"You'd be mad if you're a startup not to have Connectd get you some advisors. Why would you waste that opportunity? You're going to validate your product and get commercial traction, even in other countries, with very senior and globally respected people. It's a no-brainer."
Rav Roberts, CEO & Co-Founder, Pharma Sentinel:
As a startup founder, especially in tech, you face a huge number of challenges, constraints, risks, and issues. The most important ones for us were go-to-market and client validation. Is our product what people actually want? We don't know what people are going to buy or what they're going to spend their money on. That's number one.
Number two, if they are going to spend their money with us, how do we get our product in front of the decision makers? And number three, linked to the first two, is raising funding. But you're not going to raise funding in this environment unless you've got some go-to-market traction, whether that's paying customers, growing pilots, strong client testimonials, or really good advisors. All of that helps.
Rav Roberts:
What was great about the advisors was that rather than us reaching out, they found us. These are very experienced people, not just well qualified but with fantastic track records and really senior positions in their respective industries. One of them is Mike Anson, a very senior global director at GSK. The others cover melanoma expertise, data analytics and health tech, and experienced marketing and marcomms.
All of them were perfectly placed to validate our product and proposition. At the start of the year, we'd just launched our new AI platform and had no customers for it yet. We wanted to know: is this what people actually want?
The three Connectd advisors helped shape the product in very fine detail. For example, Mike Anson asked, "Can you do intelligence on something called nitrosamines?" None of us had ever heard of nitrosamines, but they are impurities in the drug development process that can invalidate drugs at various stages of clinical trials. These are very important issues in the industry. So we developed a nitrosamine intelligence database platform and got it to an exceptional standard. The quality of the data is second to none.
Similarly, we built a melanoma feed for one of our US advisors and got it to such a high standard that he was relying on it for really high quality information. And with the third advisor, we've been working on a psychedelics feed. Psychedelics is a massive and growing market, and he introduced us to a potential buyer.
Rav Roberts:
Initially, the three directors in the company met individually with each potential advisor to assess fit, not just in terms of market and commercial knowledge, but cultural fit too. Do these people actually want to work with a small startup, given that they all come from large companies? And they did.
In terms of cadence, we found a time that worked for everyone: Thursday at 7:00 AM East Coast time for our US advisors. If there's a client opportunity one of them has introduced us to, we schedule a separate meeting around that.
We have a good structure for the weekly advisory board meeting covering product updates, technology updates, and commercial updates. We have a set agenda, but it's flexible. It's only half an hour every week, though we often go over. Everyone is very professional about it.
Rav Roberts:
They interact really well with each other on the calls. They're very senior professionals with a lot of experience, so they know how to engage with other professionals. They haven't met each other in person yet, but they all get on very well.
The big outcome is our first commercial sale in the US. All of our previous sales had been in Europe. A US sale is especially significant for a UK tech startup because validating your product with a US company carries real strategic weight and is seen as very appealing to investors. That was number one.
The other significant outcome was product validation from a major big pharma buyer. They haven't purchased yet, but one of the main decision makers said, "This is an amazing product." We now know we're on the right track, and that's because of the advice and guidance of our advisors.
Rav Roberts:
We'd like to continue working with all of them. One is just about to start, and the other three are coming towards the end of their six months, but we want to keep working with them on an ongoing basis after the pro bono phase.
Rav Roberts:
I'd only go with Connectd. Advisors are very good, but they can be very distracting, as we found in the past. Fortunately, Connectd helped us with the terms of reference and what the expectations would be for the pro bono advisors, which made a real difference.
You'd be mad if you're a startup not to have Connectd get you some advisors. Why would you not? Why would you waste that opportunity? You're going to validate your product, get commercial traction, even in other countries, with very senior and globally respected people. It's a complete no-brainer. I wouldn't even know why you wouldn't want to do that.
Rav Roberts, CEO & Co-Founder, Pharma Sentinel
