How to Create a Community Around Your Medtech Product
When you develop something new, it’s like your baby — you know every detail, and you see its potential to change the game for patients, providers, and the healthcare system. But getting others in the industry to notice what you’ve built? That’s on you. You need to give them a reason to care. Here are some strategies from industry veterans on how to build a strong community around your product.
Gather your crowd: Share your product’s behind-the-scenes journey transparently and honestly. It doesn’t have to be perfect; the right amount of vulnerability is a required ingredient. Once you have an audience, consider including them in your journey through crowdfunding.
Design with the end user in mind: Creating an engaging, easy-to-use product with a hook can enable organic virality. Use social media platforms to showcase your product in a way that excites potential users and encourages them to share their experiences.
Empower the patients: Direct marketing to patients may not be a great fit for every company or device. If that’s the case, go beyond marketing your product by educating your audience in a meaningful, non-promotional way. Look to develop creative programs to show people your true mission: improving the overall patient experience.
Reduce adoption friction: Steer clear of developing an over-complicated product that requires substantial training. Make it so intuitive that the integration process can take care of itself.
Capitalize on patient information: There’s a reason “data” is a buzzword. Think of ways to accumulate a comprehensive registry of your potential patients and users as early as possible. This can empower your market research, help you improve product development, and speed up clinical trial enrollment.
Crowdfunding as Marketing
Benjamin Sexson is the co-founder and CEO of Monogram Orthopedics, a company pushing the boundaries of robotic surgery.
Currently, 88% of knee-replacement surgeries are manual, but 50% of surgeries are expected to be completed using robotics by 2027—a market predicted to reach $37.99 billion by 2030.
First of all, Benjamin stresses that it's essential to genuinely believe in what you're selling. Monogram’s flagship product, mBôs, is a fully autonomous robotic system that can perform knee replacements and is poised to grab a share of this expanding market. It’s safe to say Monogram is paving the way for a new era in knee replacements, but as it happens, penetrating new grounds always draws in some skeptics. In Monogram’s case, not everyone is convinced.
One unorthodox move Monogram took was to crowdfund the company rather than trying to convince VCs. To raise awareness about their technology, Benjamin chose to show people what they are really doing, flaws and all. The team streamed the world's first fully-remote total-knee arthroplasty on a cadaver live on Youtube. Although these live streams carried significant risk considering the stage of development, what the audience saw was a dedicated team passionate about their work and open to sharing it. Monogram’s laid back culture also helps them be relatable. It’s clear that they love what they do and don’t take themselves too seriously.
"People want to be on a bit of an adventure with you," Benjamin shares. It’s crucial to have a mission that you can sell not just to customers but also to employees and investors. For Monogram, it’s about personalized medicine and orthopedics, which resonated easily with people, especially those who’ve had bad experiences with knee replacements. People naturally support causes they understand and care about.
Benjamin’s practical advice boils down to a few key principles. First, believe in what you're selling—if you don’t, it’ll show, and customers will pick up on it. Create a mission that resonates. Make sure your mission is clear and easy to understand for customers, employees, and investors alike. People are more likely to rally behind a cause they can connect with. And lastly, execute on it authentically. You can share your work on social media, allowing people to witness the process, and even letting them be a part of it.
Find a Hook
Sahil Diwan began coding at 16 and founded startups in college. Now, he's the co-founder and CEO of SafKan Health, the company behind OtoSet, the first FDA-cleared automated ear-cleaning device.
OtoSet is designed with the consumer market in mind. Their team spent considerable time and energy on building a product that is both easy to use and attractive to end users. “You want them to be excited that they got a new product in their office, and you want them to be excited to use it,” Sahil explains. He adds, “We wanted to create a device that physicians would actually want to start using on patients and want to spend the time to learn how to use it properly. I think it doesn't take much more effort and it's well worth putting time and money into design.” OtoSet comes with a thoughtfully designed packaging and unboxing experience that gets its users excited from the minute they receive it.
In the end, SafKan Health developed an intuitive, easy-to-use headphone-like device that combines irrigation and micro-suction technology to break down and remove impacted earwax. But perhaps what’s even more unique about it is the oddly satisfying process of removing the wax. The product’s performance, as well as its visual hook, resonated so well with users that it went viral on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, garnering explosive popularity with over 150 million views without spending a dime on marketing. “Even clinicians who use our product post about it and get millions of views on social media,” shares Sahil. Eventually, this led to thousands of patients visiting their website daily, searching for clinicians who use the product. They are even willing to switch their healthcare providers to access Otoset’s benefits.
Take a leaf from Sahil’s book and always design your product with the end user in mind. How your users perceive and interact with it ultimately carries a lot of weight in terms of how it’s adopted.
Once you settle on a working formula, don’t be afraid to use social media to drive awareness. If you have a product people believe in, encourage them to share their experiences. It can organically drive awareness and build an audience without requiring huge marketing budgets. Use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to engage with your users organically and educate them about your product. If you play your cards right, you might get lucky enough to see some explosive traction.
Don’t Just Inform but Empower Patients
Ananth Ravi is the founder and CEO of MOLLI Surgical that was acquired by Stryker in 2024. The company has developed an award-winning, wire-free soft tissue localization technology for breast cancer that precisely marks the location of lesions for removal during surgery.
