Meet the Medical Rep Who Started Everything

His name was Suresh, and he covered a territory of eleven towns around Nashik for a mid-sized pharma company, on a bike, in weather that ranged from monsoon flooding to April heat that makes the tar go soft. We met him in the second week of the field research that eventually became FieldVoice, and he is the reason the product looks the way it does.

Suresh's routine was ordinary by the standards of the job: nine or ten doctor visits a day, sample drops, occasional retailer stops to check stock. What was not ordinary was watching him do the same day twice. Once, in the moment, a quick voice note to himself on his personal phone after each visit, doctor name, key point discussed, a reminder for next time. And then again at night, translating that same voice note into the company CRM's forms, in English, on an app that timed out if he did not fill every field in order.

Why this stuck with us

We asked him why he bothered with the voice note at all, since he was going to type it up anyway. His answer was simple: the voice note was faster and it was in Marathi, which is how he actually thinks about his own day. The CRM made him translate his own thoughts into a second language and a rigid structure before it would accept them. He was, in effect, doing the work twice, once naturally, once for the software.

That gap is the whole company. Suresh already had a system that worked for him. It just was not connected to anything. The moment we saw that, the brief for FieldVoice stopped being "build a better form" and became "make the voice note the system," capture the thing he was already doing, in the language he was already doing it in, and let the structure get extracted from that instead of demanded before it.

• •A rep who already narrates his day to himself, unprompted
• •A CRM that requires that narration to be re-typed, translated, and reformatted
• •A fifteen-minute gap between the two that FieldVoice exists to close

We are building FieldVoice because Suresh, and reps like him across every territory we visited after him, had already solved the hard part, remembering and describing the visit accurately. The software just needed to stop getting in the way of that. This is the first of what we hope is more than one product built on that idea, but for now it is the only one that matters.