Most enterprise software companies operate on a simple premise: build something marginally better than the competition, and customers will switch. But healthcare technology follows different rules. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Amenities Health founder Aasim Saeed revealed why incremental improvements fail in healthcare enterprise sales.
The 100X Rule
“You don’t have to just be better. You have to be undeniably ten times better,” Aasim explains. “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, and you can’t be 100 times better at 100 different things.”
This insight comes from Aasim’s unique perspective, having sat on both sides of healthcare technology sales. Before founding Amenities Health, he led innovation at Baylor Scott & White Health, where he experienced firsthand the challenges of implementing new technology: “No matter what we did, it took us nine months to launch any project, fastest we’ve ever done.”
Why Healthcare Demands Radical Improvement
The high bar for improvement stems from healthcare’s unique characteristics:
- Long Implementation Cycles: “There’s six to 18 month sales cycles. I would really test that before you spend a bunch of time selling.”
- Complex Decision Making: “Finding product market fit when you’re at enterprise is so hard because the end is so small, the dollars are so big and the trends are subjective.”
- Risk-Averse Culture: Healthcare systems are naturally conservative, requiring overwhelming evidence before adopting new solutions.
Amenities Health’s Approach
Instead of building multiple features with incremental improvements, Amenities Health focused on solving one fundamental problem: patient loyalty. Their research revealed a startling insight – not a single patient stayed exclusively with one healthcare brand over two years.
“We need to find evangelists,” Aasim notes. “The good news is there are, we are already in talks with about five to ten different health systems who are talking about loyalty and we’re going to help them define and build it.”
The Sales Strategy
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 strategy requires:
- Identifying a problem worth solving
- Validating the solution with customers before building
- Focusing resources on one transformative improvement
- Building evidence through early adopters
The Future Vision
For Amenities Health, the path to success lies in demonstrating massive value through market share shifts. “If you could see 10% market share shift from their competitors to them because they created a better experience, now the profit motive and greed and all the best parts of capitalism take over,” Aasim explains.
For founders entering healthcare technology, the message is clear: don’t chase incremental improvements. Find one critical problem, solve it dramatically better than anyone else, and build evidence that proves it. In an industry resistant to change, anything less than transformative improvement won’t drive adoption.