Grace Colon, Board Member at BIO, once said:

“Even in the early days with seed financing, I was having coffee meetings with physicians, I was talking to patients, I was talking to all kinds of people, all kinds of stakeholders to really understand the perspective and be able to better put forth the story, the unmet need, the commercial strategy, and the value proposition for what we were doing.

Even with just coffee meetings and a couple of $1,000 here and there with patient surveys, we were able to put together quite an exciting story that enabled us to raise our seed investment first and then our Series A.

It’s very important from the very beginning to spend some time talking to all stakeholders. And that story can evolve, you can hone your story and positioning and perfect it over time.

You need to get that constant feedback and it’s not that hard. You can talk to people, you can pick up the phone, you can go on LinkedIn. If you don’t have a lot of money, it’s amazing the resources and tools that are out there and experts that are willing to talk to you. Once you get a little funding, you can do paid interviews and build on from there. There are survey tools, there’s all sorts of ways to get that input.

The important thing is to show that you’re going about it the right way, that you’re looking at the entire picture, not only as it is today, but as it would be in the future and getting all of that input.

The payer aspect is very important. Very early on, people are going to ask about coverage and about the payer incentive to do this. It’s very important to get that as well.

I cannot stress enough that having been an investor as well, those questions need to be answered early. It doesn’t have to be a huge quantitative study. You add to that, you refine it as you mature as a company. It can be a handful, but it’s actually very powerful to even have those handful of discussions early on.” — Grace Colon, Board Member at BIO