7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Torch Dental to $5B in Transaction Volume

7 Go-to-Market Lessons from Building Torch Dental to $5B in Transaction Volume

Building software for healthcare means navigating entrenched incumbents, complex workflows, and skeptical buyers who’ve seen countless “solutions” fail. Khaled Boukadoum, Founder of Torch Dental, cracked this challenge by ignoring conventional wisdom about market entry and product positioning.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Khaled shared how Torch Dental grew to process $5 billion in patient transactions across hundreds of practices. Here are seven tactical lessons from their GTM journey that apply far beyond dental software.

Lesson 1: Don’t Replace the Incumbent—Become Their Missing Layer

The biggest mistake B2B founders make in crowded markets is trying to replace the market leader. Khaled took the opposite approach with Torch Dental.

Dental practices already use practice management systems like Dentrix and Open Dental. These platforms have been around for decades and handle clinical workflows, scheduling, and basic billing. Most startups would see this as a barrier. Khaled saw it as an opportunity.

“We sit on top of the practice management system and we’re really focused exclusively on everything that happens post clinical treatment,” Khaled explains. Rather than fighting for displacement, Torch positioned itself as the essential layer that existing systems couldn’t provide.

This strategy dramatically reduced sales friction. Practices didn’t need to migrate data, retrain staff, or disrupt operations. They simply added Torch to handle what their current system couldn’t: the complex choreography of patient payments, insurance claims, and revenue cycle management.

The lesson for founders: identify what the incumbent does well, then build the complementary infrastructure they’ll never prioritize. You’re not competing—you’re completing.

Lesson 2: Solve for 10x Improvement, Not 10% Efficiency

Healthcare is littered with software that promises to make workflows “better” or “more efficient.” These incremental improvements rarely justify switching costs or generate real excitement.

Torch’s approach was different. They focused on workflows where automation could eliminate work entirely, not just speed it up.

“Our bread and butter at Torch is really using AI to take all these manual workflows and automate them,” Khaled notes. But the key isn’t just using AI—it’s choosing which problems to automate.

Insurance verification typically requires staff to call insurance companies or navigate portals for each patient, taking 5-10 minutes per verification. Torch’s AI handles this in seconds, completely removing the task from staff workloads. The same applies to payment posting, where AI reads explanation of benefits documents and automatically reconciles payments.

The difference between helping someone complete a task 20% faster versus eliminating the task entirely is the difference between a nice-to-have and a must-have. When evaluating product features, ask: does this make something easier, or does it make something disappear?

Lesson 3: Become the System of Record, Not Just Another Tool

SaaS companies often struggle with churn because customers view their product as a tool—useful today, replaceable tomorrow. Khaled deliberately built Torch to be infrastructure, not a tool.

“We’re building what we think will be the operating system for these businesses,” Khaled explains. This isn’t aspirational language—it’s a specific product strategy.

By routing all patient financial data through Torch—from insurance verification to payment posting to collections—the platform becomes the authoritative source of truth for how practices manage revenue. Once established as the system of record, Torch becomes deeply embedded in daily operations.

This positioning creates several advantages. First, it increases switching costs exponentially. Second, it justifies premium pricing—infrastructure is valued differently than tools. Third, it opens expansion opportunities as the system of record naturally grows to encompass adjacent workflows.

For founders, the question is: are you building a feature or are you building the foundation? If you’re building the foundation, your GTM motion, pricing, and product roadmap should all reflect that strategic positioning.

Lesson 4: Use Data Accumulation as Your Moat

Many B2B companies claim “data network effects” without actually building them. Torch demonstrates how to make data accumulation a genuine competitive advantage.

“We’ve processed about $5 billion of patient transactions over our life, which is about 15 million unique transactions,” Khaled shares. Every claim submitted, every payment posted, and every insurance verification processed feeds Torch’s AI models.

This creates a compounding advantage. The more practices use Torch, the more accurate the automation becomes. Better automation attracts more practices, generating more data, improving automation further. Competitors starting today face an insurmountable data disadvantage.

The critical insight: you need to build product mechanics that genuinely improve with scale. It’s not enough to collect data—you need to architect systems where accumulated data makes the product materially better for every user.

Lesson 5: Build Self-Serve Mechanics Into Complex Sales

Dental practice software seems like a classic high-touch, complex sale. Multiple stakeholders, technical integrations, workflow changes—everything points toward needing a traditional sales team.

Torch built something more sophisticated: a product with self-serve mechanics that still supports complex deployments.

“We’re now a couple hundred practices live and definitely growing quickly,” Khaled notes. The company serves both independent practices and large groups by combining intuitive self-serve onboarding with high-touch implementation for complex accounts.

This dual approach allows Torch to scale efficiently while still winning enterprise deals. Smaller practices can onboard themselves quickly, seeing value within days. Larger groups get dedicated implementation support. The product architecture supports both motions simultaneously.

For founders in complex markets, this represents a middle path between pure product-led growth and traditional enterprise sales. Build the self-serve foundation first, then layer on white-glove service for accounts that need it.

Lesson 6: Position for the Market You Want, Not the Market You Have

Khaled doesn’t just think about serving dental practices as they operate today—he’s building for how the industry will operate in ten years.

“Our ambition is really, again, to be the operating system, to be that piece of connective tissue that connects the insurance companies with the patients and with the practices and sits at the center of all those relationships,” Khaled explains.

This long-term positioning influences immediate decisions. Product roadmap priorities, partnership strategies, and market messaging all align with becoming industry infrastructure, not just practice software.

The lesson: your GTM strategy should reflect where the market is going, not where it is. If you’re building for the future, communicate that vision clearly—it attracts investors, employees, and customers who want to be part of that transformation.

Lesson 7: Choose Problems Where Incumbents Can’t Follow

The final lesson is perhaps the most important: Torch succeeded because they chose a problem that incumbent practice management systems couldn’t solve without cannibalizing their existing business.

Traditional practice management companies make money from licensing fees and charging per provider. Building sophisticated AI-powered revenue cycle management would require massive R&D investment and potentially disrupting their own pricing models.

“What we realized is that the biggest problem in the space is actually what happens after the clinical visit,” Khaled explains. This wasn’t a gap in the market—it was a structural blind spot created by how incumbents were built and monetized.

When evaluating market opportunities, look for problems where solving them properly would require the incumbent to rebuild their entire product or business model. Those are the opportunities where you have room to build without immediate retaliation.

Torch Dental’s journey from startup to processing $5 billion in transactions offers a masterclass in strategic GTM execution. The lessons aren’t about dental software—they’re about finding structural advantages in crowded markets, building genuine moats through data and positioning, and creating products that become indispensable infrastructure rather than disposable tools.

For B2B founders facing entrenched competition, these seven lessons provide a playbook: complement rather than compete, eliminate work rather than optimize it, become infrastructure rather than a tool, and most importantly, position for the market you’re creating, not the one you inherited.