Alpha Sophia Founder and CEO Paul-Lukas Hoffschmidt explains how the company’s software diverges from competitors in healthcare commercial intelligence, with a focus on smaller innovators.
Why did you start this company?
There are approximately 15,000 startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the medtech and digital health space spearheading some of the most important innovations in healthcare today. However, these innovators lack the boundless resources of large healthcare players who can place a sales rep in every county. They are often forced to make critical decisions regarding the commercialization of their products with limited data on their target market.
Whether it’s understanding market size, identifying key opinion leaders, or pinpointing early adopter segments, data insights are the essential compass guiding a company’s growth strategy.
Diving more into this space, we observed that this valuable commercial intelligence data was primarily sold by large corporations that target other healthcare behemoths. As a result, the pricing of healthcare intelligence software has long been opaque and prohibitively expensive for smaller companies. In our conversations with healthcare leaders, we also learned that putting this data into action was challenging. Spreadsheets required an analyst on staff who could make sense of the numbers, and consequently, significant investments into data never translated into actionable steps within the sales organization.
Paul-Lukas Hoffschmidt
At Alpha Sophia, our objective is simple: to make healthcare intelligence affordable and delightful to use, thereby helping propel more innovations into our healthcare marketplace.
What does your product do? How does it work?
Our product is a browser-based software that allows you to slice and dice the healthcare provider market across various dimensions at the same time. Crafted to deliver a user experience more akin to a social media site than a conventional data platform, Alpha Sophia lets you seamlessly add and remove filters, allowing you to assemble hyper-targeted lead lists for your product. For example, a medtech company in the orthopedic space could swiftly apply several filters to narrow down from a total market view of all surgeons to their target audience: Orthopedic surgery physicians in the Midwest, focused on hip and knee surgery, with a LinkedIn account, who have received less than $10k in financial benefits from a key competitor and have been in their profession for less than 15 years. In this way, Alpha Sophia makes identifying relevant providers and markets a seamless process.
Moreover, the tool incorporates customer relationship management functionality, allowing users to transition seamlessly from slicing and dicing data to operationalizing it. This includes creating and sharing lead lists or exporting data into in-house tools like HubSpot or Salesforce.
Who is your customer?
Our customers are the growth leaders at startup and SMB medtech and digital health companies. We also serve customers who lead innovative units at larger companies. The defining characteristic among all our customers is their laser focus on allocating resources strategically, ensuring they invest in the right places and target the right audiences. By enabling social media targeting, we have observed that many of our partners are keen on exploring omnichannel growth as a lever in healthcare, diversifying the channels they invest in to establish relationships with healthcare providers.
While many of our customers have previously purchased data solutions from the dinosaurs in the industry, they seek us out to maximize the actionability of provider intelligence for their teams.
Photo: FG Trade, Getty Images
