BioForum is an established CRO company offering a wide range of consulting services, including medical writing, data management, biostatistical support, and monitoring analysis. When BioForum first connected with SmartUp, they had already been successfully running their company for 14 years. They knew the clinical trial data management space inside and out and dominated the Israeli market, but they had their sights set on global growth.

Among its services are CDISC (Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium) solutions, converting clinical data to electronic formats and building automated solutions based on ODM (Operational Data Model), SDTM (Study Data Tabulation Model), and ADaM (Analysis Data Model). The company’s vision is to offer a full suite of services, from collecting data and drafting the protocol, to building databases, managing hospital contracts, and submitting trial results to the FDA in full compliance with its requirements.

By the time BioForum joined SmartUp, there was a pressing need for global marketing to attract new customers based on BioForum’s advantage in automated data services. Eyal Wultz, president and co-founder, explains, “Most vendors in the industry still do this manually or semi-automatically, and it’s not very efficient. Pharma companies have to allocate around 700 hours of specialized clinical data programming for each trial they want to submit to the FDA. Every trial has its own unique script, and once the trial is over, it’s thrown out. The data looks different from trial to trial because there’s no unified standard. We created an automated process for collecting, organizing, analyzing, and reporting the data.”

According to Wultz, creating a unified, orderly, and automated process would significantly reduce both costs and timelines, and solve a well-known pain point in the industry. “The next step was to build such a system. It’s not a trivial task. The data is complex, and each clinical trial covers a different field.”

BioForum was looking for a partner to help execute its vision. Wultz recalls, “Working with SmartUp made sense given Yonatan’s experience founding and managing companies in the data field. When BioForum presented its idea for automating the clinical trial process, Yonatan was excited about the product, but he immediately pushed back on how BioForum wanted to position it. Yonatan understood that BioForum could use its own product internally and pass most of the cost savings on to customers, while continuing to sell a service.”

Wultz: “Yonatan told us our product vision was wrong. The product was too complex. He said it would take years to build and require significant capital, and then more years to make it truly good.”

Yonatan’s suggestion was a pivotal shift. Instead of developing a standalone product, wrap the offering as a service, using the automation internally to dramatically reduce BioForum’s costs and pass those savings on to customers.

Wultz: “Instead of sinking years into market development and product construction, Yonatan suggested positioning our offering as a service, bypassing the cost and time required to bring an imperfect new product to market. That shift in approach had us ready to market our solution within just a few weeks.”

Wultz explains why this strategy made sense, “We went directly to potential customers with an attractive offer that addressed their bottleneck with SDTM conversions. If we had gone down the product development path, we might still be stuck in that phase today. Yonatan pushed us toward the goal of starting sales as soon as possible, in line with the SmartUp principle of reaching profitability quickly and funding development with revenue. Even if we initially offered customers a basic service, it still delivered tremendous value in time and cost savings.”

Result:

“Changing our approach opened up a completely different way of thinking. The technology itself became less important. What mattered was building something that got the work done quickly and efficiently.”

After joining SmartUp, BioForum overhauled its marketing and sales strategy. Wultz: “We can now offer our customers better results without investing in product development. It may be less elegant, but it works. Our customers are happy, and so are we.”

“Today, a year after we decided not to build and sell a product, we’re getting positive signals from the market. We already have customers, we’re bringing on more, and we’ve reached the scaling stage.”