10 Things to Do When There Is No Analog for Your Asset

The commercialization playbook was written for products that have a close analog. What do you do when yours doesn’t? This is the hardest kind of commercial problem, and it comes with a private worry: that the novel science that’s your whole thesis is also the reason it’s hard to know what “good” looks like, since no one has quite done this before. Here’s how to build the case anyway.

1. Stop reaching for the nearest analog.

The instinct is to borrow the closest launch wholesale. When you do, you inherit its assumptions without noticing, and you build a strategy that doesn’t account for what’s actually different about your case.

2. Build a mosaic of analogs deliberately.

No perfect analog doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means assembling the reference case on purpose, a mosaic pieced together from adjacent products, from the underlying customer behavior, from the parts of other launches that actually apply to your situation.

3. Separate what’s inherited from what’s proven.

With truly new science, half the commercial work is sorting through which assumptions you’ve inherited by default and which ones the evidence actually backs.

4. Treat “first-in-class” as two things at once.

It’s a genuine scientific achievement and a commercial problem at the same time. The mechanism that makes the science a breakthrough is the same one that means no one has done the market-building work for you.

5. Remember that novel science doesn’t get a blank-slate market.

It still has to win in the real world of payers, prescribers, and patients who’ve never seen anything like it. And you’re rarely the only option: older, more established mechanisms are often already treating these patients, and you’ll be compared to them on every front, not just on efficacy but on logistics and access too.

6. Map the addressable population as a funnel.

The prevalence number is the starting point, not the ending point. Every step narrows it: who gets diagnosed, who reaches a physician who knows the option exists, who can afford the drug. Each filter is reasonable, and stacked together they can turn a large potential market into a fraction of itself.

7. Do the funnel math early, because it drives everything upstream.

The reachable number shapes which indication to lead with, how to design the trial, and what you tell investors. Get it wrong early and you find out when the model meets reality.

8. Account for who decides and who pays.

Novel therapies don’t just change the treatment. They can change who makes the call, who carries the cost, and how adoption actually happens. A strategy that ignores that is a strategy for a market that doesn’t exist.

9. Distrust the confident forecast with nothing behind it.

The riskiest number in the deck is the one with no analog and no worked-through rationale to anchor it. Rigor here isn’t pessimism. It’s honesty about what’s reachable versus what’s theoretically possible.

10. Start sooner, not later.

“There’s no precedent for this” isn’t a reason to wait on commercial strategy. It’s the reason to start earlier, because the thinking is harder and takes longer than a borrowed playbook ever would.

Genuinely new science is the reason a company exists. It’s also the reason the commercial thinking has to be more original, and start earlier.