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Ask HN: We have the expertise but no clients. How to reach them?

• robertlagrant 6y ago
  Who are you targeting?
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    The clients we started with are online nutritionist and dietitian providers. The had to integrate with FHIR to get referrals from other medical practitioners. Similarly potential clients are hospitals, clinics, or EMR development companies seeking solutions on FHIR.
    • libertine 6y ago
      Hey there, just giving food for thought - the closest i've worked with healthcare marketing was media buying for big pharma. This is your website claim. >Reimagining Healthcare & Digitizing Businesses >Comprehensive Healthcare Solutions and Integrations with FHIR, HL7 and SMART Digitizing Businesses through Cloud, Mobile, and Automation. But since you have this insight from your customers: >The clients we started with are online nutritionist and dietitian providers. The had to integrate with FHIR to get referrals from other medical practitioners. Wouldn't it be better to point that you're helping healthcare businesses get more referrals by making them integrated with standards? Something like: >We will help your healthcare business generate more referrals >By setting you up to standard integrations - FHIR, HL7 and SMART - and make you more effective with Automation, Cloud and Mobile. This was just something I thought quickly, the point is to show how you've added value to other businesses. This is closer to their reality, just like you, they might be struggling to get referrals and their lack of integrations could be costing them business. Good luck :)
• ethanwillis 6y ago
  I do work in a similar space. You need to talk to the safe contacts within your clients who may know other people in the industry who are working on similar things and ask for intros.
• flatfilefan 6y ago
  Did you try to connect with your prospective customers via LinkedIn? What do they say to you?
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    The issue is these prospective clients are generally hospitals using an existing EMR system. And when they need some custom solution then they tend to connect to their provider instead of giving us the deal.
    • flatfilefan 6y ago
      Well, what about the decision makers in those hospitals? Do they have accounts on LinkedIn? If they don’t, where could you meet them, maybe some industry fairs or conferences?
      • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
        We attend conferences such as FHIR DevDays which is more about the technical aspects and attended by less prospective clients and more market competitors. The decision makers in hospitals are hard to contact. But you are right, probably some conference/fair might be there with better target audience.
        • mjfisher 6y ago
          Even if people don't have particularly accessible LinkedIn profiles, if you know their names it's often possible to guess or construct an email address for them based on the format of other publicly available emails for the same institution. There are also tools like https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/ and https://rocketreach.co/ https://rocketreach.co/ which attempt to automate the process for you. I've had very mixed results with those kinds of tools, but they're worth knowing about.
    • mynameismonkey 6y ago
      IMO hospitals are your worst target. They have seven figure deployments, maybe eight, and they have an army of HIT techs. THey also have a vendor relationship you cannot break. However... hospitals have partners, contractors, vendors, processors. In your shoes I would be looking at people who want to interop with hospitals. Some ideas: - State Medicaid agencies. Generally do not have the tech staff, but they do have money and contracts, and much of it is set-aside for small business. - Anyone with an NQIIC contract. All tasked with reducing provider burden and imprving care transitions. FHIR to the rescue. https://www.g2xchange.com/statics/cms-awards-25b-network-of-quality-improvement-and-innovation-contractors-nqiic-idiq/ https://www.g2xchange.com/statics/cms-awards-25b-network-of-... - Case in point. I need a legacy data dictionary transposed to FHIR elements so that instead of manual record abstraction I can ship an HL7-ready spec for data abstraction. - Case reporting. There are FHIR-aware case reporting frameworks, no-one knows how to use them. There's a global pandemic on at the moment, so lots of case reporting is needed. Public health agencies exist in just about every county and city in the US.
• johnjungles 6y ago
  Get a good biz dev person
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    How do I start searching for one? Post in job boards?
    • reallydontask 6y ago
      that's one way. It's a tricky position as you want somebody with the right mix of tech knowledge, business knowledge and bullshiting ability. Sadly, in my limited experience, there seems to be a large amount of people that excel at the latter but not so much at the other categories.
  • zidia 6y ago
    that's the last thing you would like to do. As a CEO, when you start a company, you are the only one that need to sell until you consolidate Product Market Fit. A biz dev will be only 50% efficient after months of training.
• danieltillett 6y ago
  I am going to be blunt. If you can’t get the people you used to work for to hire you or recommend you to their contacts then you are going to fail. Get on the phone to everyone you have ever worked for (assuming you left a good impression) and chase those leads.
