PeakSel MolEvent

Hop on hop off business model

Creating software for pharma/biotech has proven to be prohibitively expensive. That's why good tools in Life Sciences are so rare. But you're not limited by just 2 options (in-house solutions and off-the-shelf products). Instead, you can sponsor products and if you have budget cuts at some point, just hop off and let someone else take over. And then enjoy future updates without having to invest more money.

The algorithm:

  1. You share (support@elsci.io) your problems with us, and we conduct research. The result is a proposal on how the problems can be solved.
  2. If both sides agree on a common vision, we start a project with your funding. Basically, you pay for the licenses upfront, not for the development! So if your funding was 1$ and the license costs 0.25$/year then you'll be able to use the software for free for 4 years. If you know other companies willing to share the cost with you, that's even better. Note, that in the end the IP will be owned by us.
  3. During the active phase we have occasional meetings with the scientists on your side to ensure our directions are aligned with your needs.

Why is this better than buying off-the-shelf products?

You probably noticed that many software packages that claim to solve your problems don't do this effectively. Most of the time this happens because engineers are disconnected from their users. Eventually they may be solving problems that don't actually exist.

We think that collaborating with our future users is the key to building convenient software that makes you productive. This is why our model assumes keeping a close contact with you.

Why is this better than in-house projects?

Starting a project inside the company is a great way to solve problems of a small group of people. This helps refining the ideas and deepens the understanding of technical challenges. But it quickly becomes unrealistic to build a high-quality product once it gets outside of a closed circle of advanced users:

  1. It's too expensive to keep evolving products for many years. The funding ends before the product fully matures.
  2. Writing software assumes a lot of hidden work: creating pretty UI compatible with different browsers, handling edge cases, constantly improving performance, refactoring, integration with 3d-party software, supporting different vendors and formats, security, usability, etc. This all becomes very important once we let the product out to a bigger audience. But most scientists quickly get bored and move on to other tasks once they realize that 80% of the work they do isn't actually science.

And so companies end up with slow, hard-to-use, buggy software. In contrast, we at Elsci are committed to building mature products, improving and maintaining them for many years. We're ready to go extra mile to deliver quality.

Why is this better than outsourcing?

Many companies these days leverage outsourcing when they lack IT skills or simply look for cheaper options. But:

  1. Outsourcing is still a pretty expensive option
  2. Many outsourcing companies do not understand science. So you'll have to constantly oversee the development and point them in the right direction. This is a lot of additional effort from your side.
  3. After an outsourced project is done, there's often an awkward transition. By the end of it you don't necessarily have full knowledge about how to maintain and further develop the project yourself.

What are your risks with us?

As usually there is a risk that the product fails to satisfy your needs, but:

  1. The odds of the failure are lower than usually since we have a lot of experience both in Software Development and Life Sciences
  2. The costs are much lower too. We can agree on piecemeal payments, this will further lower the risks.