A year ago I published a post called "Ten Months Building Dentplicity" and went quiet again. I owe an update on what happened next.
The short version: Dentplicity is alive, growing, and the product I'm most proud of building. The longer version involves admitting what I got wrong, what surprised me, and what the usage data says about how dental practices actually make decisions.
What shipped. The core intelligence platform expanded from competitive analysis to full practice positioning. We now ingest DEA registrations, state board data, NPI/provider directories, Census/BLS baselines, employer datasets, local news, web traffic, search visibility, reviews, listings, and social sentiment. Every record is entity-resolved to the right clinic, geo-indexed to a real catchment, and time-indexed so trendlines mean something. The scorecard system compresses all of that into a handful of moves per practice. DentGPT evolved from a simple content generator to a neighborhood-aware writing tool that practices use to draft posts, emails, review replies, and landing copy tuned to their competitive context.
What didn't ship. The banking integration I spent months planning (the CLIN side of the roadmap) got deprioritized. Not because it's a bad idea. Because the data from year one showed that practices derived more immediate value from understanding their market position than from changing their banking relationship. Sequence matters. Practices need to see clearly before they'll move money. I wrote about this in The Capital-Efficient Path to Credit, and year two validated the theory: insights first, financial products second.
What the data says. Time-to-first-action (the interval between a practice seeing their scorecard and taking a suggested move) averaged 4.2 days in the first month of usage and dropped to 1.8 days by month six. That compression told me the scorecards were building trust. Practices weren't just reading the data. They were acting on it faster as they saw results.
Approximately 50% of DentGPT usage happens between 7 PM and midnight, and weekends account for about 30% of total sessions. Practice owners are doing their marketing and strategic thinking outside business hours, on their own schedule. That pattern reshaped how I think about product design (see Chat-First Interfaces Are a Dead End).
The outreach system I built on Instantly.ai continued to be the primary acquisition channel. Domain warming, subject line testing, the 5-second rule. What I learned in year two is that the quality of the initial outreach matters less than the quality of the follow-up. A practice that ignores three emails will respond to the fourth if it references something specific about their market (a new competitor opening nearby, a shift in their review sentiment, a change in their search visibility). The data platform makes the outreach specific. Specificity converts.
What surprised me. The practices that derived the most value weren't the ones I expected. I assumed strategic growth practices ($2-10M revenue) would be the power users. They were early adopters, but the highest engagement came from scaling practices ($500K-2M) that had been running on intuition and suddenly had data to confirm or challenge their assumptions. These practices didn't need sophisticated analytics. They needed simple, clear answers to questions they'd been asking themselves for years.
What I got wrong. I overbuilt features before validating them. The first version of the competitive intelligence dashboard had twelve data points per competitor. Usage data showed practices looking at three: reviews, search visibility, and whether the competitor was growing or shrinking. I cut nine views and engagement went up. Constraints breed clarity. Every feature I cut this year made the product better.
Revenue grew but not as fast as I wanted. Bootstrapping means honest CFO empathy, and the honest truth is that customer acquisition in dental is slow. Practices evaluate tools over months, not days. The sales cycle is closer to the enterprise motion I described in Four Types of Healthcare Practices than the self-service motion I'd prefer. I'm adapting by building more automated onboarding and letting the data sell itself during trials.
Year three priorities. Deeper integration between Dentplicity intelligence and practice management systems. Automated workflow execution (so practices can act on recommendations without leaving the platform). And beginning the credit sequencing work through CLIN, now that we have the practice-level financial visibility to underwrite intelligently.
Zero to one was year one. One to ten is taking longer than I planned. But the practices using Dentplicity are making better decisions with real data, and that's the thing I set out to build.