Heather Caplin on Building Lane 9: From Passion Project to Clinician Directory for Athletes
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[00:00:00] Heather, I'm so excited to have you today. Thank you for joining us on today's podcast episode. Yeah, I'm thrilled to be here.
So could you share a little bit about your advantages in leaning into this non-traditional stance and any challenges that you might have overcome with your body of work? Ooh, that's such an interesting question.
Certainly I was aware of that, but I don't think I thought too much about oh, I might be one of the first weight inclusive podcasts out in the world I didn't think too much about that. I wouldn't say I have great marketing insights or intuition, but I go where my interests lead me.
And when I started my private practice and my first podcast, which was RD Real Talk, I was coming off of an experience at a startup where. Things changed very quickly. We pivoted many times and the team is just along for the ride. And I feel like when that company closed and I decided from there to start my own company and kind of see where that [00:01:00] would take me, I was in my very early stages of learning a lot about weight inclusive care and non-diet, nutrition and health at every size.
And I think just that like excitement around having that way to practice and having. a community of RDS that were connected through that practice felt exciting. And when I launched the podcast, it was like, I'm just gonna talk to all these folks so I can continue learning and I can share that with other dietitians.
And then that kind of eventually led into starting a professional development company where. I was providing weight inclusive continuing ed, to dietitians because at the time, which this was 2018, there weren't a lot of options. It felt hard to find CEU credits that were talking about nutrition through a weight inclusive, non-diet approach.
So it was trying to fill that gap, not only. For myself. 'cause like I was looking for that, but also for other folks that I had been connected to like [00:02:00] through the podcast and through Facebook groups and things like that, where I'm like, I know a lot of us are looking for this, so let's. Make it. and some of the challenges of that ended up being there is at the time there was a much smaller kind of group of rds or community of rds that were practicing that way.
It has grown, I think, exponentially since then, which is really exciting to see. And at the time there weren't a lot of. Master's programs or even undergraduate programs that were introducing non-diet care. There were certainly a few. but now I see, from the work that I've done over the past eight, nine years, I hear more and more from students who are like, oh, we talk about this in our classes and we have a weight bias class, and we have a counseling class that focuses on white inclusive care.
And I'm like. Wow, this is incredible. So there's definitely been a huge shift in dietetics at large, which is exciting to see. So I just followed that.
It sounds like your interest led you to be a pioneer in the space, right? You were interested and then you created these professional [00:03:00] development opportunities for your peers and now you've seen that this is actually had been adopted across dietetics in ways maybe you didn't even imagine. Like having a course on weight bias is something I was unheard of when I became a dietitian, right?
I met someone really early on who I'm now, close friends with Dr. Kendra Ville, who's at the University of Michigan in 2018. I was visiting my in-laws in Ann Arbor, which is where I live now, and a student at the Michigan School of Public Health Nutrition Master's program had reached out to me.
Wanted to just doing some networking. I lived in DC at the time. I was like, I'm actually gonna be in Ann Arbor in a few weeks, would love to meet you for coffee. And she introduced me to Kendra, who is teaching a weight bias class at the University of Michigan.
And that was my first time meeting someone who was teaching from a weight inclusive lens, which felt really exciting. Yeah, I wouldn't call myself a pioneer 'cause I feel like so much of what I did followed like some of the fat activism and the non-diet work and the weight inclusive work that had been going on in different communities for [00:04:00] so long.
but it did feel like. Again, coming off of that startup experience, I had a lot of willingness to try things and do it quickly and if it didn't work, being willing to pivot. And I think that's partly my personality and probably partly why I functioned Okay. In a startup environment, which like may not be true for everyone 'cause it can be really chaotic.
There's maybe my propensity towards that anyway, and then coming out of a professional experience where that's what we did. For 18 months, like day after day was willing to change things quickly, willing to experiment quickly. And so I think what I did at that time was take that mindset into my business and think I'll try this thing and if it works, great, I'll keep doing it, and if it doesn't, I'll stop.
and it's a great attitude to have for dietitians who wanna make an impact, but also wanna have that flexibility because you still teach the same philosophies, but now you've moved on, which we'll talk about in a moment to different ways to share the message, right?
