KOL: The Startup Aiming to be at the Intersection of Google and LinkedIn

A Key Opinion Leader is an influencer and subject matter expert. Today, many people rely on personal recommendations or advice from close friends, family, and Key Opinion Leaders when buying something, making them essential for marketing and business growth.

Key Opinion Leaders give you access to a targeted audience of customers and can help you generate more sales because their opinions carry much weight. In healthcare, KOLs help create awareness of new drugs and devices, increase sales volume for suppliers, and give insight into a specific disease, including existing treatments. But identifying the right KOLs to work with is often tricky. This is where this start-up with a homonymous name (KOL) comes into play.

KOL is a search engine that allows users to find and rank Key Opinion Leaders and Influencers in two different spheres: Academia and Social media.

The problem: It is hard to tell what percentage of influence/authority KOLs possess in their niche and compare them to others. In many cases, you must go with an estimate or merely the number of followers/citations, something one California-based start-up focuses on changing.

According to its website, the company uses data science to measure and numerically compare people's influence on specific concepts to provide measurable figures for each topic.

For example, the report “The Top Influencers in Social Media for New York” provides a list of the top social media influencers on matters related (only) to New York City, including their affiliation and influence concepts scores. In the KOL platform, the number of followers is not the critical metric, but how much influence each person has on the concept in question.

For instance, one can imagine a scenario where a person with fewer followers can have more power over a topic than a person with more followers. For example, consider Greta Thunberg (5.8 million Twitter followers) vs. Michelle Obama (22 million Twitter followers). Who has a more substantial influence on the topic of Global Warming?

In this example, although Ms. Obama has four times more followers, it is more likely that the most potent influence (for that topic) rests in the hands of Mrs. Thunberg. These are the kind of questions that we were able to test during our review process of this platform.

We could test two product lines from our interaction with the KOL platform: Academia and Social Media Influence Scores. With the Academia search, KOL showed us the top people in the areas we tested: healthcare, life sciences, and engineering.

Social Media influence scores: We also tried KOL to find social media influencers. We could filter these searches by concepts like the specific niche, organizations, and locations.

According to the company's website, universities, hospitals, patients, research organizations, and grantmakers use the platform for different use cases, from human resources to recruiting and marketing.

Patients can also use KeyOpinionLeaders.com via the Health Guides available on their website. These Health Guides map different medical conditions to the top experts in different countries. The difference between this approach and other companies’ is that the ranking is not based on patients’ reviews but on support seen from other doctors, researchers and medical journals.

Lastly, we downloaded and tested the platform's mobile version, which is available for iPhone and Android at the time of this writing. We were able to conduct similar searches with a reasonably good user experience, given the limitations of the screens of our devices (iPhone 14 Pro and Pixel 7.)

According to Ana Codallo, the CTO of KOL, their goal is to build a Google for KOLs/influencers, a website where you can learn what topics a person influences in the real world, be it a social media influencer or a person in academia.