Covidence is a not-for-profit organisation that enables researchers to contribute to the global pool of scientific health knowledge 30% faster than without it. With better evidence comes better knowledge, and with better knowledge comes healthier humans. Covidence’s mission is to shape the world’s knowledge and, with Matt’s help, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Key impact
As the consulting foundational designer for Covidence, Matt helped Covidence become a revenue-generating business, unlocking its ability to hire its own full-time team across the world. Inheriting a very early prototype, Matt used his exceptional research, design, product and strategy skills to iteratively shape the product into the one that’s now used by more than 200 academic institutions around the world including Harvard, Yale, and Oxford. Key achievements:
- Foundational design and research to help scale Covidence from less than 100 users to over 150,000 users, globally
- The Australian Stroke Foundation reduced the time between guideline updates (working evidence for practitioners) from 7 years to under 3 months
- Research and Design to discover and implement product/market fit and become self-sustaining
- Began with a team of three, left the business when Covidence became a globally distributed team of 15
- Unified vision of the customer/s: Globally scaled research operations and team engagement
- Played a Creative Director role on the Covidence global re-brand
- Supported funding proposals for multi-million dollar grants
From 100 to 150,000 consumers globally
When Matt joined the Covidence team, there were less than one hundred people using the software. These people were mostly hand-picked by the founder – an early adopter group who agreed to trial the software and provide sporadic feedback on how to improve it. It was, in it’s essence, still a research project.
The more sophisticated and nuanced your understanding of your customer, the more likely you are to solve their specific problems and win their hearts in the process.
But, with a founder committed to the eventual commercialisation of the product, and with a deep respect and understanding of the importance of evidence-based decision-making, Matt set his sights on getting a deeper understanding of the types of users Covidence already had, and some generative research on the ones that could be.
Commercialising research: B2B2C product strategy and market fit
Once the flywheel of early problem/solution fit is spinning, the next step in ensuring it’s sustainability is to discover a commercial model that ensures the long term finances of the business. Working directly with the founder, engineer, and product managers, Matt once again used his deep expertise in research to understand Covidence’s unique market:
- Who would pay?
- What would they pay for?
- How much would they pay?
- For how long would they pay?
- What would this revenue unlock for Covidence?
And, whilst Covidence began its journey as a B2C platform, the research carried out by Matt provided clear direction that the easiest, fastest way to scale the platform and support it in the long-term was to provide a service to the Academic Institutions where most of the consumers of the product were working within. This meant that Covidence would grow best through by supplementing their Sales-led growth strategy with a product-led one and so hiring a solid growth team (marketing and data analytics) became a priority.
Creative direction and iterative brand development
Over the years, Matt used his extensive background in branding and marketing and communications to support multi-million dollar grant and funding proposals for Covidence whilst iterating the brand to a global standard. Colloborating remotely with designers in New York and developers in Melbourne, Australia, Covidence’s 2019 brand refresh ensured that its visual presence reflected the high-quality reputation that Covidence gained for its software platform whilst, at the same time, leaving behind the feeling of being a bootstrapped startup.
More about Covidence
Systematic reviews are a niche, complicated business, but it’s the gold-standard we have so far for ensuring that health practitioners can make the best available decisions on how to prevent and treat human illness. If you’re interested in learning more about Covidence, and this very interesting domain visit the website.