Our first version took three months. The procurement conversation took longer, and we started it months late.
Our first version took three months. The procurement conversation took longer, and we started it months late.
We wanted the product to survive a skeptical chemist before anyone saw it. Chemists are a hard audience, and in pharma the cost of looking unserious early is that you don’t get a second meeting. So we built, and we waited until it was defensible.
What we hadn’t accounted for is that enterprise procurement runs for months on its own. Security review. Legal. Vendor onboarding. IT assessment. Budget cycles that only open at certain points in the year, which you discover by missing one.
None of that depends on how good the product is. It’s a process that runs at its own pace once someone inside the organization decides to start it, and nothing you build makes it move faster.
Those two clocks run in sequence, not in parallel. Every month spent polishing was a month the second clock hadn’t started.
Today you can put something working in front of someone in days. That doesn’t make the mistake smaller, it makes it larger. If the product is no longer the bottleneck, then the only thing between you and a signed contract is how early you started the conversation that takes nine months.
What I’d do differently: have the first call before the product is ready, and be honest about where it is. A pharma team can tell the difference between an early product and an unserious one, and most of them would rather be in the conversation early than be sold to late. The buyer’s clock and your build clock should be running at the same time, not one after the other.
You can always build faster. But procurement has a tendency to move at its own slow pace