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    Our existing client is very happy with our quality of service. However we never approached them directly about referring or providing us leads. Show we do that?
    • spiderfarmer 6y ago
      Call them.
    • barry-cotter 6y ago
      You should ask for referrals and you should also ask if you can use them as a case study for your website. After referrals and case studies you should probably divide your time between sales calls, cold emails and content marketing, i.e. white papers on technical topics, blog posts, short videos on your topic of expertise. Better badly produced videos that a potential customer can find than planned well produced ones they can’t find. If you’re confident enough in your skills as a trainer giving classes/courses in person is a wonderful way to build a name and helps a great deal with the book. It is very good to have a book you authored on the topic, even if it is a slim book. Slim books can be the basis for expensive courses, which both make money and serve as advertising.
  • cryptica 6y ago
    Exactly. For the past decade, we have been in a declining economy with no upward mobility for individuals. So anyone who has money now already has an existing network of suppliers to keep their business running smoothly. They don't need new suppliers. Those who have money by now don't need your expertise. If you don't have connections by now, you have no chance. The game of capitalism is over and the results are in. If you're a billionaire, congrats, you won the game! If you don't have your own successful business, you lost the game!
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  Random internet advice (not an expert) is to call everyone you know who might know someone. Also would it be so bad to take a contract from a job site or even a job in the intermediate time. Maybe one of you does a job the other biz dev.
• ghoshbishakh 6y ago
  Link: https://alstonia.io https://alstonia.io
• onion2k 6y ago
  This is an incredibly common story among people in tech who learn the skills to build great things and believe that's enough to start a company. Being good at building tech is only half the story. You can write the best code, build the best apps, and design the most amazing UX, but if you can't market your business and sell to people you won't make any money. To run a successful company you need to be good at getting your message in front of people who buy what you're selling. I don't have an answer beyond the advice that you should always be marketing, generating leads, and selling even when you think you have years worth of work in the pipeline.
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    Yes Marketing is the main challenge as you say, not technology ( for us ). Searching LinkedIn is our only bet which is difficult. Also we think posting google ads won't be of much use. Am I mistaken?
    • giancarlostoro 6y ago
      Dont limit yourself to one avenue, expand your horizon. Find platforms catered towards teams like your own. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never good. When you drop that one basket all your eggs are ruined.
  • kqr 6y ago
    Not to mention that it's a common misconception in technology that a company creates value by shipping increasing complexity to the customer. I.e. "this is what we have built, this is how we know how to extend it with more features, now let's figure out how to sell that." Starting with an idea and trying to market it is the opposite of what to do. Instead, figure out what problems your potential customers have (by talking to them!) and then set about solving those problems with as little technology and ceremony as possible. Once you're done with that, your potential customers are practically already lined up, because they were the ones who ordered your solution in the first place. Edit: The key thing is that in the initial exploration of the problem space, you are not selling anything. Those discussions are all about the potential customer. You have to put yourself into their minds and view yourself from the outside. They will be really insecure. Both because they are not ready to buy something any time soon, and because they don't want to reveal sensitive information to an arbitrary third party. You know that you care about them and their business deeply, so it's easy for you to assume that everything you say comes from a good place. They don't know that yet – and worse, they're used to awful salespeople that just want to trick them into buying more complexity – so they will interpret everything you say in the most dismissive way possible. You have to show that you're different and that you're not in it to sell stuff, but that you have a genuine interest in understanding their business, in which they are the expert. This is seriously hard but something that can be practised.
• cconcepts 6y ago
  I'm sorry to say this but, in my experience targeting very niche needs, a well targeted Google Adwords campaign is hard to beat and gives you the data to help structure the rest of your marketing. If you have the expertise you will learn to get the search terms right.
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    I had the completely opposite idea and thought google ads will be of little benifit. Thank you for the advice, I will try adwords.
    • cconcepts 6y ago
      There is a small amount of people searching for what you offer. Adwords lets you be there when they search for it at a relatively low cost in a very short timeframe. Hard to beat really.
• andi999 6y ago
  How many people are in your sales team?
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    Currently we are a very small team. Only one person handles sales and marketing ( and social media ).
    • andi999 6y ago
      At least double that number
      • libertine 6y ago
        Just out of curiosity: why doubling the amount of human resources will fix the issue? What is the indicator that points that they have an HR bottleneck?
