One of the best ways to gain a qualitative grasp for a company is to be a customer. I’ve had this experience over the past year with Plasmidsaurus, and it makes me extremely excited.
Contra most biotech companies Plasmidsaurus keeps things simple. They’re not in the difficult, competitive, heavily-regulated business of making drugs. They’re not doing something cool and cutting edge with AI. Science risk is all well and good, but they leave that part to their customers. Plasmidsaurus does one thing, and does it well – they sequence DNA.
DNA sequencing is important for ~every biotech lab. No matter what you are doing, if you are working with cells, it is helpful to know what the DNA inside them says. This is not going to change anytime soon.
From a business perspective, it is quite helpful to Plasmidsaurus that they are riding one of the most impressive trends in technology over the past 30 years: the decline in sequencing costs. If this trend continues, Plasmidsaurus will be able to continually lower their prices over time and induce more demand from customers.
Oh, and we should talk about prices. Plasmidsaurus will sequence your sample for $15. Fifteen bucks! Prices like these are simply unheard of for biotech services. To call this affordable is an absurd understatement – you would be foolish not to use this service liberally, because it can avoid costly mistakes. This is mission-critical information, at a price that is low for me, running an independent two-man lab. For a big academic or industry lab, it’s a rounding error.
Plasmidsaurus is fast too. I’ve sent out probably 6 or 7 samples for sequencing in the past 6 months and they always get back to me within a week. (Sometimes they turn things around in 6 hours!)
All of this to say: Plasmidsaurus provides an important service extremely well, with high reliability, for a price that makes it irresponsible for its customers not to use it. They have shown a remarkable ability to execute, and have the tailwinds of improving technology behind them.
P.S. Mark, if you come across this post, thanks for building something awesome. Pretty please let me invest :).