Building health tech is getting easier. Selling it isn’t.

Topic: Growth

AI has made it ridiculously easy to build things. A founder with a small team can now create, test and launch products in a fraction of the time it used to take. Things that once needed a decent engineering team, a big budget and months of work can now be prototyped in days or weeks. That is obviously a great thing.

But I also think it creates a bit of a trap, especially in healthcare. It is easy to start thinking: We built this quickly, so surely we can sell it quickly too. That is where things tend to get harder.

The Struggle for Traction

I have worked with quite a few health-tech companies over the years, and one thing comes up again and again. You can have a really good product and still struggle to get traction. Not because the product is bad, but because healthcare is full of existing workflows, legacy systems, procurement processes, budgets, regulations and people who are already extremely busy.

The person using your product might not be the person buying it. The buyer might not control the budget. The budget holder might agree there is a problem, but not see it as important enough to deal with right now. And even when everyone likes the solution, introducing something new still means changing behaviour. That is often the hard bit.

Customer Perspective Matters

Customers are not looking at your product the way you are. Founders naturally spend a lot of time thinking about their product. Features. Functionality. AI. Integrations. Roadmaps. Customers usually think about things in a much simpler way.

A physio might not be looking for a new digital care platform. They might just want to stop wasting time building exercise programs. A hospital team might not care that you have an AI-powered workflow engine. They might just want to reduce a waiting list.

You need to understand the problem in the way the customer sees it, not just explain the product in the way you built it.

Competing with the Status Quo

Your biggest competitor might be Excel. Or Word. Or paper. Or WhatsApp. Or someone remembering to do something.

I see founders spending a lot of time analysing competitors, when the real competition is often just the current way of doing things. And the current way of doing things has one big advantage: People already know how to do it. It may be clunky. It may be inefficient. Everyone may complain about it. But it works well enough.

So your new solution can't just be a bit better. It has to be good enough to justify the hassle of changing.

Prioritise Distribution Early

Spend as much time on distribution as you do on product. This is probably the main thing I would encourage founders to think about. Go-to-market should not be something you start working on once the product is ready. It should be part of the product-building process.

You should be asking things like:

• Who really feels this problem?
• What is happening when the problem suddenly becomes important?
• Who owns it internally?
• Who can actually approve the purchase?
• What are they doing today?
• Why would they change now?
• And can we actually find enough people like them?

You do not need perfect answers. But you should have much better answers than “healthcare providers would benefit from this”.

Start Narrow, Then Expand

Start narrower than feels comfortable. This is another common one. A product may genuinely work for hospitals, clinics, allied health, aged care, insurers and employers. That does not mean you should try to sell to all of them. Early on, narrow is usually better.

Find a specific group with a specific problem at a specific moment. Maybe it is a type of clinician. Maybe it is a particular workflow. Maybe something has changed internally. Maybe there is a new regulation. That is your wedge.

Once you understand why that group buys, your messaging gets easier, your outreach gets easier and your product decisions usually get better too. Then you can expand.

So before asking: Can we build this? It is worth spending just as much time asking: Can we actually get people to change what they are doing today? Because more and more often, building the product is the easy bit.