Why We Built Hovn
How we're building a clean, modern foundation for medical training centers and sites.
This is the first post in our Behind the Scenes series — a look at Hovn and what a “modern” medical training platform actually looks like.
Every guideline cycle — AHA, ARC, HSI — forces providers to touch their courses, rosters, and instructor records. Most copy-paste the same mess forward. A few use it as the chance to build a real foundation.
This series is for people who want the second option.
What This Series Covers
Why We Built Hovn (this post)
What makes a great, modern training platform (and a checklist you can use)
7 ways your CPR software stack keeps you stuck in operations
Up Next: A breakdown of Hovn’s core pillars
How to transition off your old platform without blowing things up
How we think about roadmap and “living” products
How to pick the right pricing tier and think about ROI
A case study of a center that flipped to Hovn
Concrete ways to get help / start, if you want it
Subscribe to get every post in this series.
Inside the machine
Shubs (our CEO & co‑founder) was an owner and operator at Lifework Education, a major training center that was acquiring other businesses. His job was to consolidate multiple training centers and sites into a national network under one brand.
Across dozens of providers, the same three problems kept showing up.
1. No student system of record
At every level – Center, Site, instructor – there was no real student account. No single place that “owned” the relationship.
Pieces of a student lived in:
Spreadsheets
Email threads
Invoicing tools
Agency portals
Which means:
Nobody had a clean answer to “Who is this student?”, “What have we done for them?”, or “What expires next?”
Sites were just moving data back and forth between systems like transactions, instead of running a connected business.
Every class was a one‑off project, not part of a compounding student base.
No unified student view = humans manually shuffling data all day. Inefficient. Inconsistent. Nothing can connect.
2. Centers couldn’t really help sites and instructors grow
Because there was no clean data and no shared view:
Centers couldn’t see which Sites and instructors had capacity
They couldn’t easily route students or clients to the right place
They couldn’t see which locations or offerings were actually working
So even inside a “network,” every Site and instructor had to:
Find their own students
Build their own little stack
Start from zero every time they wanted to grow
The people who were supposed to be running the industry couldn’t actually power growth for the people doing the teaching.
3. Disparate, unstructured tools
The tools that were sold as “flexible” were highly customizable but almost completely unstructured. Every provider configured them differently.
Reporting across courses, locations, and staff was painful
Group and private training – the most lucrative work – was often sold and tracked outside the system
There was no easy way to see performance across providers or locations
Whether you were a big Center or a single Site, it felt the same: all grit, no engine.
Outside looking in
I (Jon, co-founder) came at it from a different direction.
Shubs saw these problems from inside one of the largest companies in the space — real capital, real staff, the supposed gold-standard software. My reaction was simpler: if they can't solve this, the problems aren't about execution. They're structural. And structural problems don't stay inside one company. They show up everywhere — for instructors, for students, and for the employers trying to keep their people current.
So we got on the phone and started interviewing all of them.
Sure enough, the same three failures kept showing up on the other side of the equation.
1. Instructors are invisible
Instructors had availability. What they didn't have was a way to get found.
The model most of the industry runs on works like this: become an instructor, get listed on a directory, hope students scroll far enough to find you. Your "discovery" is a name on a list — not a class page, not a bookable session, not something Google can index or a student can share.
That directory model was built for a different era. Directories show providers, not classes. Most clicks on a directory listing never reach a checkout page. And when directory traffic shifts or dries up, instructors have nothing underneath — no brand, no student base, no way to generate their own demand.
So they improvise. They glue together their own websites, calendars, payment links, and spreadsheets. It kind of works — but that DIY stack only learns from one business. There's no shared data, no compounding, no network effect. Every class starts from scratch.
Centers were supposed to fix this. But as Shubs showed — without clean data, shared structure, or real visibility across the network — they couldn't reliably route students to instructors even inside their own organizations. Instructors stayed invisible. Not because they weren't good, but because nothing in the system was designed to make them findable.
2. The student experience is suppressing the entire market
Students described CPR classes like a trip to the DMV: confusing websites, clunky registration, unclear instructions, and then waiting for a card to maybe show up.
That's not one provider's problem. It's the market default.
