Savana’s Five-Year Detour: Why Selling to the Wrong Customer Kept Them Alive

Savana’s Five-Year Detour: Why Selling to the Wrong Customer Kept Them Alive

Savana had paying customers within a year. The technology worked. The value proposition was clear. They were still about to die.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Ignacio Medrano, Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Savana, revealed the counterintuitive move that saved his healthcare AI company: spending five years deliberately selling to the wrong customer. Not as a mistake, but as a calculated strategy to survive until their actual target market was ready to buy.

For founders building in emerging categories or ahead-of-market innovation, Savana’s story offers a framework for when serving an “interim customer” isn’t a distraction from your vision—it’s the bridge that gets you there alive.

The Crisis: Technology Without a Budget Owner

Savana built something genuinely innovative: natural language processing that could extract structured data from the free text doctors write in medical records. “We have to invent the methods to make this reliable from a scientific point of view,” Ignacio explains. “The idea that you can transform the free text that doctors write into variables into a database.”

The technology worked. Hospitals were interested. Early revenue arrived quickly. “For us it wasn’t that long to generate revenue. Maybe I would say, less than one year,” Ignacio notes.

But that early traction was deceptive. Savana had stumbled into what might be the most dangerous trap in B2B: building something valuable that isn’t anyone’s job to buy.

“When we launched this tool that is able to go to medical records, apply a lot of validated and scientific natural language processing,” Ignacio recalls, “the idea was great, but then who would use it? And we found that it was no one’s job to use this kind of tool.”

In hospitals, especially in Europe where Savana started, there was no organizational role responsible for AI-powered medical record analysis. No budget line. No decision-maker whose quarterly objectives included implementing this category of software. “And of course the budget were not big, especially in Europe where we started, so we had to pivot very quickly.”

They had a handful of early adopters—”innovators that we found in a sector that is known for being very conservative”—but no path to repeatable sales. The organizational infrastructure to support their product simply didn’t exist yet.

The Pivot: Same Technology, Different Customer

Rather than trying to force hospitals to create new budget categories and organizational roles, Savana made a pragmatic decision: find a customer who already had budget allocated for this type of insight.

“What we did was we started selling this to pharmaceutical companies because they really have this interest of knowing what is happening to patients by certain disease,” Ignacio explains.

The core technology remained identical—the same NLP extraction, the same data processing capabilities. But the customer and use case shifted completely. Instead of helping hospitals use their own data for operations, Savana partnered with hospitals to access de-identified patient data and sold those insights to pharma companies studying real-world disease progression.

“So the same technology, the same NLP extraction of data with the provision of hospitals, and then in a de identified way, we started selling it to pharmas,” Ignacio says.

This wasn’t the original vision. It didn’t have the same direct impact on patient care. But it had one critical advantage: pharmaceutical companies already had multi-million dollar budgets for real-world evidence and understood the value proposition immediately.

Five Years in the Wilderness

What Savana didn’t know at the time was how long this detour would last. Five years. Half a decade selling to an interim customer while waiting for their actual target market to mature.

“So we stayed there as a company for five years. We survived. We’re incredibly close to die, as probably every entrepreneur would tell you,” Ignacio admits.

Those five years weren’t wasted. They refined the technology. They built credibility. They generated revenue and survived. But they weren’t building the company they’d originally envisioned. They were in a holding pattern, waiting for the market to catch up.

What finally changed? A global pandemic that forced healthcare to confront digital transformation on an accelerated timeline.

“And then only when the technology evolved, the mindset evolved, the culture evolved around the idea of data, healthcare data, intelligence, especially, sadly, thanks to the COVID situation. Only at that moment, the hospitals were ready to catch up with budgets and with people waiting to use our tools.”

COVID didn’t just create urgency. It fundamentally restructured healthcare organizations. New roles were created. Budget priorities shifted. What wasn’t anyone’s job in 2015 became essential infrastructure by 2021. “And that’s how we came back somehow to the original idea, which was selling this to hospitals that could then use their own information, aside from pharmas, for all kinds of use cases.”

The Framework: When to Serve an Interim Customer

Savana’s five-year detour reveals a strategic framework that applies far beyond healthcare. Here’s when serving an interim customer makes sense:

Your technology works, but organizational infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. If you’re creating a new category, you’re not just building software—you’re asking customers to create new roles, budget lines, and decision-making processes. That takes years, not quarters.

An adjacent market has existing budget for similar value. Pharmaceutical companies already paid for real-world evidence. Savana’s insight was that they could deliver that value using technology built for a different purpose.

You can maintain technical progress while serving the interim customer. The five years in pharma weren’t static—Savana continued developing their core NLP capabilities, just applied to a different use case.

You have reason to believe the original market will eventually mature. This isn’t about permanently abandoning your vision. It’s about recognizing that market timing beats perfect execution, and sometimes survival requires patience.

You can afford the opportunity cost. Five years is a long time. Savana’s founders had to accept that they wouldn’t be building their original vision during that period. That’s only viable if you believe the eventual payoff justifies the wait.

The Principle: Market Timing Beats Persistence

The conventional startup wisdom says to persist through obstacles, that determination and execution overcome market resistance. Savana’s story suggests something more nuanced: sometimes the market simply isn’t ready, and no amount of effort will change that.

“For us it was like a journey where went somewhere, then we had to go somewhere else. And then we came back,” Ignacio reflects.

This isn’t a story about pivoting because the original idea was wrong. It’s about recognizing when you’re right but early—and finding a way to survive the gap between your vision and market readiness.

For founders building ahead of their market, the question isn’t whether to serve an interim customer. It’s whether you can identify one that keeps your core technology relevant, generates enough revenue to survive, and positions you to move quickly when your original market finally matures.

Savana spent five years selling to pharmaceutical companies. That detour didn’t distract them from their vision—it kept them alive long enough to achieve it. Sometimes that’s the difference between being a cautionary tale and a $44 million success story.