        • andi999 6y ago
          Well, a) the textbook answer for not enough sales is to add sales power b)any important function should have at least 2 ppl (so if one is at a trade fair, sick holiday etc, the other can continue) and also the team can discuss ideas how to progress Edit (since reply depth is reached): more ppl might have also different ideas what to do I still mantain one of the problems is not enough ppl in sales. There there might be more problems: probably, but it is not my company (meaning if other people want to figure out the other problens: go ahead) Of course also one of the programmers can take over this role. (Aptitude assumed)
          • libertine 6y ago
            But you need to be think critically taking into account what OP said. >a) the textbook answer for not enough sales is to add sales power Yes, but ff your lead generation isn't working, or if the current sales team can't turn them into clients, then the problem isn't lack of sales power. You could throw 10 sales guys at this problem and still get the same results, because your conversion rate is 0%. b)any important function should have at least 2 ppl (so if one is at a trade fair, sick holiday etc, the other can continue) and also the team can discuss ideas how to progress I understand that, but for some companies that's a luxury they can't afford - they need something to sustain that person. Else every business would start with 2 of each role, because every role is important. In my opinion, if the marketing/sales isn't working properly, they need to fix that first. Throwing more people at the problem won't fix it.
• jd115 6y ago
  Lots of condescending negativity in the comments here. Although a lot of it is true, it's not necessarily helpful. I've been through this exact frustration, read everything there is on the topic, and have discovered things that work and things that don't. First and foremost - DO NOT go hire anyone to do this for you. No one can. You MUST learn to sell your own products and services, there is no way around it. And no one can do it better than you. Second, avoid paid advertising before you've learned how to generate high-ticket sales WITHOUT it. Paid ads and sales people are for scaling only, once you've got your offer and your messaging down to a proven working system. The good news is, you can get started easily and you can see results quickly, without spending a fortune on anyone or anything. If you'd like some hand-holding through this, ping me at code+hn@a115.co.uk
  • throwaway4good 6y ago
    This is good advice. When you are just two people doing consulting services then you need to do your own sales probably starting with a bunch of cold calls.
  • klft 6y ago
    > and have discovered things that work and things that don't. Could you share some of your insights?
    • jd115 6y ago
      Happy to help. Send me an e-mail with a bit more details about what you do and what you're currently struggling with.
      • newsbinator 6y ago
        It would be helpful to share some general insights, or give some concrete examples from your particular experience, so we can all benefit. Then people can email you for their specific situation.
        • 6y ago
• geekybiz 6y ago
  Talk as much as you can to your potential customers about their problems in your area of expertise & try to best align. Try to identify, understand and solve points-of-friction from these conversations. Where to find potential customers? I'd try in following order: - Talk to existing customers / contacts for referrals - Talk to your past colleagues / friends for referrals - Quality cold emails with decent research & pre-work - Hang out on social wherever your potential customers hang-out and engage in meaningful conversations. You may not strike success right away but do persist & keep identify what's working / not working. Follow-up regularly. If above gets tiring once-in-a-while - write content that can market your expertise. Background : Been offering website speed / scalability services expertise for 3+ years.
• Foxhuls 6y ago
  I’ve never been in your exact position and won’t claim to be an expert but I have a fair bit of sales experience and a few close friends who’ve started their own businesses. One thing that stood out to me is that if I were to stumble across your website I’d have no idea what you’re actually providing or looking to provide. It could easily be my personal lack of healthcare industry knowledge and not an issue for your target market. My advice would be not to try and rethink the strategy that seems I see as “if you have a tech need in the medical field, we can handle it” and create something specific. Find a specific problem, create something that solves it, and sell that. Once you have customers for that you can move on to try and grow your business with them. The other big thing is with a field with such sensitive data as the medical field, you need to establish some level of trust and a relationship before a business like a hospital is going to take a gamble like that.
• tenbino 6y ago
  How to get clients. Or put another way, how to have a business. The hardest question of all. As Paul Graham says sell something people want.