You've gone from, your podcast and you host a conference and we'll get to your current project. And [00:05:00] they all are rooted in that same, Methodology that you first started with said eight, nine years ago, right? Yeah. And actually the current business that I'm working on now, which we can get to Lane 9, I actually started that in 2017.
Okay. Before I did any of these other things. When I started Lane 9 in early 2017 with my co-founder Alexis, we did not structure it as a business. We kept thinking. It, quote unquote, should be a nonprofit, but neither of us had a clue how to set up a nonprofit and neither of us had worked for a nonprofit.
And so we just stayed in this space of indecision for a really long time and it grew and took off and had all this organic growth and engagement from a community of athletes. And we just let it be its own separate thing for such a long time. And. A couple of years ago when I realized oh, I just feel like there's more we could do with that.
Set it up as a business and then you can see where it can go from there. Let's talk about Lane 9. What is it? And I didn't [00:06:00] realize that it was founded that long ago. I'd love to hear more about how that works, what it is. And did you first set it up as a nonprofit, like you mentioned or what was it doing since 2017?
Yeah, we set it up as nothing. so in 2017. Basically what Lane 9 was, if you were to zoom out, it was not a business, it wasn't a nonprofit. We just called it like a passion project, if you will. it was the same time I launched it around the same time that I launched my private practice had just left the startup.
The startup had folded, so we all lost our jobs, and was coaching runners and was like, okay, my. Client that I wanna work with is a person who's active and has probably stopped getting a regular period and is probably a runner. 'cause that's the sport that I know besides soccer. But not as many people are playing soccer as adults and is interested in getting their period back and working on nutrition.
So that's where I was focusing a lot of my content. Like [00:07:00] I had a blog at the time and. People were like loosely active on Instagram, but I'm like, these were the days where like your Instagram caption was like one sentence, and then just like a bunch of hashtags. so that was my, persona, if you will.
Online was like running hypothalmic amenorrhea, recovery flexibility with food, non diet, nutrition, et cetera. And I met my co-founder in DC and we connected over a shared experience with some of the things that I was passionate about, which was. I didn't have a period in college and no one really told me like, Hey, that might not be a good thing.
And she had been a collegiate athlete and also wasn't getting a period in college. And also didn't have anybody like flag that as a negative health outcome. And so we formed Lane 9 in 2017 with a desire to raise awareness of. The issues that might come from undereating and over exercising.
and again, primarily at the time we were speaking to an audience of active adults mostly who. Love to [00:08:00] run and train for maybe a half marathon, a 10 KA marathon. So we started with personal essays.
We had a medium site, which like, I don't know, I guess people still use medium, but at the time it was like this big fancy new thing. Now, I would say we probably would've started with a substack. Like we didn't wanna build a website. But we wanted to get content out there and that felt like the easiest way to do it.
And I had, again, come off of this startup where we had used medium for marketing. And so I'm like, this is a tool I know how to use. Let's just use this. for a long time it was a medium publication. We did have a newsletter that we used MailChimp for, and we had an active Facebook group and we had an Instagram, but we were on and off with Instagram.
And we did that for years. Monetized nothing. It just resonated with people and people came in and people signed up for the newsletter and we just were like, I guess we just keep going. There was momentum that kind of carried us. I do think in many ways that kind of was marketing for my private practice.
That's not why we started it, but. [00:09:00] It did have that kind of side effect, and meanwhile, like I'm doing all these other projects, so I was just like, oh, it's okay. That Lane 9 doesn't make money because I have all these other things going on and my co-founder has a full-time job. So that's how it got started.
Then at what point did you see it was a business and it had turned from this, really great source of information and love to something that can be profitable. Could you talk about that and then how it is to, how it stands today and what the listener can learn from Line nine now?
In 2022 was at this crossroads where my, I have three kids, all of which were born between 2018 and 2021. something's gotta give. and it was early in the pandemic and or I guess mid pandemic.
And I had all these different things going on and just feel like I couldn't keep my head on straight. And so with Lane 9 not being a thing that brought in revenue and I was winding down my private practice at the time, it didn't make sense to keep doing it. And so we never officially [00:10:00] closed anything.
We never made an announcement, but we had gradually. Been doing it less and less frequently. And we had a conversation where I was like, can we just put this on pause? I need one less thing to think about right now. and I also closed my private practice that year, so that was 2022. And then fast forward to 2024, I knew that I was gonna close the professional development business.
