Chemo 101: a web success story

Kristin Gustafson started marketing Chemo101 even before she launched the website that keeps chemotherapy patients, nurses, doctors and caregivers abreast of the latest information available about life in the Chemo Room.

Gustafson says her Denver-based site has grown like a blogger's dream over the last year, landing a $25,000 ad schedule from Whole Foods because of the marketing buzz she created within its target audience by competing for startup funding in the Pepsi Refresh Project.

That's a fund-raising program run by Pepsi which gives away grant money to make innovative ideas -- anyone's idea, really -- into reality by winning the funds to make it happen through a contest.

KG, as Gustafson calls herself, entered Pepsi Refresh last September at the $250,000 level, but lost out to a much larger organization, the animal protector ASPCA, which was able to marshal many more voters to its cause than Chemo 101.

But soliciting votes for her project from all the people who might use it essentially put Chemo 101 in the minds of its audience even before it was available. The site launched in December, and besides her Whole Foods advertising program, KG is now averaging 30,000 unique visitors to the site per month. Like I said: a blogger or website developer's dream.

And that's as much a reason for writing about her here as the nature of her cancer-related website. Gustafson has started a small business on the Internet in the booming health-care industry which never seems to shrink even as the nation's economy falters.

So KG's business lesson is valuable to many of the readers of this blog whether they come from the blogging world, the cancer world, the small-business world, or even the politics and policy world. Chemo 101 is an example of a successful, small-business startup in a booming industry fueled by the Internet.

And Gustafson has gone about starting that business in an instinctively entrepreneurial way.

Her professional background is in human resources, having worked with health-care, and specifically oncology-related, companies in Minnesota, before moving to Colorado to work briefly with a medical-device manufacturer. She found herself drawn back to oncology and the fight against cancer, however, and so decided to start Chemo 101 as an outgrowth of what started as an HR consultant's practice.

She didn't win the Pepsi contest, so her funding came from her own savings and investments, and she was helped by a friend who volunteered his expertise not only in programming but also in sales and marketing because he had been touched by the fight against cancer in his own life and wanted to "give back" while waiting a few months to take a new professional position.

Chemo 101 was borne of KG's experience with her target audience: patients, nurses, doctors and caregivers from mostly community-based cancer clinics. "Our site is really augmenting what they do in the clinic every day," she said.  "A lot of times from the day that someone is told there's cancer, they're just rushed through the process. And the oncology nurse has fifteen people that she's trying to get set up." So a lot of patients go home from a first treatment with dozens of unanswered questions.

KG's website has the answers to many of those questions. "My idea," KG says, "was build a website for cancer patients to understand their drugs and dollars, ... a resource to understand your chemotherapy drugs, understand the different food and drug interactions, and how co-pays work, and what type of insurance you're on; what questions to ask."

But while cancer consumers were the target audience, Gustafson knew her target market for monetizing the site was big pharma, the huge pharmaceutical companies that test, make and sell drugs that help millions of people fight cancer across the globe.

"My business models started with the thought of I'm going after the big pharmaceutical companies; they are the ones that have drugs in the data base that I have built. They have branded, marketed products that we see ... advertised on TV."

Those companies' oncology products, the chemotherapy drugs pumped into patients all over the world, are the mystery meat of the cancer-treatment industry. Millions of patients, nurses  and caregivers are constantly seeking the ever-changing, latest information about drugs and their side effects in order to ease the patient's struggle to stay alive.
 
And Gustafson, through the website, keeps the information up to date. She uses what are called Food and Drug Administration-approved "package inserts" to describe the chemicals patients receive during chemotherapy. The inserts are the printed material included with any medicine sold to consumers.

But she also has a "resources" section of the site she says will be used to offer information about alternative treatments ranging from use of medical marijuana for nausea to nutrition and diet information geared to the cancer patient. That portion of the site is not yet very developed, but like any site on the Internet, Chemo 101 is a work in progress.

Nurses' desire for more nutrition information, however, is what drove Gustafson to seek out advertising from Whole Foods Market. Surveys she collected at a national meeting of oncology nurses in Boston earlier this year showed nurses ranked a desire for more information on nutrition as high as their desire for information about clinical trials.

"Wow, nutrition is really something I never thought of, and here we've got 40 percent of the nurses saying they would want nutritional information for themselves and their patients," she said. So she contacted a Whole Foods sponsorship program in Boulder and quickly signed up for the first $25,000 of revenue Chemo 101 has generated for itself.

At a later annual  meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago -- "Kind of the Big Dance in oncology," Gufstason said -- "we met with just about any pharmaceutical company that sells an oncology product that you can think of" and were "walking on air a little bit" with the Whole Foods ads already up on the site.

When you are talking with pharma "Goliaths" like Pfizer or Merck, Gufstason said, "David at Chemo 101 didn't seem so small when you had a partner like Whole Foods."

