Software Business in the Middle East

I could pretend and tell about how smart and cool guys we were finding an excellent solution for our problems. But everything was not so cool, and, to tell more, we had nothing to do with the solution at all. It simply was a contingency or pure luck, I would say. One of those that could change your business or even your entire life.

On one of my endless meetings at that time somebody said he knew a professor from the local medical university, who had been working with the subject of drug database and medical errors for several years. I got a phone number of this professor, and we met already in couple hours.

It was a perfect match. The professor had collected and analyzed drug data for the last five years. His only problem was to find out a way how to organize his data as a computer program. He tried once asking some of the programmers to develop software for him, but they all spoke different language – both parties had issues in understanding medical terminology from one side and computer stuff from another.

We did not have problems with either medical or computer terminology, but we had problems with getting drug data.

At that time I really didn’t figure out how big luck my meeting with the professor was. After a while we decided to work together – the professor would be responsible for medical content of our drug database, and we would drive the technical implementation.

Looking now at our continuous cooperation, I could tell that my new partner keeps doing great job for getting new contacts. He lived in Saudi Arabia for many years working at that time in the only medical university in the Kingdom. His students graduated for 10-15 years back are now working as top executives and decision makers in the official healthcare authorities and large healthcare organizations in Saudi Arabia. It means that many doors are opened for us just with one phone call from our professor.

Finally, we got a very good team – one of us got deep medical knowledge, and others had rich technical background. Later, after having many troubles with moving sales forward, I had understood how badly we needed a professional salesman in our startup – in this case we would have just a dream team.