Ananth’s philosophy revolves around understanding the actual needs of your target users—whether clinicians or patients—and ensuring that your product solves a problem that genuinely matters. "It's really important to not just focus on your device, but to understand the whole treatment landscape. You need to think about how you can make clinicians' lives easier and improve the patient's experience of treatment," he shares.
However, that’s only the first step. The second equally important mission is to educate your customer base about your offering.
A significant part of MOLLI's messaging revolves around its mission to democratize high-quality care by driving public awareness. This includes educating patients about the available treatment options, such as MOLLI’s device. However, there’s a fine art to educating without coming off as overly promotional. As Ananth shares, “You, as an industry, can potentially lose a lot of credibility really quickly if you start talking to patients about your product.”
Instead of engaging with patients directly through traditional marketing methods, MOLLI started an initiative called H.O.P.E. (Help-Optimism-Positivity-Empowerment) Program. H.O.P.E. offers a collection of resources, educational tools, interviews, support, and services—furthering MOLLI’s commitment to improving the patient experience and helping people affected by breast cancer make the right decisions for their journey.
While it's important for patients to know about innovative solutions, directly marketing your product to them can backfire and damage your company's credibility if not managed the right way. Ananth’s approach to building MOLLI has revolved around one specific purpose from the outset: making a difficult experience easier. Keep your focus on patient empowerment. Then, like MOLLI, you can create a platform that not only educates the market but also builds a supportive community.
Make It Easy to Integrate
Bill Snyder is the CEO of Cylinder (formerly Vivante Health), a company developing digital solutions for GI tract diseases—an unwieldy area where patients suffer from frustrating digestive health issues. Their product, GIThrive, is a platform that offers personalized care plans tailored to each patient’s situation based on the data they provide.
When you’re introducing a new product, whether it’s a platform or a device, most stakeholders, like hospitals, payers, and even investors, need to know that it’s not only effective but also financially viable. For that, your offering should be easy to integrate into existing workflows. “You have to think about how you interact with the plan and with other providers,” says Bill. This ensures that your solution fits the workflow smoothly and can be adopted easily. Bill explains, “We know how to do it. We're going to take the work off your plate. We've got a team that can help educate your members about the availability of this solution and show them that there's a great benefit that is going to make them feel better and reduce their healthcare costs.”
Next, you need to demonstrate clinical efficacy and then cost savings at scale. Bill advises, “Show them how you’re going to take the cost out of the system and make their members feel better.” For example, GIThrive started with a simple pre- and post-analysis to show improvement in patients’ conditions. You can start with smaller-scale clinical outcomes and build on that as you refine your product. Proving and communicating your endpoints is critical in building confidence in your solution's viability and sustainability.
In Cylinder’s case, Bill works with large employers, and he highlights the importance of making things easy for them. Whether you’re working with employers, health plans, or consumers, simplifying the process for your customers is essential to getting them onboard. He says, "Help them make that decision for their employees."
After making your product easy to adopt for each stakeholder, one important thing is left: maintaining communication channels. Bill stresses that healthcare is a “contact sport” where uninterrupted engagement with customers—whether they’re employers, providers, or end-users—is crucial.
Overall, to build a community of advocates for your product, you need to simplify adoption and prove its value. Ensure your product integrates smoothly into existing workflows and takes the burden off your stakeholders by providing the support and education they need. Whether you’re working with employers, health plans, or consumers, keeping things simple and offering clear, measurable benefits is important to get parties on your side.
Capture Demand Early
Kevin Eisenfrats is working on bringing a long-lasting, reversible male contraceptive, ADAM, to market at his company, Contraline.
While the science behind your offering is crucial, it has to lead to a viable product. “You're not there just to do a science project,” Kevin asserts. You need to focus your R&D efforts on experiments that prove efficacy and demonstrate the market potential early on.
Kevin also highlights the importance of understanding who will use your product. Male contraception is a long-awaited solution. Even in the early days of Contraline, people were reaching out weekly to participate in clinical trials. To manage this demand, with the help of a few UVA interns, Kevin created a simple landing page where interested parties, both patients and urologists, could submit their information. Over the years, their database has amassed a list of 7,500 people, along with their contact information, as well as a growing segment of urologists interested in clinical trials for the technology.
Contraline’s database has quickly become a goldmine for market research through direct communication with prospective end users. They can email potential participants questions about their demographics and preferences to identify the ideal customer for ADAM. The register has also allowed Contraline to test messaging for faster clinical study enrollment efficiently. Kevin provided some data to a marketing company in Australia that tested a few ads. When one worked infinitely better than the others, Contraline was off to the races.
Kevin’s approach to building a community of advocates revolves around understanding your audience and creating ways to directly engage with them early on. By focusing on product viability and practical experiments that show market potential, you can build trust with both investors and users. Also, regardless of the specific indication you’re targeting with your offering, even if it's a rare disease, there are individuals actively researching and following early-stage companies in anticipation of clinical trials. Create a simple interface to gather and maintain information about your potential patients and users. This repository can be invaluable for multiple aspects of your business, from product development to clinical trial enrollment and eventual commercialization.