Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In that revenue model, what does an average deal size look like?

Brian Loew: I’ll answer that but also, the other part of research that has actually become larger than that is the market research side of it where pharmaceutical companies want to know about patient perspectives on things. Typically, a pharma will pay us an amount just to promote the existence of this trial and to do the screening for them. I combine that with the second one because in both cases, what we’re doing for the pharmaceuticals is try to find a very focused patient population and screen them by asking them questions.

I would say the range of these engagements is between $50,000 and $200,000. It ranges based on two things. One is how many patients they need and the difficulty to find that population.

Sramana Mitra: How many pharmas are engaged with you in this mode?

Brian Loew: About 20, and we have nine of the top 10.

Sramana Mitra: How often do they run these kinds of projects?

Brian Loew: Some of them are ongoing. We have something called a private research community, which is six months long to a year long where you’re studying a group of patients over time. Others are pulses where they say, “We want answer to one set of questions and we want to do it right now.” It turns out that these pharma companies are gigantic, they’re almost like small countries. We do a lot of work with Novartis, Pfizer, and Merck. In each case, they’re multiple clients within the pharmaceutical. One client might do something with us two to three times a year but we generally do have multiple clients within a company.

Sramana Mitra: Multiple product lines, multiple communities, multiple countries.

Brian Loew: Exactly. Our customer is usually a brand manager within a pharma company.

Sramana Mitra: From the time you started the company with a little bit of angel financing from your old investors at the previous company and some of your own money, how long did it take to get the first platform out and get a critical mass of these non-profits on board?

Brian Loew: That’s one of the most important questions. There are many stories to be told about this. It took us longer than we thought it would. It probably took five years before we had any revenue at all, and then revenue started to turn up very quickly. It was not zero, but it was small and it wasn’t clear how it was going to grow. It took a lot of faith in the early days. It was only in the last couple of years that revenue is growing at a very rapid pace.

There are really two reasons for this. The first one is what you said. It took a long time to build a network from scratch. The second reason, I think, is we started too early. It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t have done it over again. Starting early is good in one way and bad in another way. It was bad because our customers were not ready for this.

You remember what it was like in 2005. Social media was new and when you talk to a big company about social media, if they had even heard of it, they would say, “My teenager uses Facebook.” There was no real involvement from older people in social media in 2006. It was either dating or Facebook. That, of course, changed dramatically. We would go meet with brand managers in pharma companies and we would spend two-thirds of the meeting just educating them on what a social network was.

Sramana Mitra: Being early is a double-edged sword.

Brian Loew: That’s right. The positive was when we signed up those non-profits, we were doing so in an environment where there weren’t a million other options for them.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Resilient Entrepreneurship: Inspire CEO Brian Loew
1 2 3 4 5 6 7