Turning Trust Into Traction: How Sleuth Built a Buyer-Centric HealthTech Platform for Parents

In crowded digital health markets, many startups race to scale before they truly understand their buyers. The result? Shiny products that miss the mark.

Sehreen Noor Ali, co-founder of Sleuth, took the opposite route. Her company—a recommendation platform for children’s health—was born from personal experience, validated through hundreds of buyer conversations, and shaped by a relentless focus on trust.

The lesson for SaaS and tech founders: when your product touches something as high-stakes as a child’s wellbeing, buyer intelligence isn’t just a growth lever—it’s the foundation.

Lesson 1: Live the Buyer’s Problem Before You Solve It

Sehreen’s journey began not in a lab or a boardroom, but in late nights spent piecing together clues from Facebook groups about her child’s unexplained symptoms.

That lived experience gave her:

• An insider’s view of the frustrations parents face in navigating children’s healthcare.

• A deep understanding of the language and emotional triggers of her target buyer.

• A network of potential early adopters who trusted her motives from the start.

This wasn’t market research from the outside—it was immersion. And that intimacy with the problem became Sleuth’s positioning advantage.

Lesson 2: Use Buyer Intelligence to Build, Not Just Sell

Before building their MVP, Sehreen and co-founder Alex Leads (a data scientist formerly at Squarespace) interviewed dozens of parents. They discovered two key insights:

1. Parents were eager to share information with others in similar situations.

2. The data they had—especially about therapies and outcomes—was largely untapped by traditional healthcare providers.

Armed with this, Sleuth’s first product wasn’t a generic health forum. It was a structured storytelling tool designed to turn unstructured parent narratives into actionable data.

Lesson 3: Position for Trust Before Scale

In a category where misinformation is rampant, Sleuth’s early strategy was intentionally unscalable. Sehreen personally reached out to parents, nonprofits, and health organizations, building relationships one by one.

Why? Because in high-trust markets:

• A single warm referral from a trusted parent advocate is worth more than a thousand cold clicks.

• Slow, deliberate early growth ensures product feedback comes from the right buyers—not just the loudest ones.

Lesson 4: Own the Emotional + Economic Narrative

One early fundraising challenge was being perceived as “bleeding heart” founders—passionate but not commercially sharp. Sehreen’s pivot was to lead with the business case for her mission:

“We live in a capitalist society. Parents will pay for solutions that help their children. This is both a market opportunity and a way to close care gaps.”

By pairing emotional credibility with a clear revenue model, Sleuth positioned itself as both impactful and investable.

Lesson 5: Align Co-Founder Roles Around Buyer Flow

• Alex builds the data-powered platform, ensuring insights are accurate and scalable.

• Sehreen manages parent outreach, partner relationships, and the brand’s trust capital.

This loop—where product improvements are directly fed by real buyer feedback—keeps Sleuth aligned with user needs, not internal assumptions.

Key Takeaways for SaaS & Tech Founders

1. Your first 100 buyers should feel like collaborators, not just customers.

2. Positioning for trust often means trading early speed for credibility.

3. Frame your mission as a market opportunity to win over both buyers and investors.

4. Separate emotional buy-in from economic proof—you need both.

5. Keep your feedback loop alive between product and buyer-facing teams.

Why this matters for your business: Whether you’re building in healthtech, fintech, or SaaS, trust is your most defensible asset. Sleuth proves that buyer intelligence—collected with empathy, structured with precision, and paired with a clear commercial model—can turn a deeply personal mission into a scalable growth engine.

Written by: Tony Zayas, Chief Revenue Officer

In my role as Chief Revenue Officer at Insivia, I help SaaS and technology companies break through growth ceilings by aligning their marketing, sales, and positioning around one central truth: buyers drive everything.

I lead our go-to-market strategy and revenue operations, working with founders and teams to sharpen their message, accelerate demand, and remove friction across the entire buyer journey.

With years of experience collaborating with fast-growth companies, I focus on turning deep buyer understanding into predictable, scalable revenue—because real growth happens when every motion reflects what the buyer actually needs, expects, and believes.