With a $6.1B valuation today, cloud software startup Benchling has taken the biotech R&D world by storm. Itâs hard to believe that in their early days, they went several years without earning any revenue.
So, how did they grow from 0 revenue to becoming a unicorn?
đ Customer obsession. Benchling invested into deep relationships with their initial customers, which caused a snowball effect.
What does this mean for founders like you?
âïžDeeply understand the problem that youâre trying to solve much better than existing solutions.
Back in 2012, the software world was booming around mobile and on-demand, but the biotech industry hadnât caught up. Scientists were still capturing experimental data in notebooks or Excel, which made recordkeeping difficult to track and limited direct collaboration. There were no existing tech-enabled solutions.
So, Benchlingâs small team of 5 grounded themselves in customer discovery and coding. They traveled to university labs at MIT and Stanford, sat down with scientists one-by-one, and understood all their pain points.
Through these individual conversations, they learned that sequence design and lab management inventory were major obstacles to overcome. This informed their vision to build top-notch softwareâas sleek and purposeful as consumer softwareâto suit biotech workflows.
âïž Create an “unattackable” moat with your first customers.
They initially gave their software away for free to academic researchers. From a business standpoint, this was scary to investors. They were generating no revenue and werenât courting big industry players.
Targeting scientists in academia, however, allowed Benchling to specifically cater software features towards these end users and completely win them over. Academics saw that Benchling was mission-critical to their researchâs success.
When these scientists later moved on into industry or founded their own biotechs, they remembered Benchling and brought the software over. Growing alongside these early customers allowed Benchling to land industry clients, including well-known big pharma companies.
âïžKeep adapting with your customersâ needs, even after success.
Even with over 200K scientists on their platform, Benchling never stopped listening to their needs. They realized that biotech was quickly evolving into other areas such as consumer materials and foodtech. Lab techniques and instruments were also rapidly advancing. This meant more complex data sets that needed to be managed.
Benchlingâs software could not stay static if they still wanted to achieve product-market fit.
Over time, theyâve added advanced features to contribute value at scale. Recently, they saw opportunity in RNA therapeutics, following the success of Pfizer and Modernaâs vaccines. Their newly released feature helps researchers create, test, and develop mRNA molecules.
Sometimes you need to innovate just as well as your customers!
đ§ȘThe future of biotech is bright with you, Sajith and Ashu!
