Learnings From Building In Healthcare

18 Aug 2024 · 1 min

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1:23

In this segment, the speaker discusses the unique challenges of launching a marketplace in the healthcare, pharma, and biotech sectors. Unlike typical fast‑moving, scrappy marketplace launches, the regulated and risk‑averse nature of healthcare forces a more conservative approach. Early customers preferred an agency‑style, fixed‑fee (with limited outcome‑based components) arrangement rather than a transaction‑based marketplace fee structure, which they found intimidating. Consequently, the company initially presented its offering as a familiar fixed‑fee service to secure adoption, and plans to gradually shift clients toward a true marketplace model with transaction‑level pricing as trust and familiarity grow.

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So are there any, you know, learnings, you know, recent learnings as far as like building in the space that might be helpful that you can share with us? Healthcare is a funny spot for a marketplace because a lot of marketplaces get started, as you all know as well as I do, by sort of like moving really fast and being really scrappy. And like, that doesn't really fly in healthcare. And so I think we've had to make parts of our business look less like a marketplace to get started and to get initial adoption. And then we're transitioning folks into a truer marketplace model over time. So for example, the very first pharma and biotech companies who are paying us, they bought something that looked very much more like what they would pay an agency for than a typical marketplace. And when we showed them pricing that looked more like, hey, pay on the transaction level, they almost got a little bit spooked. And so we went back to this model of like, hey, this is like a fixed fee, maybe a little bit of outcome-based payment, but it's actually mostly a fixed fee. Even though in theory this would be worse for them just because they were more comfortable with it. Yeah. It was less sort of scary and unknown.