Willie Pritchett spent the first four years of his career as a software developer, helping a large insurance company manage retirement funds for its clients.
But the young programmer, who grew up crafting arcade games on one of Atari’s first computer systems, felt the walls of corporate America were stifling his creativity.
Each night, when he returned from the company’s Downtown skyscraper, he sat down at his home desktop computer and set to work on his personal mission: designing programs that would help ordinary people eliminate hassles from their daily lives.
Mega Input Data Services, the company that began in 29-year-old Pritchett’s home office, now has 11 employees in four states and an array of products on the market or in development that he hopes will change the way people think about everything from their health to retail shopping.
The company has been in business for five years, building a list of customers from hospitals to landscaping firms. By some standards, five years is young for a company. But in the software industry, where startups come and go, that period can be nearly a lifetime.
“Three-quarters of businesses that start today will be out of business in five years,” said Bruce Kidd, director of the Indiana Economic Development Corp. “But software companies can compete if they find a useful niche.”
Patient Assist, the latest in the line of Web-based programs from the company’s MIDOSIS health-care brand, allows patients, doctors and insurance companies to electronically record all information about the patient, from illness history and allergies to blood type and copies of X-rays. The program aims to eliminate most medical paperwork. “Going to the doctor, I hated filling out all the forms,” Pritchett said. “It was just a drag to have to do that.”
Mega Input is betting that enough people feel the same way that they’ll pay $49.99 to purchase the program’s CD version, plus $70 annually to access records through the Internet. Users who exclusively use the Web version of the product pay only the $70 yearly subscription fee.
Patient Assist’s biggest selling point is an identification card that comes with the product. Customers can carry it in their wallets, and if they become unconscious in an emergency, when fast treatment may be a matter of life and death, doctors can access all the information instantaneously instead of calling the patient’s next-of-kin and normal physician for records.
Patient Assist is one of the company’s eight pending patents and may take a while to catch on, but customers are already using management software developed by Mega Input to run daily business tasks. Timothy Williams, vice president of operations for Indiana Minority Business Magazine, said he uses Pritchett’s scheduling software to keep track of contacts with advertisers, from the first cold call to the final contract.
“It makes my day a lot easier,” Williams said. “It creates less paperwork, particularly during the sales crunch.” The company also uses a Mega Input program to send mass e-mails to readers. Pritchett started Mega Input with his friend JurJuan Walker, whom he met when they pledged the same fraternity at Purdue. Pritchett studied organizational leadership, and Walker studied electrical engineering technology.
Getting Mega Input off the ground has been a tough job, less in the financial sense of rounding up investors and taking out loans than in the 16-hour workdays and juggling of responsibilities; Pritchett left the insurance company after four years. Walker still spends his days developing hardware and his evenings working in tech support for General Motors. But both men are optimistic that their hard work in development will pay off in the success of their new products.
In one of Mega Input’s first projects, Walker developed network security hardware that fought back against hackers by infecting their computers with viruses. Walker wanted to bring the product to market but didn’t have enough money for the launch at the time.
“Software is less expensive than hardware (to develop), so we’re hoping to make money from the software to fund the hardware,” he said. In growing the company to customers’ needs, Pritchett is both making his products useful and living a childhood dream. “I’ve had offers to go back to corporate America,” he said, “but I wouldn’t trade what we’re doing for the world.”
