How early commercial assessment can challenge founder assumptions, build investor confidence, and reveal a product’s true market potential.

A Harvard Biotech Company Founder Refused to Meet With Me. She Ended Up Hugging Me.

I had flown to Boston specifically to see her. She was the founder and scientific creator behind a promising new sickle cell drug. Her investor wanted to know if the sickle cell product they were developing could be commercially successful before committing. He knew the unmet need was real, but he needed confirmation that the target product profile would actually address the needs of the market.

The founder refused to meet with me. The CEO spent an entire day convincing her to sit down with me.

When she finally did, she told me exactly why she'd refused:

"You're commercial. You're going to want to kill my drug."

My answer came out before I could think about it:

"No. I want to make sure you don't waste the next 7 years of your life developing a product that no one uses or cares about."

She stood up from behind her desk, walked over, and gave me a big hug.

Then she called the CEO and said, "I really like him. He's great."

They got their funding.

But that wasn't the end of the story. The drug ultimately failed in Phase 3. That's the reality of drug development. New product development is hard, and no commercial assessment can change biology.

But something important happened before that outcome: the company held multiple discussions with new investors and with strategics interested in the product. The commercial work we had done featured prominently in every one of them and I was invited to participate in all of those initial conversations.

The assessment didn't kill the drug. It got investors and strategics excited and brought more interest than was originally the case . The early commercial assessment gave everyone at the table — founder, CEO, investors, clinical development, potential partners — a shared, credible picture of what the product could be. It replaced suspicion with transparency and some degree of confidence.

That engagement became one more data point in what eventually grew into the RAMPx model: a common framework that lets investors, CEOs, clinical teams, and commercial teams share the same customer-centric and commercial perspective. It provides a common language from day one.

Because for a single-asset company or a platform company with a lead asset, there's either no portfolio to hide behind or enough cash to develop the next product.

In today’s world, there are two ways to fail: the product doesn't work — or the product works, gets approved and nobody uses it.

You can't control the first one.

The second one is entirely preventable.

Mail