Go Beyond Incremental Improvement In enterprise healthcare, marginal improvements won’t drive adoption. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Amenities Health founder Aasim Saeed emphasized this reality: “You have to be undeniably ten times better. If you do what Epic does with one feature and it’s a little bit better, you will never make a sale in this industry. You have to be a hundred times better at that one thing.”
This insight shaped Amenities Health’s entire product strategy. Rather than building multiple features with minor improvements, they focused on solving one fundamental problem: patient loyalty. Their research revealed that not a single patient stayed exclusively with one healthcare brand over two years, representing a massive market opportunity.
Validate Before Building For founders entering healthcare, Aasim advocates for a counterintuitive approach: “Sell it before you build it. Anything that we’re going to use can be built… Most things can’t be sold like that’s actually – people don’t often think of it like that’s the harder part.”
This principle becomes crucial when dealing with healthcare’s extended sales cycles: “There’s six to 18 month sales cycles. I would really test that before you spend a bunch of time selling.” Amenities Health discovered this firsthand, learning that finding product-market fit in enterprise is particularly challenging “because the end is so small, the dollars are so big and the trends are subjective.”
Differentiate Through Brand While most healthcare startups adopt conservative branding to mirror their enterprise customers, Amenities Health took a bold stance. “Healthcare is really bad at experience… If we’re coming in and we’re saying we’re really great at experience, why would we want to look as awful as healthcare does?”
This differentiation serves a strategic purpose. As Aasim explains, “We’re not trying to take over their brand… we fill in a gap that you don’t have.” This approach positions Amenities Health as a complementary partner rather than a threat.
Focus on Real Customer Value Through extensive research, Amenities Health discovered that physical experience improvements weren’t enough. “The number one problem in US healthcare today for patients is cost. It’s the fear of bankruptcy. I have no idea what this will cost and I won’t know until six months after I’ve already consumed the service and on the hook to pay for it.”
This insight led them to develop features like no-surprise billing guarantees and transparent pricing – addressing fundamental customer pain points rather than surface-level improvements.
Build for Enterprise Scale Success in healthcare requires building solutions that can handle enterprise complexity. “Even more than a physician shortage, we have a specialist shortage,” Aasim notes, highlighting the need to understand systemic challenges.
For Amenities Health, this meant developing a platform that could serve entire health systems, not just individual practices. Their goal became enabling these systems to compete on experience – something they currently lack the tools and infrastructure to do effectively.
These lessons underscore a crucial truth about healthcare technology: success requires more than just technical excellence. It demands deep market understanding, strategic positioning, and a willingness to challenge industry norms while building solutions robust enough for enterprise deployment. For founders entering this space, these insights provide a valuable roadmap for navigating the complex journey from innovative idea to enterprise adoption.
Twitter
facebook
linkedin