Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: That was what I was trying to extract. One of the things that is always very compelling is if you can solve a serious enterprise problem for people who have a lot of money and for whom you can end up saving a lot of money. That’s the reason why I took you through these questions. How long did it take you to build that product and start selling?

Terry Ryan: It took us about a year and a half to get our first product to market and sell it to the first customer.

Sramana Mitra: In that time, did you have a customer already in the process who were giving you input?

Terry Ryan: From day one, we were out talking to prospects and customers about our vision and about where we wanted to take things. We also asked them how much they might want to help us craft or be a part of that build. We were not asking them for money. We were asking them for advice and thoughts.

Sramana Mitra: How did it ramp once you launched and started selling? How did the market respond?

Terry Ryan: It ramped fine but to get a serious ramp, we needed to create more of the product on our suite sooner than later. A one-trick pony is interesting to talk to, but when you’re pitching a platform and you move beyond the pitch to the single-solution application and the moment you get to the second, you’re almost getting back to what you talked to someone about your vision.

We started to scale when we tipped into our second and third solution set on the same platform. Each could be bought independently by these exact same customers. The more they buy, the more value there is.

They give us their claims once, no matter how many product lines they’re running from us. To give someone their claims is a big thing. Once you do that, the solution sets are running the same gobs of data. The real trigger point for us was the second and third products on the same platform that created an opportunity for our current clients to expand. It also created three different arrow points for entering an organization to sell. There’s not a starting point in our platform. Anything at anytime is a great starting point. The goal is to get them to the other products over time.

Sramana Mitra: You have different starting points. Whichever you enter through, you can upsell to the whole portfolio. You launched the product in 2011?

Terry Ryan: No, 2010.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building an Exciting Healthcare IT Company From Chicago: LaunchPoint CEO Terry Ryan
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