VetRoam Wrap Up 2024
Hopefully everyone had a great holiday! Sorry I haven’t been able to update the blog in a while. Running VetRoam as a one man team means I have to wear so many different hats - maintaining the website and adding new features, marketing, graphic design, sales, accounting, customer service, etc. On top of that, maintaining my schedule as a full time relief veterinarian.
I’m glad to do it though, because keeping VetRoam as a solo project means that I get to keep the costs to hospitals at a fraction of what the big platforms like Roo charges, keeping more money in the hands of relief vets while making it more affordable for small hospitals to hire relief. That’s a whole other story about these big platforms and the invasion of private equity all across veterinary medicine - maybe I’ll write about that in my next post because it’s actually insane what’s going on behind the scenes.
Anyhow, this post is more of a wrap up of 2024 and what’s in store for VetRoam in 2025!
What Happened in 2024
In July I was able to get a booth to exhibit at my first conference, PacVet San Francisco! It was very exciting, it was basically my public launch of VetRoam. I got to meet a lot of vets, give out branded swag. Would I do it again? Probably not, that was expensive so unless a kind billionaire is reading this I probably won’t be doing many more conferences. Also as an introvert talking to 1000 people was not my cup of tea.
More importantly, I’m super proud to say that in 2024 the number of VetRoam users quadrupled! A lot of growth is coming from word of mouth which is great, it’s telling me that maybe I’m onto something when both hospitals and veterinarians are enjoying the site. VetRoam has expanded throughout California and is now open to sign ups in Colorado.
Besides that, I’m always making minor tweaks to VetRoam behind the scenes. Things like making the chat page more mobile responsive, adding the ability to list multiple state licenses, etc. But I launched one major update recently.
The new update allows hospitals to post shifts, which vets can browse and request a booking. Why is that a big deal? For hospitals, posting a shift makes your job viewable to all of the relief vets on VetRoam, not just those in your local area. It also makes it easier to establish a relationship with a vet. Once a booking is made and a connection is established between the vet and hospital, hospitals can go back to using the direct offer method with much better success. For veterinarians, the update makes it so much easier for vets that travel or just want to pick up the occasional relief shift.
With this new update, I’m able to say now that VetRoam has arguably more features than these big, expensive platforms. VetRoam now has free chat, direct shift offers, browse and post shifts, digital payments - all this for a fraction of the cost to hospitals!
What’s Coming in 2025
This will be a lot of work, but my next big update is going to be working on two day payments. As it works now, most payments on VetRoam are processed within a week. Some payments however, depend on that hospital’s corporate processing timeline and those payments can take a couple weeks. I’m hoping to get this launched in early 2025.
The next goal is more users - the more vets and hospitals on VetRoam, the more useful it becomes for both sides. So sign up, join the Facebook group, tell your vet friends and hospitals to do the same!
Let me know if you want any other features.
Happy New Year everyone! Have a happy and healthy 2025.
