To Learn a New Market, Start by Building Your Product — Tactics From a Twitter PM Turned Healthcare Founder
TL;DR: Othman Laraki and Elad Gil left Twitter to build Color after realizing genetic testing costs were plummeting faster than Moore's Law. Despite having no healthcare experience, Laraki approached learning the market through building - using product development as a forcing function for market education. The company went through multiple pivots: starting with direct-to-consumer genetic testing ($250), shifting to selling medical-grade tests to physicians, then pivoting to employer health plans after a Stripe founder requested it for employees, and finally expanding to a comprehensive virtual cancer clinic. Key lessons include the importance of mapping the flow of money and decision-making in enterprise markets, understanding that the 'buyer' is often splintered across multiple entities with conflicting incentives, and recruiting domain experts through cold outreach by leading with mission and personal connection. Laraki emphasizes that in healthcare, being cheap doesn't help if market access costs dominate, leading Color to rebundle as a solutions provider rather than compete on price alone.
Key Insights
- Build to learn: In unfamiliar markets, product development forces you to discover incentive structures and buyer dynamics that research alone cannot reveal
- Enterprise markets have splintered buyers - in healthcare, the beneficiary, economic buyer, and prescriber are different entities with conflicting incentives
- False positives from early wins through influence or luck can mask lack of true product-market fit - validate that wins generalize before assuming PMF
- Low price alone is not a wedge if market access costs dominate - Color learned that sales and billing costs exceeded margins even at 1/20th the price
- Cold email mission-driven experts who do the work, not celebrities - Color recruited Mary Claire King, who had never worked with businesses, by leading with personal story and rigor
Actionable Takeaways
- Map the full transaction flow in your industry: who influences, who decides, who sets price, how payment occurs - interview industry leaders to understand each step
- Test whether early customers bought because of genuine value or because of influence/luck by asking if wins would generalize to customers outside your network
- Build a unit economics spreadsheet with no placeholders - unpack every component of COGS and negotiate each one intensely
- Recruit domain experts through cold outreach by leading with mission and personal connection - offer hourly cash compensation rather than equity for non-tech experts
- Before hiring senior GTM people, ensure they are open to iteration - rigid playbook operators fail when you need to fundamentally pivot the go-to-market motion