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Katherine
In the beginning, of course, like when you grow from zero to something that was like 150% per year, like 100% per year, now we are growing around 70%. And a lot of this growth is really driven by running a million ads.
Eric Dick
To this product right out of the gate was probably not the best plan. You started with organic, you started with product seeding. Talk a little bit about your strategy to go that way with the product and how it paid dividends.
Katherine
I think around 30 to 40% of our customer support tickets, it's answered by our AI agent. And AI agent has sometimes better reviews, like a better CCA score than a human agent because she replies quickly. She knows everything. People like her.
Eric Dick
Katherine, welcome to the D2C podcast. Could we start with a bit of your hero's journey that led you to the position of CMO at the world's number one hormonal tracker?
Katherine
Sure. So first of all, maybe a couple words. What is Mira? Mira is a at home hormonal monitor device that helps women to track their hormones at home for trying to conceive, understanding their hormonal imbalances. Or maybe perimenopause. It's my first company that focuses on the women health. I joined them around five years ago. Honestly was a bit of surprise for me because before that I worked with multiple brands on the agency side, mostly established FEMCG brands and after that jumped into startup world but more focused on fintech companies. And I think at some point I was thinking that I want to have a project or a product that I can deeply relate to and also that would make the impact and a change in the world. So I was interviewing with different campuses, focusing on sustainability and ecology and Europe pop up and it was very risky decision for me because the company was brand new and the product just about to launch. But in the same time I realized that I really like this initial time. Like when everything is chaotic, unorganized, there is no brands, there is no communication, strategy, anything. And I have opportunity to build it from scratch. It sounded pretty exciting. And yeah, since then we grew quite a bit and looking back it's like almost feels impossible. How we did it and how long.
Eric Dick
Have you been with them on this journey?
Katherine
Around five years.
Eric Dick
Around five years. Okay, talk. Take me back to the beginning. What was you painted a picture of what it was like then, but what was the size of the business? Had it gone to market? Start at the beginning.
Katherine
Yeah. So when I joined we basically just got FDA approval for product. It's a medical device. So all this compliance and regulation is pretty important. It took founders couple years to develop devices innovation. So like went through the whole studies and confirmation from FDA and CS marks approval and when I joined they were like oh we wanted to do launch in a couple of months so what we should do like how we're going to launch it. So my goal was to get initial feedback from customers and kind of set a base for upcoming events. We participated in ics, we did some trade shows but since but I was a person who is managing basically customer support and marketing and like being influencer and a social media manager in one. And yeah we started to grow pretty fast especially during the pandemic and that was a turning point when we started to expand and hire marketing team and besides manufacturing who is responsible for building the product like bringing it to the consumer. I think that our core growth happened from like establishing marketing team and really scaling it up. So it was like the first teams that basically formed in a company.
Eric Dick
I think we really helpful actually if you could outline those hires. You know when you've got you know a business that has traction product market fit you've got, you know you're. You're the market leader and you're building your team out. What were your first hires that you made?
Katherine
Yeah, I think for the we had first of all like our strategy especially those time was just like work with some contractors and freelancers like don't hire, you know, don't commit for something long term and try people and a lot of people with whom we start working in this part time basis eventually joined. Like for example we had one of the first hires. I need to have someone who can like a proofread and write copy. Because our product is heavily content based we do a lot of education so like writing was a very labor intense things that I can like multitask and manage. So we found a copywriter and yeah now she's a creative director in the company.
Eric Dick
Oh nice.
Katherine
So it was really interesting to see her growth and I think media buyer was also one of the first hires because I truly believe that media buying should be done like really for by dedicated person who is focusing on specifically meta or Google. And those time we didn't have opportunity to like hire good qualified agencies. So we just work with couple of freelancers and I think the kind of the third step was to hire like a marketing kind of like a person who can do everything generalist who can help me with sourcing influencers and censoring partnerships. Because in this initial stage we didn't have A lot of budget. So we were like okay, what are channels that we can leverage? And definitely like product gifting and partnership with like minded companies who also have female wellness, women's health audience really helped. But it's again it's like you feel that it's organic. And some founders, they ask like what I can do that doesn't require money. And I guess there is nothing that requires money.
