6 Go-to-Market Lessons from Feedback PLC’s Healthcare Tech Transformation

Regulatory constraints killed more healthcare startups than bad product-market fit ever did. But what if those same regulations could become your competitive moat? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Thomas Oakley, CEO of Feedback PLC, revealed how embracing medical device regulations helped transform a declining imaging company into a fast-growing clinical collaboration platform.

Here are six essential go-to-market lessons from their journey:

Turn Constraints into Competitive Advantages

Most startups see medical device regulations as innovation killers. Feedback PLC saw them as a barrier to entry. “We are certainly in the UK, the only clinical collaboration platform that is certified as medical device for image display,” Thomas explains. This certification opened doors that were firmly closed to competitors: “We’re able to move at a pace and a speed that large entities can’t compete with, and to create a user experience that is often far superior to the technology that these large companies generate.”

Find Your Blue Ocean

Instead of competing in crowded markets, look for adjacent opportunities where your unique capabilities create uncontested value. As Thomas notes, “We have competitors that do bits of what we do, but no one that brings it all together in the way that we have.” This positioning led them to win significant contracts, including “the UK’s first end-to-end care pathway between GPs in primary care hospitals, in secondary care, and these new community diagnostic centers.”

Embrace Long Sales Cycles

In enterprise healthcare, persistence matters more than pitch perfection. “It takes anywhere between ten to thirty engagements before you get to the point of contracting. Then you typically go through procurement, and that procurement process can take six to nine months,” Thomas reveals. Success requires “a lot of internal discipline and drive to keep pacing and chasing and pushing, and to not give up on opportunities and to ensure that you close them.”

Make Customer Obsession Your Innovation Engine

Rather than trying to move fast and break things, Feedback PLC developed a unique approach to regulated innovation. They maintain an “absolute obsession with sitting close to the customer,” using their input to drive product iterations. This led to breakthrough features during COVID, enabling “consultants who were treating patients in Manchester and advising on treatment plans whilst being at home with family in Delhi, India.”

Build for Edge Cases

Sometimes your most valuable innovations come from solving extreme use cases. When developing capabilities for veterinary imaging in fields without WiFi, they inadvertently created technology that would later enable rural healthcare in India. As Thomas explains, they could now provide “AI-powered TB screening diagnosis within about 30 seconds of an x-ray being taken anywhere in India where you had 3G connectivity.”

Reset Expectations, Then Exceed Them

When transforming a legacy business, managing expectations is crucial. Thomas found that previous leadership had “over promised and often under delivered.” His approach? “To say that there’s a bold new strategy we’re going to under promise and over deliver.” This reset helped rebuild trust with stakeholders while giving the team room to execute their transformation.

The Results Speak Themselves

These principles have driven consistent 74% year-over-year growth for three years running, with an 89% increase in sales in their latest period. More importantly, they’ve reduced patient wait times in the NHS by 70% without adding clinical staff.

Looking ahead, Thomas sees their approach enabling even broader impact: “Our technology is going to become essentially a digital glue that pulls healthcare environments together and through party technologies can be deployed to a national or international healthcare audience.”

The lesson for founders? Your biggest market constraints might actually be hiding your biggest opportunities. The key is learning to see them differently – not as limitations to overcome, but as unique advantages to leverage in your go-to-market strategy.