KG is still working to land other advertising and sponsorship deals that carry Chemo 101 into the future of the fight against all kinds of cancers.

But her one-year fight to start the company: the pre-launch marketing campaign through the national Pepsi Refresh program; her visits to national meetings to build traffic and credibility among professionals "critical" to the care of cancer patients, her primary audience; her widening of her advertising market beyond big pharma to businesses on the periphery of the cancer-care industry; all make for text-book examples of how to build an online small business.

So, even if you don't have cancer, Chemo 101 is a website to watch.

Herman Malone, an evolving provocateur

Herman Malone is a provocateur. He wants to incite the Colorado business community to eliminate racism from its ranks.

Al Lewis, who writes in the Denver Post for Dow Jones Newswires, once turned down an opportunity to write about Malone's book (and mine), "Lynched by Corporate America," because he decided the word "lynched" in the book title was too provocative to be used atop Malone's story.

Yet over the years of a sometimes controversial and always entrepreneurial career, Malone has made it his business to be provocative, and it would be unlike him to give up his principles in the face of press criticism. (Or even the absence of it, since Lewis essentially kept a review of Malone's book -- and mine -- out of the pages of the Post.)

But I write here now about Malone's business for the same reason I co-wrote our book with him.

Black-owned businesses in Colorado are being discriminated against now; they were discriminated against when Malone's story of discrimination by U.S. West started in 1992; and they probably will continue to be discriminated against in the future, at least by the state of Colorado, because Colorado has taken no steps to eliminate discrimination in the state purchasing process.

And there is a documented history of discrimination against minority-owned and women-owned businesses by state purchasers.

Malone's primary business, RMES Communications Inc., self-described on its website as "Your Interactive Multimedia Solutions Provider," sells Internet-based business and entertainment services through kiosks at Denver International Airport.

It used to provide pay phones at DIA, and still owns a few there, using the most advanced model of public pay-phone available, but pay-phones are a dying business now, eliminated largely, but not entirely, by the ubiquitous use of private cell phones.

Malone said RMES posted more than $2 million in revenue in 2008, although 2009 sales have been hit hard by the tough economic and travelling environments caused by the recession.

"We continue to evolve," he said, describing how he has moved the company into digital signage, music downloads, and social-networking applications for travellers as well. He's also hoping to expand RMES kiosks into public-transportation facilities, perhaps into future Fastracks stations for example.

But all that work of RMES is largely being delegated nowadays to employee family members.

Malone is concentrating now on a public-speaking career, taking the message of his book and a personal message about contracting and surviving prostate cancer on the road to businesses and business-student audiences.

"I will be talking about two things that stop people in their tracks," he said. "Racism and cancer."

He has found that race infects the treatment of cancers for both black men and black women, just as it has infected business conducted across America, which is basically what his story is about in "Lynched by Corporate America." The book is the first and only one ever written about discrimination in contracting against minority-owned businesses.

The former U.S. West, now Qwest, has taken steps to eliminate the discrimination against black contractors that is documented in Malone's (and my) book. But the recent $9 million local settlement of an employee-discrimination lawsuit filed against Idaho-based grocer Albertsons, over allegations of ethnic slurs, graffiti and abuse of African-American and immigrant employees at a distribution center in Aurora, illustrates one of Malone's primary speaking-tour messages:

Racism is still alive in Corporate America, and it eats away at the nation's business community just as cancer devours its victims of all races -- from the inside out.

"And I have a solution," says Malone. "The solution I am talking about is a very simple one. We've got to talk.... We gotta' talk about our differences."

Citing President Barack Obama's "teachable moment" of having a beer at the White House with Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley over differences roused by the policeman's arrest of African-American Harvard scholar Henry Lewis Gates Jr., Malone said the only way to end racism in America is by talking about it. The only way to eliminate discriminatory treatment of cancers is by talking about how that discrimination occurs and what treatments work best, he says.

"So I'm going to be talking about all the things you see every day in the news," Malone said. "We've been afraid to have those kinds of discussions.... I want to be part of that dialog."

Yet, for Malone, his speaking tour is really just an extension of the provocative business career he started when he opened Rocky Mountain Electrical Supply (the previous name of RMES) back in 1976. Marketing remains a key ingredient.

Malone says candidly that sales of "Lynched by Corporate America" are not what he had anticipated when he paid for publication of 3,000 copies.

But during the three years since the book was published, Malone has studied the book-publishing trade. "Ninety-nine percent of all authors' sales are less than 5,000 copies," he's learned. "The problem is you need to have more promotional dollars.

"You've got to have that -- or a publishing company that is willing to invest those dollars.... The other way you [can market the book] ... is that you do public speaking, which is what I'm embarking on right now."

Marketing. It's an essential business ingredient Malone has been teaching me ever since we first sat down together to begin writing "Lynched."

As for myself, I'm only beginning to learn the lessons he teaches.