Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: That’s great. In all two-sided marketplaces, the chicken-and-egg problem is huge. The fact that you were able to mitigate that with these non-profit organisations is a great strategy. The counterpart then becomes, what is the business model?

Brian Loew: We don’t charge anything for patients. Our customers are pharmaceutical, biotech, and device companies. Today, all of our revenue flows from industry. It comes today from, primarily, two sources. One is research. There are two kinds of research. One is the original idea of clinical trial recruitment, and the other is market research. We can do longitudinal market research and things that benefit from the fact that we have highly attached and engaged members. The other revenue source is advertising and brand promotion. Half of the money comes from pharmaceuticals learning from patients and the other half comes from pharmaceuticals promoting their message to patients. When I say pharmaceuticals, I’m including biotech and device companies.

When we think about how we make money, we have two guiding principles that govern everything. The first one is that we are transparent about how we make money. We work very hard to make sure that no member is being tricked. In some website, if you shared more than what you wanted to or did something you didn’t want to do, we just go out of our way to make sure that that never happens in Inspire. Our model is an invitation model. You may never hear from us. You may just go on and participate in the community.

At some point, we may ask you if you’d like to participate in something. We describe it to you and we ask you if you want to participate. Only if you opt in do you participate. If you ignore it or if you say no, then that’s it. The people who do opt in, that takes care of the bills. The first premise is the patient has to be in control.

The second ethical check is a more ambiguous one. We ask ourselves, “Is this something I would want a family member or someone close to me to participate in? Would I be happy if my mom was invited to participate in this thing?” There were things that we said no to. We said no to asbestos litigation lawyers who wanted to market to our lung cancer patients. We said no to a couple of groups. For the most part, everyone who has approached us in the revenue side met the ethical criteria.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I got the sense of all the things that you said. Pharmaceutical companies are paying you to put together clinical trial lists. Is that correct?

Brian Loew: What they’re paying for in the case of clinical trial is to invite members to participate in the trial. We step out at that point. To be clear, we’re not actually performing the trial or getting involved.

Sramana Mitra: Of course not, but you’re helping them put together the list by going into your community and inviting people with the right profile. The patient can choose to participate or not.

Brian Loew: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: You do get paid by pharmaceutical companies for that service of identifying and extending those invitations, and managing that process?

Brian Loew: That’s right.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew
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