• adamsvystun 6y ago
  Meta-advice, don't take all the advice here too seriously :) People here don't know you situation as well as you do, and following too many different advice will lead you to not have any consistent direction. So here are my humble thoughts on the website. I have no expertise in healthcare technology, so maybe that's the reason, but I could not understand what types of problems you are solving and what you are doing from your website. 1. For example, 'Reimagining Healthcare' is an empty phrase. All your sentences seem vague to me: "Comprehensive Healthcare Solutions and Integrations with FHIR, HL7 and SMART", are you consulting on how to create these solutions? are you developing these solutions? are you selling a created solution? Are you integrating somebody's else solution? 2. There is not a lot of connection to your company in your texts: > Healthcare Data Interoperability and Analytics > Standards like SMART and FHIR allow healthcare providers to store and share data in an interoperable manner which enables organizations to derive insights to provide effective care efficiently. This is a good description of these standards and why they are important, but what is your connection here? If you are using these standards, then mention it directly. Maybe something like this is better: > We use standards like SMART and FHIR to allow healthcare providers... All other texts in Services section have the same problem. 3. I don't understand the Solutions section. It looks like a collection of icons and slogans. Let's take one example: Cloud. So I can guess that you are developing your solutions to be deployed on the cloud. But why make clients guess? Write it directly and mention why this is good. "Our solutions are deployed on cloud. This is good because <...>.". 4. This is just a suggestion. I would add a section of Problems that you can solve. Client come to your sites with problems. So I would write: "1. You have problem X? We can solve it by doing Y." Overall, you have to think from the eyes of the client. What is the client looking for? But again, I do not know anything about your field. I don't know who your clients, what problems they have, and what technology you are building. So you should be very quick to ignore this advice if you think I don't have the necessary understanding. But regardless, good luck :) EDIT: typos
  • ghoshbishakh 6y ago
    Thanks a lot for the feedback. We will work on improving it.
  • igormsg 6y ago
• loraa 6y ago
  Half of these guys have never been in the situation and have no clue. Do what you are good at, and hire someone who is good at what they do - marketing and advertising. When you realize the value of not hav ing to become an expert marketer and double your work load, it will all make sense.
• ykevinator 6y ago
  Go to leadiro, sign up for 1 month. Download 500 leads. Write a spec for 3 or 4 emails. Go to up work, post a job for a designer and get the emails built. Write a spec for a landing page ( spec means spec, write down the detail, each section, mobile friendly etc). Get the page built. Go to sendgrid or some other mail system. Send the email campaign. Have then come to your landing page. You should spend < $500 and might get 5 or 10 leads. Hth
• brudgers 6y ago
  we have zero leads from last month I had no idea what FHIR is. I googled. I followed about five or six links without backing up to land here: http://www.hl7.org/about/gold.cfm?ref=nav http://www.hl7.org/about/gold.cfm?ref=nav Start cold calling. Collect names. Fill a rollodex. Don't stop. Fill another. Follow up in person. Ask about what's in their current budget. What's coming down the pipeline. How they currently handle work in your area. See their physical infrastructure. Know what the decision maker's office looks like. Get a sense of their actual problems and assure them that you can mitigate them. Get your ass to work. Out of the chair. In the car and cheap motels. Stop pretending there are clients on Hacker News. There aren't. It's just easier to post here than cold call. Good luck.
  • giancarlostoro 6y ago
    This is the reality. Hell show up at conferences potential customers would go to, set up a booth and sell yourselves.
  • bald 6y ago
    This. In my previous company, I did ~3k cold calls to get it off the ground. In my current one, ~1k cold calls. Get on the phone. Yes it's painful, so what
  • throwaway_kufu 6y ago
    The hope is always hard work will persevere, but there is certainly a gift to sales too. Something tells me you have that gift in spades.
• ageitgey 6y ago
  You won't find clients in a niche like this by setting up a website and waiting for them to show up. When clients need custom development, they turn to recommendations from friends or they turn to industry leaders. They usually don't have the expertise to evaluate a new player on their own. So you need to either establish yourself as a recommended friend (by networking and/or completing successful projects) or as an industry leader. For the latter, you could use strategies like blogging on how a facility should deploy or consume FHIR, write about best practices in interoperability, or whatever. That might lead to people asking you questions and eventually lead to them asking for help with projects. If you don't know many people in the industry yet, one way to get to know more people might be to partner with another company on a dev project where they need extra help. It might not be as exciting as getting your own project, but you have to start somewhere. I have a company in this niche and may need help with FHIR and related dev work in the future. Feel free to send me an email to the details in my profile and introduce yourself.
  • brudgers 6y ago
    When clients need custom development, they turn to recommendations from friends or they turn to industry leaders. Good clients just call the people who they've worked with before...if the people they've worked with before haven't called the good client first.
