Why We Built Hovn (And Why Now)
How we’re turning the 2025 Guidelines into a clean, modern foundation for medical training centers and sites.
Over the next 12 weeks, I’m going to send you something a little different from the usual SitRep.
Think of it as a behind‑the‑scenes series on Hovn and what a “modern” medical training platform actually looks like. 1 per week.
The timing isn’t an accident:
This series runs through the end of February
The AHA 2025 guideline deadline is March 1
Everyone has to touch their courses, rosters, and instructor records anyway.
You can either:
Copy‑paste your 2020 chaos into 2025, or
Use this as the once‑in‑five‑years chance to build a real foundation.
This series is for people who want the second option.
What We’ll Cover Over the Next 12 Weeks
Why we built Hovn
What makes a great, modern training platform (and a checklist you can use)
Issues we see with existing training software
How we incorporate customer feedback into Hovn
What Hovn costs and how we think about pricing
How Hovn fits alongside your existing tools and website
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
Today, I want to start with the obvious question: why?
The Problems We Kept Seeing
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.
I came at it from another angle.
If this is how it feels for the people responsible for running the industry, it has to be hurting the people teaching and the people trying to take classes.
So we got on the phone and started interviewing them.
Sure enough:
Instructors had plenty of availability but no way to get discovered. They were gluing together their own websites, calendars, and spreadsheets because their Centers couldn’t reliably send them students.
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. It’s a miserable experience, so they’re not willing to pay a premium for it.
Everyone is fighting to grow their business from zero, every time. Nothing compounds.
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
The 2025 guideline shift just forces everyone to admit what’s already true: if your foundation was messy in 2020, it will be worse if you simply copy it into 2025.
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 I’m going to pull on over the next 11 weeks.
If you already know you want help before March 1, you can grab time with us here:
Talk soon,
Jon and Shubs
Co‑founders, Hovn