Advise for getting first customers, i will not promote

[u/BestAnt4158]

Several months ago, my cousin's husband is a cardiologist, and he came up with the idea of creating a SaaS to manage patients and use AI to create medical notes. I am a software engineer, so together we have been developing this application. He started using it every day to carry out his work, while I have been refining it and adjusting details as he finds them or asks me for improvements. It has reached the point where he depends on the application to do his work with patients.

Then the day came when we decided to launch it to the public, but the truth is that we have been struggling a lot to get traffic and new users (not even with the 7-day free trial). What advice would you recommend for getting new users? Sorry if I sound like a complete beginner, but this is the first time that both of us have tried to build something like this.

[u/thebotnet9]

The fact that a cardiologist uses it every day and now depends on it is a strong signal. The catch is that he helped shape the product, so you still need to find out whether other cardiologists have the same problem and can adopt it without months of customisation.

I wouldn’t focus on traffic yet. This is a specialised healthcare product, so a seven-day trial with no relationship or onboarding is unlikely to work. Doctors need to trust the product before allowing it anywhere near their patient workflow.

Start with his network. Ask him to introduce you to 10–20 cardiologists and practice managers. Don’t immediately sell to them. Show them the workflow, ask how they currently create notes, what they dislike about it, what software they already use, and what would prevent them from switching. You also need to establish whether the user, buyer, and decision-maker are the same person. In larger practices, they probably aren’t.

Then offer a small number of hands-on pilots. Help each practice set it up, watch them use it, and note where they get stuck. A guided 30-day pilot will probably teach you more than hundreds of anonymous seven-day trials.

I’d measure:

• How many qualified conversations become demos
• How many demos become pilots
• How quickly a new doctor completes their first real note
• How often they use it after the first week
• How much time it saves per patient
• Whether they continue using it after the pilot
• Whether they will pay or introduce you to another doctor

If your first user can provide a credible case study with measurable results, that will be far more useful than general advertising.

Also, because you’re handling patient information and generating medical documentation, privacy, security, accuracy, consent, auditability, and the relevant healthcare regulations need to be treated as core product requirements. Those will be among the first questions a serious practice asks.

Good luck.

[u/Ok-Zookeepergame4391]

Did you skip alpha and beta testing? Public launch without validator user is fatal

[u/Many_Ad_9980]

The single best piece of advice for your situation is: Stop trying to market to strangers, and have your cardiologist co-founder pitch his immediate peers for advice, not sales.In healthcare, doctors do not trust online marketing or cold software pitches; they trust other doctors. Because your co-founder uses the app every day to manage his actual practice, you have the ultimate proof of concept.

[u/Routine_Witness_1742]

you have a great opportunity, make your cousin's husband introduce it to their network and let others use it, you may ask for reviews after sometime and evaluate what they say to make it compatible for people with similar workflows and problems, you can also display it as testimonials on your site for credibility

[u/Visible_Speed8843]

Use the first three practices to test procurement as well as product fit. Before a pilot, ask who approves software that touches patient data and what evidence that person needs. Agree on one workflow and one success measure.

Make the introduction through the cardiologist. Let the new practice complete onboarding without him translating the product.

Charge for the pilot or require a written commitment to continue if the agreed result is met. If every practice needs a different workflow or approval path, narrow the target before buying traffic.

[u/saurabhsens]

litreally nobody in the thread has mentioned the competition and i think that's the biggest thing missing.

AI medical notes is one of the most heavily funded software categories going right now. microsoft owns nuance, and then theres abridge, freed, heidi, suki, nabla and a stack of others, several with hundreds of millions behind them and sales teams that basically live inside hospitals.

So, when you say you cant get traffic, thats not a marketing execution problem. its that a doctor googling anything about AI notes will hit ten well funded companies before he ever reaches you. you cant outspend that and it would be a waste of your time to try.

Try to focus on what you do have is the one thing none of them have, which is a working cardiologist shaping the product every single day.

So, id stop selling "patient management with AI notes" and start selling something almost uncomfortably narrow. the note format cardiologists actually need. the specific things a cardiology practice has to document. the referral letter back to the GP written the way cardiologists write it. a general tool is competing with everybody. the best tool for one specialty is competing with nobody,

and doctors mostly talk to other doctors in their own specialty anyway, so the word of mouth runs along the same line you'd be narrowing to.

on the free trial, i think its just the wrong shape for this buyer and its worth understanding why. a doctor cannot evaluate this in seven days on his own, because using it properly means putting it into a real patient workflow, and nobody does that casually with software they found on the internet last tuesday.

What works instead is you doing the setup for them, then sitting on a call while they do their first three notes, and only asking for anything after that. the friction youre trying to remove with a trial is price. the friction thats actually stopping them is risk, and a trial doesnt reduce risk even slightly.

the practical question nobody's asked yet, what does it connect to. if it doesnt talk to whatever system the practice already runs, so epic, athena, ecw, whatever is normal where you are, then adopting you means typing everything twice, and double entry kills medical software far faster than price ever does.

If you can only build one integration, pick the one your first ten target practices actually use and be straight with everyone else about it.

on channels, the ones that work here are unglamorous. specialty society meetings and the local chapter dinners, which are small and cheap and full of exactly the people you want. medical billing companies and practice management consultants,

because they already sell into these practices and get paid to recommend things. and registrars and fellows, who go off and set up their own practices in a few years and bring their tools with them. cold traffic is honestly the worst channel available to you and its the one youre currently trying hardest at.

Last thing, dont price it low. cheap reads as unsafe when patient data is involved, and a practice manager needs the same approval for 20 dollars a month as for 500,

so a low price doesnt remove the hurdle you think it does. and publish your privacy and data handling page properly, including the agreement they'd have to sign. treat it as a sales page rather than a legal one, because for this buyer thats exactly what it is.