Ask HN: How do you get companies to talk to you about their problems?
I&#x27;m coming from a different place than most other HN commenters - I now work for a tech startup, but have a graduate degree in biochem where I worked in drug discovery. As a result, and before I decided I was not ethically congruent with working for Big Pharma, I had informational interviews, advisors, peers, and all kinds of honest interactions with people who work for pharmas, biotechs, CROs, research labs of all kinds, and hospitals. Of course, I wasn&#x27;t trying to sell them anything.<p>You don&#x27;t mention what your product or service is. If you&#x27;re creating solutions on the per-project side, essentially starting a CRO, you should hire scientists with PhDs and talk to other CROs to see if they have more contracts than capacity (yes this is a lot like being a software contractor). If you&#x27;re doing a product, &quot;life sciences and pharma&quot; is not a vertical, it&#x27;s about a half-dozen of them. Pharma for instance has different problems in R&amp;D and go-to-market, and it&#x27;s typically not the same organizations that do pharma R&amp;D and market activities. Smaller pharmas, CROs, academic research labs, and specific innovation departments might do R&amp;D, and larger pharmas have armies of representatives selling different drugs (mostly) to doctors or hospitals, marketing arms that organize and fund studies and clinical trials, M&amp;A specialists that choose compounds to buy and market, subcontractors that produce the drugs in marketable quantities (this is not the same as e.g. the quantity you need for a clinical trial), and regulatory affairs staff, and all those people largely are ignorant of the problems that are not at their specific level of the value chain.<p>Once you have chosen a specific segment to focus on (e.g. you want to reach an early stage pharma that does have staff and funding and maybe is starting one clinical trial), you can reach them through several channels. One is asking your investors, your company&#x27;s CEO, your incubator or other startup-adjacent staff for intros to people who are doing or funding companies like your target profile (be specific). You can also go to networking events at incubators, chambers of commerce, or startup-focused conferences for that stage. You will meet executives and investors, so you can ask executive-and-investor generic questions to have insight on market dynamics, funding situations, and growth stage. (&quot;Where do you want the company to be in 3 years?&quot;, &quot;What was your last executive hire, and why did you pick their profile?&quot;, &quot;Who are your competitors?&quot;) This will not help with product but might help with pricing, time-to-market, and other elements of the &quot;sales&quot; side of the product strategy. At small companies where the exec is likely to approve every line item, you can also ask if they are customers of X competitor of yours, which will give you an idea of that competitor&#x27;s market.<p>Another option is to look at who they&#x27;re hiring. Staff at companies in this industry tend to have graduate degrees and their entry level jobs are as laboratory or project management staff, so you can try to find students at the tail end of their PhDs or postdoc at research centers with close industry ties. Calls with them should be easy to get and you can ask them about the technical jobs to be done your product is supposed to help with. Depending on what your product is, they may also have used something like it and talk about competitors, if your product serves a function that also exists in academia. Some professors can also be very good networkers (like investors) and if you can get a warm intro to them, they may spontaneously refer you to people.<p>Look at competitors&#x27; advertising. In this space it will be in trade journals, trade shows or conferences, and Internet-based advertising like AdWords and such. Find the ads themselves, follow the companies on social media to be sure to catch any public posts they make, and do your own ads in the same space to try to get 1) a profile on the kind of people who click them and 2) maybe email addresses of very curious parties.<p>At conferences (healthcare or otherwise) you&#x27;re unlikely to have people committed enough to give you contact info for a follow-up call, but targeted conferences are great places to rapidly have 100+ 5-min shallow conversations. Walk on the floor in the dedicated vendor space, ask everyone you see who they work for and if they&#x27;ve heard of $market_leader in your tool space or $problem_you_solve. Half of them will not, that&#x27;s ok. Ask those who do for a quick sentiment on $problem, if it affects them personally, and why&#x2F;why not. Only ask (or beg) for a follow-up call if they look very interested and there&#x27;s a good match between their space and yours, and if you do ask for a call, mention you have nothing to sell and are after information. You need to find the right conference or trade show for this. Things your competitors advertise at (better: sponsor), or even ask your existing customers which they go to. Health conferences specifically are about 50% doctors, so that&#x27;s why hanging out in the vendor area is usually a better bet. Other vendors will also have downtime and you can talk to them when they look bored.<p>Cold emails&#x2F;LinkedIn contacts&#x2F;phone calls work too, but at like 1&#x2F;100 the rate of contacts at conferences or warm intros. So, if you have a couple afternoons free and don&#x27;t mind the occasional very vocal rejection, you can do that, same deal as at conferences with starting with a short intro&amp;question to qualify who they are in the space and asking politely for an info call only if there&#x27;s a relatively positive response.<p>I mentioned phone calls. The reason Airbyte&#x27;s strategy worked for them is software developers live on their computers. Most people in other industries don&#x27;t. Some are even (gasp) over 50 and don&#x27;t have a ton of downtime at home due to family and other obligations. If you&#x27;re doing warm outreach, and your contact gives you both an email and phone number, call. If you get a business card with both an email and phone number, call. The only time you shouldn&#x27;t at least try calling is if you got the number by paying for a database or otherwise have very unqualified leads. Never hold people on the phone too long unless they&#x27;re the ones talking: if there&#x27;s a positive response to outreach, schedule a follow-up call.