I felt like I was ready for the next chapter and I just kept thinking back to Lane 9. And I had a mentor who's a great friend of mine who was like. What about Lane 9? Is there part of you that would wanna go back to it? Coming back to it, let's see, seven years later.
Having run two different businesses throughout that time, I was like, I would love to go back to late nine. And I'd love to be a lot smarter about it and figure out how is this a functioning business so that we can still do the things we're really excited about and passionate about in the field of women's sports.
But it's sustainable for us to do it. It doesn't run us into the ground [00:11:00] by. Being something that we do, at night on the weekends, like in the margins of our day when we're trying to do all these other things. So last year, I spent quite a good amount of time. Surveying our audience. So there were people who never unsubscribed from our newsletter and never unfollowed our Instagram account.
And so it was tap, tap the mic. Are you still here? We sent out a survey to see who is still here and what are you still interested in? Do you consider yourself a runner or do you participate in other sports? Like we ask all these questions to gauge the.
Current audience if you're still here, why? And what are you most interested in? and from there put together a couple of different business plans, to be honest. We were like, what if this was the business plan and then what if this was the business plan? and then eventually, long story short, probably over the course of about eight months, of trying a few different things very lightly,
one of the survey questions was like, would you be interested in an athlete membership? But we didn't elaborate on that and almost everybody [00:12:00] said no. So I was like obviously they don't want that. But then I'm like we also didn't explain what it would be. We just had this like very loose idea.
We did have the newsletter. We moved it over to Substack, so we were like, if we wanna monetize the newsletter, maybe that would be an option. And I just kept trying to look at different data points and eventually over the fall. I was looking through our inbox and I'm thinking through who is in my network in my community.
I'm a clinician. My co-founder is a teacher. She works in a school system. I'm like, okay, who's in my network? What's going on in the inbox? The most common email that we got was a question from athletes, who should I work with?
I had done a lot of Googling to answer those questions. When I would go into the inbox and I'd see these emails, I'm like, okay, where do you live and what level are you competing at? Are you in college? Like asking a lot of questions to try to get like a right fit provider for this person.
So I had the idea last fall that what if we built out [00:13:00] a directory of clinicians so that. The person who stumbles across Lane 9, maybe a podcast episode, maybe an old blog post, maybe an Instagram post, maybe all of the above. They start to see themselves in all of the stories that we've shared from athletes.
And they have that question, who should I work with? Which we've been asked dozens of times. We have a place that they can find somebody to work with and it's just a lot easier for them to do that. So I wanted to build out a directory. I wanted also for it to not just be dietitians. 'cause a lot of the.
Spaces that I've participated in have been dietitians and therapists, which is super helpful because a lot of eating disorder, weight inclusive, non-diet work, there's usually a compatibility of if you're working with a dietitian, you probably also have a therapist, but with an athlete, they also have a coach.
a physical therapist, and probably need a physician. my thought process was. What if we could monetize a directory from the clinician standpoint to create a membership and a [00:14:00] community of clinicians that then serves all the athletes who come across our resources or our company.
So they have one place where they're finding somebody to work with. So I thank you for walking us through your thought process. Yeah. And you're obviously using the business skills. As you mentioned, you had multiple businesses before you brought this one to life. Not that it hadn't existed, but you had brought it to another stage of its existence in making this directory, which sounds like a health profs for athletes.
Is that how you would describe it? Yeah. I love that. how are you making money? How's it going? And what are the, some lessons that you've learned along the way? Yeah. You're solving a problem that you notice the inbox, that people are telling you in your inbox, which is smart, right?
Because if you would've solved a different problem, it might have not become a business. Exactly. And that's, I think where we. Could have gotten into some trouble. It was like when we first came back to it early last year, we had so much excitement of oh, we're gonna do this again. We missed it.
It's gonna be really fun. Let's do this. And I was like, wait, let's ask [00:15:00] people if they want that. It's such a hard message to teach dietitians. Just always ask. And then, also be prepared for the fact that sometimes you can ask people if they want a thing and they'll say yes, but that doesn't mean they'll buy the thing.
