Trust — The Missing Feature Your Customers Demand
Foundational has found that most healthcare technology startups’ greatest business challenges are fundamentally related to building trust with their end-users. While all startups face the challenge of trust, the healthcare space most clearly illustrates the need to interweave it throughout a product’s value proposition and core values. We’ve seen the impact of fine-tuning these two specific areas improve first-time user onboarding completion by as much as 300%.
Trust is at Risk
Building trust is necessary, and incredibly challenging. Most healthcare innovations intend to improve outcomes by facilitating interactions between a service provider and their patients, but technology intrinsically isolates humanity from its necessary role in that relationship. Maintaining the human-nature of tech-enabled interactions depends on two types of trust:
- Product Trust: Established by developing relevant and distinctive features, that meet a specific and timely need, to persuade consumers that a product is a necessity.
- Relationship Trust: Trust is established between the service provider and their patients by demonstrating authority, and brand value in order to convey a compelling story.
Trust Building is a Process
We find three paradoxes common to startups challenged with building trust in their products:
- Pain Point vs Market Opportunity: Identifying the customers’ pain points is essential to develop an engaging product. Understanding which pain point gives you a distinct market opportunity is even more crucial for marketing and operations teams to align their efforts.
- Product vs Feature: A fantastic product does not ensure a sale. One common driver in a sales process is to promote the utility of specific features, rather than the underlying need those features address. Ultimately it’s the experience with the product’s core innovation that creates customer loyalty.
- Decision-Maker vs End-User: Consumers value different aspects of a product. Who is the decision maker in the purchase — if service provider is the end-user, is it them or an administrator in the back office making the buying decision? Consider all players and target the perspectives they value. A decision maker may choose to purchase for reasons other than addressing the end-user’s pain point.
In the seemingly slow-moving healthcare industry, it is especially time-consuming to get products successfully to market. Gaining suitable market-share requires vision, strategy, and execution. Keeping long-term goals in sight is central to our process as we work to build product and relationship trust for our clients as they scale their businesses.
Foundational Removes Risk
Foundational is a team of experienced founders that leads startups towards their strategic milestones with Traction Science. Our Mission is to provide early-stage startups a path to venture capital through traction. We work with our clients to establish traction by coaching growth in the six areas investors seek validation of future success.
