How Med School Bro made studying a reason to open the app.

The brand

A fresh way to study for a century-old industry.

It’s no secret that medical school is hard work. Whether it’s prepping for entrance or certification exams, pre-med and med students study. A lot. The problem is that many traditional study methods aren’t cutting it anymore. That was the inspiration for Med School Bro, an influencer brand that sells modern educational resources, study guides, flashcards, and PDFs to med students all over the world.

“There are a lot of old and archaic textbooks in the current education system, and the industry has been ripe for innovation. One of the things that we bring to the educational space, specifically with medicine, is a fresh, fun way to study for your exams.”

Brandon Portnoff, Co-founder and CEO, Med School Bro

The best part? Med School Bro has found that their colorful, engaging study resources lead to better results than traditional ones. And as a creator-led brand with over 2M combined followers across Instagram and TikTok, their audience was already mobile. The customer experience was already happening on a phone screen. The app made it theirs.

The goal

Own the audience, not just rent it.

Med school students face standardized tests at every stage: MCAT, USMLE, OSCE. Med School Bro sells resources for each of them, which makes knowing where a customer is in their academic journey the whole game. Launching on Reactiv filled two gaps in that journey:

1. An owned communication channel Push notifications re-engage past customers and lift retention, without renting reach from an algorithm.
2. A first-party data source Unlike social audiences, app users generate data the brand owns: journey stage, quiz behaviour, product interest.

“We’re on Instagram, we’re on Facebook, we’re on TikTok, but we don’t own any of that data. When we have a mobile app, we own the app users’ data. We’re able to send push notifications to different segments whenever we want and personalize that aspect.”

Brandon PortnoffCo-founder and CEO, Med School Bro

The approach

No square peg. No round hole.

When launching a mobile app, ecommerce brands have historically had two options: build or buy. Building from scratch means time-consuming custom development and internal dev resources to maintain it forever. Drag-and-drop solutions are easy but rigid.

“Building from the ground up is a whole undertaking in and of itself. And that whole thing wasn’t something we wanted to deal with. On the flip side with the cookie-cutter aspect, our brand is different and we’re not the typical ecommerce store. We didn’t want to fit a square peg into a round hole. Having that balance with Reactiv was key in making our decision.”

Brandon Portnoff, Co-founder and CEO, Med School Bro

Working with Reactiv and agency partner Lazer Technologies, Med School Bro built a one-of-a-kind app at a fraction of the cost of a fully custom build: daily and weekly quizzes, a loyalty program, personalized recommendations, and customer segments, all on top of the native shopping experience.

The features

Reasons to come back that aren’t “buy now.”

1. App Clips The audience can use the app without downloading it. It removes the friction, and abandoned browse or cart sessions still get push follow-ups, business that email can’t recover when there’s no address on file.
2. Daily quizzes and weekly trivia Educational features built on top of the shopping experience. Fun ways to stay engaged on the go or between classes.
3. Personalized recommendations Quiz results feed merchandising. Learning what students get right and wrong shapes what they’re offered next.

The playbook

Turning quiz answers into merchandising.

“A natural kind of upsell is if we have a cardiology question of the day and 20% of the people get it wrong, we can immediately send them a push notification or an offer in-app giving them 15% off our cardiology guide.”

Brandon Portnoff, Co-founder and CEO, Med School Bro

The other lever is journey stage. First download, account creation date, and product page visits all tell Med School Bro whether a student is pre-med or deep in their clinical years, and the push messaging, offers, and recommendations follow.

Driving adoption

A launch built like a creator brand would.

Med School Bro drives app adoption the way it built its audience: influencer campaigns to seed downloads, centralized in-app order tracking that gives every web buyer a reason to install, and paid app-download ads on the channels its students already live on.

“What I’ve learned throughout this process with Reactiv is it’s actually not as hard as you think to launch your own mobile app.”

Brandon Portnoff, Co-founder and CEO, Med School Bro