Nov. 27, 2015, 9:02 a.m. CT
- Lucro mixes features — groups, ratings and pinning — from sites such as Facebook, Yelp & Pinterest.
Martin Ventures is behind a start-up that is using social-networking features to tune out the white noise that engulfs health care professionals who are trying to find the right technology or products for a project.
Lucro combines popular attributes — groups, ratings and pinning, for example — from sites such as Facebook, Yelp and Pinterest into a marketplace that allows members to rank and review third-party vendors, collaborate virtually and curate project-idea boards.
“(Product vendors) are calling us, saying they have the answer to our problems,” said Bruce Brandes, CEO and founder of Lucro. “Frankly what’s happening is some of the most promising solutions are getting lost in the noise.”
What he and the Martin Ventures team wants to do is give industry leaders a corner of the Web where social and professional networking features are used to solve problems.
The company is about a year old and has about 1,000 hospitals using the site as early adopters along with BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota, Brandes said. Four of six board of director seats are filled by representatives of Martin Ventures, a Nashville-based venture capital investor. He expects to start raising additional capital in the first quarter.
The company is going to be Nashville-based, and Brandes wants most of the staff to be local but hiring the right people to fill technology positions is “one of the things we’re struggling with.” Brandes is looking to recruit tech talent from San Francisco and Austin, and try to bring them to Nashville.
The Lucro marketplace offers several functions to let health care professionals quickly search for products or services as well as exchange information with peers. Members can join groups while a corporation with a national footprint could create a private, internal group so people across its footprint could talk about a mutually-of-interest topic.
Brandes expects members to use the site as needed on projects.
Like popular restaurant review sites, ratings and comments will be from people who work in the health care industry. Brandes wants Lucro members to be thoughtful and honest, so users can quickly sift through the information.
Lucro used available lists of vendors and service providers to develop what it calls solutions cards that are similar to hotel reviews on travels sites, which contain only vital information, and likely most valuable for Web surfers: reviews and comments from other users.
Vendors and service providers don’t have to be on the site for their product or services to be listed and reviewed, but the solutions card won’t be considered “100 percent complete” until the vendor claims it.
Reviews could boost “companies that are solving problems” or help others “fail faster,” which is also helpful for the industry, Brandes said.
“We want to help provide insight to some of those companies (whose products may not get top reviews) to help them understand how they may want to pivot,” he said.
Reach Holly Fletcher at 615-259-8287 or follow her on Twitter at @hollyfletcher.
