Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How did the first one get the users?

Rotem Shor: They paid a very small amount of money. It was not only for a specific medication. They developed it as a tool. The second was very specific for their drug. We found out later that it is much harder than we thought.

Sramana Mitra: So what did you do?

Rotem Shor: Later on, we changed the product. We started creating the integrations to the ecosystem where patients can come with a reference from a healthcare professional.

Sramana Mitra: How did you give the second client ROI?

Rotem Shor: I didn’t. It failed.

Sramana Mitra: How did you recover from that failure?

Rotem Shor: We just kept on. You need to celebrate success and learn from failures.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Rotem Shor: We learned that we cannot launch in Peru and Chile and that we needed to focus on specialty medications. We had to focus on one market and do it the best we can. To create this funnel of patients, we learned how to create engagement.

We believe patients are not the same. What Medisafe is doing is to understand the patient and create the level of engagement that the patient needs. How do we engage? What do we build? What are the problems that we are solving for patients?

Sramana Mitra: Was the next client successful?

Rotem Shor: The next one was much more successful.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about the next client. What did you have ready to make them successful?

Rotem Shor: The next client really believed in us. They had a vision in mind of what it should be.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a great client to work with.

Rotem Shor: For about eight months, it was like swimming in the ocean in the middle of the storm. We had timelines. We needed to develop the whole concept and to develop it in a scalable way. They talked about the healthcare requirements and taking our personalization layer inside and how to implement that. We needed to understand their vision and how to execute on that.

We worked like crazy for eight months. The ROI for them has been great. We built it in a scalable way so that it was much easier for the next client. In my mind, how am I going to do this without involving developers? We had more than 10 developers involved in the first product.

The overall strategy then was how do we build without developers. The next client, we had a designer who was typing into Excel. The third one was an orchestration inside the OS.

Sramana Mitra: When you were working with the first successful client, you were developing domain knowledge. Neither Omri nor you had domain knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry. You were absorbing all that and developing a workflow that captures all that.

While you were doing that, did you also have in mind architecting it in a way that you can build this without developers in the subsequent clients?

Rotem Shor: Yes, we needed to build it as a platform.

Sramana Mitra: You built it as a platform and then you built the domain-specific layers on top of that so it became easy for you to take it to multiple clients. What funding strategy did you follow after?

Rotem Shor: When we got the first funding, we already had the first client. We raised Series A when we had a million users. The seed was only $1 million.

Sramana Mitra: So the B2C free product got to a million users.

Rotem Shor: Yes. It was when Waze was acquired by Google without any business model, but they had many users.

Sramana Mitra: Your plan was still to monetize through pharmaceutical companies.

Rotem Shor: We thought, “Let’s get to the tens of millions of users and we’ll see what to do with them.” We did not have monetization. It was not successful. In order to do B2C right, you got to have the foundations. You need to measure ROI. You need to know how to funnel. We didn’t have this expertise. Luckily, we understood this after a few months. We understood that that’s not the path we should take.

Sramana Mitra: By this time, you had Series A?

Rotem Shor: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You raised Series A with a B2C thesis. Then pivoted out to B2B pharmaceutical-facing.

Rotem Shor: Correct.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Medication Management Startup Through Multiple Pivots: Medisafe Co-Founder and CTO Rotem Shor
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