Eric Dick
Time is money.
Katherine
Yeah, you still pay for employees but compared to the media cost it's more affordable. So we had a partnership manager who was responsible for this initial influencer seeding and also bringing partners, affiliate partners on board and leveraging organic channels.
Eric Dick
So your go to market. I think that's one of the things we're talking about at Pilothouse all the time these days is just sort of strategy. And I think when we kind of came up as a performance media buying company and when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So I like your perspective a little bit where you really thought deeply about how to like running a million ads to this product right out of the gate was probably not the best plan. You started with organic, you started with product seeding. Talk a little bit about your strategy to go that way with the product and how it paid dividends. I guess.
Katherine
Yeah, I see it how like a two sides component because nurturing your social media and community before product went live start to do pre order. And I started to look for communities on Facebook that have women who are trying to conceive was they discussing some like of what, you know, challenges connected to it and kind of ask admins to introduce the product and onboard some initial testers like beta testers and these beta testers we created group for them because we thought like oh they might ask some questions. But this community starts to grow and now It's I think 18,000 women who like a really army of brand ambassadors who answer questions to each other and like recommend product to other people. So it helped you build this social trust because when you generate traffic and ads, you know people come into the website, they want to see that someone is using it, someone is excited about it. So that's why also influencers and partnership help to build this content that kind of address the traffic and leverage what is a product value through storytelling. Because I mean for our products to it's pretty innovative. There is something like this before on the market. There are definitely some solutions which is just a regular like a test strips you can buy in the pharmacy. But also they cost $10 and our product cost $200. So it's a big ask. And really when I joined founders are very scientific people and we mostly communicated features and the benefits like our AI and our patented technology. But really what we realized pretty soon that no one cares. It's really what people wanted to hear like can I get pregnant or not? And this first stories that community and influencers helped to bring was addressing these questions. Not us talking about the product, but them talking about the product. And of course it can't happen organically because you need to stimulate it. We were sending. We're checking on Instagram who is posting hashtags like trying to conceive or going through ivf, having challenges checking ovulation. And we're sending them product and asking them to like, you know, whatever, if you will get pregnant, share. But if not like when you're not obligated and when we start to see first results, I mean it was very difficult to be patient because it's not like something you sent and you can see feedback next day. But when some first stories come it came in it was huge because it was my working. The ads eventually converted much better and we use start to use them as our ambassadors and also leverage white listing.
Eric Dick
And also I'm just. You're probably not building those stories into your marketing funnels, but you're using them to inform your customer avatars and your pain points and the language that you use, I'm sure in your ads and landing pages as well.
Katherine
Yeah, for sure it was. I'm still sourcing a lot of copy and insights from Amazon reviews. Now it's much easier with AI you can just summarize and but before that just go and review by review and checking what people like about the products, what people don't like about the product. And plug in this consumer language into our copy and landing pages adjusting it because also like how people call these journeys. For example, we one of things that we thought would be really great to show pregnancy test. Like two lines on the pregnancy test. Congratulations. Pauses content and make ads with it because we thought like oh, people will see I can get pregnant. And it's like confirmation that someone got pregnant. But people got really upset because it was triggering someone who is going through very sensitive journey. And they were commenting that like remove this test because we don't want to see it. It's like you can imagine how difficult is it to kind of listen in the. To this feedback help also to build guide that we use how to how. How to talk about sensitive topics like infertility or miscarriage. Or menopause in the ways that people feel that we're listening to them because number one insights that we learn that like no one listens to them. It's unfortunate that you know healthcare system builds this way that they need to go through the whole like a journey basically like demand from their practitioner to get some treatment. But it's also great for direct to consumer companies who are working on this reproduct area because consumers self educated now they're so educated like this members that on our group they probably know more than any of our medical advisors.
