Five Lessons From The Trenches Of Entrepreneurial Combat

Mark R Francis is Chief Product Officer at Electronic Caregiver.

I am a builder. I have been fortunate to spend a career building new products, services and ventures for companies ranging from bootstrapped and Silicon Valley venture-capital-funded startups to Fortune 100 companies such as Intel and Amazon. These experiences have shown me that there are many ways to conceptualize, develop, launch and scale innovative technology-based products and services.

Here are five lessons from the trenches of entrepreneurial combat.

Lesson 1: Market ignorance is a killer.

Entrepreneurs who take their own isolated experiences as an indication of market need often fail. This is particularly the case in healthcare, where a singular experience ignites a passion to fix a very real problem. The challenge is that, often, you are the 10,000th person to try to fix the problem.

Moreover, in healthcare, the issue is often a systemic one. One needs to understand the market in which the product will be sold, the needs and workflows of end users and the economics of the business. This is not to discount the opportunities to innovate but rather to reinforce the importance of understanding the structure of the market and the system into which one is selling.

Lesson 2: Don’t confuse the end user with the paying customer.

As seen in the bull rush into AI everywhere, we have evolved from “there is an app for that” to “there is an AI agent for that,” with a dizzying array of agentic AI solutions solving real-world problems and delivering remarkable efficiencies. While great, often the end user for whom the benefit is delivered is not the paying customer for a product or service.

A lack of understanding of who the paying customer is can be fatal to a company. This is exacerbated for AI companies given the rapid commoditization of capabilities such as AI notetakers and scribes. What were once promising vertical applications are now being challenged by major players such as Microsoft, Google and Epic, who embed such agents into their products. How does a company differentiate, gain and expand market share with paying customers in such an environment when you are competing against free?

Lesson 3: Understand your minimally valuable product.

It is time to put a stake in the heart of the minimally viable product (MVP 1.0) and evolve to the minimally valuable product (MVP 2.0). As an enterprise customer, I never wanted to buy or deploy a minimally viable product; this is akin to buying a two-legged stool made of balsa wood. Yes, I could balance myself and make it work—and it is marginally better than standing—but it is a flawed product that I will discard as soon as possible.

Contrast that with a minimally valuable product—in this case, a three-legged stool. It is basic and effective for the “job to be done” with clear benefits versus standing. Of course, this is a product to be iterated on over time: adjusting the height, adding an option for a back, adding cushioning, etc.

As an entrepreneur, it is important to understand the difference for the customer between minimally viable versus minimally valuable. Build, deliver and iterate on the truly important MVP: the minimally valuable product.

Lesson 4: Speed to market is critical.

I have been blessed to work in two of the most innovative and iconic technology companies in the world. One company would bullishly make large bets on Moore’s Law—the next mode of innovation in chip design and manufacturing. However, this comfort with innovation was lacking “outside the core” where new markets, new products and—God forbid—consumer products were conceptualized.

Here, innovation teams had to navigate risk aversion, quests for financial certainty, conservative development schedules, overstaffing and a reluctance to commit. As a result, internal innovation efforts would take around three years to go from zero to one—by which time the market changed, a big hole had been dug and the pressure for overnight success was enormous. This led to the development but eventual shuttering of promising businesses in areas like video services, tablets, wearable computing, IoT sensing and drones.

At the other company, the culture embraced experimentation and building. There was an appetite for innovation, with a clear mandate to get into the market ASAP to evaluate customer response and demand. The focus was on small, nimble teams, an urgency to go from zero to one fast and the imperative to gather customer feedback within a year.

In my experiences with spatial computing and robotics, we conceptualized and developed services around four key value pillars and worked closely with test customers to refine our approach. Upon launch, in both cases, we discovered that only one of the four pillars was valuable to the customer—while we had also overlooked one to three key capabilities. In this environment, that was considered a success—we had customers actively using our services for a core capability, and we had customer-market-informed road maps to prioritize the build-out of the service.

Lesson 5: Obtaining the fifth paying customer is key.

While product-market fit is great, someone needs to buy the product. While there is nothing like achieving the first paying customer, there is also a risk that this customer is an outlier. When you are in the middle of the battlefield in the marketplace, you do not think about this, but it is a very real possibility.

As such, there is a lot of value in working through those early adopters to obtain the fifth paying customer. At five paying customers, there is market traction and an indication that there is indeed product-market fit. Should a company be flexible on pricing for early customers? Yes, this can work, but there should be quid pro quo involved—the customer agrees to endorse the product or service, or the customer agrees to convert to market price once certain benchmarks are hit. The key to these early customers is to demonstrate that there is a market for your product or service.

Let’s build!

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