• stunt 6y ago
  One of the ways that sometimes works well is to find big potential client, and then hire (or even partner with) someone that works in their product team. You can use his network. I know it sounds silly. But, that's one of the tactics that many companies use.
• mtnGoat 6y ago
  Healthcare is really hard to sell into, that is why a few companies own so much of the paying field. The hospital system I worked for had 2,4 and 5 year cycles for their contracts, so things didn't the often and vendors had to be around at the right time to get consideration. It seemed very bizarre and antiquated to me. My best advice would be to to find vendors that have adjacent solutions and partner with them, maybe making their own sales funnel easier.
• andi999 6y ago
  While I believe even a good webpage wont currently help you, your current one is missing vital information. First: you business location and email. I mean you use .io, are you in the indian ocean? Are you a UK, US or India based company (this matters a lot to possible customers). Also I find it not clear from the webpage what would be the benefit of hiring you. (What pain do I have which is solved by you)
  • brudgers 6y ago
    For a consultancy, the web page is what Graham calls "playing house." It's easier to build a web page than find clients and building a web page feels like meaningful work. It isn't. Nobody hires consultants from a web page.
    • 1123581321 6y ago
      Nevertheless, they have the time to make these small improvements. Also, I don’t agree with your last sentence as there are decision makers who do research, and others in their organization who definitely do research because they don’t want to hire you.
    • ponker 6y ago
      Nobody hires consultants from a web page, but also, nobody hires consultants without checking their web page.
• gwbrooks 6y ago
  B2B consultant here for 30 years weighing in with broad truths: * If you are waiting on leads, you die. You create leads -- every day, as your top business priority -- by working to inform and educate people. You deliver value now (information, education) to capture value (a sale) later. * This is going to mean talking to strangers. It's going to mean experimenting with ads, native advertising, figuring out which channels your buyers frequent, etc. The failure-to-success ratio will be high and that, as painful as it is, is fine. It's part of the process. * As others have indicated: Don't assume you can just hire someone to do sales or marketing. If the founders don't fully understand the value proposition and the pain points of potential clients, it's very hard to succeed. * You're new and that means you're likely small. You're also specialized. Consider throwing effort at partnering with larger players who have cracked the code, have a steady stream of clients but don't have your expertise. Subconsulting is profitable and a way to keep the doors open while you figure out how to hunt and kill your own work. * Your rates have to be high enough to support you with 50%+ of your time unsold/unbooked. During that unsold/unbooked time? You are marketing. With the possible exception of sending out invoices, nothing else is as important.
  • JacobAldridge 6y ago
    Fellow B2B Consultant here. I had the thread open to find some time to return and add my thoughts and experience. Everything you’ve said is spot on, and I think you’ve hit everything of substance. Growing a consulting (even a tailored tech solution) business means making it a sales business first and foremost - you can prioritize delivery if you reach a point you want to plateau, but 0 leads is not that point.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • chii 6y ago
      > business means making it a sales business first and foremost i think a lot of people have the misunderstanding that the world works under a "build it and they will come" model.
• speedgoose 6y ago
  I work for a IT company in healthcare. We also do FHIR, interoperability, and such. This is the easy part. The really hard part is to get customers. It means having a network, a good reputation, to reply to tenders in time with a ready to use solution that is competitive, adapt to the cursomers needs, etc... We have more employees doing sales and support than software. You may find work as a contractor for a healthcare company though.
• saaaaaam 6y ago
  Without trying to be provocative I just looked at your website and this leapt our at me. “Lean Development methologies and modern cloud deployment startagies enable fast paced development with shorter iteration cycles.” Apart from the buzzword bingo, you’ve misspelt “strategies”. Your copy is incredibly bland and nebulous and doesn’t really say anything about what you do.
• gk1 6y ago
  Collected some suggestions here: https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-advice/ https://www.gkogan.co/blog/consulting-advice/ Read: Million Dollar Consulting, by Alan Weiss. Do: Build your visibility and credibility. Fish where the fish are. Where are your target buyers spending their time and getting their information? Find a way to publish there. Figure out who are the best connected people in your network or vicinity and talk to them, let them know you're taking on projects and be clear in what kind of projects you can help with. Make it easy for them to refer you.
