The post was originally published in Russian on Startup of the Day. Alexander kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.
The global market of pharmaceutical drugs is about USD 1.5 trillion, roughly 1.5% of the world’s GDP. There are 9 million doctors in the world – roughly 0.15% of the world’s working population. Subtract one by the other, and we see that even without the cost of the procedures, simply by prescribing meds, the doctor distributes 10 times more money than a regular person spends. Considering instances of self-treatment, when there is a pill but there is no doctor, – ok, it will be 8 or 9 times, because you won’t buy anything serious without a prescription. And in many countries, you won’t buy anything without a subscription at all.
And let’s note that a regular person spends on the home loans,the care, clothes, restaurants, and finally pills. And the doctor is focused on their narrow niche and prescribes relatively few drugs. All their ‘megabudget’ is spent on it. Getting into the list of prescribed pills is as good as gold for a pharmaceutical company. Ads directed at doctors are more than many more times more expensive than the regular ones.
All one needs is to bring the doctors together in a closed place without outsiders. This is both important for the price of the ads (‘no impression gets lost’) and legally required in some jurisdictions – you can’t advertise meds to regular people.
Docquity, the Singaporean startup of the day, uses the bait of free education to hook doctors. Dear doctor, please register, show you license or diploma, and you immediately get an ocean of content about all the innovation and recent research. And you also get to discuss it with others like you. And it’s all for free, you just get some useful things and an opportunity to treat patients based on the most up-to-date information. And from this point we know how to monetize your precious time, we have all the pharmaceutical companies lined up. Of course, the doctors buy it.
As of now, Docquity operates in six countries of South-East Asia, it brought in USD 32M in its recent round. There are similar projects in other countries. Japanese M3 went IPO quite a while ago, it costs over USD 20B today.
Alexander made his career in Russian internet companies including Mail.Ru, Rambler, RBC. From 2016 to 2018 he was Chief Strategy and Analytics officer in Mail.Ru Group. In this position, he worked on M&A, investments, and new project launches. In 2018 he became Deputy CEO in Citymobil, a Russian Uber-like company that was invested by Mail.Ru Group and Sberbank (the biggest Russian bank), then he left the company to launch his own projects. Now Alexander is a co-founder of United Investors – the platform for co-investments in Russian early-stage startups. His blog #startupoftheday (#стартапдня) is one of the most popular blogs about startups in Russia.
