I worked in Butterfly Network's business development team this summer, focusing on international expansion, particularly in the Singapore market.

Butterfly is a startup selling handheld ultrasound devices and just started to commercialize its products. During COVID-19, the Singapore government reached out to Butterfly since its products can help better diagnose the COVID symptoms. The Butterfly Network devices have both software and hardware components but for selling to Singapore with restrictions on the cloud side, the focus was just on the hardware, which has lower margins than software. Among all the countries Butterfly has entered so far, none of them are selling only the hardware. The key challenge was to figure out the entire go-to-market strategy in terms of features offered, pricing, procurement, logistics, etc. in the Singapore market.

First and foremost, I needed to know the financial implications, especially the customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio. In response, I developed a sensitivity analysis that took into consideration over a dozen factors ranging from our costs to procure, logistics warranty, and even customized hardware-only products. I utilized what I learned during my MBA study, including the marketing core course, financial modeling course, etc. to come up with a model. Based on the model I built, we were able to find that despite the lack of recurring revenue stream from software sales, we can still reach promising LTV/CAC ratio.

Also, I worked together with the product manager to figure out the features offered in Singapore market. And I touched base with the Singapore distributors to come up with a complete implementation plan. According to my plan, we didn't need to dedicate as many resources to outreach as usual, and could instead use a more uniform approach. Finally, the Asian market is a growing market and ultrasound is relatively new. We can get our foot in the door and potentially expand to software services in the future. While the initial margins were lower, I showed that the ease of procurement, stability of the contracts, and long-term potential growth made this a great deal.

On top of the above project, I also accomplished two side projects. The first one was US education partner outreach. I met with the CME educators in the United States to see if there was an opportunity for us to collaboratively sell the devices. Another project was point of care ultrasound (POCUS) billing research to identify the existing billing barriers in the market.

I was able to have a more holistic understanding of the ultrasound market and learn work more efficiently with cross-functional teams through the internship. I really appreciate the Tamer Center facilitting this amazing project.