KEEP
You've found the rarest thing in startups — a boring problem so painful people sign LOIs before you've written a line of code — and your only real risk is being too competent to admit compliance software bores buyers into 18-month sales cycles.
Vertical compliance automation SaaS for dental practices, targeting the recurring HIPAA and insurance-audit checks that offices routinely fail, built by a founder with six years running billing for a 32-location dental group and nine signed LOIs.
The reasoning
Why it dies
It dies slow, not fast: dental practices are cheap, distracted, and treat compliance as a fire-drill they'd rather ignore until an auditor knocks. You'll close the nine offices that already trust you, then discover the tenth doesn't know you from any other vendor, and vertical compliance tools are notorious for stalling at a few hundred logos while you burn cash chasing single-location groups one painful demo at a time. 'Everyone fails the same dozen checks' is your moat and your ceiling — automate them well and buyers feel done forever, with nothing left to upsell.
What would save it
Turn the dozen failing checks into a continuous 'always audit-ready' monitoring layer that never lets a practice feel finished, and go straight for DSOs and multi-location groups where one signature buys 30 offices instead of grinding through solo practices. Attach a hard-dollar hook — 'we recover $X in denied claims / dodge $Y in audit penalties per office' — so it's a painkiller with an ROI number, not a vitamin nobody renews.