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| Eye on the prize |
July 1, 2007 |
How one developer moved his product through multiple iterations and onto the Branham Up and Comers list
By Danny Bradbury
It has been a while since Jonathan Brett sold software from his parents’ basement, but that’s how he got started. Brett is CEO of MedicLINK, which develops Eyesistant, a management and scheduling application for eye care professionals.
Brett, who was a freelance software developer before starting his company, had been contracted in 2003 to develop an application by an optometrist friend who wanted to store data about appointments and other logistics. “That took me two or three months, and then a friend of his wanted one so I developed it some more,” Brett said. “It just sort of snowballed from there.”
He decided to make a business of the software, sold 30 or so copies from home, and then refined the product yet again. He moved to an office in September 2004 and, once more, redeveloped the software into a package focused on eye care retailers, many of whom had been labouring under paper-based systems that were prone to inefficiency.
One such customer is Dr. Jonathan Bense of St. John’s-based Bense Optical & Optometry, who worked for an ophthalmologist before opening his practice in the fall of 2006. Everything used to be done on paper, Bense said, adding the practice had a generic appointment- keeping system so unintuitive the administrators reverted to manual record keeping. When he opened his own practice he resolved to automate the operation and started using Eyesistant in October.
Dr. Bense inputs patient information including contact details, the type of glasses purchased and the type of contact lens solution. Patient recalls can be arranged automatically so staff don’t have to keep a manual record.
“It saves us money. I’d have to pay people to write everything up on paper before that, so now it saves hours each week,” he said. The old paper-based system used to be inefficient, and patient service would suffer. “Now, everything’s in the computer, it’s backed up every day and nothing gets lost.”
During its product redevelopment phase, MedicLINK expanded Eyesistant’s capabilities beyond that of a mere record-keeping system, Brett said. The revamped version of the product offered greater customer relationship management and marketing capabilities than the previous version.
“They developed it even further for me so they can tell me percentage-wise where my money is going,” said Susan Lochan, proprietor of Ottawa-based Agapé Optical. As a new independent venture (she purchased the store from a larger chain a year ago), she has been using the software to handle her administrative tasks, but also to plan her marketing budget. “Every time people walk into the store, I ask where they heard about us and input that information,” she said. She has already been able to use the software to drop poorly performing marketing campaigns (such as newspapers ads) and try others (such as advertising on buses).
In three short years, MedicLINK has experienced huge success and was recently the winner of the 2006 St. John’s Board of Trade new startup award. The company is now beginning its push into the U.S. and is also preparing a version of the product for dermatology practices, due out by the end of this year. Brett clearly has an eye on the future.
SIDEBAR
The Up and Comers
Every year the Branham Group ranks Canada’s top-performing tech companies. Part of that roundup is a list of the Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers, companies that have not yet made it big but which Branham believes may soon be headline firms. The full list is online at www.backbonemag.com or www.branhamgroup.com/branham300.
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