The huge opportunity to build better software for pharma in Romania

The pharma retail market in Romania has seen a constant increase in revenue year over year, at about 4 billion euros in 2018 corresponding to a 70% increase over ten years. This increase hasn't stopped, and it seems like the global pandemic hasn't affected sales at all.

In spite of these numbers, the harsh reality is that all these pharmaceutical retailers use an unfortunate mix of expensive and disconnected software solutions to help them manage their businesses, largely because they have no good alternatives.

Out of all these software solutions, the most important one for most of them is the retail application. This application is what pharmacists use every day and thus can generate the most stress for its users if it is not performant enough, because they need to use this application all the time when interacting with the pharmacy's clients for counseling, product availability queries, sales, reporting, and so on.

Some pharmacists have to deal with hundreds of people every day, besides having to do other duties like making sure they are never out of stock on what matters, or placing purchase orders for items on backorder. So you might imagine what kind user experience can be had or what kind of customer satisfaction rates can occur, if the retail application is not snappy and responsive enough.

Software vendors have yet to come up with new, performant and modern solutions that cater directly to the pharmaceutical retailers in Romania, and it seems like they might never do. From my experience, it seems that this is a multi-faceted problem. One reason is that these companies have built huge, tightly-coupled monoliths using very old technologies (mostly Delphi, Pascal and MFC) and old proprietary libraries that have reached end of life. Some have tried to move to C# and DotNet but all they ended up doing is build other tightly coupled pieces of code (because that's the only way they know how write code). Some of these companies have the same software architect/lead since they started (because that's the only person that is capable of making sense of the project and the huge and tangled code base).

Because I'm very passionate about computer software, programming and clean architecture, and because over time I've become very frustrated with the current situation regarding the available software solutions for pharma in Romania, I've gradually learned to let go of some of that frustration and see this as an opportunity to build proper software for the over 4000 companies doing business in the pharmaceutical retail sector in Romania, starting with the point of sales (PoS) application that is most important for their core business.

If I have convinced you to see this as a huge opportunity to start a sustainable business, I am looking for a tech partner to share the business with and work with me to help build the best software for pharma in Romania (for the start).

If you want to talk to me, you can introduce yourself over an email at my address: brokenthorn@gmail.com

Tech stack: C#, .Net 5, ASP.NET Core 5, SQL Server, Vue.js/Nuxt, TypeScript.

About me:

I'm a passionate self-taught software developer with over 10 years of experience as a SQL DBA and IT Manager, looking to switch career to software development on my own, by building my first MVP (no previous experience working as a hired software developer, even though I occasionally do software development as an IT Manager).