Product/Market Fit: What Health-Tech Startups Can Learn from Minivans & Marvel
By Dr. Joshua Tamayo-Sarver
When chatting about the importance of product/market fit with colleagues in health-tech venture funding, I often illustrate the concept with a couple personal examples outside our field, from the entertainment and automotive industry.
During my residency, I had three kids, two dogs, and one wife. We needed a minivan. But I didn’t see myself as a “minivan guy”. I had a motorcycle. I was cool. My wife needed a minivan and I could accept that it was practical, but it was not for me. She disagreed.
We had that debate on the 5 freeway in L.A one day. She kept trying to get me to admit that I had indeed become a minivan driver. Despite the fact that I was driving the minivan at that very moment, I vehemently mounted what I thought was a compelling defense: I could drive a minivan, but that didn’t prove I was a “minivan guy”:
“If this were really designed to be the pinnacle of practicality for me,” I declared, “it would have a built-in holder for my sunglasses right there.”
Without looking, I pointed… to a built-in holder for sunglasses.
While I reeled from the realization that I was the perfect center-point of the minivan driver market, I silently prayed one of our children in the backseats would vomit, to distract from our conversation as quickly as possible.
Looking back, I realized that it wasn’t me who had changed. Rather, there had been multiple rounds of iteration of minivan models over the years, with Honda (in our case) learning from their other models and competing minivans, evolving their design to meet the needs of someone like me.
Product/market fit takes time, experimentation, and often, the willingness to take daring chances. When it works best, the end result seems obvious. Even when it is anything but that.
Consider the incredibly successful Deadpool movies. While it now seems inevitable that they’d be huge hits, the franchise was actually based on a creepy old Marvel villain whose comic had originally been canceled. This freed up the artists and writers to take wild experiments with the last remaining Deadpool issues they had on the docket — going on to reimagine the character as a quirky, pansexual anti-hero with a meta inner monologue that skyrocketed in popularity among comics fans. And having proven this version of Deadpool with that core niche audience, he was now a perfect product/market fit with Ryan Reynolds and the mass market Hollywood franchise that followed.
At Inflect, we see a somewhat similar iterative process happening in our very different realm of health-tech innovation:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA) is primarily known for inventing the architecture of the early Internet, along with other game-changing technologies (GPS, drones, etc.) first intended for military use.
One of DARPA’s lesser known projects is an AI program designed to assess patient health. While the technology is incredibly powerful, it had a complex UX which was time-consuming and confusing to navigate.
Decoded Health, an Inflect portfolio startup, landed on a perfect product/market fit: “Quinn”, a friendly virtual resident built on top of the original AI. Capable of natural language conversation, Quinn checks patients’ vitals, registers them into the clinical system, and anticipates their immediate needs. Quinn depends on years of deep research and iteration — but only became a valuable, time-saving clinical resource for doctors through its simple, user-friendly UX.
Biocogniv, another startup in our portfolio, created an algorithm to identify the onset of sepsis in patients, based on an analysis of their labs and vitals. The company didn’t see much traction in the health industry, however, in great part because the initial product was too similar to other sepsis- identifying products on the market.
Their solution was a case study in product/market fit: Biocogniv realized that their machine learning had, during their iteration process, become robust enough to identify patients most likely to become septic — 48 hours before onset actually occurred. Even among patients with a normal temperature and heart rate.
For both Decoded Health and Biocogniv, a dogged persistence and a willingness to iterate and experiment is what led to that “click” moment between the product they had originally designed, and what the market actually needed — even if that meant boldly taking it in a direction that had not been anticipated.
That’s the kind of creative irreverence and experimentation that leads to successful automobiles, movies — and in our case, startups that help save lives.
Dr. Josh Tamayo-Sarver is Vice President at Inflect Health as well as Vice President of Innovation at Vituity, where he oversees the discovery, development, and integration of technology in the healthcare space.
