Barti is building the operating system for the vision industry.
Today, optometrists and ophthalmologists are often using 10+ fragmented tools or decades-old software that hasn’t changed to run their practices. Colton Calandrella, co-founder and CEO of Barti, sat down with us to discuss Barti’s vision for bringing this industry forward.
“Every doctor hates their software, but eye doctors have it particularly bad,” Calandrella said. “We’re really business-in-a-box for an independent optometry practice, and our goal is to bring AI and other new technology to a very overlooked industry.”
One of the puzzle pieces in becoming that full business-in-a-box is running marketing.
“When we ask them, what are you doing for marketing, their answer is, ‘Oh, we have a website,’” Calandrella said. “That is fully the extent of it, which is a really huge missed opportunity, and something that at Barti we get really excited about because we’re trying to help these practice owners.”
A lot of these businesses currently don’t have a way to easily get a list of their patients from their existing software. Sometimes, they’ll aggregate lists across their online form capture, EHR system, and then copy and paste that into different tools for emails and texts, but they don’t have any idea of what the history is. They’re often scared to piece together workflows on their own, too, as they try to figure out what they can and can’t use to stay HIPAA compliant.
Barti had already built out their core EHR system, an AI scribe, scheduling, phone system, and more. Marketing was a clear opportunity on their roadmap, as there were already folks who were using point solutions, and Barti had been talking about building it for a long time, but they also knew it would be a big suite to tackle.
“We generally like to build in house almost everything,” Calandrella said. “We want to make sure it all is going to unify together—that’s the whole point of our platform. Everything needs to be in sync from the user experience, the backend data, and we also like to limit our dependencies.”
Despite this general philosophy, they decided to partner with Pocketflows with the low-friction integration.
Pocketflows made it a no-brainer, because we were able to get up and running with them in easily less than a month,” Calandrella said. “From my perspective as CEO, that was huge value, and very, very, very low effort, which is the sweet spot.
Starting with the embedded email marketing solution from Pocketflows, Barti’s customers were able to unlock automations and reach-outs to patients without ever leaving their core platform. With timely announcements of seasonal specials and re-booking reminders, optometrist practices saw a boost in their revenue. The AI-campaign generation made creating emails much more efficient, increasing operational efficiency for practices and helping them focus on what they do best.
Past the initial launch, Barti also wanted to align with a partner who would be building towards the same longer-term vision.
“There's still always a long-term consideration, right? Is this a partner that we want to hitch our wagon to?” Calandrella said. “Especially as we've seen the demand grow, we’re like, alright, this is definitely going to be a core part of our product—is this now something we want to invest in and build ourselves internally?”
Though Barti started by adopting Pocketflows’ email marketing, they’re quickly starting to add on other core products of the flywheel such as reputation management. As Pocketflows builds more depth into marketing, it reinforces Barti’s strategic decision to partner versus build.
“The answer has always been resoundingly, no, because the Pocketflows team has continued to go above and beyond what they've originally said in terms of new features and the quality of the technology,” Calandrella said. “The sky’s the limit. We’re really excited to see what else is to come.”