Beach After Bio

Well, it’s now been six months since I quietly retired as President & Co-Founder of BioInformatics Inc. It was good time for me to leave, both professionally and personally, and the company I co-founded in 1994 is now in the capable hands of Science and Medicine Group, Inc.?The intervening months flew past as I prepared to sell my house in Arlington, VA and get a fresh start close to the ocean in Wilmington, NC. Now that I’ve settled in, I’ve had time to reflect on 28 years of delivering actionable insights to more than 500 life science suppliers.

When we started, “bioinformatics” meant little more than using a computer in biology. And what a computer we had! A Macintosh SE with 1 MB of RAM. Pairing this beast with a 9600 baud modem enabled us to tap into the pre-Web universe of digital information. In this way we could create profiles of scientific accounts and competitors to be used by the salesforces of the nascent life science tools industry. For the next 27 years we debated changing the name of the company!

Client feedback quickly told us that relying only on secondary information alone was insufficient for them to get an edge on their competitors. They needed deeper insights into their scientific customers’ budgets and purchasing intentions. So, we formed a network known as “the Molecular Moms” – former life science sales reps who had temporarily left the workforce to start or spend more time with their families. They were perfect for doing qualitative research because they all had scientific degrees, they all had their own networks of scientists, and weren’t at all shy about getting on the phone and asking questions. We met regularly with the Molecular Moms at the Pooks Hill Marriot near the NIH and our team meetings usually had an abundance of infants and toddlers in attendance.

In 1996, we had an idea to conduct a quantitative survey to collect data for a published report. The topic? “Would scientists ever use this new Web-thingy to buy lab products?” So, we printed 10,000 questionnaires, rented a mail list and mailed them out with a return envelope. Within a week we received over 1,200 responses from scientists around the country who told us, “Why ‘yes’, we would like to buy lab products online!” We now had the data to produce our report but we noticed something curious. If the respondent wished to be entered into a drawing for a cash prize, they needed to provide us with their contact information. Much to our surprise, most of the respondents simply entered their name and email address.

This was the proverbial “Ah-Ha!” moment. If this is how scientists wanted us to communicate with them, perhaps this was also the way to survey them. We quickly socialized this idea with several dozen respondents to the survey. The key takeaway from these discussions was that very few were interested in simply answering surveys. They needed more if they were to take time away from their important work in their labs.

This was our second “Ah-Ha!” moment. As most of you know, science rarely advances in isolation. It advances when scientists communicate and collaborate. This is an important reason why scientists join scientific societies. They join to keep up with developments in their field, network with their peers, find mentors and mentees, and - although they’d never call it this - to build their personal brand.

So, we set out to develop a platform that would deliver many of the same benefits of scientific societies but to deliver these benefits online. In other words, we set out to build an online community of scientists. With the help of Martin Leach, a young PhD candidate at Boston University, we built what today would be called in integrated content management system, an email system, a survey platform and a quasi-relational database. I say “quasi-“ because it was running in Filemaker Pro on the Mac SE and we had to manually synch it with the website several times a day.

On September 11, 1997, we started emailing scientists with invitations to join this new online community dedicated to advancing the tools and techniques of science. We had to send them in batches of 200 because there’s only so much you can push through a 9600 baud modem. Within an hour we had our first member – a post doc at the University of Calgary.?By the end of the week, we had over 5,000 registered members of The Science Advisory Board who were enticed by our invitation to “communicate, collaborate, and contribute” with their peers.

Scientists being inherently curious and skeptical, we also received hundreds of inquiries about who we were, what were our objectives, and who would this benefit? We learned an important lesson during this period – the importance of total transparency. We took the time to answer each question thoroughly with probably way more detail than they expected and a personalized appeal to join. Most of these skeptics not only joined, many became our most enthusiastic evangelists and contributed content to the site and moderated our discussion board.

By 2001 after we had upgraded our technology, members were contributing content in the form of sharing news, posting opinion pieces, and writing product, book and website reviews. They shared protocols, job opportunities, and made personal connections. They even formed local “meet up” groups to get to know fellow members in their area. Whenever possible, we would attend these functions and build friendships with these scientists that endure today. The focus was always on the value we could deliver to them in return for taking the time to answer our questions.?We had in fact created Facebook For Scientists. Before there was a Facebook.

The Science Advisory Board is the engine that drove the industry-facing BioInformatics LLC (later Inc.) brand. It gave us the ability to scale and take on multiple proprietary market research projects for our commercial clients, produce off-the-shelf market reports and deliver pre-qualified respondents for focus groups and one-on-one interviews. This continues to this day.

There’s a lot more to the story of course.?There were lots of highs but more than a few lows. As I cheekily wrote in announcing my retirement, George Carlin once said, “Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting ‘holy shit, what a ride’!” Indeed, what a ride it was!

Perhaps I’ll share more about the business lessons I learned in the coming months. Until then, I want to thank three groups of amazing people. First, our clients who placed their trust and confidence in us over many years. I’m especially grateful to those people who may be reading this with whom I’ve developed personal friendships. I miss hearing from you so keep in touch! Second, thank you to all of the scientists who built our community and continue to drive BioInformatics’ market research services. I’ll never stop being in awe of your passion for making the world a better place. Finally, to all of the employees of BioInformatics – past and present.?You guys and gals built this! And in doing so, you gave our clients the insights they need to help the world’s scientific community drive science forward.

Best wishes to you all and keep in touch!

Bill