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Strategic Communications Advisory For Visionary Founders
Actionable
Takeaways
Use a sub-segment to breach an otherwise impenetrable market.
Healthcare enterprise sales is notoriously slow and relationship-dependent. C8 bypassed that by targeting individual departments rather than hospital systems — a decision driven partly by necessity (they had $90K and no brand) and partly by their co-founder's deep anesthesiology domain expertise. Anesthesia was the right wedge: it's knowledge-intensive, anesthesiologists serve the entire hospital, and unlike surgeons who specialize narrowly, they rotate across wildly different procedures. That specificity let C8 get inside top 40 US healthcare systems fast, build product with real clinical users, and accumulate outcome data — shorter length of stay, reduced surgical site infections — that later became the proof points needed to sell enterprise-wide.
Engineer the conditions for champion-led growth, then get out of the way.
C8's breakout moment came at the American Society of Anesthesiology conference. They had a small booth, no reputation, and two customers. What they didn't expect: those customers showed up and started telling colleagues the product had transformed care delivery in their departments — unsolicited. C8 walked out with a pipeline of 20 hospitals. The lesson isn't "get happy customers." It's that engagement depth is what determines whether a customer becomes a passive reference or an active evangelist. When C8 went to that conference, they had no idea how those customers felt — they were, in Galia's words, "just praying to God that they like the product." The product's clinical engagement metrics told the real story before the relationship did.
Map value separately for buyers and end users — they are not the same conversation.
C8 built their early value proposition around the end user: clinicians saving time, feeling more empowered, accessing knowledge instantly. What they didn't anticipate was how differently department heads and administrators experienced the product. Those buyers weren't excited about time savings — they cared about compliance confidence. Knowing that across every indication in the department, every staff member was following the agreed best practice. That's a fundamentally different pitch. Missing this distinction doesn't just affect messaging — it affects which metrics you track, which features you prioritize, and how you assess customer health. C8 now runs both lenses explicitly across every aspect of their business.
Small, focused events will outperform big industry conferences for pipeline — if your personas are concentrated enough.
C8 attends roughly 20 anesthesiology-specific events per year — small medical society meetings where the total attendance might be under 100 people. They bring customers who introduce them to colleagues at other hospitals. The ROI is not comparable to HIMSS or ViVE, where you're competing for attention against every vendor in healthcare IT, spending significantly more, and often not finding your actual buyer in the crowd. The strategic logic: national medical societies publish the guidelines that C8's platform operationalizes. Being present in those rooms isn't just lead gen — it's category credibility. The tactical discipline: know exactly what you want from each event before you commit resources to it.
Focus is an active, ongoing decision — not a one-time call.
Galia is direct about this: C8 still gets pulled toward opportunities outside their core domains, and the pressure is real because for an early-stage startup, every new customer matters. The way they hold the line is by separating two types of engagement: a prospect can use the product as it exists today, but C8 will not build dedicated features for a domain they're not yet ready to own. That distinction protects velocity in their priority verticals while leaving the door open. The result — becoming the dominant platform across most major academic anesthesia departments in the US — validated the discipline. They're now applying the same focused expansion playbook to medicine, pediatrics, and nursing.
Conversation
Highlights
How C8 Health Broke Into 100+ Hospitals With $90K and Two Customers
In 2019, Ido — an anesthesiologist, internal medicine specialist, and computer scientist — was working at Geneva University Hospitals when he ran into a problem he couldn’t ignore. He needed to answer a simple question: how do we do it here? Not a complex clinical question. A procedural one. And he couldn’t answer it quickly, because the knowledge was scattered across dozens of systems with no clear path between them.
So he built something for himself.
Then Covid arrived. Healthcare systems needed to disseminate protocols across entire networks, instantly. Ido’s software became the infrastructure. The clinician engagement was undeniable. Demand from other hospitals followed. That’s when he decided to build a company — and when he met Galia Rosen Schwarz, who would become his co-founder and CEO.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Galia shared the GTM journey that took C8 Health from $90K in friends-and-family funding and zero paying customers to over 100 hospitals, including top 40 US healthcare systems.
The Problem Nobody Believed Was Real
Galia herself needed months to be convinced the opportunity was genuine. “It took me a few months to be convinced that this is a real problem, because I could not believe that in medicine or in healthcare in general, which is such a knowledge intensive domain, access to knowledge was difficult.”
