How one Medtech founder found clarity by reframing their business model — and the questions that helped get them there.
Intro
You’ve got the idea. You’ve got the vision. Maybe you’ve even got some early traction.
But when it comes to turning all that promise into a viable business, things can quickly become overwhelming.
Should you sell to clinicians? To patients? To device companies? Direct-to-consumer or B2B? Is it even fundable? Should you raise? Should you bootstrap?
Sound familiar?
We had a mentoring conversation with a promising early-stage founder this weekend who was grappling with these exact questions. Their idea had potential. But they were stuck in the fog — struggling to pin down a commercial model, unsure who the real customer was, and feeling pulled in too many directions.
By the end of our call, they had clarity. A clear sense of which route to test first, a better understanding of their customer, and a shortlist of high-quality next steps. In this week’s Monday Masterclass, we break down how we got there — and share the five questions we use to help founders move from overwhelm to focused action.
These aren’t magic bullets. But they might just change the way you approach your early-stage strategy.
1. Who is your customer, and what problem are they really trying to solve?
In this founder’s case, there were two obvious paths:
- Sell directly to clinicians as a B2C service
- Offer a B2B solution to medical device companies
Both were plausible. Both had potential. But the mistake we often see at this stage is trying to serve everyone at once — or worse, solving a vague problem for a vague audience.
So we paused and reframed the conversation:
- Who exactly do you think will pay you?
- What specific problem are they trying to solve?
- How are they solving it today — and why isn’t that good enough?
Here’s the insight:
Your users and your customers may not be the same. Remember your customer is the person who PAYS for your product or service.
Your target users and your customers may have different pain points…. And the problem you’re solving for each of them might be different.
📌 Tip: Map out a separate Lean Canvas for each major customer and user segment, as well as each different business model. Don’t try to cram everything into one. Treat it as a working hypothesis and stress test it.
2. What do YOU hope to achieve?
Before deciding which model to pursue, we asked the founder to zoom out and ask:
Where do you want to be in 3 years?
Are you hoping for a small, profitable lifestyle business? A full-time role with a small team? A venture-scale startup with investment and global scale?
These questions matter more than people think.
In our course, Idea to Business Model we encourage founders to set a Minimum Success Criteria (MSC) — a rough revenue target by Year 3. For example:
– £100K/year? That might support a lean, solo practice.
– £1M/year? You might have a 3-5 person team and a little investment
– £10M+/year? You’ll likely need a bigger team, investment, and scalable delivery.
Your commercial model needs to be shaped around your ambitions.
Are you building for flexibility? For scale? For clinical credibility? Or for acquisition?
There’s no right answer — just the right answer for you, but clarity here creates alignment across your decisions. It also filters out models that might look exciting on paper but don’t deliver what you need.
3. Which model feels most likely to help you reach your goals?
Once we’d defined the potential customer types and clarified the founder’s goals, the next question was:
Which model feels the most likely to help you get there — fast enough, lean enough, and with the least resistance and enough customers to meet your aims?
In this case, the B2B option — selling a paid service to medical device companies — felt more promising.
It aligned with their background, solved a real business problem, and offered a clearer path to revenue than going straight to clinicians (with the added bonus of being able to add value to clinicians and improve their education for free!).
This isn’t about picking a forever path. It’s about choosing a direction worth testing first.
We reminded them that it’s better to dive into validating some key assumptions and testing the viability of your model before committing time and effort into building something.
4. What is your biggest assumption — and how can you validate it?
Every early-stage model rests on a few Leap of Faith Assumptions.
The biggest one in this case?
“Medical device companies will pay for this service — and the problem we think they have is one they actually care about fixing.”
We encouraged the founder to focus here first. Not on their pitch deck. Not on building anything.
But on talking to real people.
Specifically:
– Budget holders
– Decision-makers
– People who might buy the solution
Using principles from The Mom Test, we suggested:
– Avoid asking what they would do — instead, ask what they did
– Walk through the last time they faced this problem
– Ask what they tried, what they paid for, what worked (and what didn’t)
– Look for patterns in frustration and workarounds — these are your opportunity zones
The goal at this stage is not to sell. It’s to understand.
5. Can you get a commitment from your customer?
Understanding the problem is one thing.
But true validation happens when someone is willing to give you something valuable in return — time, money, access, or even just a follow-up meeting.
We introduced the founder to one of our favourite frameworks:
Demo → Sell → Build.
Not the other way around.
Before they invest in building the full solution, we encouraged them to:
– Distil their learnings into a clear pitch
– Go back to the same decision-makers they interviewed
– Show them the concept — framed around their own words and pain points
– Ask: Would this solve your problem better than what you’re using now?
Even better:
– Ask if they’d sign a letter of intent
– Offer a paid pilot
– Or agree to a follow-up once your MVP is live
These are the real markers of traction — not compliments, not vague interest, but tangible signs of demand.
Wrap-Up: The 5 questions to cut through the noise
When you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the directions you could go, come back to these five simple but powerful questions:
1. Who is your customer, and what problem are they really trying to solve?
2. What do YOU hope to achieve in 3 years?
3. Which model feels most likely to help you reach those goals?
4. What is your biggest assumption — and how can you validate it?
5. Can you get a commitment from a real customer?
Ask the right questions — of yourself, your model, and your market — and you’ll find clarity faster than you think.
💡 Ready to take the next step?
Download the free Medtech Founder’s Starter Pack — a 10-minute tool that could save you 6 months of wasted effort. It includes a guided Lean Canvas, key validation steps, and links to top tools like The Mom Test and more. Sign up with the form below!
✅ Found this post useful?
Please consider sharing it with your network — and drop us a comment below. We’d love to hear what questions you’re asking at this stage of your journey.
See you next Monday,
– The Medtech Mentor Team