Ep 539: How Proov Turned Hormone Testing into a Scalable DTC Platform

0:00Dr. Amy Beckley:It was broken. Healthcare was really broken. We push people to the brink of draining their life savings on IVF when there's so many other things we can do to be proactive. This is a brand new thing that's never existed. It's like telling someone who has a flip phone, there's this thing called an iPhone. When you create a product, you don't know who the early adopter necessarily is going to be. test things, try things, because you might be surprised that your early adopters are somebody who you didn't think was going to be your target in the first place. We actually found a way to steal back our consumer from Amazon.

0:34Dr. Amy Beckley:I see a lot of people that fail because they're like, it's not there. It's not 100%. I can't launch something that's not 100%. You have to launch it when it's not 100 % because you're going to get the feedback, whether it's good or bad.

0:52Amy, welcome to the D2C podcast. Today, we're talking about your brand, Prove. Definitely, there's a personal connection to this for me. I have an 11-year-old daughter, but went through a huge amount of trials and tribulations in order to have her. I know fertility is an issue that affects so, so many people today. Maybe you could just start by giving me your hero's journey as to why you decided to build Prove and what exactly it is.

1:19Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah, yeah. So first, thanks for having me. I know this is going to be quite a different type of episode than you normally do. But I'm a scientist. I have a PhD in pharmacology. I love hormones and understanding how the body works. And I was, you know, did the thing that most people do, build a career, get married, buy a house, get a dog, and then decide I was going to have family. How, you know, how hard could it be? we struggled a lot and we got pregnant and we lost the pregnancy and then we got pregnant and we lost the pregnancy and we would go to doctors and I'd be like look I'm a scientist something is not right they're like you haven't been trying long enough you're not old enough you haven't had enough miscarriages and I really realized that it was broken healthcare was really broken that we push people to the brink of draining their life savings on IVF to have kids when there's so many other things we can do to be proactive and have ownership in our health.

2:17Dr. Amy Beckley:I mean, hormones affect almost 80 % of women have some kind of hormone imbalance that affects their life, either heavy periods, painful periods, PMS, infertility, miscarriage. PCOS. PCOS, a huge one, yes. Endometriosis, menopause. It impacts women so much, and we didn't have a way to look at this and to measure this and to advocate for ourselves. And we went to the professional healthcare world. They don't have time for us, right? It's just a very complicated thing. You only get like two minutes with the doctor. You're basically set up to fail. So I was a scientist. I went to business school, got my MBA in my spare time, my lunch hour, and decided to create this business.

3:04Dr. Amy Beckley:Absolutely knew nothing about it. Launched a shady product. It was a very scientifically sound product, but it was in a plastic bag with a little Amazon barcode on it. No branding, no box, nothing. Launched on Indiegogo to just kind of get it started. But I just felt like this tech needed to be out there, and I was going to do it. And if people bought it, I would keep making it. And they did. So here I am almost nine years later. Talk to me about the tech. Talk to me about what the test is actually looking for and what that is within the whole pregnancy cycle. Yeah. So we measure something called pregnant dial gluconoride.

3:43Dr. Amy Beckley:It is a urine metabolite of progesterone. And so what progesterone is, is it's a hormone that's released after you ovulate that supports implantation and pregnancy. And so the entire world focuses on finding the fertile window. So you can get a free app to find out when your fertile window is. I have an aura ring. It tells me when my fertile window is. You can take ovulation tests off Amazon, tells you when your fertile window is. Timing wasn't my issue. I had a hormone imbalance that prevented me from staying pregnant. And so when we built Prove, we built it as a platform that understands the complete menstrual cycle to help you understand if you had any hormonal issues that could decrease your chances of conception.

4:28Dr. Amy Beckley:And so what it is today, it's all urine based. You collect first morning urine, you dip a strip, wait 10 minutes, and you scan it using the app. We'll give you quantitative hormone values. We do estrogen metabolites, progesterone metabolites, LH, which is an ovulation test, and FSH, which tells you about your ovarian function and your egg count. And so the app will, you download it, it asks you how long is your cycle? How old are you? When, you know, when did you have your last menstrual cycle? All these questions. And then we just tell you when to test and then we crunch all the numbers and we give you this really detailed report at the end that basically flags anything that is kind of out of the normal so that you can have that educated conversation with the doctor.

