🎓 Don’t Be Like Bob: How to Align Your Tech with Market Demand

Anyone can start a biotech company.
Only a few can successfully build their technology from idea to MVP to product.
And even fewer can connect that technology to a real commercial outcome.

After speaking with 200+ technical founders and leaders—and based on my own experience—the biggest challenge remains the same: aligning technical strategy with commercial success.

Take Bob and his startup, Bob’s Biotech. Bob was a technical genius, with multiple publications in top journals and a shelf full of awards. Six months into launching his company, he had already built an early MVP of a biomanufactured product.

Bob knew he needed to lower costs, so he focused on reducing the doubling time of his cells, reasoning that faster-growing cells would mean shorter bioreactor dwell times and lower COGS.

But Bob missed a key insight: below a certain threshold, reducing doubling time has little to no impact on COGS.

After pouring time and money into the project, Bob discovered that cutting doubling time by 20% only led to a 5% reduction in COGS—far short of the 50%+ savings he needed.

I’ve seen this story play out too many times.
Biotech founders, armed with deep technical expertise, focus on the wrong optimizations—burning time, money, and momentum.

The lesson?
As a startup, your most limited resources are time and money. You can’t afford to optimize the wrong things.

If you're a technical founder, don’t be like Bob. Instead:

✅ Identify your market and their pain points early.
✅ Build and iterate your unique value proposition from the start.
✅ Set a North Star goal—every decision should move you toward it.
✅ Use techno-economic analysis (TEA) to link COGS to technology. Find the biggest inefficiencies and eliminate them first.

Your technical roadmap should be a commercial roadmap. That’s how biotech startups win.

I help founders bridge the gap between science and business so they can build commercially viable biotech products—without wasting time on the wrong optimizations. If that’s something you’re working on, let’s chat.