Nobody told you you’re building a marketing company

I’ve recently been talking with someone about an idea they have for a new company. It’s a company that delivers care, albeit, in a brand new way and maybe even a brand new category. It’s exciting stuff. In our conversations, we agreed that this is not a care delivery company, it’s a marketing company. While the care delivery part is necessary, being a marketing powerhouse will be the reason why this company would be successful. And that got me thinking about how many companies, especially in health care, aren’t actually healthcare companies, they’re actually another type of company.

From personal experience, one of the companies I started, Sherpaa, was ultimately a B2B sales company— something we realized too late. Sana Benefits, a health plan where I recently built out a virtual primary care practice for their 30,000 members, started out as a health plan and is in the process of transitioning to a broker engagement company— because brokers are the ones with the trusted, established relationships with Sana’s small business clients. Nabla is a healthcare ambient AI-assistant for clinicians, but ultimately it’s an enterprise sales and clinician behavior change company.

You don’t always know what type of company you are at the get go. If you’re aware of this concept, or if you’re lucky, you may find your way. Realizing that your company needs to transition from one type of company to another is the hallmark of successful companies. I mean, google transitioned from a search company to an ad tech company. Facebook from a social media company to an ad tech company. The list goes on and on.

In the early days of a vertical (let’s take digital health for example just because I know something about it), you have no other option but to be a digital health care delivery company, which essentially means that 90% of your effort has to be figuring out how to deliver care online. At the time, there’s no precedent for how to deliver care online, so you gotta figure it out yourself. But as industries mature, there’ve been a thousand online care delivery companies who experimented enough over the years to finally land on best practices. Building that stuff then becomes table stakes. Thanks pioneers!

Cores become table stakes and then you must morph into an entirely new kind of company.

Probably the most important thing founders can do is recognize this transition and develop the expertise to foster it. If you’re a founder, say, one who has specialized in building digital health services (🙋🏼‍♂️), it’s time to learn an entirely new skill. If you want to build a company that you know will be successful because of cutting edge online marketing, you’ve got to dive into that world and know way more than enough to be dangerous so you can do it yourself for a while and then hire the exact expert you need to lead this next chapter. And I guess that’s how founders grow— they become mashups of expertise, which is probably why most successful startups aren’t founded by youngins, rather, they’re founded by forty and fifty-something’s who’ve compounded their learnings and expertise over the years.