So sure, that's like a separate conversation. But thankfully, most of our people were like a membership. No, not interested in that. But again. They didn't really know what we meant. So we were pretty vague in that question. But it did stop us from like building out this whole program that I think people may not have signed up for anyways.
what made sense to me with monetizing the directory was I wanted to make it valuable for both people, so it's valuable to the athlete because we are saving them from hours of Google searching and going through health profs where you're like, I don't know, if this person is taking new clients, I don't know if they specialize in sports.
I don't know what their background is like. It's just telling me like, this is a person who is near you. we have, again, multiple disciplines or a variety of disciplines in the directory. So if you go to somewhere like psychology today, you're getting therapists. If you go to health profs, you might be [00:16:00] getting physicians and dietitians, so I wanted to bring everyone into one space. and from the clinician perspective. I went back to my experience in private practice, as a solo provider, solo entrepreneur, in a private practice, like what would've been helpful to me, and it's the community piece. So being connected to other providers, it's the multidisciplinary piece.
So you are not only connected to fellow dietitians who specialize in this area of treating relative energy deficiency in sport and disordered eating in sport, but also you have. Therapists and physicians and physical therapists. So you get different perspectives and it's easier to make referrals. So you might be working with somebody who needs a therapist, but you just can't find someone in your area who understands an athlete, which is like a really niche population.
And then also wanting to make it valuable to the clinicians in that we are marketing their services for them. So as we grow, my hope is that they can spend less and less time doing marketing. If that's not something they [00:17:00] wanna be doing, if it's something they enjoy, like certainly keep doing it.
But if that's something they would wanna spend a little bit less time on. Then we can take that load for them, like we're doing the marketing and we're connecting athletes to you. and then we provide monthly events. So it's, we do a case consult hour once a month. We've done journal clubs, book clubs, trainings, webinars with partners, like eating disorder, treatment centers, et cetera.
What's the cost for the provider? Is it free on either end or is there a fee? Is it a subscription? Like how does that work and how do you make money? Yeah, so we have an annual rate or a quarterly rate, so it's 199 annually or like $50 99 cents quarterly. those are the rates right now and that's been working for us.
We have just under 80 clinicians in the directory right now, and we launched it in January and we're recording in August, so congratulations. That's amazing. Thank you. and so just to clarify, $50 for the clinician to be a part of the directory, which is on par with health profs and other similar directory costs.
Is that correct? [00:18:00] Yeah, and that's quarterly, so it's about 200 a year. Either option you take. Yeah, I think health profs is, I wanna say 49 a month. So it's a little more expensive at the time. They might have increased their prices. I can't exactly remember. Yeah. And health profs is general. And so you're targeting very niche, like you said. folks, as you mentioned, I'm, I don't know how many in your inbox, but you saw that the most common question was, who do I work with? So you solve that by creating a directory and with the thought in mind that you're helping both the clinician. Who was looking to help market their niche practice and the end user or the client who are the people who are emailing you saying, yeah.
Who can help me, right? Because they don't know, perhaps it's not clear where they live. And maybe even finding telehealth or a care that can help them with their specific scenario is something that they desperately need and wouldn't otherwise have been able to find without your directory. So that's great.
Yeah. And it's the cost is only for the clinician, not for the end user. Is that correct? So if the patient doesn't pay, they just have this free resource. That's how it [00:19:00] works, right? Similar to other directories. Yeah. They're paying, once they decide to work with this clinician, right?
We didn't want there to be a model where an athlete pays us and we pay the clinician. I'm like, I just want this to go straight to you. I wanna help you with your private practice 'cause you're doing really important work. And it's hard to find that clinician who specializes in sport and. Disordered eating disorders, reds.
So like whatever the discipline, whether that's physical therapist, mental health counselor, therapist or provider, registered dietitian, physician, the overlap of sport and disordered eating or eating disorder is really hard to find. So we just wanted to make that easier for the athlete and they will pay.
Whatever the rate is. We have clinicians who take insurance so they're not paying us directly. Yeah. one thing I wanna add that I did for folks listening, this might be helpful. Before I built out the directory, had the idea, see the problem, wanna solve it, I had [00:20:00] 40 phone calls with individual clinicians asking them questions.
