Meri Beckwith of Lindus Health.
Tell us about yourself?
First time founder, trying to make a difference in the world of healthcare by making it easier to run clinical trials and health research. Going well so far. Also trying not to take myself too seriously! (not as successful).
What do you think is the single biggest misconception people have when it comes to startups?
What success looks like – there are lots of ways to succeed as a startup founder. It’s not all about raising tonnes of cash, press features, hustling, big exits etc.
If you could go back in time to any moment from your journey, and give yourself one tip, what would it be?
Trust your instincts. Often your first gut reaction is the right decision, and even if it isn’t, no decision is often worse than a bad decision!
What makes you stand out as an entrepreneur?
I’m a 20 something white male who can’t code. So not that. I’d maybe say the vision my co-founders and I have for the health research space is pretty enormous – we’re simultaneously trying to build 3 startups’ worth of products and features. But to get the best answer you’re better off asking the investors who backed us and our team who quit stable jobs to join our company!
What are some of the best working habits you’ve gained over the past couple of years?
Don’t micromanage; it’s way better to clearly define an exciting goal, and let everyone figure out the best way to achieve that goal.
Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?
My co-founders and I are huge fans of John Boyd. He was a US air force pilot that has quietly had a huge influence on military strategy, but also on business and entrepreneurship, particularly in tech. Inspired by how aerial dogfights and eventually wars were fought, won and lost, he was one of the first people to conceptualise Agile. Perhaps his most impactful idea is the OODA loop framework for decision making; gathering the required data to make a decision, making a decision, and crucially acting on that decision. Cycling through these steps quickly is guaranteed to make any individual or organisation perform better. I could rant for pages about Boyd and what entrepreneurs can learn from his works, but I’d recommend everyone read the excellent biography on Boyd by Robert Coram!
Where do you see your business in five years?
Lindus Health is the default partner for biotech and heathtech startups running clinical trials, helping bring new treatments to market radically faster than alternatives. By making it easier to develop new healthcare treatments, Lindus Health has inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs to build products in the space, playing a role in helping the biotech and healthtech ecosystem flourish.
What do you think the biggest challenge will be for you in getting there?
Figuring out how to scale as efficiently as possible! Incumbent competitors in our space solve this problem by throwing more bodies (literally highly paid consultants!) into each project. This greatly reduces efficiency, leads to cost overruns and delays, and ultimately is the reason it takes so long to run clinical trials and develop new healthcare treatments. We’re already seeing how our software is making trials more efficient, but we’ll need to continue pushing ourselves to find ways to automate more aspects of trials to ensure we don’t fall into the same trap that incumbents have.
Talk to us about your biggest success story so far?
We originally wanted to have run five clinical trials in 2022, as we assumed it would take a significant amount of time and product maturity to convince a healthtech company to trust us with their clinical trial. We’ve now helped run over 60! We’ve been blown away by the demand from our target customers, and extremely proud of how hard our team has worked to build out our product to allow us to take on so many new trials.
How do clients and customers find you? Are you much of a salesperson for yourself?
It’s a mix of outbound, inbound and referral, like a lot of enterprise B2B companies I imagine! But yes as a founder I spend a lot of time on sales. Our contract sizes are pretty significant (most are over $100k) so each sale is the result of building a good relationship with our customer, convincing them we can deliver, and creating a business case.
What one tip would you give to fellow startup founders?
Figuring out how to hire a great time and build an awesome culture is like having the cheat codes for building a company.
And finally, what do you hope the future brings both you personally, and your business?
Well, I’d love for the fundraising market to sort itself out! But seriously we’re very lucky to be able to work on such a significant and impactful problem, so I’d hope for continued progress for our business, particularly starting to work on even larger trials in the biotech space. Ultimately I want Lindus Health to fulfil it’s mission of making clinical trials and health research radically easier, so new treatments can reach patients sooner!
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