For years I believed adoption was an understanding problem.
It's a comfortable belief, because it means the fix is always in your hands. Feature isn't catching on? Explain it better. Rewrite the onboarding. Record a demo. Make a one-pager. Somewhere in there is the sentence that will finally make it obvious, and once you find it, people will use the thing.
I don't believe that anymore.
We have a billing feature. It solves a real problem, one I've watched cost doctors actual money. And adoption has been slower than it should be for something that useful. For a long time I read that as a communication failure on our side.
So I started paying attention to the doctors who did turn it on. Not what they said in the demo. What they said when I asked why they finally did it, after months or years of not doing it.
Almost none of them said they finally understood the value.
They said something happened.
Some got tired. One more spreadsheet, then the second spreadsheet, then the other software that only covers one clinic, until the reconciling cost more than the money it was protecting. And some found out that someone in the clinic had been taking from them. Never a big amount. One or two consultations a day, small enough that nothing ever looked obviously wrong.
Two completely different people, arriving at the same door, neither of them because of anything I wrote.
The rest is about what follows from that: who you're really competing with, why being known beats being persuasive, and the one thing you can do to make the trigger arrive sooner.
Read the full essay on Substack
Originally published on my Substack, Learnings In Healthcare Technology and SaaS.