5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Trek Health’s Journey in Healthcare Tech

Discover key go-to-market insights from Trek Health’s founder on building in healthcare tech: from specialty focus to implementation challenges in a regulated market. Essential lessons for B2B founders.

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5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Trek Health’s Journey in Healthcare Tech

5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Trek Health’s Journey in Healthcare Tech

Breaking into healthcare technology isn’t for the faint of heart. Even tech giants like Amazon and JPMorgan Chase have tried and retreated. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Trek Health’s founder Dilpreet Sahota shared hard-won insights from building a payments platform for behavioral health providers. Here are the key go-to-market lessons for B2B founders tackling regulated markets.

  1. Start With a Highly Specific Customer Segment

The healthcare market’s complexity can be paralyzing. Trek Health’s solution? Laser focus on behavioral health providers. “What we’ve really found is that in healthcare, there is a ton of noise, as is the case in most industries,” shares Dilpreet. “What we have attempted to do is really to obsess with the customer experience in a way that is actually specialty specific.”

This narrow focus allows Trek Health to master the nuances of their specific vertical – from CPT codes to transaction flows and prior authorizations – before expanding. The behavioral health market alone represents significant opportunity, with “780,000 mental health providers in America today,” according to Dilpreet.

  1. Find the Underserved Segments in Large Markets

While over half of physicians now work for corporations or health systems, behavioral health remains largely independent. These independent providers lack access to sophisticated technology infrastructure, creating an overlooked opportunity. As Dilpreet notes, these providers are “largely practicing within independent practices owned by clinicians, operated by clinicians.”

  1. Recognize That Product-Market Fit Doesn’t Guarantee Easy Implementation

Trek Health discovered that selling to providers isn’t the primary challenge – implementation is. “The pain point resonates very well with these folks. What is the challenge is implementation,” Dilpreet explains. “Data interoperability within healthcare is quite lacking. 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 go-to-market approach, requiring innovative solutions for integration and data transfer.

  1. Build for Different Customer Scales from Day One

Rather than focusing solely on small practices or enterprise clients, Trek Health built a platform that could serve both. “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,” says Dilpreet. This flexibility in their platform architecture has enabled them to grow with their customers.

  1. Focus on Automation as a Growth Strategy

Instead of traditional growth metrics, Trek Health measures success through automation efficiency. “Today a large chunk of transactions that we’re processing on behalf of our providers are quite manual,” Dilpreet shares. “What we want to aim to is have less than 10% of total transactions that our team is processing require any sort of human input whatsoever.”

This focus on automation isn’t just about operational efficiency – it’s about fundamentally changing market dynamics. As Dilpreet explains, “If we can actually make it very easy for provider groups to be stood up and act as competition to the way that care is delivered today, that will enable NetNet A. Better experience for the end patient because patients will have more options.”

The lessons from Trek Health’s journey highlight a crucial truth about building in regulated markets: success often comes not from trying to solve everything at once, but from finding a specific, underserved segment and solving their problems exceptionally well. This focused approach, combined with a clear vision for automation and scalability, provides a blueprint for founders tackling similarly complex markets.

For B2B founders, Trek Health’s story demonstrates that even in highly regulated industries with entrenched players, there’s room for innovation – if you’re willing to start narrow, go deep, and build for the long term.

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