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Building a business from the ground up is in many ways a family affair. You and your team work long hours together, putting in hard work, rallying around stellar ideas, and getting into arguments. Collectively, you celebrate your wins and recover from your losses.
But for Supply Clinic, the recently launched online marketplace for dental and healthcare supplies, it’s quite literally a family affair.
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Meet Supply Clinic’s co-founder and CEO, Jacob Drucker (pictured left), whose business partner and startup brother-in-arms is, in fact, his real-life big brother. We sat down with Drucker to get the full scoop on Supply Clinic, whose closed beta ended Thursday and has officially launched in Chicago.
A tale of two brothers
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Supply Clinic was started after after Drucker’s older brother, Scott (pictured right)—a recent graduate from Penn Dental Medicine—moved to Chicago to practice and quickly realized that the supply market for dental and healthcare supplies was illogical, unorganized, and outdated.
“We were really taken aback by the lack of a market, in that there are only a couple of really big distributors that sell the same things as hundreds of small, low-touch distributors,” Drucker said. “But the big ones have huge sale teams and charge significantly more, yet they still maintain dominant marketing power. A lot of this is due to the opaqueness of the market and a lack of knowledge on the part of doctors and dentists.”
Supply Clinic, which currently focuses exclusively on dental supplies, hopes to change that.
After teaming up with his older brother, the fresh Harvard graduate developed a digital marketplace on which all vendors—even small ones—can easily market the products they sell at the prices they sell them at.
Now, dentists can go to a single, comprehensive platform to compare market prices for all of the products they buy, as well as write and read product reviews. Because of its comprehensive and easy-to-navigate model, Supply Clinic promises to save dentist offices both money and time.
“We’ve brought it all on one platform and enabled [dentists] to do all their shopping on one portal,” Drucker said.
A startup center success story
Supply Clinic is currently based out of Matter, the premier startup center and community hub designed to provide healthcare technology startups a collaborative and innovative work environment. At Matter, young companies like Supply Clinic can work, learn, and connect with peers in their industry, allthewhile enjoying access to networking, mentorship, and shared resources.
But Matter wasn’t Supply Clinic’s first exposure to startup incubators. The company was originally working out of 1871, the renowned startup center that currently houses over 250 early-stage digital startups, before they jumped ship to the more nuanced health tech community that was starting to grow at Matter.
“Working at Matter is very similar to 1871 in that it’s an open space, it’s a collaborative environment, and you meet a lot of people who are doing really cool things,” Drucker said. “And it’s health-tech focused, which is particularly helpful to us.”
Looking toward the future
Drucker said that the four-person team behind Supply Clinic has raised money mostly through family and friends up to this point, but they will be seeking an institutional seed round in the late summer or early fall.
As far as long term goals go, Drucker’s aspirations seem at once ambitious and achievable.
“We want to be the go-to platform for healthcare supplies for the entire industry”, said Drucker. “We want to be the portal for both purchasing and reference lookup for information on every product you could possibly want in the healthcare world.”
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