Are You Really Listening to Your Customers? Probably Not, But You Should. Customers will tell you what they want. You need to be willing to hear it.
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In 2020 and early 2021, funding poured into digital health. Name-brand VCs led the charge, with General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Alphabet's GV playing a particularly active role in cultivating innovations. Beyond the obvious pandemic-driven need for remote care delivery, healthcare innovations fueled explosive growth in new companies.
While my firm, a hearing health company called Nuheara, took a different funding path through the public markets, we're on a similar trajectory and can share some of our learnings. On launch, we started with one proprietary technical feature, Super Intelligent Noise Cancellation (SINC™) technology that allows users to focus on what they want to hear in the world. This feature caught the attention of users in 80+ countries around the world. If there's one lesson we've learned, it's to let the customer tell you what they need. You just have to be willing to hear it. In our case, it's what they need on their hearing health journey. So what journey are you on with your customers?
Related: Listening to Customers is Key to Enhance Customer Experience
Here are five other lessons we discovered about scaling a digital health product offering that founders might find helpful, especially in a world where Covid has been and will likely be the top news headline.
1. Find your niche
Many of the new, well-funded startups garnering headlines in digital health have wise investors providing solid advice about product-market fit and identifying which niche to pursue. Many of these companies followed advice to pick a niche with an unsolved problem and double down on it. Many vendors have their eye on certain niches with unsolved health problems. However, as a quick review of the clinical literature will reveal, the clutter in these spaces does not guarantee solutions. Startups are likely to find themselves competing against prominent incumbent vendors with resources and low-cost products marketed by fast-follow brands. A digital health brand can establish itself as a real contender by delivering high-grade clinical solutions at an affordable price. Look for the efficiency that will allow you to provide a solution that affordably solves your users' problems.
2. No copy-cats here
It may be tempting at first to follow the playbook used by other successful brands. However, we found that what works for an adjacent company may not work for your customer. For instance, we felt SmileDirectClub, which provides dental services in a DTC model, might be a good proxy for delivering hearing health. We lost several months trying to fit their model to our market — it just wasn't what our customers needed. Conduct customer listening sessions to truly understand what they want. Online interaction — reviews, surveys, Google Analytics data — can support this process, but be sure to get face time with as many users as possible so you can understand their experience. As a team, use this data to adapt the user experience, refresh the brand, and focus on the stage of their journey that helps them best find value from your product. It's there — you have to uncover it.
3. Pay attention to customer behavior and trends
Some of the boom in digital health over the last 18 months focused on addressing challenges of the pandemic itself, such as an increased need to address mental health — a need that has continued to grow. Others focused on dedicated healthcare for communities not well-served, like maternal health, LGBTQ+ and gender-affirming healthcare needs, autism, ADHD, and even some specific ethnic groups' healthcare needs. Each of these represents an unsolved problem but try to avoid getting too locked into that one specific mode of problem-solving. Think about the customer's health journey. What do they need from you next?
Related: 3 Methods to Help You Determine What Customers Really Want (and Really Don't Want)
It's important to stay open to and support the healthcare needs which emerge from customer behavior and trends. For example, if we had focused exclusively on the mild-to-moderate hearing loss category, we would have missed the customers who found the product addresses other health needs such as auditory processing disorders. This discovery and process of expanding our clinical impact means we are now extending features and programs for those users. It was an emergent use case, which we now support and embrace.
What worked for our digital health team was following the data presented from a cluster of customer reviews describing their favorable experiences with an unexpected use case: auditory processing disorders. We would not typically associate this with the mild-to-moderate hearing loss use case we focused on initially. However, as we looked into this customer data, we found a broad community here already using the product, and that was a signal that others might also benefit.
4. Sometimes, we pivot
At the beginning of the pandemic, our work with clinicians and influencers required us to be nimble. The pandemic significantly impacted the focus and time available from clinicians with relevant knowledge in digital health, hearing health specifically. Pandemic-induced changes also impacted the available funding from government and private research grants.
As it turns out, the "new normal" provided a valuable opportunity to re-think our definition of success to engage influencers more organically. At the same time, we let a direct-to-consumer communications model become the focus of our outreach and content development. This shift reflected how we'd resolved the channel issues (third party resellers, intermediaries with conflicting incentives, retailers eating into margins) by controlling the customer experience through a direct-to-consumer distribution model.
5. If customers value a source, so should you
Finally, the customers with niche healthcare needs, some in large numbers, have specific ideas and sources they trust. Listen to your customers as they explain what they need and which sources they value. Sharing information on health issues requires a thoughtful approach to who we partner with and delivering that information in a reputable format. Influential voices in clinical and health communities may not have thousands of social media followers. However, other measures of influence make them worth pursuing, such as the specific audience who trust their endorsement, which may include people who need trusted healthcare information, journalists covering these issues, or colleagues looking to understand key trends in their field.
Digital health holds tremendous promise for both the smart founders delivering innovative solutions and the communities they are helping. Listen to these communities, include their feedback in your brand development process, and dial in your product and content delivery models to reach the niche audiences who can most benefit.