Roughly 40% of people say they want CPR certification. Only about 10% actually get it. That gap isn't a demand problem — it's a friction problem. The experience is bad enough that people abandon the process before they ever sit in a classroom. And the ones who do follow through aren't willing to pay a premium for something that felt like a chore.
That suppresses the whole market, not just individual providers. When the floor of the student experience is low, it drags down what anyone can charge. Lower revenue means less to invest in getting better. Less investment keeps the experience low. It's a cycle — and no single provider can break it alone because the problem is structural. Everyone is stuck in the same loop.
A great instructor can deliver a world-class classroom experience. But if the discovery, registration, communication, and follow-up around that classroom are broken, the student never experiences the quality. And they definitely don't come back or refer a friend.
3. Everyone is dependent on traffic they don't control
Because instructors are invisible and the student experience is poor, almost the entire industry runs on one channel: agency directory traffic. The AHA's training center finder. The Red Cross course search. That's where students go — because providers haven't given them anywhere better to go.
That creates a dependency. Providers treat agency portals as their operating system — not just for compliance, but for demand. When those directories are the only place students can find classes, every provider's growth is tied to a channel they don't own, don't control, and can't differentiate on.
And those directories aren't designed to grow your business. They're designed to move people through certification. They show providers, not classes. They don't build student relationships. You don't own the data. There's no renewal engine. There's no way for a student to come back to you directly next time.
So when traffic shifts — when an algorithm changes, when a directory redesigns, when a new competitor gets priority placement — providers have no fallback. No student profiles. No direct employer relationships. No recurring base. Nothing that compounds.
The result: the entire industry is organized around catching demand instead of building it. That's not a business model. That's a dependency. And the longer it continues, the harder it is to break.
Shubs saw what was broken inside the machine. I saw what it was doing to the market around it.
Different angles. Same conclusion: the foundation wasn't just messy — it was holding the entire industry back. Instructors couldn't get found. Students couldn't get a good experience. Providers couldn't build anything that lasted. And it would keep being true no matter how much effort any single company put in, because the problem was structural.
So we built Hovn around a simple belief:
Medical training businesses deserve a modern operating system that helps them generate more business, not a pile of spreadsheets and half‑retired software.
What “Modern” Actually Means to Us
“Modern” isn’t a buzzword for us. It means:
A standardized course catalog instead of a different BLS in every spreadsheet
Modern, SEO‑optimized pages for “near me” and location‑based searches so students can actually find you
Structured data for courses, locations, and instructors, not free‑text fields no one can report on
Online registration that doesn’t feel like 2010
A student portal where people can find their cards and get renewal reminders
Support for B2B / account‑based relationships so you can track employers, contracts, and group classes in one place
Card integrations so rosters and eCards live in one pipeline, not three systems
Every guideline shift forces everyone to admit what’s already true: if your foundation was messy last cycle, it’ll be worse when you copy it into the next one.
Today’s Small Step
Don’t overthink this. Take 5–10 minutes and run one honest audit.
Pick one common class you run (e.g. BLS).
On a blank page, write down:
For the training business (you):
Where do you list this class?
What systems do you use to take registrations and payments?
Where do you store the roster and track who showed up?
Where do you record and store cards?
For the instructor:
How do they find out they’re teaching this class?
Where do they see who’s enrolled and what to bring?
How do they report attendance and get cards issued?
For the student:
How do they find you?
What does registration feel like?
How do they get instructions and, later, their card?
Now circle every step that:
Lives in a different system (registration tool, Training Central, card bank portal, email, spreadsheets)
Depends on a specific person’s memory or personal spreadsheet
Would feel like the DMV if you were the student
Every circle is a tax you pay for not having a real platform.
It’s a place where you do a lot of work for a single class, then start from zero again next time. No shared data, no shared demand, no compounding.
Hovn’s whole job is to collapse as many of those circles as possible into one operating system, so every class you run:
Is easier to find
Is simpler to run
And is more likely to turn into repeat business
That’s the thread we pull on across this entire series.
If you already know you want to see what your setup would look like on real infrastructure:
Talk soon,
Jon and Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn
Want a second set of eyes on your operation? 15 minutes. We review your setup. You walk away knowing what to fix first.