Openpath’s Pandemic Pivot: From Office Access to Healthcare Hero

Openpath’s Pandemic Pivot: From Office Access to Healthcare Hero

March 2020 changed everything overnight. Office buildings emptied. Companies canceled contracts. Renewals stopped coming. For Openpath, a company built on providing access control for office buildings, it looked like an extinction event. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Scott Dorey, Co-Founder of Openpath, shared how they turned existential crisis into unexpected opportunity by recognizing that the product they’d built for convenience could save lives as a safety solution.

When Your Entire Market Disappears

Scott doesn’t sugarcoat what happened when COVID-19 hit. “Obviously during COVID, it wasn’t ideal for us. We were definitely impacted. People were not renewing, they were going out of business, they were not in their offices.”

This wasn’t a temporary slowdown or a market correction—it was total collapse of their primary customer base. Tech companies and office buildings, the concentrated market Openpath had deliberately targeted, were suddenly empty. The very geographic focus that had created their success now concentrated their exposure to a market in freefall.

Most companies would have retrenched, cut costs, and tried to survive until offices reopened. Scott and his team recognized they had weeks, not months, to find new customers or face serious consequences. The traditional startup playbook of “focus on your core market” becomes dangerous advice when your core market ceases to exist.

The Feature That Became a Lifeline

The key to Openpath’s pivot was already built into their product architecture. Their mobile-first approach, originally designed for user convenience and modern experience, suddenly became critical infrastructure for infection control.

Healthcare facilities were facing acute crisis. Hospitals needed to reduce surface contact to minimize virus transmission. Traditional access control systems required touching keypads and card readers—exactly what needed to be eliminated. Openpath’s mobile-first design meant users could unlock doors from their phones without touching anything.

The product hadn’t changed. The technology was identical. But the framing shifted from convenience to safety, from nice-to-have to mission-critical. What had been a differentiator in office buildings became essential in healthcare facilities trying to protect both staff and patients.

Identifying the Adjacent Market Fast

The insight about healthcare wasn’t obvious—it required looking at which sectors were still operating and needed solutions urgently. While offices closed, hospitals, clinics, and medical facilities were desperately trying to stay operational while protecting their people.

Scott and his team had to move faster than they’d ever moved before. Traditional market research and careful planning weren’t options. They needed to identify the opportunity, validate that their product solved the problem, and get in front of buyers within weeks.

The advantage was that healthcare’s need was immediate and acute. Facilities couldn’t wait for traditional procurement cycles. The urgency that made the situation dangerous for Openpath also created openings to move faster than would normally be possible in a highly regulated, slow-moving vertical like healthcare.

Reframing Without Rebuilding

The genius of Openpath’s pivot was recognizing they didn’t need to rebuild their product—they needed to reframe their value proposition. The same mobile-first architecture that appealed to tech companies for UX reasons appealed to healthcare for safety reasons.

This reframing extended to every customer-facing element. Marketing messaging shifted from emphasizing convenience and modern experience to highlighting touchless access and infection control. Sales conversations focused on safety protocols rather than user satisfaction. Case studies emphasized risk reduction rather than operational efficiency.

The product capabilities that enabled the pivot—mobile access, cloud-based management, easy deployment—were all choices made years earlier for completely different reasons. Scott’s team didn’t have to scramble to build new features. They had to scramble to help a new market understand how existing features solved urgent problems.

The Advantages of Cloud-Native in Crisis

Openpath’s cloud-native architecture, the foundation they’d chosen from day one, proved critical during the pivot. Healthcare facilities needed to deploy solutions quickly without extensive on-site installation or IT projects. Cloud-based systems could be implemented remotely, which was essential when facilities were limiting outside access.

“We wanted to build something that was inherently cloud native from day one. Everything was designed to be in the cloud, API first, mobile first,” Scott had explained about their original architecture decision. That decision, made to compete with legacy systems in offices, became the reason they could rapidly deploy in hospitals.

Traditional competitors with on-premise systems couldn’t pivot as quickly. Their products required physical servers, on-site installation, and IT involvement that was difficult during pandemic restrictions. Openpath’s architectural advantage in the office market became an even bigger advantage in the healthcare market during crisis.

Learning a New Vertical Under Pressure

Selling to healthcare required learning an entirely new set of requirements, compliance standards, and buying processes. Healthcare procurement operates differently than tech company purchasing. The decision-makers were different. The approval processes were more complex. The compliance requirements were stricter.

Scott’s team had to compress what would normally be months of market learning into weeks. They needed to understand HIPAA requirements, healthcare facility operations, infection control protocols, and medical procurement processes—all while actively selling.

The forcing function was survival. When your existing market disappears, you learn the new market as fast as humanly possible or you die. This compressed timeline, while stressful, prevented the overthinking and analysis paralysis that often slows market expansion efforts.

The Unexpected Advantage of Desperation

There’s a counterintuitive lesson in Openpath’s pandemic story: sometimes crisis forces the right decisions. Without COVID-19, Openpath might have continued focusing exclusively on offices and tech companies, leaving healthcare unexplored. The crisis forced them to discover a vertical where their product created even more value than in their original market.

Healthcare wasn’t a temporary survival play—it became a permanent expansion that strengthened the business. The pandemic accelerated a diversification that might have taken years to execute through normal strategic planning. Sometimes the market pushes you toward opportunities you would never have pursued voluntarily.

Building on the Pivot

The healthcare success didn’t replace Openpath’s office business—it expanded their addressable market and reduced concentration risk. When offices eventually reopened, Openpath had two strong verticals instead of one. The pivot didn’t mean abandoning their core market; it meant becoming less vulnerable to any single market’s fluctuations.

Scott’s broader point about their evolution speaks to this expansion: “We definitely started narrow and now we’re expanding into various verticals.” Healthcare was the first forced expansion, but it validated the model of taking their core technology into new verticals with different use cases and value propositions.

The Framework for Your Own Crisis Pivot

Openpath’s pandemic response offers a framework for any founder facing market collapse. First, look for adjacent markets where your existing capabilities solve urgent problems differently. Don’t rebuild—reframe. Second, move faster than feels comfortable because waiting for perfect information means dying with perfect information. Third, leverage architectural advantages that enable rapid deployment in new markets. Fourth, recognize that crisis-driven pivots can reveal opportunities you’d never pursue through normal strategic planning.

The brutal truth is that most companies don’t survive when their primary market disappears overnight. Openpath did because they recognized that product-market fit isn’t fixed—it’s fluid. The same product can solve different problems for different markets with different positioning. When one market closes, others might be desperate for what you’ve already built.