The difficulty is structural — and understanding it is essential to understanding C8’s GTM. A single hospital department runs separate systems for education, clinical operations, care quality, and administration. Each has its own knowledge repository. None of them talk to each other. An anesthesiologist at 3am facing a patient with an unusual underlying condition has seconds to find the right protocol. “If you need to start thinking where in the 20 systems that my department has this knowledge exists, you don’t really have time to do that,” Galia explains. “You’re going to ask someone what to do, you’re going to Google it. And this is how most medical errors happen.”
That’s the pain C8 is resolving. And it’s also why the wedge into anesthesiology wasn’t arbitrary.
The $90K Decision That Changed Everything
With almost no resources and no US healthcare network, C8 made a bet that runs counter to most enterprise software playbooks: don’t sell to the enterprise. Sell to a department.
“We said, let’s get into these healthcare systems through a single department,” Galia explains. “And what this meant is that we very quickly could penetrate these healthcare systems logos that are really hard to penetrate.”
Anesthesiology was the deliberate choice. Ido understood the domain from the inside. Anesthesiologists serve the entire hospital — unlike surgeons who specialize narrowly, they rotate across hip replacements, liver transplants, obstetric cases. The knowledge dependency is high and the standardization imperative is clear. That specificity mattered: C8 wasn’t just picking a beachhead for convenience, they were picking one where the pain was sharpest and their expertise was deepest.
The department-level entry also solved a product problem. It gave them real clinical users generating real feedback on every new feature — before they had the resources to get anything wrong at scale.
Two Customers, One Conference, Twenty Hospitals
With two customers and no brand, C8 went to the American Society of Anesthesiology conference — the largest anesthesiology event in the US. Small booth. No reputation. What they didn’t plan for: both early customers showed up and started telling colleagues, completely unprompted, that C8 had transformed care delivery in their departments.
“Our champions from both of our two customers brought us the pipeline of 20 other hospitals into our booth. And this is how the company started.”
The part founders should sit with: C8 had no idea this was coming. “We were working with them for a few months and were just praying to God that they like the product.” There was no formal champion enablement program, no referral incentive, no coordinated ask. What triggered it was engagement depth — clinicians who found the product genuinely valuable in their daily workflows and said so when they ran into peers.
After that conference, they could raise. The pipeline converted. The company had proof.
The Messaging Gap They Didn’t See Coming
As customers started articulating value in their own words, C8 discovered a significant disconnect from their own positioning.
Their original value proposition centered on the end user: clinicians accessing knowledge faster, feeling more empowered. What buyers — department heads and administrators — actually valued was fundamentally different. “Now we can do our job better because we have a peace of mind that across every indication in our department, our staff is using the knowledge that we decided is the best practice.”
That’s a compliance and operational control story, not a user experience story. Two different buyers, two different conversations, two different ROI frames. C8 now runs both lenses explicitly across messaging, customer health metrics, and feature prioritization. The practical implication: if you’re only measuring end user engagement, you’re missing half the picture that determines whether a contract renews.
The Lead Gen Channel Nobody Else Is Using
C8’s most effective pipeline source isn’t digital. It’s small medical society events — meetings where total attendance might be under 100 people, but every person in the room is a relevant persona.
“In anesthesiology alone, we participate in about 20 events a year. But these are small events and these are our best sources for lead generation,” Galia says. The format is deliberate: they bring customers who introduce them to colleagues at other hospitals. Warm introductions inside a trusted professional community, at a fraction of the cost of major industry conferences.
The strategic logic goes beyond lead gen. National medical societies publish the clinical guidelines that C8’s platform operationalizes. Being present in those rooms isn’t just pipeline — it’s category credibility with the exact people whose professional standards shape what C8 builds.
Focus as a Daily Decision
The most durable — and most uncomfortable — GTM lesson from C8’s journey is one every early-stage founder understands intellectually and struggles with operationally: maintaining domain focus when real customers with real budgets are pulling you elsewhere.
C8’s framework is concrete. Prospects outside their core verticals can use the product as it exists. What C8 won’t do is build dedicated features for a domain they’re not yet ready to own. “Becoming all over the place will make us very non efficient and will make us slow,” Galia says. “Focus has allowed us to move fast in a certain domain and then from there also learn how to expand to other domains.”
The result: C8 became the dominant platform across most major academic anesthesia departments in the US — a position of market depth that now gives them the credibility and data to expand into medicine, pediatrics, and nursing on their own terms, running the same focused playbook in each new vertical rather than spreading thin across all of them at once.
The full conversation with Galia Rosen Schwarz, Cofounder & CEO of C8 Health, is available now on BUILDERS.
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