That's amazing. You did your homework, you did your research and development right. Yeah, my goal was to do 30 before I built it out, and I think I had 40 before the end of the year.
Okay, I think I have my answer, which that people want this, so I'll build it and I'll get really scrappy and just figure it out. And then I just kept going and I have a networking spreadsheet that I update quarterly so I can see like how many calls did I make this quarter? So like for Q4 of 2024, I don't have it pulled up right now, but like I could tell you exactly who I talked to on what day, our notes from the conversation, and that was me also trying to be.
I have this idea. I think it's a pretty good idea. I think people will sign up for it. But again, before I build it, I wanna make sure this is a thing that clinicians want and would pay for. So I had a lot of those one-on-one conversations before even putting it out there. So I stress that to so many dietitians to really do the work.
And same thing with building your practice, like talking to people and [00:21:00] asking them, maybe you're trying to build your community and you wanna know if they would refer, et cetera. If you're trying to either find your specialty or you're just trying to build referrals. How many clinicians did you say? We have under 80 right now. Do you think that you would've had that amount without doing the market research that you've done, which is the phone calls and looking at the inbox to gather? What is the most popular question? Do you think the success would've been there?
I think it would've been a lot slower because that process was helpful to me in that I did a lot of one-on-one conversations to see what people wanted, what their price point might be like. a lot of the therapists are on Psychology Today, and I was like, oh, how much does that cost?
How much are you paying? $30 a month? Yeah. the SEO is pretty strong for something like that because it's existed for a long time and same for Health Pros, but people can't even directly contact you through Psychology Today. They have to go outside of the platform or through the platform, create an account, et cetera.
If that's what folks are paying for sort of a set it and forget it type membership and directory, I think we could provide something really valuable that is [00:22:00] more community oriented, connecting the clinicians to each other and to their probably ideal client if they wanna be working with athletes.
Whereas something like that, you can get a lot of great leads, but they're all over the place. And, so you not only got to learn about the problem, you're validating, but hear about some similar tools that might not be they're competition, but maybe not direct, 'cause they're a directory, but they don't specialize in the athlete the way that yours does.
So that's really great information you were able to gather and then learn about the pros and cons of those platforms. And what might be user friendly and what might not be. thank you so much for sharing the way that you approach a problem, the way that you approach your businesses, the way that you're still able to help through the core of what you represent, which is, weight inclusive and helping with eating disorders.
Would you say that's a good way to phrase it. You're still doing that throughout the nine, 10 years of you at least. Starting with the business, it's just taken on different ways of expression, through your podcast that you have archived, it's still there, just no new [00:23:00] episodes.
And through your private practice, are you still doing private practice? I know you mentioned you closed it down, so is that retired for the moment? no, everything comes full circle, so I just opened it back up this year, 2025. Okay. yeah, it's funny, it's like looking back in 2022, I made these all these different decisions to say I'm gonna follow this path and leave these things behind.
And then I just came all the way back to all of those things. But I feel like the time away. For whatever reason was helpful and maybe needed and let that season of life, and now my kids are a little bit older and I'm like, wait, I miss working in women's sports. I think I could go back to that and I actually already have this whole thing that exists that was there.
Isn't that amazing that you can pause it when you need to and bring it back when it feels good, and then maybe bring back, like you mentioned, some reflections about how you might be able to do it differently or produce a better result, better meaning maybe more specific, using those business skills.
that's exciting. Very exciting for all the opportunities. [00:24:00] Thank you so much for sharing your time today. It's been really exciting having you on. I was looking forward to this interview, Heather, and all your wealth of information and shares from your life. Is there anything you want the listeners to know?
For example, if they're hearing this and either them they themselves or they know somebody who could be a great clinician for your directory, where do they go? Yeah, if you wanna check out the directory first, it's Lane9project.org/directory, and that's LANE and then the number nine project.org.
our directory's on there, and then there's a tab that says Join. So if you're interested in learning more about it and you wanna join, you can go to that tab. And we have an application and we have a newsletter for clinicians. and then we're at Lane 9 project on Instagram and Substack. So you can connect with us in either or both of those places.
Thank you so much, Heather. any other final thoughts that you wanna share before we wrap up today? No, I'm just excited to chat with you, so thanks for having me. Pleasure was mine.