Eric Dick
Yeah, I believe it because they've got a lot on the line. Right. I guess. Which is why you have to be careful in the language that you use. Can you talk a little bit like was there? It sounds like with your. With the co founders there's a lot of. There's going to be a lot of data and science and you know results that you can show like. But how did you think about creating out the sort of like content web that will answer these questions? Maybe aside from the community how did you think about content for the brand?
Katherine
Yeah, content was really big needle mover because our sales cycles now around three weeks but I think earlier it was even longer. Like people really considering the products and checking what else is available. They're following you. So how we nurture this during this time is very important how we provide education because our funnel starts from problem awareness. It doesn't start from a product awareness. First we need to tell them oh you can't get pregnant. Maybe because you're doing it the wrong time or maybe you experience some menopause symptoms and you don't know about it. You think that it's you know for someone who happened later in a. In a lifetime. So really starting from educating what is the challenge and how you can go through it and you know, bring in some experts. So it's not again not us talking about the things but some people they have authority and for it we pretty early on started engaged just like doctors that has social media presence to run webinars with us and we collected leads, we advertise this on meta and also like did through partnerships like for example there is a free webinar where there is a doctor, someone from our company and someone from another company. For example male fertility test or supplement company or some like a sexual wellness company or even mental health because mental health also is a big topic and we do webinar together so it's more engaged and conversion rate was much better than just running giveaways because people for giveaways, they just want to get something for free and go. So bringing content for free, valuable content was really working really well because we also can split these videos to snippets and use for social media and so on. So building this really like a content wheel and using it in different channels, recycling it.
Eric Dick
What was your show up rate? I'm always curious because we've run a lot of webinars. In my info career I've run a lot of webinars and show up rates are usually pretty abysmal. Usually like 1/3 or so like one third to maybe one half of the people who sign up show up. What was it like in the, in this B2C space?
Katherine
Yeah, 1 1/3 is a really good result. I would say that around two life webinars, around 20% but again it doesn't matter because we record them, send them, link, we sent like a limited time discount and eventually we start to do prerecorded webinars. We just pre recorded them and basically evergreen like people sign up, they immediately get this webinar so they don't even need to attend life.
Eric Dick
Okay, so you've set the groundwork here. You've got a great organic base, you've got community, you've got content marketing. Tell me a little bit about the growth journey and like because it's, it's been pretty wild, it's been been a lot of growth in the last five years. Talk to me a little bit about your growth journey, how what you can say about how big you guys now and what really were the key levers in that growth.
Katherine
Yeah, so in the beginning of course like when you grow from zero to something that was like 150% per year, like 100% per year, now we are growing around 30% and a lot of this growth is really driven by new product launches because I think it's something that also I learned, you know when I worked with the big brands on the markets inside and I kind of didn't participate in a product development so closely was like we're given, you know, there is this products and you are like advertising them. But at Mira, I work pretty closely with the product team and the product strategy is very driven by consumer demand. Like what they want, what they don't like and like launching for example. In the beginning we had just one hormone test and after that we launched two hormones that can not only predict ovulation but also confirm that it happened. And after that we launched another hormone that also can like tell you how successful you ovulated and now we have hormones that also measure your ovarian reserve. So like every launch was really game changer that you can't achieve just by launching new channel. I don't know. We're launching now connected TV so we'll see. Maybe it will be the huge change. But honestly like any adjustments, like any I don't know influencer we bring or changes we did on Meta is they never like made this turning point as well as new products. So new products are very important and pipeline having them regularly like every year and preparing for them like making sure that people understand what the benefits and a lot of people of course like a switch to the new product. So it kind of feels like upgrade like iPhone launch every year.
Eric Dick
Yeah, it's. I've talked to other people in this space that you know where there's a, a large focus around pregnancy and it's a challenge because you. There's only a few windows in a person's life necessarily. And I think you mentioned menopause as well. So you've got that to think about. But it probably when you think about your, your customer avatar there's a lot that goes into finding them at those exact stages.
