BioForum is a well-established clinical research organization (CRO) handling medical writing, data management, biostatistics, and monitoring analysis. By the time they connected with SmartUp, they’d been running a successful business for 14 years. They knew clinical trial data management inside and out and dominated the Israeli market. Now they wanted to go global.
They also offer CDISC (industry data standards) solutions, turning clinical data into electronic formats and building automated tools around ODM, SDTM, and ADaM, the standard formats used to structure and model trial data. Their vision is to be a one-stop shop, handling everything from data collection and protocol drafting to database building, hospital contract management, and FDA submission in full compliance.
By the time BioForum joined SmartUp, they urgently needed global marketing to win customers around their automated data services. President and co-founder Eyal Wultz explains the opportunity. Most companies in this industry still do the work by hand, or only partly automated, and it’s inefficient. Pharma companies need roughly 700 hours of specialized programming just to prep data for a single FDA trial submission, and that script is custom to each trial, then thrown away once it’s done, since there’s no shared standard for how the data looks from trial to trial. BioForum built an automated system that handles the whole process instead, collecting, organizing, analyzing, and reporting the data.
A standardized, automated process would cut both costs and timelines, Wultz says, solving a problem everyone in the industry knows. “The next step was actually building that system. It’s not simple. The data is complicated, and every trial deals with a different medical field.”
BioForum needed a partner to bring that vision to life. “Working with SmartUp made sense given Yonatan’s track record founding and running data companies,” Wultz recalls. “When we pitched the idea of automating clinical trial work, Yonatan loved the product, but immediately disagreed with how we wanted to position it. He saw that we could use the product internally, pass most of the savings on to customers, and still sell it as a service.”
“Yonatan told us we had the product vision wrong,” Wultz says. “What we wanted to build was too complex. He said it would take years and a lot of money just to build it, then more years to actually get it right.”
Yonatan’s suggestion changed everything. Instead of building a standalone product, wrap it as a service. Use the automation in-house to slash BioForum’s own costs, and pass those savings straight to customers.
“Rather than spending years building the product and the market for it, Yonatan suggested we sell it as a service, skipping the cost and time of pushing out an unfinished product,” Wultz says. “That change meant we were ready to go to market in just a few weeks.”
“We went straight to potential customers with a strong offer that solved their SDTM conversion bottleneck,” Wultz explains. “Had we gone the product-development route, we might still be stuck building it today. Yonatan pushed us to start selling as fast as possible, in line with SmartUp’s principle of reaching profitability quickly and using revenue to fund development. Even a basic version of the service already saved customers huge amounts of time and money.”
Result:
“That shift in thinking changed everything,” Wultz says. “The technology stopped being the point. What mattered was getting the work done fast and efficiently.”
After joining SmartUp, BioForum rebuilt its marketing and sales approach. “We can now give customers better results without pouring money into product development,” Wultz says. “It’s not the most elegant solution, but it works. Our customers are happy, and so are we.”
“A year after deciding not to build and sell a standalone product, we’re seeing real traction. We have customers, we’re signing more, and we’ve hit the scaling stage.”
