Hello {{first_name}},

Today is the last day of HLTH Europe!

More on some thoughts on the floor below…

But the thing actually on my mind in this Proof Points issue didn't come from a keynote. It came from my inbox.

Twice this month, a client has forwarded me something with the digital equivalent of a racing heartbeat: have you seen this?

A competitor poking holes in their study. A pointed comment under a LinkedIn post. A letter to a journal editor, written by someone claiming to be a neutral observer who, it turns out, was nothing of the sort.

Here's the thing nobody warns founders about:

When you've poured years, money, and your own reputation into a company, your evidence stops being a dataset.

It becomes your baby.

And when someone tells you your baby is ugly, the instinct is to swing.

This issue is about what to do instead.

– Paul

The best time to write a policy for handling attacks on your evidence is before a single one arrives.

Because they always arrive at the worst possible moment. 5pm on a Friday. 8am on a Sunday, as you're loading the kids into the car.

That's the moment your advisors start messaging have you seen this? — and you do not want to be inventing your answer on the fly.

So let's write the policy now.

Most attacks fall somewhere on a ladder. The higher the rung, the more deliberate your response should be…. and, counterintuitively, the more often the right move is to do very little.

The nuclear options exist too: getting a journal to issue a correction, a retraction, or an expression of concern; or, where claims are genuinely false and damaging, a call to your counsel. But these are last resorts. A retraction can take a year or more, and academic publishing is heavily protected by free speech. Reach for them only when a claim threatens a patent, your regulatory exposure, or was made in clear bad faith.

So much for defence….

Here's the part that changes the game.

The strongest position is having the receipts before anyone asks for them.

Competitors will make claims their data can't carry. "98% effective." "3:1 ROI." "Four points of improvement." The numbers are big, the slides are clean, and in a sales call a prospect will eventually ask: they're twice as good as you — why aren't you?

This is why we build a Claims Bank for clients. Every claim — theirs and yours — traced to its source, checked for whether it's citable, and graded on how robust the underlying study actually is.

And once you lay the claims side by side, a pattern jumps out almost every time.

The flashiest number is usually the weakest evidence.

Here's an anonymised example, built to show the format:

Read the competitor's claims and yours side by side, and it looks like you're losing. 63 is smaller than 98. 2.1 is smaller than 4. 18% is less exciting than 3:1.

But (this is where the magic happens) read the last column: what each number actually proves… and it's the reverse.

A patient feeling less uncertain is a feeling. A patient who actually changes what they do next is a behaviour… and the only one a payer cares about.

A four-point improvement with no control group tells you people got better. It does not tell you your product is why. People improve anyway: time passes, the worst moment passes, the act of being measured changes things. A smaller effect measured against a control is harder to produce and far harder to argue with.

That's the whole move. When a competitor's bold number turns up in your sales cycle, you don't get rattled. You ask the only question that matters: what's the evidence under it? — and you already know the answer, because you wrote it down last quarter.

One clear channel, one process, and everyone agrees in advance not to freelance a public response. Let people vent privately… a Slack channel where the team can call the critics jerks is healthy; it builds loyalty and a sense of who's in the foxhole with you. Just keep the venting in the Slack.

A closing thought, because the alternative is genuinely funny.

I once heard about two academic titans of a particular school of therapy. Therapy. Offices next door to each other. They wrote books slating one another, ran rival symposia on opposite sides of the planet, and fired letters back and forth in the journals… despite sharing a hallway the entire time.

Men will do remarkable things to avoid simply talking about their feelings.

Therapy was always an option, boys.

— Paul

In an ideal world, that’s what would happen to everyone without the care, diligence, and data to back up their claims with robust evidence. In health evidence isn’t a nice to have, it’s table stakes.

If you're here for the final day, reply to this email and let's grab a coffee before it wraps!

Q3 is quiet on the events front, and that's deliberate. In the UK we take something called a “holiday” (a tradition our American friends regard with deep suspicion… and occasional alarm). I'll be using a couple of weeks in Mallorca to do absolutely nothing of consequence. Consider it training. Q4 is stacked, and you can't prove things at speed on an empty tank!