Trek Health’s Playbook: How to Gain Initial Traction in a Highly Regulated Market

Even the tech giants struggle with healthcare. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Berkshire Hathaway have all attempted and retreated from the sector. Yet Trek Health, a healthcare payments startup, has managed to gain significant traction in just over a year, serving 35 clients with over 200 providers. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Dilpreet Sahota shared their blueprint for breaking into this notoriously difficult market.

Finding the Right Entry Point

The key to Trek Health’s early success wasn’t trying to solve everything at once. “What we’ve really found is that in healthcare, there is a ton of noise, as is the case in most industries,” Dilpreet explains. “What we have attempted to do is really to obsess with the customer experience in a way that is actually specialty specific.”

Their chosen specialty – behavioral health – wasn’t a random choice. Unlike traditional medicine, where most doctors work for large health systems, mental health providers largely operate independently. “There’s 780,000 mental health providers in America today,” notes Dilpreet. These providers are “largely practicing within independent practices owned by clinicians, operated by clinicians.”

Building for the Market Reality

Trek Health’s approach acknowledges a crucial reality of healthcare technology: you’re not just building for users, you’re building for an entire ecosystem of legacy systems. “Data interoperability within healthcare is quite lacking,” Dilpreet explains. “Many of the practice management systems or EHR systems that these groups have within their stack today… don’t have APIs.”

This insight shaped their entire product development and implementation strategy. Instead of trying to force their ideal solution, they adapted to the market’s constraints, building solutions that could work with existing systems, even if that meant dealing with CSV reports or implementing screen scraping solutions.

The Sales-Implementation Balance

One of Trek Health’s most valuable insights was recognizing that in healthcare, getting the sale isn’t the hardest part. “The pain point resonates very well with these folks. What is the challenge is implementation,” Dilpreet shares. This understanding led them to focus heavily on the post-sale experience, ensuring they could deliver on their promises despite the technical challenges.

Starting Small but Building for Scale

While Trek Health started by serving small practices, they built their platform to handle larger operations from the beginning. “We support provider groups ranging from someone as small as just a couple of providers… and now our largest clients are venture backed startups that have a presence in 15 states,” Dilpreet explains. This scalability has proven crucial for growth.

Focus on Core Problems

Instead of trying to solve every healthcare technology problem, Trek Health focused on the most pressing issue: payments. Of the $4 trillion spent in healthcare annually, “$1 trillion every year is spent specifically on healthcare admin,” Dilpreet notes. “And most of that is related to billing claims, insurance, all these things.”

The Path Forward

Trek Health’s approach provides a blueprint for founders tackling regulated markets:

1. Choose a specific, underserved segment within the larger market
2. Build solutions that work with existing infrastructure, not against it
3. Focus on post-sale implementation as much as pre-sale development
4. Build for scale from day one
5. Target fundamental problems that affect the entire industry

For B2B founders entering regulated markets, Trek Health’s experience shows that success often comes not from disrupting everything at once, but from finding the right entry point and executing methodically. As Dilpreet puts it, the goal is to “make it very easy for provider groups to be stood up and act as competition to the way that care is delivered today.”