Do you think offering some kind of onboarding/deployment service would have helped? Helping them migrate all their data and workflows into this new tool?
It likely would have helped on the margin, but honestly it seemed like we were selling a much better experience to patients, and only marginally better experience to doctors. We really needed to nail the doctor experience, but there is some nuance there. Generally, PTs have front office people who spend their day in these tools, while doctors have fairly limited exposure. The shortcomings of the existing tools aren't as obvious to them.
One thing was completely clear---this was not as close to product market fit as we expected it to be, so we decided to back away from the project instead of raising money and doubling down on trying to force a solution to a problem that wasn't very important to our direct customers. In other fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the bottom line in some way. Physical Therapy is less of a sales business and more of a referrals business (from other docs), so we didn't have much impact. If anything, we may have prevented business by increasing exercise adherence and improving outcomes, therefore cutting "recurring business" (decreasing the amount of visits/injury, or the overall amount of recurring injuries).
“ In other fields, tools that affect our customers customers are very successful IF that drives more sales, or can affect the bottom line in some way.”
Very insightful - whatever solution you have must actually drive enough $ for someone to really want to give it a try. Which is a huge ask if someone’s business isn’t really tech oriented and they don’t really believe the optimization is worth breaking through existing ways of doing things.
