You haven't heard from me for a long time (busy, busy, busy!) but don't worry, the Inolytix adventure is still ongoing! Time to grow A lot of new developments have been happening in the shadows and it's time to turn on the lights. Just like a seed taking root and slowly growing into a tree, customer relationships need time to develop and turn into fruitful enterprises. Unlike in the IT market where the number of clicks per day counts, or in the B2C market where the number of clients can quickly reach several thousands, the B2B market is all about relations, trust, and… relations! Two examples may illustrate this slow path to success. Strong development with IGC My first experience began some 2 years ago, when I contacted Eric Bendle from Adscientis. We agreed on a partnership 6 months after initial contact. His proposal to have me moderate his IGC Symposium in June 2014 took me by surprise, and one year later I organized the same Symposium for him*. During the 2014 event, we met a key individual and it took 8 months before we met again and today, we are proud to be their improvement team in charge of their internal IGC analytics. Another example underlying the critical importance of time: it took a third business partner and 12 months of patience to finally receive an order for the IGC software and hardware. It will be delivered very soon, so crazy! Microtomography - a new look into solid samples My second experience is pretty different but also took a significant amount of time. In 2014, I saw a presentation from a young Ph.D. student about image analysis and tomography. Although interesting, I was questioning myself about the relevance of the presentation. I sought him out several months later, we met, and I understood more the intricacies of the technique. In March 2015, I planned to attend a catalysts conference and I had the idea to promote his image analysis and microtomography. We made several iterations to condense 5 pages of scientific "promotional material" into a neat 1 page flyer. Today, our customers are able to see images never seen before, an exciting start for new product developments and greater insight into studied systems... Taking off... They say a startup needs 3 years to really take off. Being generally impatient myself, I was wondering why 3 long years? After almost 2 years of life, Inolytix is off to a nice start and still needs to invest time into developing lasting relationships to grow. After all, you can still be on the right path even if the success is not there right away. I'm pretty sure about that and have some confidence now... *N.B: the 5th IGC Symposium will take place in Munich, June 14th, 2016!
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