Osu Sala Online

We started what feels like one month ago, even though it was Thursday last week, and it has been a crazy journey thus far! This is our storey, it's not very long, but we hope you enjoy it.

COVID-19

Life as we know it was changing all around us faster than we could imagine due to COVID 19. We couldn't believe the sheer toll the virus was taking on our society. Society started to get locked down, more people than we could imagine started losing their jobs and business were getting shut down. However, this didn't compare to what we heard from a call from our extended family in Sri Lanka....Sri Lanka was under extreme lockdown and had a curfew that was enforced by the police and military. This prevented people from going to pharmacies to access their medication, even when their lives depended on it. The solution the government came up with was using WhatsApp and Viber for people to upload their prescriptions directly to the pharmacy. Problem was the system wasn't working to the point where thousands of people were not even getting a reply from the pharmacy let alone having their orders processed. 

Banding together to do some good. 

We couldn't stand sitting around and feeling helpless for our finds and family. We realised we could repurpose some tech we had developed to potentially help the pharmacies become more efficient and ultimately deliver more medication to those in need.  

We reached out to the State Pharmaceutical Corporation (a government body) who agreed to implement our system to help them manage their prescription requests and manage their demand across their  38 pharmacies.

To our surprise, we made a Facebook page and within hours people started liking it and asking us to help them and explaining how desperate they were. We had done no marketing so couldn't understand how they found us but realised there was a real need for the product. 

Product-market fit.

The next few days were gruelling.

It was a crazy sprint get the tech ready to launch but we did it in 3 days. We launched the next day and worked 18-hour days fixing bugs, building our marketing, customer support and onboarding all at the same time.  

We kept getting heartfelt messages from users telling us how much they appreciated what we were doing so were more driven than ever. 

In three days we had over 7,000 users on our platform and over 3,500 prescriptions uploaded. We only spend $80 on marketing and had over 1300 people share our posts. 

That's when we found out the pharmacies were not expecting us to grow so quickly and weren't able to service all of the orders.

So we rapidly switched focus towards helping them fix their systems and onboard more pharmacies to help improve the overall output. 

That brings us to today. 

(Here are some comments!)

Next Steps

We realise we have a real opportunity to help a lot of people not only in Sri Lanka but across the world. Especially in countries that are facing similar lockdown with traditional pharmacies. 

That is why we decided we need help from experts and funding to support our growth. 

We live for startups and love solving problems. We have a passionate and highly skilled team that has experience building a fast-growing startup. We would love to be part of We Funder community and would really appreciate your support. 

Thanks for spending the time to read our application and storey. 

Osu Sala Team, 

Himasha, Janaka and Dilshan.