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Bringing a first product to market as a startup in pharma, biotech, or medtech is an exercise in constrained ambition. Dollars are tight. Runway is limited. Expectations are astronomical. In this context, every investment must carry disproportionate weight—and that includes marketing research. When you don’t have the luxury of large budgets or long timelines, designing smarter, leaner studies isn’t optional—it’s existential.
Too often, early-stage companies default to broad, randomized respondent recruitment in their research—aiming for broad customer representativeness or pristine statistical projectability. But that approach, while academically tidy, often misses the mark in practice. Not all customer voices are equally valuable when your goal is to understand how to launch and grow a product under pressure.
Instead, startups must focus on deliberate, intentional sampling. This means carefully selecting respondents based not just on their titles, affiliations or academic bibliography, but on their real-world ability to drive business impact. These may not be the traditional podium speakers or trial investigators. They are often the high-volume, highly credible HCPs—either in academic centers or in the community—who can influence prescribing behavior at scale, but who often go overlooked in traditional qual or quant MR sampling.
When research budgets are limited, each interview or focus group must do more. That’s why I advocate for identifying respondents who are not only clinically credible, but commercially critical. These are the individuals who have high potential to evolve into early adopters and brand advocates—if you bring them along for the journey.
Engaging these stakeholders in iterative research isn’t about selling. It’s about co-creation. Whether it’s shaping a TPP, refining messaging, or evaluating market access strategies, their input can make or break a launch. When done well, engaging with these commercially critical HCPs also build early familiarity with your product, laying the foundation for advocacy when it matters most. We advocate for building iterative research programs where these HCPs might be engaged multiple times during the course of a launch.
In a previous LinkedIN article, I spoke about the concept of “Super Respondents”—those rare individuals whose marketing research feedback consistently offers outsized value. For startups, the stakes are even higher, and the definition expands. You’re not just looking for insightful thinkers; you’re looking for potential champions. People whose feedback can inform, and whose future behavior can influence adoption. You don’t find these people by accident. You find them through a rigorous, strategic approach to recruitment.
And these folks might or might not be the types who pitch a tent in front of an Apple store to get the latest iPhone. Sometimes those folks are as quick to ditch a new product as they are to embrace it.
It’s tempting to think of the market as a monolith, but healthcare markets are typically hierarchical by nature. Early adopters aren’t always the loudest or most visible—they’re the ones who try, stick, and tell others. "Power Sneezers," as Seth Godin once called them (in his book, Unleashing the Ideavirus, published in 2000). These are the people whose enthusiasm is contagious, whose endorsement drives diffusion. Identifying and engaging them early can yield disproportionate downstream value—both in insight and influence.
In the startup world, every encounter must count. Whether it’s a 1:1 interview or a group advisory session, your research must be high-impact and insight-rich. That doesn’t start with the discussion guide—it starts with the recruit list.
You’re not operating with the resources of a global giant. You’re fighting uphill, with limited time, capital, and team bandwidth. That’s why being intentional isn’t just good practice—it’s a survival strategy. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae, you win not by brute force, but by precision, discipline, flexibility, and choosing every move with care. In your case, a few well-chosen respondents can stand against the noise, the inertia, and the risk of getting it wrong.
Choose wisely. Make every conversation count. And let your research carry more than its weight.
