Sorcero’s Framework for Product-Market Fit in Regulated Industries
Finding product-market fit in regulated industries requires a different playbook. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Sorcero founder Dipanwita Das revealed how they tested across verticals before finding their sweet spot in medical affairs – an approach that led to 400% year-over-year growth.
Testing Across Verticals
“We knew from day one that medical affairs was going to be one of our customer bases,” Dipanwita explains, “but we spent still the first three ish years looking at other and running pilots and tests with other verticals as well, insurance and otherwise.”
This methodical exploration revealed three critical challenges that would shape their product strategy: “First, of course, data is everywhere. There’s a lot of it. It’s also spread out and really hard to handle. The data unification challenge is extremely real.”
The second insight proved even more valuable: “We’re building the same thing over and over again. With every new campaign, with every new group we’re supporting, with every new disease we’re working on, we’d start everything again and build again.”
Finding Their Ideal Customer
Through these pilots, Sorcero identified medical affairs teams as their ideal first market. These customers had spent “eleven years and $2.6 billion to take a new product to market” and were “convinced from the data that I have seen so far that this is going to be a blockbuster, which means it’s going to make 16, $20 billion.”
This profile meant their customers had both the urgency and resources to adopt new solutions. As Dipanwita notes, “Medical affairs, as you know, is much more focused in the business of treating patients, not just making money or not making money at all. It’s mainly focused on patients.”
Indicators of Product-Market Fit
Three key signals showed Sorcero had found PMF:
- Customer Adoption Speed: After launching their first product in early 2021, they rapidly expanded to three products with 400% growth.
- Network Effects: “It’s both a big and a small industry. Everyone talks to each other,” Dipanwita explains. “Which means once the top three customers begin to use us and start talking about us, the other ones follow.”
- Measurable Impact: Teams using their platform work 92% faster, while gaining insights that were previously impossible to surface manually.
Building for Scale
Understanding their market led to a crucial insight about product development. “In 2021, in 2020, people were a lot more skeptical about buying a product without seeing proof of that product being, well, fully baked,” Dipanwita shares.
This influenced their approach to building: comprehensive solutions over MVPs, deep functionality over quick iterations. The result is a platform that serves as what Dipanwita envisions as “the command center for Life Sciences product commercialization.”
For founders targeting regulated industries, Sorcero’s journey offers a valuable framework: test methodically across verticals, but when you find your market, build deep. Success in these industries often comes not from moving fast and breaking things, but from understanding deeply and building comprehensively.
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