Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Social media hasn’t quite taken off yet. 2004 was the beginning of Facebook.

Brian Loew: That’s right. You didn’t have vertical social networks. You had message boards. There were some message boards, as you remember, that were good. We thought that there was some opportunity here. I got some friends with web background together. We didn’t have health backgrounds but we had web backgrounds. We said, “Let’s build a community.”

So we built the beta, and we were off and running. We raised some money and we got 1.0 off the ground. Early on, we had this idea that a good friend had suggested to me. I didn’t want to put ads on the sides of buses the way you would have in 1999. I was looking for some mechanism to attract members that wouldn’t cost a fortune. I was really struggling to find an idea. She said, “There are all these non-profit patient advocacy organisations. Every disease has a non-profit. You’ve got the American Lung Association, the National Osteoporosis Foundation, etc. About 70% of all these non-profits are in the greater Washington area, which was where I was. All of them had the need to support their constituents. What if you go to them and offered to be in their community?”

It was a wonderful idea. I had no idea how difficult it would be and if I had, I might not have done it. In hindsight, I’m very glad that we did. The reason it was difficult is that these organisations are often run by people who are completely mission-driven. A lot of the others, as they get larger, become administrative and sometimes, bureaucratic. They make decisions slowly. We went around and met with a bunch of these non-profits. The first one was, in hindsight, an amazing stroke of luck. At the National Institute of Health, there’s something called the Children’s Inn. It’s for the parents of children who have rare conditions or cancer primarily. These children are undergoing care at NIH and the parents are staying at this inn. The Executive Director said, “Let’s do it.”

We built our privacy policy and terms of use with NIH lawyers. They were our first partner. I think our second partner was Women Heart, which is another non-profit in DC for women with heart disease. Later, we had other groups like the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance. Today, we have a hundred disease patient advocacy partners. They turn out to be a wonderful source for patients of credibility, authority, and trust. They also work for organic search. If you learn that a friend of yours has a serious medical condition and begin Googling, you would probably, pretty quickly, find one of these organisations. When you browse around, you see that they have a community. You would click on that and you would find yourself in Inspire.

All of those non-profit partners exist under the umbrella of Inspire. When members sign up, they’re actually joining Inspire but they’re doing so in a place where you’re in the Osteoporosis community in partnership with the foundation. It’s very easy for you to also join other groups in Inspire. We found that many of our members do want to join multiple groups.

Sramana Mitra: What was the arrangement that you had with these non-profits and foundation? Did they just come for free? Were they paying you?

Brian Loew: The relationship that we have with them is we don’t charge them a penny. In exchange, we ask for three things. They’re all under contract. One is that we ask for exclusivity. Our logic being that it’s a lot of work for us to set this up and maintain it. We have live human moderators. It’s a lot of effort. The second thing that we ask for is that they promote it, which they’re happy to do because it’s in their interest to grow the community anyway. The third is when it comes to commercialisation, we have the right to commercialise according to some ethical principles that we have. That’s it. We’re providing them a service that they very much want to provide.

As we added more and more partners, there’s a real network effect. When we sign up a new partner today, what they know is that on day zero, the existing Inspire members, which is now 700,000, will be exposed to their community. It solves the empty room problem that we had in the very beginning.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew
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