Katherine
Yeah, exactly. And unfortunately also the lifespan of a customer is pretty short. I compare it to like dating app lifetime because you're like you want to build the products for people to get pregnant faster but in the same time you want them to stay and like retain and be loyal. So also it comes to product development like how we know that hormones connected to different aspects of our life not only reproductive and there is no other products that kind of gives this insights. So that's challenge because we need to educate. But now we're bringing it into hormonal umbrell balances checking and like perimenopause or some like a more wellness application. So it's not just for time when they're trying to get pregnant. It also helps to justify cost of investing into the product.
Eric Dick
I feel like it's maybe not as much as I think but it's a blue ocean space in a lot of ways because it's a, it's people are just learning or you know the science around a lot of this stuff. Right. Where for a long time we've just sort of had this one way relationship with, with doctors or health providers. Whereas now people like you say are really educating themselves about this stuff.
Katherine
Exactly. And I think other products like some people asking like oh is it like or your competitor or maybe whoop or some Like Apple Health. I think that no, because they really help to educate and like build this behavior. We even did the research with the glucose monitors how like cycle and hormones affect glucose spikes and women House. But really it's, it's consumer now much more trained and educated even than five years ago. It's like oh wow, I can track everything. And all these companies that come in now like brings ownership of your health more preventative way, brings you patient rather than just like relying on the doctor and dealing with consequences.
Eric Dick
You mentioned how important it is to have a strong in house media buyer. And I also know that you kind of came to this podcast because you were a pilot house client as well. Can you talk a little bit about your decision, decision to work with an agency when that became a priority for you?
Katherine
Yeah, I think as we start to spend more and more on Meta. Before that we tried to build our in house team and we had a like part time person who was doing media buying and after that we hired someone full time and we hired a producer who was helping with preparing creative assets and like setting briefs for designers for static ads. But at some point we just realized that the level of expertise that you know, we can get from just one person like a basically boiling in the same product all the time and the exposure to like what I see as a big benefit of the agency that people and first of all they're working in the teams and I think based on my journey like the best ideas coming from discussing with the people who understand what they're talking about. And unfortunately we had just one person so we can't provide the support, we can't guide. We didn't have someone senior and another one is exposure to other clients like even you know, you don't have like exactly the same product. You can see like inspire ideas and what worked with other brands and kind of cross pollinate to and bring these ideas to us. So I think it was really helpful to get the team, not get just one person who is probably, you know, the best in the class and super skilled, but get a team with a diverse set of expertise and see how each person can contribute to scale. Because with meta at some point the most like you do everything right. Meta limits what you actually can change in the account. It's not so many things as before. You actually don't need maybe so much technical skills. It all goes to the strategy and analytics. Like how do you get insights, what's working or not and what are fresh ideas, what we can try and you.
Eric Dick
Have to feed the machine the week in, week out, new concepts, new tweaks, new angles, new avatars to keep it going. Right.
Katherine
Yeah. And also scale. Like when the first time heard that like oh, we need to like produce like 100 ads per week, I was like, oh my God, how we can do it. So definitely need help.
Eric Dick
Yeah. And how's it gone? How has it gone with pilot House?
Katherine
Yeah, it's going great. We were able to first I think that one of the biggest wins right now to really leverage menopause signals because everyone had concerns about it, like is it right audience like why do they need test hormones? Do they understand the product and we see great results. But they didn't came like from beginning. I think it took a lot of iterations and gaining these insights from customer interviews from product team, from comments from influencers and testing a lot of creators and hooks as well and see like what resonates.
Eric Dick
I wonder if it would be as hard pre iOS 14 or if. Because that's kind of been the feeling.
Katherine
Right.
