Mapping uBiome’s Business Development Ecosystem
(The startup microbiome mapper becomes the map-ee)
uBiome is a startup that analyzes people’s saliva, skin, and yes, stool, to determine the microorganism that make up their microbiome and how they correlate with people’s health.
What is the microbiome, exactly? It’s the approximately 100 trillion bacterial cells that live primarily in your gut, mouth, and on your skin. The makeup of this biome has evolved with us as a mainly symbiotic relationship.
Significantly, while our microbiome is initially passed on from our mothers, and then by what we ingest, the genetic diversity and makeup of that ecosystem can be disrupted by antibiotics and other environmental factors.
The startup uBiome offers a kit that allows consumers to take their own samples and send it to uBiome’s laboratory to analyze and test. Consumers also fill out a survey about their dietary habits, exercise, and different metrics of health. The startup then correlates these factors with the makeup of your microbiome and provides feedback on what steps to take to become healthier.
A Business Development Ecosystem
Much as human beings can improve their health by having healthy “partnerships” with the trillions of bacteria in their microbiomes, a startup can improve its own health by engaging with the right partners.
In business development it’s important to map out your company’s partner ecosystem. A partner ecosystem categorizes the companies and organizations that might prove to be valuable partners. The map describes the relationships between your product, customers, and your partners’ products and customers, accounting for each’s goals and the benefit of a partnership.
For uBiome the ecosystem might look something like this:
There are four main types of relationships in this ecosystem, detailed below.
Partnerships with Healthcare: uBiome as a Diagnosis Tool
There have been numerous studies linking the makeup of the gut’s biome to gastrointestinal health. uBiome offers a cost-effective means of diagnosis which promises to get better as it adds more and more consumer data correlating gut biome-metrics to different maladies and afflictions.
Diagnosis is only really important if there’s treatment—and understanding just what’s going on in a person’s gut can help a doctor make an informed decision about what diet or probiotics to recommend to people suffering from stomach and lower gut ailments.
In this type of partnership, uBiome would partner with larger healthcare groups to offer the uBiome kit to diagnose issues related to gastrointestinal illnesses like IBS, Crohn’s disease, and celiac disorder. The startup would work with doctors to understand how to use uBiome’s findings to diagnose and treat the root cause of these maladies.
Partnerships With Research, Sports, and Organizations: Specialty Testing
This type of partnership could include A/B testing different diets and treatments and creating specialty tests that test questions of particular interest to the universities or teams. (For instance, studies linking testosterone and natural steroid production to the gut biome might be of particular interest to sports teams and the military).
In this partnership, uBiome would provide multiple kits to the organizations, who would provide them to the either test-subjects or team members. uBiome would provide specialty testing of these kits, and the data collected would or could be more rigorous than normal uBiome users. This partnership relationship has two similar types—relationships with research universities and projects, and relationships with organizations intent on achieving the cutting edge in physical and mental prowess, where every improvement on their team’s physical health can have a material effect on performance.
In some ways any partnership which increases uBiome’s reach also improves its product. uBiome relies on data provided by its customers to provide correlations between the presence of different microorganisms and their effect on people’s health, as well as correlations between diet, supplements, and other course corrections and people’s health. Obtaining more customers (and their associated data) would improve the breadth and accuracy of these correlations, which would help consumers decide how to improve their own health.
However, the product will be improved even more by reaching people or organizations who systematically organize people’s health data. A partnership with research universities or sports teams (both of whom have the capacity to rigorously measure people’s health and fitness levels) would be valuable because they would provide more (and better) consumer data. uBiome could then decipher how the microorganisms of the human intestinal tract influence biological functions with more confidence.
Because these partnerships would greatly improve uBiome’s product and because any association with a well known research lab or sports team would shine a bit of their brand halo on uBiome, the startup should consider approaching these organizations by offering its product for free, and offering to help design specific tests and analysis to further the research goals that these organizations want to achieve.
Partnerships with Body Analytics Companies: Sharing Revenue and Data
uBiome can also partner with companies and startups that have a similar business model to theirs. The most obvious potential partner is 23andMe. 23andMe has two main audiences, the audience who wants to know their family history (largely inapplicable to uBiome’s audience) and the audience who wants to know what diseases and issues that they should look out for, given their genetic predisposition (while the FDA shut down this aspect of 23andMe’s service in November, the embattled startup appears to be making headway with the FDA—and building a large moat around their business to boot). This audience would probably find uBiome helpful and is very much used to collecting and providing bodily samples in order to get health data.
So what would a partnership with these companies look like?
uBiome could integrate data with these companies to determine what, if any, correlations exist between the microorganisms in your gut and what these companies measure. We already know that genetics, the microbiome, and the environment interact. What other health correlations might exist? For instance, if certain people have a genetic predisposition for IBS or Crohn’s, are there any correlations between these people’s microbiomes and their resistance to these diseases? How does our body’s response to drugs correlate with the our microbiome? What about correlations between mental health and the biome? And fitness?
Let’s take a look at a specific potential partnership, a uBiome partnership with 23andMe. 23andMe has a great product (a genetic testing kit and data about what that means for one’s disease predispositions)—the problem for that company is it can only sell their product to a person once. If 23andMe offered the uBiome kit, and shared the revenue and results with uBiome, then 23andMe could make additional income off of existing customers while providing a valuable service that would actually improve their core offering to a receptive audience.
A 23andMe partnership with uBiome would allow 23andMe to drive more revenue from existing customers. —Tweet this.
Right now, 23andMe also offers less prescriptive information than uBiome. Unlike people’s genetics, which people don’t have the power to change, they have the power to change their microbiome, (intentionally and unintentionally). People can try new diets, reduce antibiotic use, and increase probiotic intake. Partnering with uBiome would give 23andMe’s customers more opportunities to actually make life changes to change their health for the better. In addition, uBiome kits would be useful more than once—they would be useful every time a consumer made a major change in their dietary habits, used antibiotics, or started to suffer from certain gastrointestinal maladies.
As a result, a revenue and data-sharing partnership with uBiome would give 23andMe multiple opportunities for additional sales. It would also increase repeat visitors, both to check on the health of their microbiome and to check on whether any additional information has been uncovered regarding the interaction between the the the environment, one’s microbiome, one’s genes, and ultimately one’s health.
Partnerships with External Websites: Affiliate Marketing Revenue Sharing
There would be two main types of affiliate marketing partners: content publishers focused on diet and nutrition and vendors who sell probiotics, supplements, or diet foods.
This is a typical BD partnership—find a company who has an established audience that includes your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP), then partner with those companies to either sell your product for a commission, or pay for click-throughs to your site. These deals don’t make headlines, but they do make money, and for a startup like uBiome (whose initial seeding was from crowd funded and who’s looking to bootstrap as much of their funding as possible), this income is immensely valuable.
Representative Sample of Target Partners
Evolving Ecosystems
The field of microbiome study is still very nascent and it’s difficult to predict just what types of findings that might be around the corner regarding the microbiome and health. As uBiome and the rest of the scientific community unlock more secrets about this internal ecosystem’s role on our health, the potential applications could be far-ranging. As a result, so could uBiome’s partnership opportunities. This should make the next decade incredibly interesting, both for uBiome and for our understanding of our health.
Devon Edwards is focused on building better products through business development. He’s learning BD at Tradecraft and building a few products on the side. Tweet me @devonaedwards
Thanks to Gabriel Dillon for providing feedback and much-needed copy editing.
