“We took an incorrect decision by targeting the wrong market”

Aissel is founded by Prasad Patil Mahesh Grampurohit is a Co-founder & CTO. It’s a software technology solutions and business research company. Our software solutions cater to the business intelligence needs of pharmaceutical and biotech companies. These are built on technology platforms (like Apple or Microsoft) and can be integrated with existing enterprise applications.

Our research services and methodologies complement our software solutions and enable us to help strengthen the information and analytics needed by pharmaceutical and biotech companies. We use Microsoft, Java and other technologies with service oriented architecture to enable us to integrate wide range of Enterprise-Class Pharmaceutical and Healthcare systems

Need for your business

We map thought leaders from various specialties such as cardiology, oncology, rheumatology, and neurology. The implementation of software solutions coupled with data and analytics will give a new edge to a company in targeting the right experts and managing their relationship with the scientific community.

KOL Management Suite is our flagship product that enables our customers to integrate, manage and monitor their development and management initiatives.

Initial Challenges

It’s been a a year and half since we started operations. The biggest challenges, so far, have been putting a dedicated team together and convincing companies to use our solutions.

We needed a team who can work in an uncertain environment; one that is creative when it comes to problem solving and all this took us around 6-8 months to establish.

Initially, when we reached out and pitched our product to customers, we had a real tough time. The value of our customer relationship management solution would be questioned. Also, it competes with large software companies.

We’ve received a small round of funding from an international angel investor (not disclosed).

How unique is the idea?

Our key differentiator is the aggregation of different enterprise customer relationship management applications. Companies generally sell lot of different products to make informed decisions of all their products information . We have mapped it into one single platform. For example, we have mapped physicians in a hospital and segmented their specialities at affordable costs. This will drive revenues for us.

With regard to adoption, we recently signed three of the world’s top pharmaceutical / medical devices company. Over the next few months, we will be working with these companies to implement our BI software and analytics solutions.

Further, we are working with the world’s leading supplier of eye care and ophthalmology products. We have partnered with this American company to support them in finding out the top medical experts in ophthalmology and implementing our full suite KOL management solution.

We are also working with this Minnesota-based company, supporting their dental division in finding out the best dental experts in the US who they can partner with to grow the dental products sales.

We have released the new version of our KOLM software. The new version is fully integrated with mobile and iPad access so the users can log interactions and view profiles from practically anywhere and any device. The ChaterOn! feature brings the power of Facebook and Twitter to the closed secure user-group within the organisation. Now, our users can increase productivity and collaborate using the same benefits of social media. With a strong life-sciences team and robust BI software for healthcare experts, we are now the only Indian company offering a solution in the medical thought leader management segment.

Learnings

As a startup, you have lots of things to do. A big learning was to prioritise.When we started out we took an incorrect decision by targeting a wrong market (India) which was not ready for our solutions. For several months, we were evaluating the market and putting our energies into it. This resulted in missing out on building another market. It taught us the value of opportunity costs.

Future Plans

No plans to raise money in the immediate future. On the business side, there is ample scope to build more offerings into our platform as companies are still grappling with different systems. Long term plan is to sell our solutions into other verticals and use social media. We also want to continue to build on existing products so that multiple organisations can take advantage. Our ultimate aim is to grow in multiple geographies; emerging markets are a huge opportunity.

(As told to Venkatesh Ganesh)

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