5:14Dr. Amy Beckley:You can say, hey, I'm not ovulating. I need an ovulation medication. I might have low ovarian reserve. I want to get into the doctor sooner to see if there's something else I can be doing. And so we're kind of like that in addition to a standard ovulation test to really unpack the entire menstrual cycle. And then recently, in the last like three, six months or so, we've launched into perimenopause, so testing women in their 40s, because the same imbalances that are causing issues getting and staying pregnant are the issues that we're seeing as we start to go through perimenopause and into menopause, that we can use that information to advocate for medication sooner, to track our symptoms, to manage our symptoms.

5:57Dr. Amy Beckley:And so my goal is really to create this hormonal wellness platform that all women can have. I mean, selfishly, I also have an 11-year-old daughter, and she's not going to be put on birth control or get an IUD because she has acne or bloating or something like that. She's going to get educated on her hormones. And, you know, I want that for our younger generation. Going through it, I can only speak to it because my partner went through it, but it can be such a disempowering experience that, you know, you said it in the intro there, like, oh, you haven't had enough miscarriages for us to care. That's got to be just a horrific, they can be such traumatic things to go through during that whole emotional cycle.

6:41And to have, you know, this sort of dispassionate medical system that's like, well, your life isn't in danger, so we don't really have time for you is such a disempowering experience. So I feel it's extremely important thing that you're just arming people with more knowledge. And then in the medical system, you just have to advocate for yourself. It's like, it's like a total, you know, situation, They want you going through the square peg, square hole. And if you don't, they don't really have time for you. So when people are armed with this, are they able to advocate for further treatments? Like do you get exogenous progesterone essentially added if you don't have enough progesterone via one of your tests?

7:22Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah, sometimes. I mean, doctors are humans. They have opinions. Opinions are like buttholes, right? Everyone has one. And if their opinion is they can't prescribe it until you've been trying 12 months or three losses or whatever, it's a dead end. They don't believe in it. They just don't familiar with it. It's a dead end. And so we've actually integrated into our platform that if you are a candidate for this medication, you'll be presented with a doctor who can prescribe it and send it to your house. And so really trying to reduce this red tape because, like I said, we're set up to fail. We're not given this education.

7:57Dr. Amy Beckley:Doctors don't have this education either. And so instead of, you know, educating yourself and then trying to educate a doctor, you know, why not bring the ones that are already educated directly to them to kind of decrease that red tape? But it's got to be so many people don't know, like, you know, your assumption, like everyone's assumption that like, hey, let's do the birds and the bees. Let's create a child. But increasingly, the amount of friends that I know that have had to go to great lengths to have their child through IVF and precursors to that. Talk to a little bit about like the state of fertility right now in the Western world, or even just globally, like what's happening in the Western world, let's say with fertility?

8:38Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah, I mean, infertility rates are probably one in five couples will deal with infertility. And it's because we're waiting longer, right? We're being smart, conscious consumers and saying, wait, let me make sure I have a career and a house and a stable financial life before I bring a child into the world. And so by the time that happens, it's typically 30, 35. And then you're starting this hormonal decline and it just gets, you know, harder and harder to conceive. Your eggs aren't as good quality. Your hormones aren't as good as they used to be or ovarian function. And, you know, same with the male partner.

9:14Dr. Amy Beckley:I don't know if you've heard of this spermageddon idea. So like, you know, by 2050, I think is what they're projecting, there will be no more sperm because it's just at this huge rapid decline. You know, another thing is the economy is not great. And so people can't afford daycare and take off work and all the other extras that come with having a child. So we're seeing a lot more, you know, you know, child-free couples that just don't, you know, decide to have children. instead of having, you know, two or three, um, we're having one. Um, and then, you know, we're taught that you try by yourself for 12 months with literally no help other than like some app or something that tells you when your fertile window is.

