adventurous lives. But I noted that the people who showed up to these events were already on board with that message, while people I met accidentally who also had type 1 diabetes (say, in the grocery store because they saw my insulin pump) were often not doing so hot.
Wanting to understand that difference, I started speaking to healthcare professionals in the type 1 diabetes space (endocrinologists, nurses, psychologists, educators, dieticians, exercise physiologists) and learned that the normal condition of a patient (and their family, since type 1 diabetes normally onsets between ages 2 and 11) is less optimistic than that of my conference-goers. The biggest problem the medical professionals identified as common across families newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes was difficulty absorbing the necessary education. It's just complex. Type 1 diabetes essentially requires the patient and their family to manually replace a function of the pancreas by measuring levels of blood glucose, adjusting for exercise, diet, stress, mood, growth, and acclimatization, then injecting the right amount insulin (and perhaps glucose and perhaps liraglutide) at the right time. But most of the "education" that's possible within the medical system happens while the family is in shock immediately after diagnosis, or in 15-minute bursts twice yearly admist prescription and insurance logistics.
I was determined to do something, but what? I iterated on various media and methods of getting some education across at conferences and in hospital visits with patients. Among them, in 2010, a simple video hit home with a decent-sized audience.
I now had something that could be shared with a large audience, but one video couldn't capture the various topics that needed covering. So I needed a business model. A few pharmaceutical and medical device companies had been paying me to speak publicly on their behalf, so I proposed various contracts until we arrived at the idea of them sponsoring a website that was designed to educate families new to type 1 diabetes. In this manner, I could reach my audience while they could try to convince my audience to choose their insulin or pump or blood glucose meter, which is a decision that's worth tens of thousands of dollars (on the low end) to someone like Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Medtronic, Bayer, or J&J, over the course of a lifetime of one person with type 1 diabetes. We stayed connected with our audience, created content at and between conferences, and distributed it on our website and via youtube. At the height of our efforts, my small team had more followers than a channel on the same topic that was funded by Lilly and run by Disney. We sold the company, but the resource still exists and still gets used.
