Inato’s Marketplace Evolution: Why They Spent 3 Years on Core Matching Before Adding Features

Most marketplace founders rush to add features. But when you’re connecting hospitals with pharmaceutical companies for clinical trials, getting the core matching wrong can have devastating consequences. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Kourosh Davarpanah revealed why Inato took an unusually methodical approach to marketplace development.

The Core Problem

The stakes in clinical trial matching are enormous. As Kourosh explains, “Out of the about 8000 patients that were in the different trials, only three patients were African American, and the disease predominantly affects African Americans. So when you’re in that type of situation, you don’t even know if the drug that comes to market really works on African Americans.”

Breaking from Convention

Instead of building a full-featured marketplace immediately, Inato made an unconventional choice. “What was quite unique to us is we ended up focusing on the discovery piece, on the matching piece for a really long period of time,” Kourosh shares. “We’re only now, after about three years, starting to expand to support everything you would expect in terms of the admin work, the legal work, the pricing, the payment, et cetera.”

Why Such Intense Focus?

The decision to spend three years on matching stemmed from understanding their market’s unique challenges:

1. Regulatory Complexity: “Because the industry is super regulated, and for very good reasons, they tend to be very concerned about the idea of trying out new approaches,” Kourosh explains. Getting the core matching wrong could have serious consequences.
2. Trust Building: “You need to have experts internally that the pharma are going to trust.” The team realized that building trust required perfecting their core value proposition before expanding.
3. Market Concentration: “The 5% top hospitals in the world run about 70 plus percent of trials.” Breaking this concentration required getting the matching exactly right.

The Human-First Approach

Rather than relying solely on technology, Inato built trust through expertise. They created an “amazing customer success team with dozens of years of pharma experience” to guide pharmaceutical companies through processes that were “partly product and partly still human based.”

This hybrid approach helped them understand “what does the pharma company want to see? What data points do they need to really create trust with sites?”

The Results of Focus

The methodical approach paid off. Today, Inato works with over half of the top pharmaceutical companies and approximately 3,500 sites across 50 countries, growing revenue by 600% in the past year.

Key Lessons for Marketplace Builders

1. Core Value First: Perfect your fundamental matching before adding auxiliary features
2. Trust Takes Time: In regulated industries, rushing to add features can undermine credibility
3. Human + Technology: Sometimes the best approach combines human expertise with technological matching
4. Market Understanding: Spend time understanding why existing solutions haven’t solved the problem
5. Patient Growth: Don’t be afraid to focus exclusively on core problems, even if it takes years

Looking ahead, Kourosh envisions making the entire process as seamless as consumer marketplaces: “The big picture for us is making it as easy for any hospital in the world to offer trials to their patients as it is to book a place on Airbnb.”

Currently, it takes six months of paperwork after a match before doctors can offer trials to patients. Kourosh believes marketplaces can transform this: “If you really want to increase patient access by, say, an order of magnitude, you really need to completely reinvent the collaboration model between pharma and hospitals… from discovery all the way to the partnership being sealed, this takes a week and not a year.”

For B2B marketplace founders, Inato’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the path to rapid growth requires extraordinary patience with your core offering. In complex markets, rushing to add features before perfecting your fundamental value proposition can undermine trust and limit long-term success.