The PathologyWatch Customer Interview Process: How 12 Conversations Shaped Their Entire Business Model
Most startups build products first and find customers later. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, PathologyWatch CEO Daniel Lambert shared how they flipped this model, letting just twelve customer interviews completely reshape their approach to transforming pathology diagnostics.
The Sales-First Philosophy
Daniel’s approach to building PathologyWatch was grounded in a strong conviction: “I think it’s 100% sales. You have to get out there early and learn from the customer from day one, rather than building a product and then letting it fail, or you think the entire product is just coming from your head.”
This philosophy led them to conduct extensive customer interviews before writing a single line of code.
The Interview Process
Instead of pitching solutions, PathologyWatch started by understanding the current workflow. As Daniel explains, “We interviewed about ten or twelve dermatologists and said, hey, what do you need?” This simple question yielded a crucial insight about what customers didn’t want: “Don’t bring us just a point of the solution or like a piece of it. We get pitched all the time on just a single device or a single thing.”
The Consistent Message
What made these interviews particularly valuable was the consistency of the feedback. Customers unanimously wanted an end-to-end solution: “What we want is for you to pick up our biopsies, handle everything end to end, show us the digital image, integrate with our electronic medical record system. And we heard that so consistently, ten times over and that they were just completely underserved because nobody was doing that.”
The Pivot
This feedback fundamentally changed PathologyWatch’s direction. Instead of just developing AI software for license, they built a comprehensive service. As Daniel describes it, “We convince clinics and hospitals to send us volume. We process those inside of our labs. We digitize the image. We then have both a pathologist look at it and then an AI look at it retrospectively to make the diagnosis, and then we push the results into the electronic medical record system.”
Testing Value Propositions
The customer interviews also helped PathologyWatch develop multiple value propositions to test:
- Patient Care: “It’s simply better patient care if the dermatologist can see the image and they can see the notes from the physician.”
- Operational Efficiency: “Our average clinic saves 25 hours a month.”
- Revenue Opportunities: “The potential for additional billing if wanted. So this enabled the dermatologist to potentially read their own cases.”
The Impact
The insights from these early conversations continue to shape PathologyWatch’s growth. As Daniel notes, “The light bulb went off after having all those customer interactions of, this is what needs to happen in this industry, like, let the customer guide you.” This customer-led approach has helped them grow to 180 clinics and three hospital partnerships in just two and a half years.
Key Lessons for Founders
PathologyWatch’s interview process reveals several crucial insights for founders entering regulated markets:
- Start with understanding the current workflow in detail
- Listen for consistent patterns across multiple customers
- Pay attention to what customers explicitly don’t want
- Let customer needs shape your entire business model, not just your product
For technical founders especially, Daniel’s experience demonstrates the value of starting with sales and customer understanding rather than product development. As he puts it, it’s about “letting the customer guide you.” This approach might seem slower initially, but it can actually accelerate growth by ensuring you build something customers truly want.
Their success shows that sometimes the most valuable startup activities aren’t about building products or raising capital, but about having the right conversations with potential customers early enough to shape your entire approach to the market.
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