Buying peace of mind

Most often, we buy software for functionality: a specific feature, a solution to an annoying problem. But with some categories of tools, what you're actually buying (or looking for) is peace of mind – a way to feel more confident about something, reduce stress, or free up cognitive load. Here, we briefly cover the idea of buying peace of mind, and why that matters in biotech. If anything here resonates, please reach out!

When we were looking to make Kaleidoscope SOC 2 compliant, we went through Drata. Right now, their application is front and center on our desktops, constantly reminding our team of whether or not we’re compliant. For instance, every monitor used by a Kaleidoscopian must go into auto-lock mode after a minute of inactivity. Drata’s tool helps us monitor this, among many other things. 

As founders, this is why we chose to go with a provider like Drata. We wanted someone to guide us through a clear, actionable framework for compliance. Follow these steps, hit these milestones over the next 18 months, and you’re on track to become (and remain) compliant. 

This roadmap gave us full peace of mind. 

We recently spoke with someone who uses the same ‘peace’ gauge when buying software. They used to manage a fund with multiple arms (venture, real estate, and more) and needed a tool to track all the action items for each arm after each meeting. They went with the one that stored every action item no matter how small it was.  For them, buying the tool was as much, if not more, about buying peace of mind as it was about functionality. They knew it was unlikely they would ever need to tick off every action item – priorities change, and things get bumped off the list. But they wanted to feel secure knowing that all their to-do items were there, in case they ever needed to reference them.

In many industries, people reference buying software for peace of mind, but the sentiment isn’t echoed to the same extent in the biotech community. Biotechs do, however, hire consultants all the time – at the crux of this, is the feeling that they’re bringing experts on board who they can trust to point out their blindspots.

The more we speak with the customers who love Kaleidoscope and who expand their contracts with us, the more we realize that they think the same of our platform. Yes, they use the product for increased productivity, better access to data, easier collaboration – but, fundamentally, they use it because it gives them peace of mind. They can be confident they’re generating the data they need, advancing their pipeline at velocity, and allocating their resources efficiently. At the same time, they can automatically store, organize, review, and re-reference any piece of data they generate across their organization.

In biotech, where so much data is produced, it’s usually scattered across different tools and team members, with minimal visibility around where it’s stored and limited ways to summarize across sources. No biotech startup will ever need to use every piece of data they generate, but knowing the headline results + location of underlying raw data, is a powerful thing. Data availability and observability saves you from headaches later on – both when your company reaches inflection points and on a more regular cadence like during review meetings. 

No one wants to be scrambling for data when it’s time to file an IND, after realizing at the last minute that they don’t have it. Or to be spending a day each week, every week, digging through emails and spreadsheets, looking for key data that they need to summarize in presentations (something many of our customers tell us they previously had to do). This not only delays collaborative discussions internally, but also creates highly stressful situations when interacting with external parties, like Pharma partners – stress around whether the right data will be easily accessible during these high-stakes meetings.

This is the point of peace-of-mind businesses: for their customers to feel like they can put certain problems out of mind. These businesses are built on trust: the provider handles all the underlying complexity and provides simplified, direct guidance when needed, so that the customer can minimize distractions and cognitive load. 

We’ve learned through countless conversations that biotechs who don’t have this peace of mind are burned by the same stress over and over again. They stress about whether they’re spending money on the right things to generate the right data; about not knowing where all their data is or whether they’ll be able to find it when they need it; and about the expensive delays that all this causes in their path to market.

Having a reliable system in place - made up of both labor (like expert consultants) and software - is critical to circumvent this. Choosing the right tools will help you eliminate unnecessary stress, save you months every year in operating costs and admin, and pave the way to a clearer, faster path to market.

If you want to chat more about anything we wrote, or you’re interested in finding a way to work together, let us know!