We Decided We Could Do It Better. So We Did.

Eric and I have been best friends since high school. Long before either of us knew what dental marketing was, before anyone had heard of SEO or Google Business Profiles or AI-powered anything — we were just two kids getting separated in class because we talked too much and goofed off. Teachers kept moving our seats apart. Didn't help.

The dental industry wasn't a plan. It was a series of accidents that turned into a calling.

The Job That Started Everything

I landed at ProSites — a dental website and marketing company — and pretty quickly realized it was a world I wanted to be in. Dental practices are fascinating businesses. They're run by people who spent a decade becoming experts at one thing and then get handed the keys to a small business with real employees, real overhead, and real competition. Most of them didn't sign up for that part. I wanted to help.

I got Eric a job there. That's what you do when you find something good — you bring your people in.

After two years as a top sales rep at ProSites, I left for WEO Media, another dental marketing company. Eric stayed. We were now at competing firms, but we were still talking every day, still comparing notes, still trying to figure out what great dental marketing actually looked like.

The Idea Was Already There. Then I Got Fired.

Let me be honest about how this actually went.

Eric and I had been bouncing around the idea of starting our own thing for a while. Not seriously enough to have a plan — just seriously enough that the conversation kept coming back up. We knew the industry. We knew where the gaps were. We thought we could do it better. But knowing something and actually doing it are two very different things.

Then WEO fired me.

The reason? Not documenting everything in Salesforce. That was it. Two years as their top sales rep — two years of outperforming everyone else on the team — and the thing that ended it was CRM hygiene.

I'd be lying if I said it didn't sting. It did. But somewhere underneath the frustration was something that felt a lot like relief. The decision that Eric and I had been circling around for months had just been made for us.

I called Eric. We didn't deliberate long. He quit ProSites. We went all in on Lasso MD.

Day Jobs That Had Nothing to Do With Dental

Here's the part that doesn't make it into most founder stories: after the leap of faith, you still have to pay rent.

Eric and I weren't in a position to just stare at a blank whiteboard and build a company. We needed income. So we both got jobs — deliberately outside of dental, so there was zero conflict of interest with what we were building on the side.

I took a role as an SDR at Empyr, a martech company doing card-linked offers. I was overqualified for it — I'd been a top sales rep at both ProSites and WEO — but that wasn't the point. The point was a paycheck while Lasso got off the ground.

Eric went to work at Lytx, a dashcam company. Also completely unrelated to dental. Also deliberate.

And then we got to work on Lasso — before our shifts, over lunch, after we got home. Every margin of every day. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't a garage in Silicon Valley. It was two guys squeezing a company into the cracks of jobs they'd taken specifically to keep the lights on while they built something better.

We Spent Everything on a Cruise Ship

Here's where the story gets either inspiring or insane, depending on how you look at it.

We had 6 clients. We had $20,000 in the bank. And we had a decision to make.

There was a dental trade show coming up called Smiles at Sea — a conference held on a cruise ship. The whole thing would cost us essentially everything we had. Every dollar. Our entire runway.

We did the math. We did the logic. And then we booked it anyway.

Our reasoning was simple: dentists locked on a boat with us for several days would either result in deals — or it wouldn't, and we'd have a great time while we tanked the company. Either way, we were going.

We signed 16 clients during that event.

Sixteen. From six. On a cruise ship. With our last $20,000 on the table.

That's what made it real. That event didn't just bring in clients — it gave us the proof of concept we needed to believe this thing could actually work. In November of 2018, I went full time. Eric followed in January 2019.

Two months apart. Same leap of faith. And a lot more conviction than we'd had before we got on that boat.

What We Were Actually Building

Our thesis was simple: dental practices deserve a marketing partner who actually understands their world. Not a generalist agency that dabbles in dental. Not a vendor selling a one-size-fits-all package. A real strategic partner — one with the data, the technology, and the relationships to drive new patient growth that lasts.

We've now worked with over 1,500 practices. We've built PatientLoop, our all-in-one ROI and growth platform. We've developed AI-powered tools that no other dental marketing company has. We speak at conferences. We run competitive analyses that change the way practice owners think about their market position.

But honestly? The foundation of all of it is the same thing it always was: two guys who looked at each other one afternoon and said we could do it better.

Why I'm Telling You This

I don't share this story to make it sound romantic. Building Lasso MD has been hard in ways I didn't expect and rewarding in ways I couldn't have predicted.

I share it because I think it matters who you work with. When a Lasso MD client calls, they're not reaching a faceless support queue. They're reaching a team built by two guys who have been in this industry long enough to know what doesn't work — and who care enough to do something about it.

That's the story. That's the company.

And we're just getting started.

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If you want to see what working with a marketing partner who actually gives a damn looks like, book a discovery call. Or check out the current state of dental marketing to see how we think about this industry — and where we think it's going.