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Why This Healthcare Founder Turned Down Traditional Revenue to Scale Faster

When your target customers can’t afford your solution, most founders would move upmarket. But for Yuvo Health’s CEO, serving underserved communities meant completely inverting their revenue model – a decision that grew their patient base from 3,000 to 40,000 in just two years.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Yuvo Health CEO Cesar Herrera shared how his immigrant background shaped a counterintuitive go-to-market strategy that’s now revolutionizing healthcare access for millions of underserved Americans.

The Hidden Market of Healthcare Centers

Most healthcare startups target profitable hospital systems or well-funded insurance companies. But Herrera saw opportunity in the 1,400 community health centers serving 30 million predominantly underinsured Americans.

“If I didn’t have access to health centers, I don’t think I would have had access to care at all,” Cesar explains, drawing from his experience as an immigrant child. This personal connection helped him spot a critical market gap: these essential institutions aren’t financially sustainable despite their massive impact.

The Revenue Model Pivot That Changed Everything

Initially, Yuvo Health launched as a traditional management services organization, charging health centers administrative fees for their services. But they quickly hit a wall that would force a complete business model reinvention.

“Our health centers are woefully under-resourced and they need access to capital today,” Cesar reveals. Instead of asking health centers to pay them, Yuvo Health made a radical pivot – they became a risk-bearing entity that contracts directly with health plans, funneling value-based care revenue to their health center partners.

“That’s what’s put us in this trajectory that we are in today,” Cesar notes. The numbers back this up: from an initial pilot of 3,000 patients, they’ve scaled to 40,000 patients in just two and a half years, with projections to hit 80,000 next year.

Building Trust Through Mission-Driven Operations

For founders entering established markets, Yuvo Health’s approach to building credibility offers valuable lessons. As Cesar explains, many community health centers have had challenging experiences with previous commercial partnerships, making trust-building essential to any successful collaboration.

Yuvo Health addressed this challenge by embedding their mission into every operational aspect:

• • Marketing focuses on spotlighting their health center partners rather than themselves
  • Their business model prioritizes driving revenue to partners first
  • Trust-building is embedded in their OKRs and core metrics

The Go-to-Market Lesson Every Founder Needs to Hear

When asked for his top go-to-market advice, Cesar emphasizes a principle that guided their pivot: “Everything should be centered on your customer, whoever that is. Make sure that you truly understand the motivations of your customer and their quote, unquote, ‘buying decisions.’ Because if you don’t understand that, regardless of how great your solution is, you’re not going to be able to sell it.”

The $28M Bet on Serving the Underserved

With $28 million in funding, Yuvo Health is proving that serving traditionally overlooked markets can be both impactful and profitable. Their vision? To help community health centers serve an additional 20 million Americans who currently lack access to care.

For B2B founders, Yuvo Health’s journey offers a powerful reminder: sometimes the biggest opportunities lie in completely reimagining how you generate revenue, especially when serving markets that traditional business models have failed to reach.