5 Go-to-Market Lessons from Gradient Health’s Journey to Landing Fortune 500 Clients
In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Gradient Health founder Joshua Miller shared candid insights about building a healthcare AI data company. Here are the key lessons from their journey from zero to Fortune 500 clients.
- Sell First, Build Later The conventional wisdom of perfecting your product before selling gets flipped on its head at Gradient Health. “Just like the way we got started was we took orders first and then went and found the data later,” Joshua explains. This approach validated their market before investing heavily in development.
His three-month rule is particularly striking: “If you’re considering starting a startup right now and you can’t reach a sellable MVP in three months, you probably need to pare down your vision a little bit more.” For founders stuck in development cycles, this aggressive timeline forces focus on essential features.
- Strategic First Customer Selection In healthcare, landing the first customer requires a deliberate approach. Rather than cold outreach, Gradient Health leveraged relationships through their angel investors to connect with Cone Health. As Joshua notes, “That’s kind of how it works for healthcare startups. You find one institution that’s willing to take a chance on you, and then you kind of build up that momentum.”
- Build for Inbound When You Have an Acute Problem Today, Gradient Health receives nearly 50% of leads through inbound channels, including Fortune 500 companies directly reaching out to their 15-person team. The key? They’re solving what Joshua calls “an acute problem” – when companies desperately need medical imaging data for AI development, they actively search for solutions.
- Balance Market Requirements with Industry Norms While self-service platforms aren’t common in healthcare, Gradient Health launched one anyway. Joshua’s reasoning is pragmatic: “The way our venture capital market kind of functions is most folks are going to expect you to have a SaaS product where people are signing up and they’re paying a monthly fee.” The platform gained 130 users in just 30 days.
- Maintain Vision Flexibility Success requires balancing long-term vision with tactical adaptability. Joshua advocates for “a seven year vision, but be flexible in its execution, meaning you should have a long term vision, but you should always expect that something unexpected will come when you’re starting a company.”
The emergence of foundation models in radiology, for instance, dramatically expanded their market opportunity. As Joshua notes, “If you asked me six months ago, could you build a company in a large company in imaging alone, I probably would have said no. But now that we start to see people build these ultra large scale models imaging, I would make the argument that now you can.”
These insights challenge conventional startup wisdom, particularly in regulated industries like healthcare. While many founders focus on perfecting their product or following industry norms, Gradient Health’s success suggests a different path: validate quickly, leverage relationships strategically, and remain flexible while solving acute market problems.
For founders building in complex B2B spaces, particularly those requiring enterprise sales, these lessons offer a framework for accelerating go-to-market success without compromising on necessary industry considerations.