Josh Rome is the Founder and CEO of Runway Health, the first direct-to-consumer telehealth company building a brand around travel health. 

With a career spanning technology, pharma and travel, Josh is uniquely positioned to build a transformative company at the intersection of these industries. 

Josh started his career at Adobe, helping publishers digitize their traditional print publication workflows through the launch of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite. 

He then joined Patagonia Pharmaceuticals, a start-up specialty pharmaceutical company developing innovative prescription therapies for rare dermatologic diseases. 

Josh led business development efforts to secure an international licensing deal valued at over $100MM, a $1.5MM FDA grant, and ultimately the divestiture of Patagonia’s lead assets to a public dermatology company in 2019. 

With an opportunity to better align his career with his passion for travel, Josh then launched CitySpeak, a daily travel based newsletter turned boutique travel agency. 

Through this experience, Josh identified the gap between travelers' needs and the current marketplace, which ultimately resulted in the genesis of Runway. 

Josh is an avid traveler and adventurer, having ventured to over 60 countries, circumnavigating the globe on Semester at Sea, and climbing mountains such as Kilimanjaro and Toubkal.

In This Conversation We Discuss: 

• [00:00] Intro
• [01:09] What products does Runway offer?
• [01:41] How Josh realized the opportunity for Runway
• [04:09] The “real genesis” of Runway
• [05:55] Pioneers bear so much risk
• [07:15] Choosing partnerships over self-production
• [08:07] Sponsor: Electric Eye electriceye.io/connect
• [09:03] Sponsor: JSON-LD for SEO jsonld.app
• [10:18] Sponsor: Wayflyer wayflyer.com/ecomm/honest
• [11:21] Runway’s go-to-market strategy
• [13:43] How Runway compensates their partner network
• [15:52] Partners can value things other than money
• [17:17] Experiment and don’t be afraid to fail
• [18:01] The benefits of being first to market
• [19:35] Coming up with your own relevant KPIs
• [20:29] Where to find Runway products

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Affordable, convenient travel health medications for motion sickness, sleeplessness, altitude sickness, malaria prevention and traveler's diarrhea runwayhealth.com
• Connect with Josh linkedin.com/in/joshuarome
• Take the first step towards Shopify success electriceye.io/connect
• Get your free structured data audit for your store jsonld.app
• Funding a better way wayflyer.com/ecomm/honest

If you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!