[Playbook + Case Study] How to Build a Media Brand for a Company

How Rupa Health Became One of the Biggest Brands in Medicine

In October 2024, Rupa Health, a Series A+ startup, was successfully acquired by Fullscript, a multi-billion-dollar company.

One of the biggest reasons for the acquisition? Rupa built one of the most dominant brands in all of medicine—despite being a small startup.

We weren’t the biggest, and we weren’t a household name like Andrew Huberman. But as a healthcare startup, we systematically built the largest medical brand in the United States—by a company, for a company.

That’s why we used decentralized content authority to hit our ultimate North Star metric: building the largest medical brand in the world.

We didn’t just want to build up a social media page. We wanted to build a medical media empire.

*BONUS: Read to The End to Read about a YouTube Channel Growth Hack

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About Philip Ruffini:

• Over 100M Views on Social Media
• Built out Content and Media for Rupa Health
• Current Growth and Marketing Advisor to Fullscript
• Built 20+ growth contracting team for Rupa Health

Designing a Media Brand for Massive Scale

When we set out to design Rupa Health’s media brand, we knew one thing: we needed massive scale.

Our target market was medical practitioners, but we wanted our content to have a much larger reach.

So we took this approach:

👉 Create medical content for practitioners that is also consumable by consumers.

This did two things:

1. It allowed us to reach a huge top-of-funnel audience.
2. It positioned Rupa as an educational authority in medicine.

If you’re designing a media brand, the first thing you need to do is define your audience:

✔ Who is your ideal customer?

✔ What do they care about?

✔ What problems do they have?

✔ How can you create educational content that serves them?

For us, education wasn’t just a content play—it was a business model.

In addition to all of our content, we launched Rupa University, which ran six-week online cohort-based bootcamps.

💡 Rupa University alone generated nearly $2 million in course sales.

By combining free educational content with paid medical education, we created a media brand that directly drove revenue.

The Content Flywheel That Scaled to Millions

The most important part of building a media brand? Systems that run without you.

At Rupa, we ensured our content engine wasn’t bottlenecked by a single person. Instead, we built playbooks—repeatable processes that kept producing high-value content without manual oversight.

Here’s how our priority content channels performed:

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But our four main priorities were:

✔ SEO

✔ YouTube

✔ The Podcast

✔ Instagram & Facebook

Build the Playbook, Then Hand It Off: How We Hit 35,000+ Subscribers and Millions of Views on YouTube

As Head of Media, I figured out how to make YouTube work.

When we first started, we relied on an in-house doctor to create content. It didn’t work.

So I built a repeatable system to consistently go viral and scale Rupa’s YouTube channel to millions of views.

How I Engineered the YouTube Growth System:

✔ Hired 12+ doctors as independent contractors.

✔ Paid $600–$800 per 30–60 min video.

✔ Created a self-serve system—doctors submitted videos at their own pace.

✔ Let the best rise to the top—whichever doctors consistently delivered stayed on.

✔ Built a team of 6 full-time video editors.

✔ Used Notion + Descript to streamline production.

Once I perfected the system, I turned it into a playbook.

✔ Documented the entire strategy in Loom videos & Notion docs.

✔ Created ChatGPT prompts for automated video descriptions, titles, and thumbnails.

✔ Hired a growth marketing assistant contractor from the Philippines to manage the YouTube playbook.

This meant I never had to touch YouTube again—and the channel continued scaling without me.

Build Media Like a Product: The SEO Strategy That Dominated Google

We didn’t just create a blog—we built a magazine.

💡 Why? Because doctors don’t want to write for a "blog." They want to write for a respected medical publication.

How We Built an SEO Machine That Attracted 500K+ Readers Monthly

✔ Treated our blog like a product. Competed against after WebMD, Healthline, and Medical News Today.

✔ Built three content types:

• Primary: "How to treat X chronic disease."
• Secondary: Informational (e.g., "What is turmeric?").
• Spotlight: Guest posts from famous doctors like Casey Means.

✔ Hired offshore doctors (Nigeria) to ghostwrite secondary pieces.

✔ Built a team of 20+ U.S. doctors to write for the Magazine

✔ Used Overseas SEO Specialist to optimize article structure & SEO.

✔ Hired U.S. doctors to review & validate medical accuracy.

✔ Overseas Graphic Designer to create custom graphics for each article

✔ Built an offshore team to handle publishing.

🚀 This system made us the #1 functional medicine resource online.

Build Systems That Run Themselves: Scaling Social Media

Every part of our social media growth engine ran through repeatable workflows.

✔ LinkedIn & Twitter:

• A Nigerian doctor researched daily medical studies.
• Used ChatGPT to turn findings into LinkedIn posts.
• A graphic designer created visuals.
• One of our growth assistant marketers posted daily at 11 AM EST.

✔ Instagram & Facebook:

• Podcast clips repurposed for social.
• Managed by a social media manager + graphic designers.

✔ Podcast (Root Cause Medicine):

• Utilized a podcast agency to produce high-quality episodes.
• Growth assistant marketers put the flywheels into place to automate content distribution.

Everything ran without micromanaging—just consistent, automated execution.

The Future of Growth Teams: 5-10 Contractors Per Full-Time Employee

💡 The real reason we could scale? We built the entire media team with offshore contractors.

At Rupa Health, our core team was small, but our execution power was massive because we leveraged offshore specialists for almost every function of our content and growth operations.

Our Growth Team Structure:

✔ 6 full-time video editors

✔ Podcast agency team (video editor + researcher)

✔ 3 growth assistant marketers

✔ 2 Webflow developers/designers

✔ SEO specialist

✔ 2 offshore doctors (for ghostwriting and research)

✔ 2 full-time graphic designers

✔ Additional contractors for social media, outreach, and backlinking

💡 The future of growth teams? A 5:1 or even 10:1 ratio of contractors to full-time employees.

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That’s how we built a medical media empire at Rupa Health. Now, go build yours. 🚀

Bonus! YouTube Channel Growth Hack

One of the biggest growth hacks for our YouTube channel was leveraging existing high-traffic channels.

Our magazine was getting hundreds of thousands of page visits per month, so we used that to drive massive traffic to YouTube.

The Process:

1. At the beginning of the month, we’d analyze our top-performing SEO articles.
2. We’d have doctors create YouTube videos corresponding to those articles.
3. We’d embed the YouTube video at the bottom of the article.
4. Readers who spent 10–20 minutes on an article would then watch another 10-minute YouTube video.

For example:

👉 One of our articles on Slippery Elm went viral.

👉 We had a doctor create a video called "8 Benefits of Slippery Elm."

👉 We embedded the video at the bottom of the article.

👉 Readers finished the article and clicked over to watch the YouTube video.

👉 This drove thousands of external views, which boosted search rankings on both Google & YouTube.

👉 The video hit 25,000+ views organically.

💡 Key takeaway: If you have high-traffic SEO content, create corresponding YouTube videos and embed them in your articles.

This creates a compounding traffic flywheel—external traffic boosts YouTube views, which increases rankings, which generates even more organic traffic.

Example Video

Corresponding Article

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