Eric Dick
Is you've had to get really go back to basics a little bit with how you think about advertising, you know, and make sure you really are putting forward compelling hooks. You know, really thought out customer avatars. You're speaking to pain points, all that stuff that you talk about, you know, really having to work at to lock in. So it's cool that you guys have found it. You mentioned partnerships. I think people on this podcast are always interested about partnerships. Can you talk a little bit about some of your more successful partnerships and what made them work so well?
Katherine
Yeah, I think one of recent partnerships that was pretty successful was an app called Sveltori which is a longevity app. And also sometimes you're like you don't know from where this successful partnership can come from. And it was pretty good because they had had menopause audience that we don't have. And we introduced our product in terms of more PR and awareness impact. We really believe in our partnership with Aura. We're doing research with them and now like launching integration and some I would say I can highlight like one specific partnership but just bundling them. We had pretty good partnership with some other fertility like clinics and man reproductive health products and of fertility benefits as well like a carrot and wind fertility. So it's like a companies who offer to employee benefits and like being part of them. Yeah. Also help to kind of grow this B2B sales at some partnerships that we had really high hopes with a big one of biggest apps for period tracking for example, didn't work. It's just you know, you need to think not only if it's the right audience but also if it's the right moment. Like do they come to this product to learn about something or is just like I don't know, very utilitary function and they're not open to kind of research and get introduced to other products. But what we learn also that what works the best is more like long term partnerships where we not just exchange social media posts, emails about each other, but doing campaigns. Now we're working with this app that calls Flow Living and with them we have studies that we are conducting and their founder Lisha with you which is like very famous in this women health space. Like being a speaker for us and joining our podcast. So it really helps to like show consumers that you are not just selling another company product but you really believe in a synergy with between both of you.
Eric Dick
You mentioned you're experimenting with connected tv and that also leads me to this, the next piece which is I think, correct me if I'm wrong, you said in the pre you guys are approaching eight figures. You're like really experience incredible growth. What's it going to take, do you think to get to the. It's like you're building this, it seems like you're building it very organically, very steadily. What's it going to take to get to that next phase of growth?
Katherine
Yeah, it's a great question that I'm also trying to answer and recently I was talking about like doing my research and you know I never been in the same role before when I kind of like scale company from ground up and I joined, you know when I build the product and the brand from beginning. So I was doing a lot of consulting with different CMOs of famous brands, not only in women's health and wellness but just overall D2C brands and was asking the same question like you know, what. What brings brand from like being you know, in a, I don't know, 2035 millions revenue to like 150 and 200. And honestly there is no secret recipe for it.
Eric Dick
More of the same, Better of the. More of the same.
Katherine
I was like asking what channels do you bring? And everyone is like oh you just need to work on a brand awareness. So honestly I don't know like our approach and our now is to try different things and I think that really big growth will come from new products and reach a new audience. Like menopause audience we know is pretty growing and like trending right now. And we also want to get into wellness Space and also working on their products for men because there are also men hormones that you might be interested in the test. So all of it will expand the product to be multifaceted. Like for example, like Oura Ring. They started from someone who is a biohacking for sleep and now the big growth coming actually from women health and the women health also there are multiple segments like someone tracking for avoiding pregnancy or someone is tracking for menopause. So it's really like a. How do you expand into different segments and tell the story. But also I believe that the brand awareness will play more role. We just discussed today too to do a campaign for our new product launch on a Times Square, like on this big screen.
Eric Dick
Yeah.
Katherine
But probably I would be like a year ago. Oh my God, that's crazy. Because it's so expensive. It's absolutely impossible to measure. It's just waste of money. But now I feel like it's really something that would help us to put the brand up front of people's eyes. And even though they don't need the need right now, maybe at some point of their journey they will like, they will think about the brand.
Eric Dick
Yeah. I'm telling you, super bowl, you work out the CPM on, on women. Like I just think, I think you're. Because it's the kind of product it is too, right? Because it's. There's this dawning awareness of your ability to take this into your own hands that maybe wasn't there before. So I do think these, these exercises that you're doing in branding at the top of the funnel could pay real dividends down the line. I think that's really cool. Are you guys in retail?