• jameslk 6y ago
  > We have the expertise and experience in healthcare technology ( FHIR, interoperability ), which is a niche. Cool, but what's the value you offer? Who needs it? Why? What do they usually do? What's their title? Where do they usually look for solutions to their problems? Selling expertise vs selling value is the difference between being an laborer vs a business owner. If you're trying to sell your expertise, you're thinking about it wrong.
• nradov 6y ago
  If you can spare the time, get actively involved in HL7 FHIR standards development by participating in work groups, showing up at Connectathon events, and volunteering to write sections of implementation guides. This will raise your visibility among customers who hire interoperability consultants.
• bashwizard 6y ago
  Why are so many people starting businesses without even knowing how to sell their service/product? No service/product is so good that it automagically sell itself.
• ponker 6y ago
  The core expertise in a consulting company is getting the clients. Half of the consultants have absolutely no idea what they're talking about and do fine, domain expertise is 1/10th of the job, getting clients is 50% of the job, and putting together a work product that feels like it could represent domain expertise is 40%. So I'd approach the problem from "I have no expertise in consulting, how do I build some" which will be more fruitful.
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I worked in insurance for 5 years. If what you do can be sold to doctor's offices instead of hospitals, that's where I would start cold calling people. Every doctor's office is a small business. They aren't that good at the business end of things and their HIPAA training tends to be poor compared to what hospitals do. If you can figure out how to educate doctors on why this matters and what the rules are and how you can solve their problems, I think that's your best shot at developing a solid customer base. Larger healthcare organizations, like hospitals and insurance companies, do their own in-house training and custom solutions. It's doctors offices that can't afford their own IT department but still need to comply with things like HIPAA that are in a world of hurt and could benefit from someone coming in and serving as their part-time IT department and staff expert.
• ealexhudson 6y ago
  So, I work in pretty much this exact area. The main issue is you're trying to sell something that customers don't buy - any integration, FHIR or HL7 or something, is only ever needed to get one product to talk to another. Usually a new one to talk to the old one; and the business selling the new product is the one in whose interest it is to get the integration working. While it's always possible to take existing kit and do more/better automation, this kind of operational improvement tends to have little to no budget unless there's some specific project being undertaken (e.g. going to structured reporting). Generally, although people are often unhappy with internal software, the business will be operating as-is pretty comfortably. You'd need to deliver an awful lot of value to make it worthwhile paying you what you need. I would probably look to better define your customer. You might have a better shout trying to approach ISVs who are selling new healthcare products, and asking them to use you as a delivery partner. Many ISVs have weak deployment teams and cannot deal with complex integrations, but they will be the ones with a customer and a contract. If you can speed up time to implementation, they get paid quicker and can do more.
  • mynameismonkey 6y ago
    I agree it's important to define your customer, although when starting out it can be difficult to do so as it brings a sense of closing some doors that you might want open for a bit longer, but in general I'd say your comment: >you're trying to sell something that customers don't buy - any integration, FHIR or HL7 or something, is only ever needed to get one product to talk to another is not entirely correct. I for one buy small scale interop product, and the FHIR space is growing quickly, more and more companies will be looking for small and medium activity in the space as new regulation starts taking hold.
• dep_b 6y ago
  You need to go where your customers are. Our customers are startups so we went to every startup meeting we could find in our area, talking to people, perfecting our pitch. I assume there are places where your customers gather too.
• indymike 6y ago
  The best way to get leads is to ask you customer to introduce you to other potential customers. If they say yes, get the intros done quickly and make sure you do a great job with the new prospects so your customer refers you more.
• slgeorge 6y ago
  The easiest customer to 'do more with' is the existing customer you have. You have two projects (presumably two companies), reach out to them and ask them where else they need more help, "what other projects could we help with?" If you're doing a good job then it's natural. It's all about forming a strong relationship at different levels in your customer and having them advocate to use you in other projects. The other tactic is that your customers know other companies and contacts in the space. Ask them for help - "as a new consultancy we're trying to build our contacts in healthcare, is there anyone in the industry you think we should speak to?".
