Steve Harvey and his business partner managed to raise enough money to rent some lab space in Cambridge (UK) to get started on an idea they had for synthesizing template-free DNA.
The Start
They invited an investor to meet them at the lab where they sat on the garden furniture Steve brought with him because they had nothing else.
TL;DR They got more money. Camena Bioscience was getting started.
That was the first hurdle. There were more. Competitors had similar ideas around the IP. And evolution had a different idea, altogether.
Synthesizing DNA without a template means providing an enzyme with modified nucleotide bases so that only one can be added to the DNA chain at a time. After addition, a blocking group is removed, allowing the next base in the sequence to be added. That’s the only way to end up with the gene you intend to make.
The problem is that most enzymes are very good at what they do. In this case, the enzyme, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase, naturally prefers unmodified nucleotides (evolution). If there are any of those contaminating the mix, the enzyme will add a string of them even before you can spell “DNA”. The end result is likely a lot of DNA of the wrong sequence.
The Pivot
Steve decided it was time to take a different approach. (If you meet a founder who has never had to pivot, congratulate them.) It’s a hard thing to do after investing time and money and being (partially) successful.
The new approach seems to have worked out. Camena published a couple of application notes and they were picked up by Nature Biotechnology for a story about DNA synthesis technologies.
Now they were getting customers but awareness was still a challenge.
I had a couple of people that came to me and said, “We've looked at your website. We, don't really know what you do.” Okay. And so I decided that we need to get some kind of numerical value on brand awareness.
I announced the team, “We're gonna run some brand awareness surveys. We'll put it out via LinkedIn and Twitter as well. We'll understand, you know, do people really know what we do?”
And I put it out and I was quite excited about doing this. And then I think it was two weeks later, we'd had five responses. And I think one of the responses was from a family member. So, so it didn't go very well.
But Steve wasn’t deterred. He tried again with the offer of a $25 Amazon gift card.
I think it was within a week we had 2000 responses. So it was, the whole thing was really funny. But what came out of that was that, it was roughly kind of 75% of people that responded to the survey had only heard of us in the last six months, and we'd been going for nearly like six years!
Hey, that’s progress.
The Story
Steve decided to post regularly on LinkedIn about his journey, which is how I found him. He did a great job of posting a little bit of the story each day, (like Charles Dickens!) and teasing what was to come.
His followers have grown significantly and no doubt more people know about Camena Bio as a result.
In my own experience, authentic personal stories get the most traction. People are interested in people. Products are useful. People are fascinating. You may not think you are, but I’ve interviewed hundreds of people across several podcasts for myself and my clients. Only one was an absolute dud that left me with nothing to publish.
Find your channel. It might be LinkedIn, your blog, a podcast, someone else’s podcast or that thing that was Twitter yesterday, but is apparently “X” today.
Schedule a 15-minute chat with Chris about turning conversations into content for your life science company.
Intro Music stefsax / CC BY 2.5
Pivoting and Storytelling Along the Founder's Journey