9:58Dr. Amy Beckley:And then if you don't do that, it's almost like IVF is the next step. IVF average life birth is$58 ,000. That is a lot of money. That's a car. And so people are up against this, like, no help, no help, no help. Okay, hand over your life savings. And it's such a disaster that, you know, people are doing it because they're pushed to this, like, oh, that's the only option I was given or that I have. When there's a lot of things you can kind of do in between. I'm not saying it fixes everything. Some people do actually need IVF and IVF wasn't there. I wouldn't have my 14-year-old son. But, you know, there's got to be other things.

10:41Dr. Amy Beckley:So it's just really high infertility rates. Women are, couples are choosing not to have kids for various reasons. It was interesting to hear it come up in the election cycle this year in the US, where both parties on both sides were talking about making IVF and maybe some of their precursor treatments free. But you're saying there's a whole other vacuum that can be taken up there with understanding this process. And that's what I'm so interested in to go to something like Indiegogo. How did you get traction on a platform like that when there would be so much education even required for that audience for them to understand what your product was aiming to do?

11:21Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah. So I, you know, have a business degree on paper, no experience at all. And I was like, oh, just do this Indiegogo campaign. And if you put it on the Internet, people will buy it. Right. it sat there and the only people that were funding it were family and friends and I just out of desperation or sheer brute force whatever you want to call it went to just googled a bunch of Facebook groups of like fertility trying to conceive groups miscarriage awareness groups like anything I could find and message the admins with like hey I have this product can I post about it and I did that across all these women that were trying to conceive and different groups, whatever.

12:01Dr. Amy Beckley:And like, everyone's like, I don't know what that is, because this is a brand new thing that's never existed. It's like telling someone who has a flip phone, there's this thing called an iPhone that like, wait, what? Just too far out of, you know. And so I landed on the NFP community or the natural family planning, Catholics, fertility awareness community. And this community doesn't believe in hormonal birth control. and so they have classes to learn about their menstrual cycle and they know exactly what progesterone is and all the hormones and how to confirm ovulation and all this stuff and so when i went to this group and i said i have this test they're like oh my god we've been literally waiting for this for like 10 years like please post it posted it into the group and got funded immediately and i still joke to this day that i invented this to help people get pregnant.

12:52Dr. Amy Beckley:And the first people that bought it were trying to not get pregnant. Oh, nice. Yeah. You know, when you, when you, when you create a product, you know, you don't know who the early adopter necessarily is going to be. And so you should test things. You should try things because you might be surprised that your early adopters are somebody who you didn't think was going to be your target in the first place that can help you get that traction. You know, they helped us with the Amazon reviews and build the listing and talk to their friends and stuff like that. So So I owe that community everything pretty much.

13:25I want to dive more into your growth journey. But first, I just want to detour back to something you said about birth control. Because this is, as a layman from the outside, I've always, that idea that you're going to go on a drug in your early teens that's going to change the way your body operates in order to not have acne, for instance, for a reason, always seemed to me to be like a pretty outrageous concept. Talk to me a little bit about birth control and does all these people going on birth control so early, does that lead to the, does it make it harder to become pregnant down the road? Or talk to me about what birth control really is.

14:06Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah. So the short answer is we don't know, but the longer answer is, you know, birth control is to help you not get pregnant. And the the pill, the IUDs, what they typically do is stop your body from ovulating. So your ovary makes hormones and those hormones are needed for, you know, getting pregnant. And so if you take hormonal birth control, you're tricking your body into thinking it's already pregnant, so it doesn't ovulate. And so that sounds great in theory. But what we don't know, and we haven't studied enough of is these hormones are so important for brain function, for hair, for skin, for nails, you know, bone strength, cardiovascular health, like so much.

14:50Dr. Amy Beckley:And we're learning this because the generation of women that went through menopause without hormone therapy age seven times faster than women on hormone replacement therapy and their lifespan. So their active, you know, healthy life is diminished. so they're healthier than men, hit menopause, and it's just like down the toilet. And so hormones are just so important for women. And we just thought, hey, they're just not going to get pregnant, right? So we don't really need them. They're not for any other function. Where I worry about for women is all those things, right? You need it for all these other tissues in your body.