• gravypod 6y ago
  For HIPAA integrations you're going to need to a lot of security auditing. Something that might work well is publishing a white paper of your personal security practices. Things like full-disk-encryption for developers, password policies, hardware 2FA for ALL company accounts, SSO for all logins with a single place to delete a credential set, mandatory monthly/weekly HIPAA training, etc. Another thing you might want to consider doing is open sourcing some stuff to help setup FHIR/HL7 integrations. Pretty much the only fully fledged HL7 "solution" you can get for free HAPI [0]. You might want to make some open source tools around all of this. For example: a reverse proxy that prints all to a log that's censored for PII for debugging. Make that for free, push that to github and open source it. This will get you: 1. Lead generation: People in this space will know who you are 2. Trust: Hiring consultants is difficult if you cant see the quality of their work. If you do a good job on these OSS tools you can prove to people that your code quality is high. This demands a much higher price tag. Something else you might consider discussing is what EMRs you have direct experience with. For instance Epic [1] provides "training services". HL7 has a "HL7 Certified" exam you can take to prove you can memorize it's obtuse message structures. Taking, passing, and displaying this might make some buisnessy-people happy. [0] - https://hapifhir.github.io/hapi-hl7v2/ https://hapifhir.github.io/hapi-hl7v2/ [1] - https://www.epic.com/services https://www.epic.com/services
• teleforce 6y ago
  Personally I've been researching in healthcare mainly on CVD for the past five years. Coming from outside healthcare, I was really shocked initially on how primitive the technology in clinics and hospitals as if they are still in the 1980s especially in the hospital management and operation. I've come to conclusion that healthcare is a very well-funded area and it's ripe for disruption. Consider these scenarios in where I live: You want a digital copy of your ECG reading, nope they give you the paper based reading of several seconds recording that will lose their ink in a few months time. You want to transfer your health data record to another hospital or clinic, nope that's impossible since the hospitals or clinics don't perform any proactive data sharing even between government's hospitals, paper based or digitally. You want the over crowded hospital outpatient section to send you SMS or at least make an online/website call numbers, nope you have to wait physically, and if you've missed your turn when you're away then you are basically screwed. You have a disabled family member who cannot even move to attend the hospital, nope you need to pay expensive third party doctor to make a visit to your house. I think you get the idea by now, and since your expertise in healthcare IT and depending on where do you live just talk to the hospital management or govt appointed organization (e.g. NHS in the UK) about any of the above issues and how you can you solve the above mentioned problems or others for the benefit of hospitals/clinics and the society in general.
• projektfu 6y ago
  I’ve often wondered if an opinionated solution — in the Rails sense — would sell to SMEs in healthcare. Ask any physician group in the US what their pain point is and it’s probably reimbursement. They have to deal with finicky rules from different insurance providers, and usually employ a couple people dedicated to getting reimbursed. They also have to wait long periods of time for those reimbursements. A company that could promise to improve that situation by standardizing how the practice operates and optimizing reimbursement could have a great sales value. You could also standardize data sharing/HIPAA practice. You still have to sell it to buyers, one by one.
• dade_ 6y ago
  E-Myth \ 'e-,'mith\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work Voted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs. https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280 https://www.amazon.ca/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/...
• mynameismonkey 6y ago
  Hi there, I'm someone who builds and buys SMART on FHIR tech, albeit small potatoes in the space. A few thoughts from checking out your site to see if I should follow up with you, I hope these are helpful. 1. WHo are you? Your site says nothing about you. I'm going to give you the keys to the PHI kingdom, I need to know who's soliciting me. Are you two twenty-somethings with amazing skills and ideas, or 20 ex-Epic employees looking to fill a particular gap you found? Without this general information I wouldn't know what sort of project to think about including you in. 2. Where are you? I'm under contract with numerous health agencies that require data to be on US soil. I have no idea if you are in Romania or Virginia. (Side note, government is the biggest purchaser of health care and therefore your paths will cross at some point, even if it's simply being downstream of federal or state data.) 3. How compliant are you? Your one page tells me nothing about your understanding of HIPAA, nor how you ensure the security and privacy of the data you will be exposed to. It may seem as if anyone in the space _should_ know about this and the reader can assume compliance, but frankly it's not the case. Yell at me about your third-party audits, your ability to transact PHI, as well as any SOC/FISMA compliance you have. 4. What have you done before? There are a lot of corners in the niche, and I'd need to know what systems you've worked with, what you've built and who for, so I can get an understanding of whether or not you'd be a good fit. As for leads, with most conferences going virtual your usual approach of HIMSS is buggered, but Healthcare Datapalooza just put out a call for presentations so they're likely looking for (virtual) sponsors already. I assume HIMSS and HCDP sell attendee data, have you looked in to that? And how about FHIR aggregators like 1up and Redox, they are likely plugged in to many of your potential customers. I'd be happy to chat more, my profile has an E-mail address you can use. Good luck with your venture! EDIT - forgot to mention, starting out a great way to get noticed is to participate on a HIT Challenge, not sure what's up for grabs lately but challenge.gov - easy way to find the right people to start netowrking with.
