“We Had to Be Really Convincing”: How PocketHealth Differentiated True Product-Market Fit from Sales Success
Most founders can tell you the moment they achieved product-market fit. For PocketHealth’s team, it was more about what they learned in the year before claiming it.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, PocketHealth Co-Founder and CEO Rishi Nayyar shared a counterintuitive insight about validating PMF in healthcare: sometimes your early sales success can be your biggest red flag.
“We could just be really convincing, so we could go to a bunch of places and pitch it and just convince people to adopt it inside their clinics or their hospitals,” Rishi explained. “That’s not a true product market fit.”
This distinction between sales effectiveness and genuine product-market fit shaped their entire validation strategy. Instead of celebrating early customer wins, they looked for a more elusive signal: would patients actually use the platform without direct promotion?
The team’s skepticism came from a deep understanding of healthcare’s adoption challenges. While existing solutions had convinced hospitals to buy their software, they hadn’t solved the fundamental usability issues. As Rishi noted, “You burn a CD, you hand it to a patient who might not be tech savvy, and they walk it over to their doctor and it works.”
This insight led to a crucial realization: any digital solution would need to be easier than physically handling a CD. Previous attempts had failed because “if you’re trying to replace it with a complex portal where the physician has to create an account, and you need this code and that code and this pin from the patient who loses their pin, and all this is in a pretty fast paced healthcare atmosphere, you can imagine people defaulting back to the CD basically instantly.”
Their validation process focused on three key signals:
- Organic patient adoption without direct sales involvement
- Natural spread across healthcare providers through patient use
- Sustained usage rather than just initial sign-ups
This approach required patience. “Once we started seeing that happen on its own without us in the room, and it took about a year for us to feel like this was happening with some reliability, that there is something special here,” Rishi shared.
The strategy paid off. Rather than building another portal that would die “in the crib,” they created a platform that now serves over 700 hospitals and imaging centers across North America, with more than a million patients actively using the system.
The growth came from what Rishi calls a natural “product led growth motion” – as he explained, “Hospitals share with patients share with physicians or physicians who work in hospitals, and then that naturally generates inbound interest for us.”
What’s particularly instructive about PocketHealth’s approach is how it challenges the conventional startup wisdom about rapid validation and quick iteration. In a regulated industry like healthcare, where trust and reliability are paramount, they recognized that true product-market fit required a different framework.
Their experience offers several key lessons for founders building in complex markets:
- Early sales success can mask deeper adoption issues
- Look for organic usage patterns rather than just closed deals
- Build for the actual end user, not just the buyer
- Patient validation is worth the wait
Today, their growth metrics validate this patient approach. As Rishi noted, “2023 looks like it’s going to match previous years in terms of our growth rate, which is we’re growing multiples every year.”
For founders navigating the challenging waters of product-market fit validation, PocketHealth’s story offers a compelling alternative to the “move fast and break things” ethos. Sometimes the best way to build lasting growth is to take the time to ensure you’re solving the right problem, for the right user, in the right way.