Get

Getting customers in healthcare means identifying and engaging the right stakeholders before a purchase decision is possible. At the early stage, this is almost entirely relationship-driven. The most effective channels for building initial relationships in medtech include clinical partnerships with hospitals and research institutions, medical conferences and professional networks, scientific content and educational outreach, and advisory boards and accelerator programs.

Clinical partnerships are the most credible entry point. Early pilots, clinical studies, and usability evaluations conducted in partnership with target institutions generate both evidence and relationships simultaneously. The relationship here is collaborative — working closely with clinicians as partners in developing and validating the solution, not just as eventual customers.

Keep

Keeping customers in healthcare requires sustained engagement that goes well beyond the initial sale. Training, onboarding, and ongoing clinical support are not post-sale overhead — they are determinants of whether the solution becomes embedded in clinical practice or quietly abandoned.

The most important principle at this stage is maintaining direct contact with clinical users. If you rely entirely on intermediaries to maintain customer relationships, you will lose the intelligence you need to understand how your solution is actually being used. Direct relationships with users are a strategic asset, not just a customer service function.

Evidence generation continues after the sale. Supporting early adopting institutions in generating and publishing clinical data is one of the most valuable things you can do to sustain and expand the relationship.

Grow

Growing customer relationships means expanding adoption within existing institutions and leveraging early successes to enter new ones. Reference sites are your most powerful growth tool — a respected institution that has adopted your solution and is willing to discuss their experience with peers is worth more than any marketing activity.

Penetration and retention require ongoing investment. Late adopters within an institution need their own introduction, training, and support. Treating the sale as complete when the contract is signed is one of the most common reasons medtech companies underperform their market size estimates.

Relevance

An activity passes the Relevance test if it gives your customer something that strongly influences their decision to choose your solution. If removing or weakening this activity would not affect whether customers choose you over alternatives, it is not a core competency.

In medtech, activities that typically pass the Relevance test include clinical evidence generation, regulatory execution, and core technology development. The Relevance test forces an honest conversation: what do we do that our customers actually value, and what do we do because we have always done it?

Difficulty of Imitation

An activity passes the Difficulty of Imitation test if it is hard for competitors to replicate. An activity that a well-funded competitor could match within six months provides little defensibility. An activity that requires years of accumulated clinical relationships, proprietary data, or specialized expertise creates a durable competitive moat.

The Difficulty of Imitation test is often where early-stage teams are most honest with themselves. A technology that can be replicated by a larger competitor with more resources is not a sustainable competitive advantage — the sustainable advantage comes from what you build around the technology.

Breadth of Application

An activity passes the Breadth of Application test if it opens up a meaningful range of market opportunities beyond your current beachhead. A core competency relevant only to a single narrow application provides limited strategic value. A core competency applicable across multiple indications, geographies, or customer segments is a platform for growth.

The Breadth of Application test is not a reason to avoid focus — early-stage companies must focus. But it should inform how you frame and protect your core activities and how you think about the long-term strategic value of what you are building.

Human Resources

In knowledge-intensive healthcare businesses, human capital is often the most important and most difficult to replace resource. Critical human resources typically include a core technical team with device-specific expertise, clinical advisors with credibility in the target specialty, regulatory experts who understand the specific submission pathway, reimbursement specialists, and sales professionals with established institutional relationships.

Advisors and board members who have navigated similar regulatory, clinical, and commercial challenges bring pattern recognition that is genuinely scarce. Identifying advisors who are not financially vested in your specific technology — who will give you honest assessment rather than encouragement — is one of the highest-leverage investments an early-stage team can make.

Physical Resources

Physical resources for early-stage medtech companies are focused on enabling research, prototyping, testing, and regulatory preparation. Most physical resources at the early stage should be leased, borrowed through incubator relationships, or accessed through partners rather than owned outright. Capital efficiency matters — building owned physical infrastructure before it is strategically necessary consumes resources better deployed on clinical evidence and regulatory execution.

Intellectual Resources

Over 90% of the value of companies listed on major stock exchanges is attributable to intangible assets. In medtech, the intellectual resources that matter most include patents and patent applications that protect the business model and market position (not just the technology), trade secrets and know-how protected by NDAs, curated datasets, customer and clinical site databases, contracts with hospitals and key partners, and brand equity.

A critical point on patents: the goal of a patent portfolio is to protect the business, not the technology. A patent that prevents competitors from entering your market is valuable. A patent that protects a technical approach that competitors can design around is less so.

Regulatory Resources

Regulatory assets are among the most defensible resources a medtech company can hold. They take years and significant capital to build, cannot be purchased directly, and confer rights and credibility that competitors must replicate independently. Key regulatory resources include FDA clearances and approvals, CE marks and notified body certifications, approved indications, clinical data packages that support future label expansion, and active IRB approvals at target clinical institutions.

Regulatory assets compound over time — each clearance, each approved indication, and each active clinical relationship makes the next one easier to obtain.

Financial Resources

For early-stage medtech companies, managing financial resources is not a finance function — it is a survival function. Key financial resources include cash and short-term liquidity, grants and non-dilutive funding, convertible notes and seed investment, equity investment at later stages, lines of credit, and bootstrapped revenues from consulting or services.

The single most important financial resource metric is runway — how many months of operating costs are covered by current resources. Always know your runway. Running out of cash before reaching a fundable milestone is one of the most common and most avoidable causes of medtech company failure.