The Pitch

We have mentioned our pitch in a couple of posts. In this post we share a snapshot of our presentation. Let us know how you like it!

So, we're automating the tedious task of keeping a diabetes diary.

We start by explaining diabetes briefly. Diabetics need to track blood glucose levels, carbohydrate intake, insulin dosages, physical activity, and changes in weight. To get along in everyday life, but also to be able to make improvements to their treatment.

It's nowadays really easy to track all that information. Diabetes devices produce rich logs, and we can choose from dozens of pedometer and sports tracking apps, activity tracker gadgets and meal loggers.

The problem is that there is no way to bring all that gathered data into a single user interface that presents it in a way suitable for diabetes treatment.

That's what we do. We collect data from multiple sources, build adapters where required, and store that data to emerging Health Information Exchanges. Taltioni is a Finnish initiative, Microsoft's HealthVault is an example of an international solution.

We visualize the data for diabetics and their healthcare professionals. Also healthcare organizations benefit from the gathered data. They can, for instance, rationalize the provision of glucose test strips based on actual consumption, and also use the data to categorize diabetics to be able to offer most suitable, personalized treatment. Those are just the immediate savings. Of course improved treatment reduces the additional cost of complications that occur if diabetics are not in control of their condition.

The size of diabetes treatment market is huge, almost half a trillion! If every tenth diabetic would use our service and we'd charge just one dollar per patient per month on average, our yearly revenue would be half a billion.

Finland is a good place to launch our service. Type 1 diabetes is more prevalent than anywhere in the world, and we already have a Health Information Exchange in operation. Once such platforms launch in other markets, we want to be ready to offer our service. We want to be a global company, helping all diabetics all over the world.

We're currently a team of three. We know diabetes, software, and marketing really well, but would appreciate some expertise in financials and business execution. Would you know a good candidate to join our team?

Talking of financials, we're looking for 500 000 € seed funding to finalize our product, get the first deals with healthcare organizations, and to prepare for an accelerator round in late 2014. During the accelerator phase, we plan to go through the medical software certification processes and get the first international customers. We're expecting the emerging Health Information Exchanges to become widely adopted from 2016 onward, and want to be a globally recognized company by that time.

Finally, some buzzwords related to the field we're working in. If anything of the above resonates with you, get in contact with us. You can schedule a meeting with us at the SLUSH conference through this page, connect with me in LinkedIn, or email me at mikael.rinnetmaki(at)gmail.com.

Second Performance

I wrote earlier about our first pitching competition. Yesterday was our second public presentation, this time to FIBAN, the Finnish Business Angels Network.

This time the competition was tougher. A lot tougher. 10 companies had been preselected from 25 applicants based on the slide deck, and we were really honored to be in that lot. There were plenty of experienced pitchers from companies in accelerator phase, such as Responsive Ads who have cool HTML5 tech and feature Mashable as their client, the award winning Runteq, and also established companies with patent portfolios like Tamturbo.

The selected companies each gave a 5 minute pitch, no questions were asked. Cramming all the relevant info to just 5 minutes was incredibly challenging for us, but in the presentation we reached the end just on time. In the end, the three best pitches were announced. We're really proud of our second place! Tamturbo won the competition, the third place went to Jalava Sensors.

Our record of the second place

Afterwards, there was some time for networking and closer discussions with interested angel investors. We got some good contacts and initiated some interesting discussions. We're hoping the discussions will result in us getting more help in putting the numbers in shape. Financial expertise is clearly our week spot at the moment.

Diabetes diaries

Last night I participated to the GB DOC tweetchat for the first time. GB DOC (@theGBDOC) is the Diabetes Online Community in Great Britain, and tweetchat is real time conversation on the internet, using Twitter. Similar online communities exist at least in Australia (@OzDiabetesOC), Canada (@theCANDOC), France (@Fr_DOC), Germany (deDOC), Italy (@ITDoc3), Nigeria (@theNGdoc), Spain (@es_doc), and the United States (@DiabetesSocMed). But not in Finland, at least yet.

I've been monitoring the GB DOC chat a few times. This time the topic was particularly interesting for me, so I decided to participate to the discussion. It was about diabetes diaries.

It turned out many of the participants shared my views and had the exact same wishes for a perfect diabetes diary.

Q4 I want all my data in one place: meter, CGM, pump, activity, food, moods etc. As automatically as possible! #isthattoomuchtoask? #gbdoc
— Andrea Limbourg (@AndreaLimbourg) October 2, 2013

Is getting that kind of a service really that hard? So far it has been. And there have been challenges. As one doctor I talked with put it: the electronic diabetes diary is a 25 year old idea, but now it finally seems feasible. Glucose meters, bolus calculators, and insulin pumps produce verbose logs, mobile phones have cameras to snap pics of meals, and pedometer apps to keep track of physical activity. Combining all that data to a single, coherent visualization seems really quite trivial.

The discussion, and hearing so many other diabetics still haven't found a good diabetes diary, encouraged me to continue developing Sensotrend towards that goal.

To top it all up, I ended up winning the #bgbingo, with a perfect match. Lucky times... :)

Any thoughts about diabetes diaries you'd like in comments? I'm listening.

Market research

Another quick piece of news. We recently published a user survey, asking our potential end users how they feel about some aspects of their treatment.

So if you are a diabetic, or a parent of a child with diabetes, please take some time to share your views. If you know any diabetics, please share the address with them.

The survey can be found at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MJZWYFT (only in Finnish at the moment).

Pitching

No updates for a while, sorry about that.

We have been working on our pitch. A pitch is a tool most startup companies need to use. It's a presentation that sells the company to an investor, so that the company gets financial funding for growth. Pitches come in many flavors, from a one minute elevator speech (you need to explain the main idea of the company fast if you get to the same elevator with an investor) to a longer presentation describing details of the product, the markets, the team, and the business plan.

Our first public pitch was in a pitching competition organized by Protomo, our incubator. There were several teams both from within and outside the incubator, working through the day, presenting the idea and continuously improving the presentation. In the end, we managed to win the competition! Our price is some one-on-one time with an accelerator fund. We get to hone our pitch even further, and discuss all aspects regarding financials, markets, and funding options.

There is a bigger local pitching competition next week, and we're hoping to get to present there as well. Our main goal is in the big, international startup conference Slush, taking place in mid-November. We'll try to get a version of the presentation online as well before that, so you can all participate in the development.