Joshua Liu, MD

Clinician Startups Fail Because Product, Not Sales, Misses Market

When Clinician Entrepreneurs can’t get adoption, the Number 1 mistake is to think: “It’s not a product problem, it’s a sales problem.” Sorry but 99% of the time it IS a product problem. I’ve seen it over qnd over again from well-meaning clinician innovators. They: → Identify a clinical problem they are passionate about solving → Spend months (or years) just building the product and it works exactly as they imagined → Hustle their way to lots of meetings with potential customers. But besides them, no one else wants to use the product (and they definitely don’t want to pay for it) → Assume they are just bad at sales, so they spend lots of money hiring seasoned (ie expensive) sales people → The seasoned salespeople can’t sell it either → Entrepreneur eventually shuts down - but still walks away thinking “if only I had found the right sales person earlier” The truth is that if your innovation is truly solving a massive headache for many people - if Product - Market fit was truly there - sales shouldn’t be that hard. Yes, if you’re bad at sales, you will get less adoption than if you were good at it. But when your product has a true market, some customers desperate for a solution will adopt it anyways - despite how bad you are at sales. Think back to the start of the pandemic: how hard do you think it was to sell Zoom? The Clinician Entrepreneur should almost always be the 1st salesperson. If YOU - with all your passion and knowledge about the problem/product - can’t sell the first 10 customers, trust me, the best salesperson in the world can’t either. They can’t sell something that doesn’t have Product-Market fit, no matter how charismatic or brilliant they are. So if you can’t sell it, most likely the market for your product isn’t there (or is just really, really small). I’m sorry to say it but it’s probably true. So what do you do? You either pivot (the problem / product / market) to something with stronger market pull. Or you just keep working on your passion project, knowing that there just won’t be many adopters, but that’s fine with you because you built it first for yourself. But what you can’t do is keep spinning your wheels solving for the wrong thing in the adoption process.