Category: Business Reviews, Entrepreneurship

Startup Stories: Pharmahelper.com aims for lower drug prices

Pharmahelper is a drug search engine that helps you find the lowest prices for prescription drugs. Huge market, check. Competition, not too much online. Great margins, yuop. I got a chance to talk to the founders and here’s their story.

What gave you the idea to get into it?

We were interested in starting up our own online business but didn’t want to get involved in managing inventory or shipping products and we were all passionate about Search. We also liked the idea of shopping comparison engines, but wanted to focus on becoming specialists in one market. We built Pharmahelper.com because we wanted to provide a safe and trusted source for people to compare and buy their prescription medication online.

How big is the pharma sales market?

In 2007 total US sales for prescription medication reached $287 billion dollars.

How do you get the word out about your site?

We have just recently moved off Beta and are now in launch mode so a big forum will be speaking with guys like you. We are always interested in talking with our peers and learning as much information as possible to improve our search and give people what they want. We will also be using PPC advertising and are exploring radio and print advertising in certain demographic regions.

Who should be using your site?

With 47 million Americans currently without any form of medical insurance and the current state of the global economy, anyone who is taking prescription medication, and is looking for a safe and trusted source on online pharmacies, will benefit. Just recently, The Kaiser Family Foundation found that 27% of Americans have decided not to fill a prescription due to the cost. Pharmahelper provides a safe place for these people to find significant cost savings on their medications.

Did you develop the Pharmahelper platform or did you license someone’s technology?

We have a great development team and developed everything in house. We use open source software bundled with some proprietary technology that we had to develop as it was non-existent.

Do you believe taking such a niche approach to comparison shopping will be a formula for success?

We are a very focused company as we only concentrate on prescription medication. Taking this niche approach allows us to provide the most accurate search available for drug prices, while saving people time and money.

What were the main challenges in developing the site?

These were mostly encountered when we began to normalize the drugs. Normalizing drugs effectively was something we felt the big comparison shopping engines were not doing successfully as it was not their core business. Drugs come in different dosages and strengths. When you add generics to the mix it becomes quite a challenge to equally compare side by side. We spent close to a year at getting things right and we realize it will always be a work in progress. However at this point, I think we got it right.

What does the clipboard mean?

The clipboard is a tool we introduced to help people save and share searches with friends and family. We found that people like to research price options for medicine for use at a later date. We thought the implementation of the clipboard would be useful in achieving this, as it can also allow a customer to conduct side-by-side comparisons as well as to email the results.

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