15:29Dr. Amy Beckley:But the reason that she got put on birth control in the first place was acne, was any type of symptom, those are symptoms of hormone imbalance. Typically, they're PCOS symptoms. And so it's acne, bloating, getting overweight, oily skin, like those kind of things that women, like teenagers, are like super self-conscious and they're like, I just shut my ovaries off. I don't want to deal with these. But that just means that you're covering up the problem. And so as soon as you come off of it, you still have the same problem you had as a teenager. and you just mask the whole thing. And so if you put on birth control for anything other than pure birth control, you're probably gonna be at an increased risk for infertility.

16:16Dr. Amy Beckley:And the message to everybody listening to this is go get tested now today when you get off those hormonal birth controls and tell them, hey, I went on this when I was a teenager because of these symptoms. I'm worried I have some amount of hormone imbalance. Can we do some testing now? I don't want to wait a year. With this awareness dawning on everyone, are doctors becoming more and more open to this line of medicine? Yes and no. Again, doctors are individuals, they're human beings, they all have different training. Typical healthcare, at least in the US, you only get like two minutes with your patient, it's very basic.

16:55I mean, I went to my last OB appointment, and I was telling her my symptoms,

17:00Dr. Amy Beckley:She's like, okay, cool. What do you want to do about it? And I'm like, you were the doctor. You're supposed to tell me. Like, you know, but I was like, well, I Googled it. And here's the four things. Like, let's talk about the four options. And so I think we're expected to have this ownership. Something that's complicated like hormones, if you go to a traditional healthcare provider, usually it's too hard. It just takes too much time. And you just don't get diagnosed for a long time. And so there's this, I call it a new field, but it's probably not very new, functional medicine. So naturopathic doctors, these are the ones that take the time to do all the testing and they give you more resources and they really dive deep into you as a person to restore yourself.

17:46Dr. Amy Beckley:you know, because hormone imbalance is, I don't think it's a medical term. And it's just really hard to, it's just so time consuming for traditional doctors to do that. But the problem with functional medicine, it's very, very expensive and it's not covered under health insurance. Yeah. But it's the only thing really looking at underlying causes rather than, in a lot of ways, right? When you're looking at the underlying reasons for these things, rather than just prescribing something that covers up the symptoms. Yeah, healthcare is not healthcare. It's not like I'm going to promote and be proactive to keep you healthy.

18:20Dr. Amy Beckley:It's disease care. It's you have a disease, let me fix it. You have a cancer, let me fix it. You have a thing you need in operation, let me fix it. You know, so if you think about it the other way as like true healthcare, you want to be proactive and healthy and maintain healthy. That's not what, you know, traditional healthcare has been designed to do. And then there's second order ramifications quite often too with that, with the current modality of medicine where the treatments can cause other problems down the line that you weren't perceiving. What a great mess we found ourselves in as humans.

18:49So I'm glad you're here helping people sort it out. Okay. So we got Indiegogo, you got funded from being, you know, from these, these Facebook posts from solving people's problems or really helping people in this area where they weren't getting helped. What was your next move after you got funded on Indiegogo? did you upgrade your packaging from the Ziploc?

19:08Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah, eventually. Yes. So, so we sold on Amazon first. Cause that was, I mean, anybody who's trying to launch a product, you know, Amazon, this was before the days of Shopify, to be honest. Um, you know, this was the easiest thing. You could just barcode some stuff, go in and anybody can kind of sell on Amazon. Um, so that's what we did. And I just, I built up enough traction and enough sales to kind of take that next step. And that next step was raising money from venture capital to give us a brand and a box and a team. And I could actually quit my day job and not do this on my weekends. I mean, I was having my kids' sticker packages, you know?

19:51Nice. Okay. So how was that? How was the fundraising process outside of Indiegogo?

19:56Dr. Amy Beckley:You know, ups and downs. it's significantly harder to raise as a female than a male even as a female company you know male founders of female health raise way more dollars in venture than females do but you know having that initial traction having that bootstrapped and like look it isn't just an idea on a napkin this is real life stuff with real life sales and people and reviews and that I think was essential to us raising the money that we needed. So, so hard, you know, you have this idea, I need sales, but I need money for sales, like chicken or the egg, which comes first, you know, and for us, we were able to bootstrap it long enough to get that traction to be able to work into, you know, getting venture capital.