  • karmajunkie 6y ago
    I worked in this space for 12 years, this is one of two or three “correct” replies in this thread. OP, you’re in a pretty niche market (albeit a largish niche). standard marketing advice isn’t going to do you a lot of good here. look for the responses coming from people who have anxious experience in HIT and take whatever advice they’re offering.
• ShradhaSingh 6y ago
  Market yourself on B2B forums of your industry and create a funnel.
• CapriciousCptl 6y ago
  I'm CTO at one of your target firms. Integration is a major pain point for us. We don't have a need for you now, but I've noted a few things based on what I could find on Alstonia.io. My needs are different than others, but hopefully this helps. If any consultant or agency wants someone like me to hire you, I want to see that they have used the tech we use, that I can estimate your cost reliably, that they're reliable people in general and that I can understand the code they write. The stuff about security and high availability/fault tolerance kind of comes as a matter of course. You can check a lot of those boxes by 1) some content on your website describing previous projects (like whitepaper PDFs or long-form blog posts), 2) GitHub projects, 3) references/testimonials. Then give a giant call to action form including asking for a phone number (I hate giving out my phone number, but it seems like everyone requires it, so I imagine it would help you more than not). Note that these needs are very different then what I'd need from an employee. For instance, I can invest in employees and give them time to learn our tech. For consultants, I can't.
• ghgr 6y ago
  If you are based in Europe drop me an email. We might have something for you.
• x87678r 6y ago
  You should look at basic marketing 101. Identify market segments, identify customers, who makes purchasing decisions and how do they decide, target those people.
• newmnhn 6y ago
  There are a lot of useful comments already. Something that hasn't been pointed out yet as far as I can tell is that there are accessibility and quality errors on your website. If I am looking to hire somebody it's one of the things I look at when I want to see if they know what they are doing. Not everybody is like me, but these problems are worth fixing anyway: - The "Explore" button is a span with a click handler, the click handler updates the URL hash. It's not keyboard focusable, and since it's just a link to a different location in the page, it could just be a link, but if it must be JS, it needs to be a button element. - The form does not have accessible labels. Placeholder text is not a label. Also "fullname" looks like an error. Lighthouse reports some other low hanging fruit. Overall vibe of that website is that somebody chose some readily-available bootstrap landing page template and didn't check it for basic errors. That combined with the scant information about the company & the fact that your website is really just a single page does not inspire confidence. Even in the small amount of copy that is on the site, there are three errors in this one sentence: "Healthcare providers will need an infracstructure what is open, interoperable and standards-compliant, which ensures the security, confidentiality and privacy of presonal data." If you are not spellchecking your copy & shipping valid HTML for a single web page you make for yourselves, it would be wrong of me to expect higher quality in something you are hired to build. FHIR and HIPAA are tough and I have a ton of respect for you for being able to work in that context. The quality of your website should reflect the high standard you bring to that work.
• rbreve 6y ago
  Give free presentations (webinars), youtube videos, show your work, demos, working products. Meet people in the health industry. Try to reach them and show what can you do. Ask for intros, show what you can do.
• saadalem 6y ago
  1- Offer over funnels : Funnels are important, but if I have to choose between a funnel or an offer, I’d choose the OFFER FIRST. You can close 6/5 figure deals over text message, PDFS, ugly 1-page websites, and emails. The offer is the key. Don’t create offers that you “think” people will like, instead, find out exactly what they want, do some digging… and give them exactly what they are looking for, and don’t overthink it. 2- It’s not all about the “one close call” : High Ticket clients have a different psychology. Part of attracting high-paying clients is knowing what triggers them to buy (exclusivity, high perceived value, emotional, psychological, time investment, etc..) 3- Don’t sell, select : Everything in your funnel should be designed with you SELECTING them, not you begging for their business. 4- Break the rules! You can go through copying what works, and try it out to get some quick success but eventually you’ll get to a point where you create something new in the marketplace, and you are the first one to offer it (angle wise, position wise, offer wise), so take it! First mover advantage is risky, but that’s where all the upside is, if you get it right.