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• Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised January 2019)

  Giving Birth to Ovia Health

  Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Julia Kelley

  In late 2016, Paris Wallace, the CEO of Ovia Health, and the rest of the company’s co-founders faced a difficult decision about the best way to grow Ovia Health’s revenue. Founded in 2012, Ovia Health specialized in mobile and web applications in the women’s health space. After building a strong user base with its original app (Ovia Fertility, which helped women conceive by tracking ovulation and other factors), the young company launched a second app, Ovia Pregnancy, which helped women have a healthy pregnancy by tracking various health metrics. Ovia Health’s apps were free to use, and most of the company’s revenue came from charging advertisers to host ads on its native advertising platform. Wallace believed that the family benefits market was a promising growth area, but he was not sure of the best way to enter the market. Recently, a top health benefits provider had offered Ovia Health a multi-million-dollar contract, but Wallace wondered whether Ovia Health could create a better family benefits solution by turning down the contract and selling directly to employers’ HR departments. Participants will need to examine how Ovia Health evolved its strategy over time and decide which growth opportunity was the better choice.

  Keywords: Growth and Development Strategy; Market Entry and Exit; Health Care and Treatment; Health Industry;

  Citation:

  Bussgang, Jeffrey J., and Julia Kelley. "Giving Birth to Ovia Health." Harvard Business School Case 818-004, January 2018. (Revised January 2019.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2018 (Revised January 2019)

  ZappRx

  Jeffrey J. Bussgang and Olivia Hull

  In October 2015, ZappRx founder Zoe Barry is deciding between two business models for her health technology start-up. Her product, a software application that aims to expedite the prescription fulfillment process for patients with rare diseases, has attracted interest from specialty drug manufacturers who wish to build an exclusive platform for patients taking their medications. But Barry, against the advice of her management team, is considering an alternative business model, which would open the platform up to all manufacturers in a given disease area. Instead of financing product development through individual contracts, the comprehensive platform would be free to doctors and pharma alike and financed via an aggressive fundraising strategy and through the sale of the prescription data collected on the app. Barry is willing to take the risk, but her management team is staunchly opposed. Which path should ZappRx take? The case is a window into the early go-to-market and business model decisions that an entrepreneur must make, in this case in the face of pushback from her own management team. The case also provides a detailed picture of the specialty pharmaceutical industry and challenges students to think about target customer identification and talent management in a start-up environment.

  Keywords: Speciality Drugs; Hub Services; business model; Pivot; Speciality Prescriptions; Health Care and Treatment; Customization and Personalization; Online Technology; Business Model; Decision Choices and Conditions; Pharmaceutical Industry; Massachusetts;

  Citation:

  Bussgang, Jeffrey J., and Olivia Hull. "ZappRx." Harvard Business School Case 818-001, January 2018. (Revised January 2019.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2019

  Analytical Space: The Next Frontier?

  Thomas R. Eisenmann, Jeffrey J. Bussgang and David Lane

  With one satellite aloft and in the midst of beta testing in late 2018, Analytical Space founders Justin Oliveira and Dan Nevius turned to critical questions about the pioneering startup’s go-to-market, pricing, and business development strategy. Analytical Space aimed to build and operate a constellation of inexpensive satellites that would receive and relay to the ground data gathered by orbiting Earth observation satellites, thereby speeding and increasing the amount of data their operators could collect and sell to clients in the multi-billion market for information on crops, weather, and other observable changes on Earth. The cofounders now needed to select the best initial customers, validate demand for their unique data relay service, and establish pricing that would both spur adoption and impress investors ahead of their next financing round.

  Keywords: Pricing decisions, Demand validation, Revenue model, Business development, Space tech, satellites, earth observation, remote sensing;

  Citation:

  Eisenmann, Thomas R., Jeffrey J. Bussgang, and David Lane. "Analytical Space: The Next Frontier?" Harvard Business School Case 819-089, January 2019.  View Details

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