I've been selling software for a long time, and these days most of my conversations are with early-stage and mid-sized pharmaceutical companies. Teams of a few dozen people. Companies where the head of Medical Affairs is also the publications lead, the congress planner, and half of the regulatory department.
Somewhere in the first ten minutes of those calls, the same thing comes up. And I've started saying it back to them plainly, because somebody should.
You're not held to a different standard because you're small. The FDA doesn't publish a lighter rulebook for companies under a hundred employees, and neither does the EMA. You might not have the staff the big companies do, but that doesn't change the standard you're held to: the same disclosure requirements, the same documentation expectations, the same questions in an audit.
A 30-person pharma answers to the same regulators as a 30,000-person one. Same scrutiny, none of the headcount. That's the whole problem in one sentence.
And here's what I've realized after enough of these conversations: everybody in the industry knows this, and almost nobody builds for it.
Ask a small pharma team how they manage publications and Medical Affairs work today, and you'll usually hear one of two answers.
The first is an enterprise platform built for big pharma. It assumes a dedicated pubs operations person, a long implementation, and a budget line that makes the CFO wince. The buyer asks a fair question: why am I paying for a system designed around staff I don't have?
The second is spreadsheets, email threads, and a shared drive. That feels free right up until an auditor asks who reviewed which version of which document, and when, and someone spends weeks reconstructing an answer that should take minutes.
Neither option is sized for the way these teams actually work. You don't need a cannon to shoot a fly. You also can't swat it with a sticky note.
Here's the realization I keep coming back to. The big companies close the compliance gap with headcount: whole departments whose job is to route documents, chase approvals, and keep the audit trail clean. If you can't close it with headcount, you close it with a system.
That means intake, routing, review, and approvals running through one governed process, with the audit trail recorded as the work happens rather than reconstructed after the fact. Who reviewed it, what changed, who signed off: all captured automatically. When the scrutiny comes, the answer already exists.
That's the same governance argument we make across everything at BP Logix (our Governance Gap white paper goes deep on it): accountability and auditability have to live in the system doing the work. Big pharma can staff its way there, at enormous cost. Early-stage pharma has a better option.
It's why we built PubPro to be right-sized for lean teams: big-pharma governance in a system a five-person Medical Affairs team can actually run. And it isn't a starter tool. The same governed process carries the industry's largest teams, so it scales as you grow.
If you're leading an early-stage or mid-sized pharma company, the regulators have already decided the standard you'll be held to. The only decision left is how you'll meet it: with headcount you can't justify, with spreadsheets that won't survive an audit, or with a system sized for the team you actually have.
I know which conversation I'd rather be in. If you want to have it, let's talk. Thirty minutes, no pitch deck: you tell me how your process runs today, and I'll tell you honestly whether PubPro fits it. Book a call with me today.