Notes on Startups #2-Social Capital

I’ve been reading up on this, and since I think I have some smart friends who have tried to run start ups anound small companies in the past as a side hustle, I would like to hear from you. Our plan is to bootstrap for awhile — just reinvest a certain fraction of the sales back into the company for awhile. We talk more about this in other articles mostly on product development and learn start up methods. Here I wanted to talk about marketing.

I think the pharmaceutical industry is over-saturated with a lot of big players. There is a huge barrier to market (ie it costs a few billion dollars to get a new COVID drug to market). By nature, the pharmaceutical and biotech industries burn through a lot of money. I think software companies are exactly the opposite. All you need is a computer and a programmer and a few bucks each month for servers. You can contract with larger companies and sell cloud services as well as small desktop editions of your software for smaller labs.

Having social capital is something that I never gave much thought to in the past, but now that we are getting closer to starting a company it’s something I am thinking about. You should get a list of high value connections and a plan of meeting with them. Our plan is to map out the ecosystem of our profession. We will list out the top 5/top 50/top100 connections we want to build, and sort and categorize these regularly as we refocus our strategy. Our goal will be to build relationships rather than just giving sales pitches…. We recognize that when approaching…