RxDefine

RxDefine is a platform that helps pharma companies with consumer marketing by enabling them to create patient engagement through a call to action on pharmaceutical brand websites for their medications. This allows pharmaceutical companies to promote their products while learning more about their customers, provide a better and more interactive customer experience, and empower patients to explore and understand their healthcare options. RxDefine’s patient engagement platform includes a live concierge operated by “nurse navigators” to help answer patient questions, provide educational resources, and schedule appointments with doctors.

Before RxDefine, pharmaceutical companies were extremely limited in the data they could collect about their customers and the efficacy of their marketing efforts. So much of traditional pharmaceutical marketing centers on producing expensive leave-behind documents for doctors offices, and advertisements where the only call to action is “talk to a doctor.” There is no exchange of information or data in these traditional ad channels, so pharma companies don’t get feedback on their marketing and customers, and customers can’t engage in a conversation about whether a drug is right for them unless they visit a doctor’s office. RxDefine is revolutionizing the traditional pharmaceutical marketing model, making the process more effective and informative for manufacturers, clinicians, and patients alike.

Where did the idea for RxDefine come from?

Ahmed: My cofounder Chase Feiger, MD and I were both watching the rapid growth of direct-to-consumer telemedicine companies like hims, roman, and curology. This was happening at the same time that telemedicine regulations were loosening and opening up space for innovation. As we started conducting customer development with pharmaceutical companies, we discovered a major pain point – these companies know very little about their customers, and customers don’t have a streamlined way to learn about their treatment options. This resulted in a hypothesis: could we provide the same patient experience as direct-to-consumer telemedicine companies by creating engaging pharma landing pages that better empower the patient to understand their options while arming pharmaceutical companies with better information to improve the patient experience going forward?

What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?

Chase: I like to get up at 5:30am and start my day mapping out blockers across all areas of the business. For most, getting started is the hardest and I feel like I gain a lot of momentum by going through some of the outstanding items from the previous night.

How do you bring ideas to life?

Chase: Customer development. Every idea is really a hypothesis that needs to be validated. As such, anytime I get a new idea, I pressure test it with existing and new potential customers to validate or invalidate the seriousness of the pain/problem it solves. After receiving input, I run low-cost experiments putting the solution into the market. I then take the data from the experiment, make the proper adjustments and either continue running new experiments, put it on ice, or kill it.

What’s one trend that excites you?

Ahmed: In the last year, we have seen a huge influx of venture funding enter the market. I am incredibly excited about this because it’s resulting in very capital intensive companies that used to have a hard time getting quickly funded – personalized medicine and biogenomics, robotics, space travel, etc.

What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?

Ahmed: I am an inbox 0 person. I cannot go to sleep without resolving all of the issues or at least having a plan to resolve the issues for the day.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Ahmed: Don’t sweat the small stuff. If it will not matter in 1 year, and therefore, it should not matter now.

Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.

Ahmed: We drastically underestimate existential risks – asteroid collision, genetically modified viruses, nuclear war, etc. As a result, we don’t spend enough time both trying to prevent those risks by investing in preventative mechanisms in the unlikely circumstance they are to occur.

As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?

Ahmed: Read a lot and maximize your time with people you want to be like and enjoy working with.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?

Chase: Understand the overlapping area between your strongest ability and what energizes you the most. Simultaneously, be honest with yourself about every area where you’re weak. Next, hire people smarter than you in all of those areas.

What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?

Chase: As an entrepreneur, I’ve failed four times. The root cause for each of these four failures is me not conducting a true customer development process. I’ve actually never gotten an idea right the first time. It’s because good ideas are extremely rare. Nothing is a “good idea” until it has been validated (i.e. it has been validated by your target market and customer segment). In fact, when an entrepreneur has a “good idea” and has not taken the time to get out of the office and interact directly with their end-users to validate it, I already know they’re likely on a path to failure. To create a good idea, you need to get inside the mind of your end-users and decision-makers. It’s critical to empathize and experience the world through your customer. As such, to overcome failure, I always do the same thing: go back to customer development. Customer development is my compass through all failure.

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?

Chase: Apply consumerization techniques to a legacy industry that has barely adopted technology.

What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?

Ahmed: I recently got a Clear membership – which really speeds up time to go through airport security. I highly recommend it and it’s offered as a part of many credit cards membership benefits.

What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?

Ahmed: I am an avid user of Superhuman, the email client. It allows me to go through my email 2-3x faster than I normally would.

What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?

Ahmed: I really enjoyed Driven by Alex Davies which discusses the history behind autonomous vehicles. I think anyone interested in entrepreneurship should give it a read because it illustrates how relentless vision and grit can enable an underdog to take on the incumbents.

What is your favorite quote?

Ahmed: You have about 80,000 hours in your career: 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 40 years.
This makes your choice of career the most important ethical decision of your life. – 80,000 Hours (Centre for Effective Altruism)