How two graduate students launched the leading biotech publisher in Europe
Co-founder Joachim Eeckhout explains how Labiotech.eu filled an information gap for Europe's fast-growing biotech scene.
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The first time Philip Hemme and Joachim Eeckhout realized that anyone actually read their blog was when they were recognized by complete strangers at a biotech conference in Paris. “These were top executives and people really high in the industry,” Eeckhout told me. “Each time we went to a new event, there were more people who knew us, more people who wanted to talk to us. And that’s when we thought that there was something here for sure.”
This was in 2012, when Hemme and Eeckhout were both French university students getting their graduate degrees in biotechnology. The two had grown frustrated by the lack of digital publications in their field; what few existed were published mainly in print and difficult to access. So they launched Labiotech.fr, a French-language blog that covered the biotech companies that were based in France.
In the early days, Labiotech consisted mostly of aggregation. “We were curating everything we could find in the French market about biotech and putting it on our platform,” said Eeckhout. “We were conducting interviews from time to time, but it wasn’t the main thing.” Occasionally, they’d visit biotech companies during their free time and film video interviews that they later posted to the blog.
Traffic growth was slow at first, but given the relative paucity of coverage in the space, the industry started to notice. Labiotech eventually reached 5,000 monthly readers, and its founders started to interact more with France’s small biotech community. “We did a cool ‘Tour de France,’ in which we biked through the country to meet 26 CEOs, film interviews with them and publish a documentary,” Hemme later recounted in a blog post.
This was about six months before they graduated, and they started to think about whether they could turn the blog into a full-time job. The problem was that the French biotech scene alone probably couldn’t sustain a media company. “We wanted something bigger,” Eeckhout said. “We knew that the French market was good enough if you’re a one-person business, but it wasn’t really scalable. We saw that most of the European magazines for biotech were still on paper, and there was no big digital platform for this.” They looked at the US — which already had several thriving biotech media outlets — as a model for what was possible in this space.
So in quick succession, Hemme and Eeckhout made three decisions. The first was that they’d expand from covering France’s biotech industry to all of Europe. The second was that they would transition from writing in French to English. And the third was that they’d move their headquarters outside of France. “We took out a map of Europe and looked at all the major cities,” wrote Hemme. “We wanted a dynamic and affordable city with a good startup ecosystem that included biotechs.” They ended up settling on Berlin, choosing it because of the density of biotech startups and Germany’s growing importance as an economic superpower.
So in September 2014, they changed the URL from Labiotech.fr to Labiotech.eu. “We saw in our stats that all of the French users moved right away to the European website,” said Eeckhout. “We didn’t lose any traffic.”
The pivot paid off in a big way. Over the next several years, Labiotech took on multiple investors, grew its staff, developed a successful business model, and recently got acquired by a major biotech software company. In an interview conducted last year, Eeckhout walked me through the publisher’s evolution from a hobbyist blog to a thriving media company.
Let’s jump into my findings…
Expanding beyond aggregation
Neither of Labiotech’s founders had any journalism experience, and for the first two years they relied mostly on news curation to grow their audience. In January 2016, the company closed a seed round of investment, and it used this money to expand its content operations. “At the beginning, we were mainly digesting press releases, trying to do a bit of analysis, but not too much,” said Eeckhout. “And step by step, we learned how to do good journalism. We also brought more experienced people on the team.” The site eventually pivoted away from short news all together and devoted nearly 100% of its focus on publishing longform analysis.