Max Brun built Power by starting with patients, creating a Zillow-style search engine that used GPT-2 to translate clinical trial jargon into plain language. He validated demand through organic traffic before approaching trial sponsors, then discovered the real market wasn't the cheapest researchers or the biggest clinic chains, but the middle: organizations running a business that could afford to pay for patient recruitment.
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So what were the first steps then that you took to actually starting Power as a marketplace? So we started, well, we started with the side of the marketplace we understood, which is the patient side, right? I'd gone through that experience. I knew what I wanted. So that was a natural place to focus. And then we started by building a tool rather than really a marketplace. So we built sort of like Zillow did, a better search engine, but for clinical trials. The status quo today, all these trials are listed online on a government website, clinicaltrials.gov. That website is written by PhDs for PhDs. And so we spent a lot of time using at the time like GPT-2 to simplify this language and make it sort of comprehensible for a layperson. Then we spent a bunch of time pulling out key attributes of these trials, making them searchable, and comparable so that there was something valuable to patients even when we didn't yet have supply on the platform. So that's where we started. And then once we saw that, you know, we were starting to have a bunch of organic traffic from Google and patients were going through this experience and expressing interest, we started building out the supply side. And what we did there is we We focused on like the group of folks who were just like quickest to make a decision. This ended up being the participants in the ecosystem who were least professional. So there were these researchers at academic medical centers, at hospitals, at schools who had small grants and wanted some help running, recruiting patients for their trials. They were super price sensitive. They could pay us, you know, $8 a patient or something like this. But they could also make a decision sort of same day, same week. And so we started validating that someone would pay for this thing by going directly to those folks. And then over time, we've seen that, hey, these folks who are sort of on the not yet professionalized end of the spectrum, they don't have budgets. They don't make a ton of money from this research. And so we've had to move towards increasingly professional segments of the market. And we've found that actually you can go too far in the other direction too. So if you're working with networks of clinics run by PE firms, actually they're super good at compressing all the margin out of their vendors, out of the people they work with. So actually the sweet spot is the middle of the professionalism curve where, hey, They know how to run a business and can make money and thus can give some of that money to you, but they also need help. Whereas the really professional folks might have internal marketing teams and they've sort of already solved the problem in a way that means your potential to add value is pretty minimal.
