On his fourth B2B SaaS company, Michael Riley walked into the most crowded corner of healthcare tech — claim denials — and walked right back out. He pivoted Gabeo.ai into a niche almost no one was working: claim write-offs, the revenue hospitals and provider groups have already given up on. In the first 90 days at a large Midwest hospital group, his agentic AI layer pulled back $1.2 million.In this episode of We Built It Because We Had To, Michael and host Jonathan W. Buckley get into the mechanics of finding a niche inside a saturated market, the two-product strategy at Gabeo (Zoey for fee-for-service, Aria for value-based care), and why value-based care flips the economic incentives of US healthcare. Michael walks through how their AI agents cut through hundreds of pages of contract language that "you'd need a team of lawyers and months to decode."Then they rewind to his arc — learning to program at seven, co-founding Simple Post, surviving a year of failure-after-failure at Funnl before landing on an analytics product that got acquired. Michael gets candid about a 45x-ROI pilot he renegotiated DOWN to a fairer 5-10x, why his entire GTM at Gabeo is warm intros (no paid ads, no sales team), and the single biggest tell that you've actually hit product-market fit: the body language in the room.What you'll hear:- Why Gabeo abandoned denials and chased write-offs instead- How agentic AI cuts through 100s of pages of contract language in minutes- The pricing lesson behind the 45x ROI pilot they renegotiated- 12 product pivots, one acquisition — and what Michael learned about MVPs- Why "selling is asking questions" beats pitching, every time- What he wishes he'd known 15 years agoConnect with Michael Riley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/themichaelriley/Learn more about Gabeo.ai: https://gabeo.aiSubscribe to We Built It Because We Had To for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. More from Jonathan W. Buckley and The Artesian Network: https://artesiannetwork.comIf this episode hit, share it with a founder who's still trying to brute-force product-market fit with a bigger sales team.#FounderStory #HealthcareAI #B2BSaaS #ProductMarketFit #AgenticAI