Learning the industry the “hard way”
With my roots in academia, I’m no stranger to jargon and complexity. But learning the clinical research industry still gave me a run for my money.
While building & scaling an eClinical startup as a founding employee, I learned most of my industry knowledge the hard way.
I remember my first client project with Roche at mProve Health. This was a big moment for the company — after working with CROs as channel partners, we’d finally begun to get direct sponsor engagements (and with top ten pharma, no less). I thought I was managing pretty well until my client gently provided some feedback. “Well it’s clear you’re new to the industry, but you’re doing a great job”. Pfffffftttt. Like the air out of a ballon, all pretense evaporated.
And because we were still checking the right boxes for her, that was the best possible outcome of that feedback. You can imagine a moment like that combined with something like mismatched product capabilities leading to a lost sale, de-scopes, or even worse, a cancellation. That would have been devastating at our stage. So if you haven’t already heard this or figured it out yourself, let me assure you here that faking it doesn’t work in this space. And google will never tell you what you really need to know.
After I started working with startups as an independent consultant, I saw this trend repeat over and over. Industry experience within a startup would be silo’d (typically within the sales teams) and there wasn’t foundational training for employees in delivery or product positions to rely on. So not only was every startup learning the industry the hard way, each individual team member was doing it as well.
I had one of those TV-infomercial “there has to be a better way” moments. So I dug around and asked around, looking for a resource that either I hadn’t found in my time as an employee or one that had been developed since that moment over 7 years ago. And sadly, I still didn’t find the right boots-on-the-ground knowledge that I could have used effectively.
So I mocked up a workshop concept as a prototype and started showing it to people all over the industry, from early-stage founders to established industry professionals. They had helpful feedback in shaping the offering (feedback is a gift!) but one trend was 100% consistent regardless of who I talked to.
Here are just a few quotes:
“There’s no formal education in this space, so it’s really ‘on the job’ training and using others as a sounding board” - Founder of an in-home healthcare startup
“It’s hard to know if people are doing things this way because they don’t have a better way of doing it, or if they are trying to avoid some risk. I learn the most from doing demo’s for sponsors” - Product lead at a mid-stage digital CRO
“It’s an amazingly cryptic world. I mostly learned by doing… with lots of googling” - Healthcare consultant
“We reach out to our customers and people we have relationships with and spend an hour talking. But that doesn’t work that well - they only understand a tiny piece, so it’s hard to get the bigger picture” - Product manager at a Series B eClinical startup
And when I asked if they looked for something like my workshop concept as a way to solve the problem, none said they had. One in particular said, “I didn’t seek it out because, well, I figured there wouldn’t be anything”. I can relate because, well… when I was at mProve, we didn’t seek it out either.
Finding out that everyone has defaulted to doing it the hard way has only deepened my resolve to find a way to solve this problem. And while a workshop will never take the place of good advisors or customer interviews, I’d like to offer a cheat code so you don’t have to learn about the industry in the middle of doing a sponsor demo.
I’m excited about developing a bite-sized workshop that’s easily accessible to start-ups and speeding up their ability to gain traction in this space. I’m grateful to those who have already contributed to this taking form and I’ll continue to document the journey here along the way!
