5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from PathologyWatch’s Journey in Healthcare Tech
When building a healthcare startup, conventional Silicon Valley wisdom often falls short. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, PathologyWatch CEO Daniel Lambert shared invaluable insights from scaling a healthcare technology company to 180 clinics and three hospital partnerships in just two and a half years. Here are the key go-to-market lessons that emerged from their journey.
- Sales First, Everything Else Second
For Daniel, the most crucial skill for B2B founders isn’t technical expertise or product development – it’s sales. “I think it’s 100% sales. You have to get out there early and learn from the customer from day one, rather than building a product and then letting it fail, or you think the entire product is just coming from your head.”
This sales-first mentality led PathologyWatch to conduct extensive customer interviews before building their product. The feedback they received from interviewing 10-12 dermatologists completely shaped their go-to-market strategy, with customers consistently demanding an end-to-end solution rather than point products.
- Master the Regulatory Landscape Before Launch
Unlike typical B2B software companies, healthcare startups must navigate complex regulatory requirements before they can even begin selling. Daniel’s advice for healthcare founders is unequivocal: “Really reading up on how the FDA thinks about AI and stark laws and sunshine act and anti kickback laws and Medicare billing laws, getting a very good understanding of how many legal opinions were going to be needed to grow a company like this.”
This deep regulatory understanding isn’t just about compliance – it’s about building a sustainable competitive advantage in a complex market.
- Test Multiple Value Propositions Simultaneously
Instead of betting everything on a single value proposition, PathologyWatch developed a “stack of ideas” to appeal to different customer segments. Daniel reveals, “Each of our first four or five customers, I think they all latched onto a different value proposition. So it was a little bit of spray and prey on these value propositions until we found one that landed.”
This experimental approach allowed them to discover which benefits resonated most strongly with different customer segments while building their initial customer base.
- Embrace Industry Complexity Instead of Fighting It
Rather than trying to simplify healthcare’s complexity, PathologyWatch chose to embrace it by becoming a tech-enabled service company. As Daniel explains, “The best way to break in, and this is true, especially in healthcare, is to start as a tech enabled service company, more so than just trying to be the SaaS technology provider, which means you’re sacrificing some upside on the multiples, but it also means that you can actually handle the patient case directly.”
- Build Deep Domain Expertise Through Direct Operations
PathologyWatch made the counterintuitive decision to operate their own laboratories rather than just developing software. Daniel explains why: “We really needed to run the labs. We really needed to run these algorithms on our own and develop these algorithms in our own lab so that we can learn from all of those things. And in healthcare, you’re dealing with biology, and it’s a lot of unknown things when you start a company like this.”
This hands-on approach proved crucial for developing effective AI systems, as it exposed them to real-world challenges they wouldn’t have encountered otherwise: “We had to actually sell the process of this, actively working to catch smudges and bad stains and artifacts that come out of the lab.”
For founders entering regulated markets, these lessons highlight a crucial truth: sometimes the path to disruption requires embracing your industry’s complexity rather than trying to circumvent it. By building a full-stack solution and focusing on deep customer understanding, PathologyWatch has positioned itself not just to serve the market, but to help define how digital pathology will be done in the future.
As Daniel puts it, “Sometimes you can’t move at lightning speed.” But by following these principles – prioritizing sales, mastering regulations, testing multiple value propositions, embracing complexity, and building deep domain expertise – healthcare startups can build sustainable businesses that create genuine value in a challenging market.