6 Go-to-Market Lessons from DexCare’s Category Creation Journey

Discover how DexCare transformed healthcare’s regulatory challenges into competitive advantages. Learn 5 actionable go-to-market lessons from their journey in category creation, enterprise sales, and thought leadership strategy.

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6 Go-to-Market Lessons from DexCare’s Category Creation Journey

6 Go-to-Market Lessons from DexCare’s Category Creation Journey

Regulatory hurdles kill most startups. But what if they could become your greatest competitive advantage? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, DexCare CEO Derek Streat revealed how his team turned healthcare’s infamous complexity into a powerful moat, offering crucial lessons for founders targeting regulated markets.

  1. Use Industry Constraints to Build Competitive Moats

The conventional wisdom says to avoid heavily regulated industries. DexCare took the opposite approach. “What I also find is those challenges and headwinds usually can become your competitive differentiators and even the moats that you can build as well because they’re really good at weeding people out of wanting to build businesses in those spaces in the first place,” Derek explains. This counterintuitive approach helped them establish strong barriers to entry in the healthcare access space.

  1. Validate Before You Scale

Instead of rushing to market, DexCare spent years proving their model within Providence Health System. “We really have been a product in production inside of this large health system for several years now at this point,” Derek notes. “And that provided us a lot of validation on the product and the value that it can provide all those stakeholders.” This patience paid off – when they finally spun out, they had something most startups lack: proof of concept at scale.

  1. Build Credibility Through Strategic Relationships

In enterprise sales, especially healthcare, credibility is everything. DexCare built theirs through strategic partnerships with industry leaders. “That’s why we have people like Toby Crossgrove on our board who ran Cleveland Clinic, the number two hospital in the entire world. That’s why we have investors like Kaiser Permanente and Providence and Mass General Brigham invested in this organization,” Derek shares. These relationships weren’t just about funding – they were about building trust in a new category.

  1. Focus on Thought Leadership Over Traditional Marketing

DexCare recognized that complex enterprise sales require a different approach. “We’re a complex solution sale in an enterprise market and one of the most kind of challenging markets out there… there’s never going to be a buy button for DexCare online. This is all about building thought leadership and relationships with the leading systems around the country,” Derek explains. By focusing on thought leadership, they’ve been able to influence key decision-makers at major health systems.

  1. Map Pain Points Instead of Creating Them

Many startups try to manufacture problems to solve. DexCare took a different approach. “You can’t necessarily create the pain… you want to expose it and then address it,” Derek emphasizes. Their success came from identifying real problems in healthcare access and delivery, then creating solutions that addressed these existing pain points.

  1. Maintain Growth Through Strategic Evolution

Even with strong market position, DexCare keeps evolving their vision. “Our vision is that everyone everywhere enjoys exceptional access to the best expertise to treat, prevent and cure illness,” Derek shares. This expansive vision allows them to grow while staying true to their core mission.

The results speak for themselves: “We’re either doubling or quadrupling every year across every metric you look at right now in the company,” Derek notes. But perhaps more importantly, their approach offers a blueprint for founders targeting regulated industries: embrace the complexity, build strategic relationships, and focus on solving real problems.

The key takeaway? In highly regulated markets, success often comes not from avoiding complexity, but from embracing it as a strategic advantage. By turning potential obstacles into opportunities, companies can create and dominate new categories – even in the most challenging markets.

For founders looking to create new categories in regulated industries, DexCare’s journey offers a powerful lesson: sometimes the biggest barriers to entry can become your strongest competitive advantages, if you’re willing to embrace them strategically.

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