Early-stage digital health founders often face a tough reality: building great technology is only half the battle. Breaking into healthcare markets means navigating long enterprise sales cycles, overcoming pilot fatigue, and finding ways to scale without burning through capital.

That’s why HealthX Ventures recently hosted a Commercial Bootcamp for portfolio founders, led by Jen Manswell, CEO of Mieileen Consulting. Drawing on 15 years of corporate experience — now applied to healthcare — and her own entrepreneurial work in health tech, Jen shared frameworks, strategies, and hard truths that every founder can put to work. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways:

1. Strategy without action is just expensive procrastination

Healthcare founders are no strangers to strategy decks, growth plans, and carefully modeled forecasts. But as Jen put it, “strategy without action is just expensive procrastination.”

The takeaway: don’t wait for the perfect plan to start building traction. Quick wins—whether that’s testing a new offer, running a pilot campaign, or reaching out to warm prospects—create momentum and keep your business moving forward. Every small step compounds into real progress, while over-planning only delays growth.

2. Don’t just shorten the sales cycle—fill the pipeline

Long enterprise sales cycles are a fact of life in healthcare. Even the best founders can’t shrink an 18-month procurement process into three. Instead of obsessing over shaving weeks off bureaucracy-heavy reviews, Jen challenged founders to focus on pipeline health.

That means ensuring new prospects are always entering the funnel so that when one contract drags, another is already moving forward. The risk isn’t the nine-month sales cycle itself—it’s the gap that emerges when founders bet everything on a single deal. A healthy, continuously replenished pipeline is the best insurance policy against stalled growth.

3. Tier your offers to generate early revenue

Too many startups wait for the big enterprise deal to close before seeing any revenue. Jen pushed founders to rethink this approach with tiered offers.

Instead of a single, all-or-nothing product, create entry points that customers can adopt faster—a pilot package, a smaller module, or a limited-scope service. This strategy keeps cash flowing, demonstrates value early, and builds trust that makes larger deals easier to close. In healthcare especially, where buying committees move slowly, tiered offers can be the bridge that keeps the lights on while momentum builds.

4. Treat marketing as a revenue engine, not a cost center

Too often, founders—especially in healthcare—see marketing as something that supports sales rather than drives it. Marketing gets treated as the “brand polish” or a set of nice-to-have campaigns that come after the product is built.

But Jen pushed founders to reframe marketing as the architect of revenue. When aligned correctly, marketing does the heavy lifting of:

Identifying the right buyers (account-based targeting rather than casting a wide net).
Crafting the messaging that resonates with those buyers’ pain points.
Generating and nurturing demand so that by the time sales enters the picture, prospects are already primed to buy.
Creating offer architectures (tiers, pilots, bundles) that accelerate time-to-revenue.

The bottom line: Marketing isn’t overhead—it’s the system that keeps the funnel full and revenue predictable. When you design it that way, you stop duct-taping growth and start compounding it.

5. Build systems, not duct tape

It’s tempting for early-stage founders to patch together growth: a quick campaign here, a one-off pilot there, a handshake deal that buys time. But as Jen reminded us, duct-taped growth won’t hold under pressure.

The companies that scale are the ones that design repeatable, durable systems. Systems for generating leads. Systems for nurturing them. Systems for converting, onboarding, and retaining customers. Each process adds resilience to the business, reduces reliance on any one deal, and sets the stage for compounding growth and valuation.

The Founder’s Next Step

Revenue challenges in healthcare won’t disappear overnight. Long sales cycles, pilot fatigue, and capital efficiency pressures are baked into the system. But with the right mindset, they can be managed — and even turned into opportunities for differentiation. The founders who thrive are the ones who stop waiting for perfect conditions and instead build systems that create consistent momentum, even in the face of friction.

So here’s the question Jen left founders with: What’s one quick win you can implement this week to strengthen your revenue architecture?

Photo by Martin Grandchamp on Unsplash

Architecting Growth: Lessons from HealthX’s Commercial Bootcamp