6 Go-to-Market Lessons from PocketHealth’s Path to 1M+ Patients

Sometimes the most valuable GTM insights come from companies that took the road less traveled. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, PocketHealth Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Nayyar shared how ignoring conventional startup wisdom led to building a healthcare platform now used by over a million patients.

Here are six key lessons from their journey:

1. Your Industry Experience Gap Can Be Your Greatest Asset Being an outsider in healthcare tech turned out to be PocketHealth’s secret weapon. Rather than accepting industry norms, they looked beyond them. “Our bias is how are these problems solved in the entirety of tech, in the entirety of consumer applications, not, hey, what are other patient portals that we can look at,” Rishi explained. This fresh perspective allowed them to set a higher bar for user experience that existing players weren’t even considering.
2. True Product-Market Fit Takes Longer Than You Think While many startups rush to declare product-market fit after early sales success, PocketHealth waited a full year to make that call. As Rishi noted, “We could just be really convincing, so we could go to a bunch of places and pitch it and just convince people to adopt it inside their clinics or their hospitals. That’s not a true product market fit.” Instead, they waited for consistent organic adoption without their direct involvement.
3. Start Small to Go Big Despite the larger U.S. market opportunity, PocketHealth deliberately started local in Toronto. “Starting locally in the Toronto area was really important for us to get that early feedback, early revenue, and be able to get to the point where we felt we had a product that was heavily chipped away and refined not by us, but by the market,” Rishi shared. This focus on deep market understanding over rapid expansion paid off in building a more robust solution.
4. Look for Natural Network Effects Rather than fighting against stakeholder friction, PocketHealth built it into their growth engine. “Hospitals share with patients share with physicians or physicians who work in hospitals, and then that naturally generates inbound interest for us,” Rishi explained. This built-in virality became a key driver of their expansion.
5. Position Around Moments, Not Features Instead of selling image sharing as a feature, PocketHealth recognized it as a crucial moment in the patient journey. As Rishi put it, “Imaging is this special moment…afterwards, everything in the healthcare journey happens. Your second opinions, what drugs do I go on, what treatment plan, what do I do next?” This positioning elevated their solution from a utility to a strategic platform.
6. Build for Your Future Customer While starting with smaller clinics, PocketHealth always kept enterprise needs in mind. Their ideal customers became “academic health systems or more complex medical imaging clinic groups…dealing with complex imaging, complex patient scenarios, and that imaging needs to move around a lot.” This long-term vision informed their product decisions from day one.

What makes these lessons particularly valuable is how they challenge common startup assumptions. When everyone else was rushing to scale, PocketHealth stayed local. When competitors were building complex portals, they focused on simplicity. When the industry treated image sharing as a feature, they saw it as a crucial moment.

The results speak for themselves. “2023 looks like it’s going to match previous years in terms of our growth rate, which is we’re growing multiples every year,” Rishi noted. Their approach shows that sometimes the best go-to-market strategy isn’t about moving faster or being louder – it’s about having the conviction to take the path that others overlook.

For founders building in regulated markets, these lessons offer a powerful framework for growth: leverage your outsider perspective, validate thoroughly, start small, build on natural network effects, position around moments rather than features, and always keep your future customer in mind. It might not be the fastest path to growth, but it could be the surest.