You can only map a closed field from the inside
I sold medical devices for ten years. RepCity is the resource I kept wishing existed while I was doing it — a straight answer, from someone who was actually in the room.
By Andrew Pyle
For ten years, I sold medical devices. It's a good living and a strange one: a lucrative, largely closed field that's genuinely hard to break into, and once you're in, hard to see clearly from any vantage but your own. You learn it by living it — the companies, the territories, the unwritten rules about how you get in and how you move up.
And the thing about a field like that is how little of it is actually written down anywhere. How you break in. Which companies treat their reps well and which chew through them. What a territory is really worth. When to jump and when to stay. The answers exist, but they live in people's heads and hallway conversations, not anywhere you can search for them. I spent years piecing that map together the slow way, one conversation at a time, because there was no faster way to get it.
01A generation behind
The tools were a generation behind
The tools built for us, meanwhile, were a generation behind. When I needed a new role, I used the same resource everyone in the field used — the one that had been the standard for years and had genuinely earned that place. But it had also become the default as much by inertia as by merit, and it showed its age. The field had moved on; the place we all went to navigate it hadn't quite kept up.
02The thing I wanted
The resource I wish I'd had
RepCity is my attempt to build the thing I wish I'd had. A modern place for medical-device and pharma reps that starts with the straight answers — the content that addresses what reps actually search for at eleven at night, the questions I used to ask myself and had to answer the hard way. The network on top of it — the roles, the connections — is the direction it's building toward, layered onto the audience those answers earn. It's a career platform, but it starts as a place that just tells you the truth about the job.
03Narrow on purpose
Deliberately narrow, on purpose
It's deliberately narrow, and I want to be plain about why. General job boards are a mile wide and an inch deep; a field this specialized rewards the opposite — an inch wide and a mile deep. But I don't go narrow as a tactic. I go narrow because it's the field I actually know. I can answer these questions with real specificity because I lived them, and in this world specificity is the entire thing. A generalist can tell you about a hundred fields shallowly. Someone who did this one for a decade can tell you the part that actually matters — and reps can feel the difference in about two sentences.
What I keep coming back to is how much easier the whole thing would have been with a straight answer at the right moment. The field guards its knowledge, mostly not on purpose — it's just that nobody ever wrote it down. Becoming the person who finally does, for the version of me that was trying to break in ten years ago, turns out to be a genuinely satisfying thing to build.
04Trust before product
Building trust before the product
I'll be honest that it's early. Right now it's mostly the content — the editorial engine, the positioning, the slow work of becoming a place reps trust. The network features are real intentions, not shipped facts, and I'd rather say that plainly than dress it up. In a field this tight you don't get a second chance if you show up shallow, so I'd rather build the trust first and the product second than the other way around.
Mostly, RepCity is a bet that the best person to map a closed world is someone who spent ten years finding their way around it in the dark. I don't know yet if it becomes everything I hope it does. But I know the questions, because they were mine, and I remember exactly how much it would have meant to have them answered plainly. That's a solid enough thing to build on.