Bay Bridge Bio

I'm working on Biotech Startup School, a free online course on how to start a biotech company: https://www.baybridgebio.com/biotech-startup-school.html

This week I just passed 500 registrations. I put up the landing page in November. The weekly growth has varied from 3% (the week of Thanksgiving holiday in the US) to 93% (last week). This excludes the first 2 weeks were % growth was very high but from a small total number of registrations.

Things that work well:

• the landing page converts well. Registrations / unique pageviews is 33%.
• Partner / sponsor marketing: some of the speakers, sponsors and co-organizers have decent-sized audiences and drive a lot of traffic
• My mailing list drives a bit over half of signups

Things that haven't worked as well or that I haven't done:

• social media marketing. I haven't done any social marketing. Will start doing more. I don't really focus much on social media so have small audiences, the impact of that is low for me
• marketing in online communities. There aren't many biotech-focused online communities like HN or IH.
• direct email to student groups or universities: I've been doing some of this, and it has been working ok, but it is much more time-intensive per number of new users than the other options

I think this can get far more users than it currently has. The main issue is driving traffic to the site, as it converts well once that is done.

Earlier this week I got my 700th subscriber to my newsletter. This is up from 250 in June, when I first decided to try to grow my audience.

I've only emailed my audience 6 times since June. Open rates have been 50-60% and CTRs at 15-20%. I don't publish many articles but the ones I do are very deeply researched.

Most of the traffic has come from organic search + word of mouth, plus some spikes due to being featured in industry newswraps and some social media posts that do well. I don't get very much web traffic but the traffic converts well (5-10% of visitors sign up for the newsletter).

Most of the signups come from relevant, high-value content upgrades. My blog is about biotech finance, so I often provide an excel spreadsheet that walks through an example in exchange for emails. I've also added more prominent "subscribe to the newsletter" links at the bottom of articles that convert well.

My biotech startup database was featured in STAT's daily newswrap today! STAT is one of the most popular niche news companies for biotech.

https://www.baybridgebio.com/startup_database.html

Yesterday I posted a twitter thread (inspired by Harry Dry) with some takeaways and charts from the database, and one of the reporters from STAT retweeted it. Today they did a writeup on it!

Overall the traffic was pretty low -- just about 100 people so far at 8 am PT. Got a few more newsletter signups but overall this was probably more of a nice ego boost than a material business event. Several journalists have signed up for my mailing list or follow me on twitter, so I think I should repackage some of my content and tools for them so they can fact-check and get context for stories. Not a huge market -- there are maybe a dozen biotech reporters at major publications -- but could get a bit of revenue, some nice backlinks and start building relationships.

Checked my analytics today and saw that two days ago I made $325 in revenue! It was cool to see because I did absolutely nothing to accomplish this and didn't even know about it for two days. The traffic came from organic search and the user just clicked the "instant download" button to buy immediately.

I didn't actually think that anyone would buy a $300+ spreadsheet from an organic search to a random site without ever communicating with the seller.

I would love to find more customers like this. I emailed the customer but got no response. He signed up with his personal email so I can't tell what company he works for. However he hasn't responded with any complaints so I assume he's happy with the purchase.

My blog post on valuing drugs and biotech companies got to the front page of Hacker News, though for just a short time. Here's the post:

https://www.baybridgebio.com/drug_valuation.html

I got about 1,000 visitors from this post, so pretty small in terms of what I've seen others get from HN spikes. But HN is not that into biotech content so it was cool to see this get attention. The traffic didn't convert super well: just 1.35% of people signed up for my newsletter. For reference, last week 12% of my ~200 visitors signed up.

This was the first blog post that had an embedded tool: a drug valuation calculator. It has a list of inputs that help determine valuation, and you can change the input and recalculate the value. As a self-taught hobbyist programmer, it was fun to build this more interactive blog post. The page itself is just a static html / css page. The backend is a Flask-RESTful API hosted on heroku. A javascript file connects the static site with the backend. Since I don't know anything about devops or setting up servers, and don't write very performant code, this setup lets me rely on free Netlify servers for pretty much all the content and then only touches the application server on Heroku if users use the tool.

I sold my first online product today, a spreadsheet with a list of biotech startups and VCs, for $350. I found this customer through a google ads campaign that cost ~$200, so it was a mildly profitable sale. I also cold emailed a bunch of people and that led to some sales conversations but no sales. I think the price was too high.

Unfortunately the customer isn't a type of customer I'm looking to pursue: they are a procurements company that has clients across all industries. They don't seem to have much of a focus on biotech. I frankly don't even know why they bought the list. So this is probably not a step on the path to sustainable revenue.

A link to one of my blog posts was featured in Endpoints News, one of the top daily news wraps for the biopharma industry. The post only took me an hour or two to write, compared to my other posts which take days or weeks. This definitely isn't evergreen content, and I don't have any way of monetizing this traffic, but it's cool to see some of my work get attention.

I organized a VC panel at UC Berkeley and got $8,500 in sponsorship for it. All of that went to covering the cost of catering for ~200 people and gifts for the panelists, so I didn't get to keep anything. I got about 150 signups for my email list from the event though and the panelists and audience really enjoyed it. Everyone said they want more of this but it was exhausting organizing this by myself.

This cohort went really well! We all went out and got drinks after the last VC visit in SF and the students got me a nice bottle of scotch and had really great things to say about the program. Very grateful to have gotten to know these amazing scientists and look forward to staying in touch.

I started the second cohort of the class this week. Some Stanford and UCSF students asked to be part of it, so I expanded the program from just Berkeley students. I'm really excited to get started. The curriculum is similar to last time, which makes organization a bit easier, but adding people from SF, Palo Alto and Berkeley makes the logistics a bit tricky.