20:48Okay, so you've got venture capital, you're reinventing the packaging, the branding. Did you have to do a lot of work on the, When I first actually started with Pilot House, we worked with a telemedicine client. And I was working with all the different sort of like flow chart that you sort of have to be able to manage in order to connect with people at all these different points to get their samples, to send them, you know. Did you already have that process dialed or did you have to really evolve that user experience part of it?

21:21Dr. Amy Beckley:So we are a medical device and we are regulated by the FDA. And very, very early on, we made that decision to go direct to consumer. So really like a CPG company, just a consumer product that you can buy on Amazon. So we didn't really need to do that part of it. We worked into it. So we started off as a single test that didn't exist. We invented that home progesterone test. And then we invented an app that helps women go through this. And then we added on the different hormones. And we kind of grew it over time. and so starting small with like an mvp of like just this one piece and then listening to your market and adding on from there that's how we were able to grow i see a lot of people that really fail because they're like it's not there it's not 100 i can't launch something that's not 100 and i would say you have to you have to launch it when it's not 100 because you're going to get the feedback whether it's good or bad um that's going to help you grow you're going to hear i I wish I had this or like, oh my God, that was so horrible.

22:24Dr. Amy Beckley:Like, you know, you hear negative reviews. You're like, wow, I did not explain that perfectly. Like I need to, you know, fix things. Yeah. But you got to build the plane as you've jumped off the cliff. Pretty much. Pretty much. Yeah. So you made the decision to go direct to consumer. And is that because it was almost even harder just to sell to doctors that this was something because they were kind of set in their ways? And then my next question is, if you're selling DTC, how does your customer know what they don't know? Like if they are looking for pregnancy tests and this is what the modality is and you've got this other thing that gives you more data, how are you getting their attention to be like, hey, you don't know what you don't know.

23:06You need to know this as well.

23:07Dr. Amy Beckley:Yeah, yeah. So the first question, look, I still haven't figured it out. to tell you the truth. You know, you just have to try things, you know, I almost call it like spaghetti. Like, you know, people don't know what a progesterone test is. And so you have to come at it at different angles. Something that was really useful for us was this was back in like 2018, 19. And it was, you know, what doesn't, what, how are these different, right? So you see the two pictures of like two things different, you're like trying to figure out the differences. We just had you know a pregnancy test an ovulation test and approved test right next to each other like what what's different about this and they're like they look the same but it may it forced them to kind of read the text to see it stopped and be like oh my gosh this is a whole other technology you know and that was a really good kind of educational um point to it you know finding those early adopters and having them talk about it and tell friends um you know leaning into the community i was I'm still very active, you know, listening and trying to be supportive.

24:19Dr. Amy Beckley:But yeah, it's really hard, you know, to tell someone, you need to know this, but you don't know it. I'm thinking of the checklist, right? Is that kind of what you're talking about, where you literally have three products next to each other, and then you've got a checklist of how your product has all the checklists, you can check all these different things, and these other products just do certain things. Has that been used in your marketing? yes that one's a little more difficult this was literally like a picture of three things that looked exactly the same they were just different colors it was like what's the difference and like you couldn't tell the difference on the picture you had to read the text and sort of like the pink one is a pregnancy test the blue one is an ovulation test the purple one is a proof test and it does this and this right so you're already blanking on that they know the first two now you're educating about that third one.

25:06Dr. Amy Beckley:And so it kind of puts it into context. Another one that did really well is we had this little cartoon of an egg and it was like a sad egg. And then it got progressively more happy as it went up kind of like the scale. And it was a simple line that says, you know, there's more than one way to ovulate. And that was very intriguing to be like, wait, I thought it was like, you have an egg or you don't. And then we took that, that kind of context of like, well, ovulation is about releasing the egg, but it's also about producing hormones to support implantation. And so to really have a very healthy ovulatory event, you need to have an egg released and enough progesterone made after.