Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 1)

Rotem represents yet another point of view of a software developer/technologist who successfully transitioned to an entrepreneur in an unfamiliar domain: pharmaceutical.

In that journey, he paired up with his brother who was more the business person in the duo. This is a common strategy for developers to become entrepreneurs, although, I generally
believe that developers can learn the business side as well.

The story also traces the pivots that were necessary to find product-market fit, as well as the failures that triggered each pivot.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some background of your personal journey. Where are you from? What kind of background leads you up to the entrepreneurial path?

Rotem Shor: I’m from Israel. I’m married with three kids. I co-founded Medisafe together with my brother Omri almost 10 years ago. Our father is a diabetic. He once injected a double dose of insulin. Thankfully, everything is okay right now.

Back then in 2012, we started thinking how come his pharma company is not providing him with tools to manage his health in a better way. It was the beginning of mobile. We started thinking about it. In the first couple of years, we were fully focused on the patient experience. We gained a lot of traction from patients who really like our solution and how it is saving their lives.

Sramana Mitra: Let me get into some background material. You come from a technical background, right?

Rotem Shor: Yes, I’m a software developer.

Sramana Mitra: How about Omri?

Rotem Shor: Omri comes from a business background. We come from an entrepreneurial house. My father was an entrepreneur in software and development. My mother joined him after many years. I worked for Checkpoint. Even there, I remember always having ideas. That’s what I like to do.

Sramana Mitra: You are entrepreneurial by nature.

Rotem Shor: Yes. I always say Medisafe is my first daughter.

Sramana Mitra: Is Omri also of that kind of thought process?

Rotem Shor: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: At the beginning of a startup journey, especially for people from technical backgrounds, there is a lot of learning. You have to validate your idea and how to put one foot after the other. How did you learn all that?

Rotem Shor: We started with another idea. It was something similar to a company called Honeybook. They have client management software. They’re very successful. Then the issue with my father happened. That’s when we pivoted. When thinking of founding your own company, it’s like pushing a wall. You truly believe that you can move this wall. You push that for years. All of a sudden, you move it for an inch. Then you push harder. People are coming to help you. You start moving the wall faster.

Sramana Mitra: Over time, there are methodologies that have developed. We have developed methodologies based on case studies on how to push better. You have to decide where to push. One of the areas that you have to get right to move the wall is validation. When you decided that your father’s diabetes situation is something you want to build a solution around, how did you validate? What did you learn from the market?

Rotem Shor: What we decided to focus on was medication management. We got our first client even before our first day of funding.

Sramana Mitra: Was your solution being built for pharma companies?

Rotem Shor: For patients. Pharma companies are sponsoring that for their patients.

Sramana Mitra: The user is the patient, but the customer is the pharma.

Rotem Shor: That’s correct.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor
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