Chris Hahn

Appature offers cloud-based marketing services tailored for pharmaceutical, medical device and other health care companies.

The Seattle startup is backed by Ignition Partners and Madrona Venture Group. Appature was co-founded in 2007 by CEO Kabir Shahani and Chris Hahn, and the company has turned a profit in the past.

Hahn, who is Appature’s chief technical officer, worked on 3D graphics hardware at ATI Research. He also worked at Microsoft, where his focus included operating systems. We caught up with Hahn in this latest installment of Startup of the Week.

What is your elevator pitch? Appature helps health care marketers drive better patient outcomes by utilizing technology that enables them to deepen brand relationships with health care professionals (HCPs) and patients. Our product, Appature Nexus, does this by integrating a number of opt-in HCP and patient data sets so marketers can deliver powerful personalized campaigns and measure campaign effectiveness.

We came up with the idea ... Kabir Shahani and I came up with the idea to build a great company with great people building great products first. Actual product ideas, we believed, were a dime a dozen, and execution was more important. We had this discussion over a lunch at a Thai restaurant in the International District in Seattle back in December 2006. By Jan. 1, 2007, we founded Appature and began researching a number of possible opportunities. In our research, we met with industry experts and discovered that there was no market leader for a marketing platform the way Salesforce.com had been successful with a sales platform. We focused on health care because we noticed that the industry was ready for a change, and we had connections that helped us get started there fast.

The word that describes our company culture is ... This is really hard to sum up in a word, but if I only have one word to work with, I’d say “Unicorn.” Unicorns are magical creatures that don’t exist. Bold visions for how technology can solve problems are like unicorns in that, if the solution did exist, it would be magical, but it might seem near impossible to imagine. At Appature, we pride ourselves on delivering the impossible and attempting to pull “Unicorns,” kicking and screaming if need be, into reality. We’re lucky to have been successful at doing this, and Appature Nexus is a great demonstration of our unicorn mentality.

We are different from the competition because ... First, our “drag and drop” marketing segmentation engine makes it easy for marketers to get their hands on huge amounts of demographic and transactional data in a way that performs better than traditional on-premise relational database technologies. When using our competitors’ products, marketers typically never see their data because they simply do not have the ability to run these types of queries, which are critical to creating personalized, relevant marketing programs.

Second, we focus heavily on user experience. We deliver an enterprise-level software solution with the usability of a consumer web application. All of our direct competitors have interfaces that were designed and built before 1999; a time when applications in general were far more cumbersome than they are today. While our competitors have evolved, it has been harder for them to get away from both their core technology and their core design principles. Design is something you have to build into your culture from day 1 if you want to really build it into a competitive advantage.

Third, we understand the landscape, challenges and data architecture for the health care industry better than any marketing platform company today. We are setup to integrate, cleanse, normalize and de-duplicate data on health care providers and patients, out of the box. This lets us get our customers up and running in weeks - not months or years, and the costs to implement are a fraction of any other remotely possible solution. Companies that try to apply general purpose marketing software to health care data end up paying that customization burden over and over again if they don’t work with Appature. This is bad for individual customers, and it is wasteful for the industry.

The biggest challenge we face is ... More opportunities than we can responsibly process and onboard in any given quarter. We are committed to delivering a first-class customer experience, so it’s always a delicate balance to grow as much as possible, while ensuring a high-quality experience for our customers.

We've raised ... We’ve raised $3.5 million in venture money from Madrona Venture Group and Ignition Partners in November 2009. Prior to that, Appature was a boot-strapped and profitable business since founding the company in 2007.

If we had $3 million, we'd invest in ... We’re at a slightly different inflection point and that particular number would not move the needle as much as we plan to – but in the spirit of the question, any incremental capital is used to further commercialization to accelerate sales and channel development, R&D to capture a much wider capability listing as well as very deep investment in our performance and infrastructure and delivery capacity to handle and increased rate of customer setup.

The oddest thing about our company is ... Nyan Cat (aka Pop Tart Cat) seems to be taking an ever-increasing amount of mind share in the meme-space of our company’s brainpower, and there appears to be no logical explanation for this. We’re really a unique, yet passionate group of people and we’re not afraid to be ourselves.

The one thing missing from the business is ... Even more awesome people to, quoting Tony Hsieh, help us “build our own universe.”

We won't fail because ... We are committed to the shared purposes of building a great place to work, changing the face of enterprise software, delivering solutions to real people with real problems and being a part of the ecosystem that improves the quality of people's lives.

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