I help athenahealth marketplace partners figure out what's blocking growth and fix it.

I track 500+ marketplace partners with longitudinal data. I spent over a decade inside athena and now advise partners directly. I know why some scale and others stall.

WHEN TO REACH OUT

Your growth has slowed and you can't see why.
Early customers came from founder relationships and network outreach. That engine ran out, and now nobody inside the company can name what changed.
athena shut off the marketing services you used to buy.
Webinars, mailers, newsletter ads — gone. Thrive is the only paid marketing channel left. Every partner is trying to figure out what to do next.
athena isn't sending you leads.
You're on the marketplace but athena's go-to-market teams aren't referring customers your way. You're pushing when the ecosystem should be pulling.
athena is building features that overlap with yours.
They shipped something free, or they're taking notes on what you're building. You need to know what it means for your roadmap and how to respond.
Customers love you, but you can't prove it in numbers.
Results are real, but the data is locked inside athena. Most partners (and most practices) don't know how to pull the reports that would prove it.
Your marketing leads with features, not customer problems.
Prospects can't tell which of the many things you do is the one they actually need. The differentiator that closes deals is buried under everything else.

I’m Max Alsgaard-Miller

I spent over a decade at athenahealth across product, implementation, operations, and marketing, including leading marketplace marketing strategy. I know how athena works from the inside, how practices actually operate, and what separates the marketplace partners who scale from the ones who stall.

For three years, my job was translating athena's R&D roadmap into marketing stories and enablement for customer-facing teams. I shaped how new features got positioned to practices, taught athena's client-facing teams why those features mattered, and designed the trainings that drove adoption. That's the skill I use now with marketplace partners: getting athena's teams excited enough to move your product forward, and giving your sales team what they need to close.

Now I work with marketplace partners directly. I track 500+ of them with longitudinal data on customer counts, ratings, capabilities, and reviews. I know the patterns. I've watched who's moved up, who's leveled off, and what separates the two.

HOW I WORK

STEP 1

Diagnose

Listen to your customers. Listen to your team. Look at the data most partners don't know how to pull from athena. Ask the questions no one inside the company is asking. The thing that's blocking your growth is almost always something your team already suspects but hasn't been able to name.

STEP 2

Prescribe

A clear, prioritized plan of what to fix, what to build, and what to stop doing. Not a deck. The three to five decisions that matter most, in the sequence they need to happen, with the reasoning behind each. You leave this phase knowing exactly what the next move is.

STEP 3

Implement

Guide your team through execution. Case studies, positioning, product direction, athena strategy. Whatever the prescription calls for. I don't hand you a plan and disappear. I stay close enough to keep it moving and far enough to let your team own the work.

STEP 4

Refine

Measure what moved. Adjust the approach. Keep compounding. Growth is a cycle, not a project. The athena landscape keeps shifting: new features, new competitors, new customer expectations. The partners that keep growing are the ones that keep refining.

“Max’s encyclopedic knowledge of athenahealth has transformed how we solve problems for our practices. Working with Max is like having a senior athenahealth architect on call.”

— Lauren Jensen, Senior Manager of Customer Success, Osmind

If any of this sounds familiar, let's talk.

I work with established marketplace partners who have customers and revenue. If something's not working, I can probably tell you why.

Let's talk