The founders of the company invested €100k in the start-up of Leaphy. Since the foundation of Leaphy s.a/n.v. in October 2018, the company has piloted its business plan in Belgium. Leaphy offers Belgian patients access to the majority of Belgian Patient Information Leaflets (PILs - in NL, FR and DE) via its website, and the Leaphy app. The PILs are converted from PDF into an HTML format in order to improve the readability and the app allows today patients to scan the barcode of a pack of medicine in order to retrieve the PIL.
Next to the development of the database and app (in its first phase), the company is getting a lot of attention from the market. Since Leaphy featured on the Belgian TV news, it reached around 11,000 users and more than 85,000 scans to retrieve leaflets were done.
Pharma companies such as Mylan, Bayer, Roche and others have showed interests and a first b2b contract with Wit-Geel Kruis (home-care nurses organisation) is near to being sealed. Discussions are also ongoing with pharmacy chains, hospital groups and Medaxes, the Belgian industry association representing the generic medicines industry.
In addition, initial discussions took place with the Dutch pharma industry organisations who have prioritised the use of digital leaflets. Leaphy was also introduces at a stakeholders meeting organised by the Dutch medicines agency in July 2019.
Cost drivers
In order to further expand business and operations to other countries, the company is looking for a seed capital of € 900k. The biggest cost driver for the company in the next 3 years is in human resources. To grow sales activities, in and outside Belgium, the company needs to recruit sales managers. When sales pick up, data managers (up to 2) need to be recruited to manage the leaflets database. The company is planning to expand to 2-3 countries per year.
In addition, in order to gain the interest from users, new features need to be developed for the app. A third cost driver is marketing in order to grow business interest (from pharmaceutical companies and for b2b licensing to the database) and the user population.
Parameters for the financial plan
Price per (unique) PIL: € 95/year
API subscription fee: €30 per subscription/year
Advertisement: click trough rate: 1.16% - average price per click: €1.82
Data reports: €50k - €250k per report
Medicinal products registered in Europe: 500,000 (~500,000 PILs)
User growth: 10%/month
User churn rate: 57%/month
Inflation rate: 3% (no inflation for year one)
Contingency on costs: 10%
Financial plan
Leaphy is free for users. Our revenues will be generated from
Main revenues: Publications of eLeaflets (annual maintenance fee for pharma companies)
API license fee for B2B (including hospitals, home-care…) (annual maintenance fee)
as of year 3: B2B2C communication: Communication from companies to patients via Leaphy (advertisement or surveys)
as of year 3: Data analytics of real world data (reports or data files)
In the first 3 years, the number of PILs and API licenses sold per month grows gradually. We assume that we will benefit from a faster growth in sales in time when Leaphy is getting introduced in more markets. The country expansion starts first in smaller market prior to moving to EU-5 since a bigger country does not necessarily has more medicinal products on its market. The income on advertisement is based on the number of users. According to literature, the majority of apps has a user based between 10,000 and 100,000 users. It is however anticipated that the mHealth market will be growing and becoming more mature over the following years. As such, by year 5,Leaphy will achieve for a moderate amount of around 45,000 users on Leaphy or 0.03% of all patients with chronical diseases.
