According to market research statistics, more than 300 million startups are launched every year around the world. Only about 10% of these become successful businesses.
Startups in the digital health technology industry cannot escape this reality. It’s even harder for healthcare startups to get off the ground because developing healthcare products often requires rigorous research and testing. 35% of startups fail due to a misunderstanding of market needs. So the last thing a healthcare company wants to do is spend a ton of time building a platform that people aren’t interested in.
The Lean Startup methodology was created to alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with building a startup from scratch. Helpful for both small and large businesses, several well-known brands have adopted Lean Startup principles to build highly successful products. The list also includes Qualcomm, Dropbox, and Toyota.
Let’s take a look at this unique system and how healthtech startups can successfully adapt its principles to their business ideas.
What is the Lean Startup Model?
The Lean Startup methodology is a set of principles used to launch and build new ideas based on the researched desires of your target customers. This allows startups to strategically eliminate market uncertainty while charting a path to product development. The concept’s founding principles are primarily credited to Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Blank, whose work was published in 2013 by Harvard Business Review in the book “The Lean Startup”. It has led to groundbreaking articles on the subject, including “Why Change Everything.”
Differences between lean startup and regular startup process
The Lean Startup methodology guides founders to use a scientific approach when turning an idea into a business. In the traditional method, aspiring founders not only hope that their idea will be favorable to their target audience upon launch, but also draft complex business plans that they use to attract investors. With this approach, the product is hidden from the customer as much as possible, so there is nothing to indicate whether the product meets the customer’s needs or not.
Lean Startup focuses on understanding customer pain points and unmet needs without introducing a product. Once a burning need is identified, a value proposition is generated that requires validation by potential customers. Responses are measured and the results are used to determine the features and characteristics of the product that will prompt the customer to use the product.
Build your own startup using lean startup techniques
Moving from concept to full-fledged startup can present many challenges, including finding resources, building networks, and learning the skills needed to get your idea off the ground. Overcoming the hurdles requires careful consideration, but this is where I found value in adopting the principles of Steve Blank’s Lean Startup methodology.
Learn more about Lean Startup methodology
The success or failure of starting any kind of business usually depends on how well the product is received by the target market. It’s not just about coming up with a great idea and developing a compelling business plan. Lean Startups take this fact into account and begin a process of continuous trial and error, constantly modifying or discarding ideas as necessary.
Here’s a breakdown of the steps:
- Idea generation
- Hypothesis verification
- Build a minimum viable product (MVP) to collect customer feedback
- Revise your hypothesis accordingly
- building the product
- Continuous testing to improve or enhance the product
After understanding the pain points and unmet needs, the first step in the process is to validate the value proposition. Once you have established your hypothesis, the next step in the Lean Startup system is to create a minimum viable product. An MVP is the minimum version of the product you want to build.
This allows you to test the main features of your product with real customers of your target audience, collect data, and measure customer interest accordingly. If the feedback is positive, that’s your signal to continue. If it is negative, the startup can choose to scrap the idea or use the feedback to pivot accordingly.
I leveraged Steve Blank’s Lean Startup principles to develop an MVP and presented it to hundreds of potential customers. The target audience is pediatricians and pediatric neurologists.
Additionally, we wanted to determine what products would be most convenient and comfortable for patients to use. The MVP we built allows doctors to understand what kind of data they need from the product, when they need to get that data, and the entire interaction between doctor and patient. We were able to find out exactly how the product needed to work. seamless.
After some back and forth, we were able to create a product that met the pain points identified by the doctors. However, once the solution was implemented, it became clear that physicians did not need the level of detail or amount of data that the tool could provide. Fortunately, by using Lean Startup principles, we were able to use physician feedback to further fine-tune our product. We proceeded to build a smartphone app to watch patients take selfie videos and allow doctors to extract the exact data they needed.
Continuous development of Lean Startup
Overall, the Lean Startup methodology focuses on conducting tests that lead to the realization of a broader vision, rather than following a step-by-step business plan. Lean Startups continue to use the system to ask questions that can improve product maturity, develop additional products, and change direction as needed.
Photo credit: elenabs, Getty Images
Dr. Rachel Kuperman, a 2022 CharmHealth Innovation Challenge participant, is a pediatric epileptologist who spent 10 years directing the pediatric epilepsy program at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Oakland, California. Although she studied physics and neurophysiology, she became frustrated by the lack of data used to make important decisions about the diagnosis and management of epilepsy, and her 30-year outcomes had been significantly reduced. was not improved. Cardiologists were using Holter EKGs, endocrinologists were using remote glucose monitoring, but neurologists had patient-generated seizure diaries that were less than 50% accurate at best. Using powerful data generated in the hospital through complex brain-mapping surgeries, she has been able to understand where her child’s seizures are coming from, but in the day-to-day clinic, patients’ lives are Box, so I was feeling frustrated and disillusioned. . She founded Eysz with the goal of using patient-generated data to change outcomes for people with neurological diseases, including epilepsy.
