PlaybooksMaria Gorn
Healthcare marketing & agency
Built and ran Up Digital across healthcare accounts.
Brought the playbooks.
Our story
Four people. Four different backgrounds. One problem we couldn’t ignore.
We didn’t meet because we wanted to start an AI company. We met because each of us had already spent years solving a different part of the same problem.
Marketing had become too complicated, too expensive, and too dependent on people doing the same work over and over.
Then we realised we could build something different.
01
First, there was the problem
Maria saw it happen again and again.
Running Up Digital with healthcare clients, Maria kept seeing the same thing. Clinics were paying thousands every month for marketing. But the work was spread across people, agencies, platforms and spreadsheets.
Campaigns could waste money for weeks before anyone noticed. And growing meant hiring more people.
The better the agency got, the harder it became to grow.
Her pieceThe playbooks
Google AdsMeta AdsSEO
SocialEmailReportsAnalytics
MariaHealthcare marketingPlaybooks
02
But knowing what works isn’t enough
Someone still has to make the numbers work.
Jane had built an education-abroad business from the advertising up. She wasn’t running campaigns because a client asked her to. The business depended on them working.
That meant following the whole journey, not the clicks and not the pretty reports. She knew how to look at a funnel and ask the question that matters.
Where are we losing people, and why?
Her piecePerformance
AdClickLeadleakBookingPatient
JaneAds and funnelsPerformance
03
But you can’t improve something nobody watches
That’s where Lisa came in.
Lisa spent years working with creators and growing organic audiences past a million. Her world wasn’t spreadsheets. It was attention.
Why does someone stop scrolling? Why do they watch one video and skip the next? Why does one post make someone actually book?
You can buy attention. Keeping it is a different job.
Her pieceThe content engine
skipskipstoppedskip
HookContentAttentionAction
We had the marketing.
We had the performance.
We had the content.
But we couldn’t build SHMEL yet.
Automating marketing is one thing. Automating it safely is another.
04
The missing piece
Technology we could actually trust.
Kair brought 25 years across security, compliance and machine learning. In healthcare, that matters. Because the question isn’t only whether AI can do something.
It’s whether AI should be allowed to do it on its own.
Some work can happen automatically. Some decisions need a person to approve them. Sensitive data needs protecting. Healthcare marketing needs guardrails.
His pieceThe guardrails
DataPermissionsApprovalsComplianceSecurity
KairML, security, complianceGuardrails
That’s when SHMEL became possible.
PlaybooksMaria
PerformanceJane
ContentLisa
GuardrailsKair
One of us knew how clinics actually market. One knew how to make funnels perform. One knew how to earn attention. One knew how to build it safely.
SHMEL is all four.
The people behind SHMEL.
PlaybooksPerformanceJane Mokrinskaia
Paid acquisition & funnels
Built a business where advertising had to turn into actual customers.
Brought the performance discipline.
ContentLisa Medviedieva
Organic & creator growth
Worked with leading creators and grew organic audiences past a million.
Brought the content engine.
GuardrailsKair Akhmettayev
Machine learning, security & compliance
25 years across technology, security and compliance.
Brought the guardrails.
The same thinking still shapes how we build SHMEL.
01Built from real work.
SHMEL’s workflows come from marketing our team actually did. Not advice we found on the internet.
02Always learning.
Platforms change. Rules change. What worked six months ago can stop working. So the playbooks keep changing too.
03Your data stays yours.
Client data is kept separated, encrypted in transit and at rest, with staff access logged. Ad budgets stay in the clinic’s own accounts. A BAA is available. See exactly what we hold and what we don’t.
04Built with our partners.
The clinics using SHMEL shape what we build next. When we see the same problem twice, we build for it.
We’re building AI. But we’re building it for people.
We’re not trying to remove humans from healthcare marketing. We’re trying to remove the repetitive work that stops good people doing their best work.
And we’re trying to make sure a great clinic doesn’t lose simply because someone else has a bigger marketing team.
Marketing should never be the reason a good clinic stays small.
That’s the problem that brought us together. And it’s the problem we’re building SHMEL to solve.