Katherine
No, we did some trials but honestly I don't think that it's time for retail yet.
Eric Dick
No post super bowl commercial.
Katherine
Yeah, maybe after for sure. When, when we will be for like everyone basically for men, for women, for. For now, for trying to conceive. It still feels like as a very specific need that people research a lot online. And also we see based on sales growth that coming from Amazon, a lot of people like pick something that is more convenient for them. Like just, you know, Amazon where they can get fast delivery cash back and so on. But retail is. Would be a big step for awareness for sure.
Eric Dick
Oh yeah. But it's like it almost requires more category awareness or like the amount that you'd have to put into raising awareness right now in the retail environment would cost you a lot probably. Right. And no one's doing Costco samples with this. Right. That's not going to work. I have to ask you one final question which I've got to start asking everyone who comes on the podcast is how are you using AI right now? What are some of the ways that you're using. Using AI as a CMO effectively? Are you old school and not using it?
Katherine
Oh, we're trying to use it in many different ways. It was a fun experiment, kind of like my failure as a cmo. I, we, we did this commercial video right now for that we will use for our new campaign and launch. And I was like, please don't just don't do the voiceover with AI because a couple months ago I tried it and it was horrible and I feel like, you know, need a human voice. And our creative director sent me two wings and I was like, which voiceover do you like the most? And honestly I thought that both of them are some narrators, some actors who did it. And I picked one and she's like, oh, do you know, actually the ones that you picked is AI and the ones I thought maybe AI was a human. So it's really developing so fast. And yeah, so for like video editing, for video creation, for voiceover, for, for generating ads, generating illustrations, it's like creative process wise. But also I think around 30 to 40% of our customer support tickets is answered by our AI agent. And AI agent has sometimes better reviews, like a better CCAD score than a human agent because she replies quickly, she knows everything, people like her. So it's another good case was really helping us not to scale team, not to spend more on a team when we have more sales and more tickets coming in.
Eric Dick
Yeah, it's something I think organizations have to kind of continually assess right now don't we just had a meeting about it today and we're wanting to be careful not to do make work projects or like oh wouldn't it be cool if we could do this with it but like really take repetitive things that we're doing all the time and figure out can we do it faster with AI rather than making work?
Katherine
Yeah, it would be interesting. A lot of hopes regarding AI and analytics like all the things that triple whale now launch and North Beam, it doesn't work, you know in a. How. How to say like, you know there is a pretty demos when someone is like just ask questions and I answer all the, all the concerns but so you still need the data analyst to support but I believe it's just a matter of time and pretty soon we will get much better analytics everyone can access without like Being in data analyst and asking to send the report or get some data.
Eric Dick
Yeah I will just be able to talk to it. It'll just be a lot more natural language processing. I was watching some videos on people putting you know basically something that was watching their screen and listening to them talk and it's like it totally. You don't need a keyboard any anymore if you can just sort of naturally have these natural language conversations that allow you to do this really interesting data extraction. I'm. I'm just. There's one last random question. Do you have any tools like SaaS products that you're a big fan of that have been a big part of Mirror's growth?
Katherine
I mean we use, we use a lot of tools. I think AAA definitely would help us to flip how we look into acquisition because before we were looking into metadata and we were optimizing towards Eros and Meta and after like launching triple well we started to optimize towards new customer acquisition and sometimes it leads you to make very different decision than before really like gorgeous integrated term of customer support and helping use this AI for answering tickets. There are some tools that we use on Shopify overall Shopify Assess I think is pretty great and like amazing infrastructure and all the apps we use like Loop like Rebuy just to like build the ecosystem and increase LTV by subscribing people or offering them upsells Exciting. One of the less recent tools we launched is a video wise for like more social looking e commerce and see how it will work we using selling gems for our AB test. It's also a big part because you know you sometimes there are questions that you never know answer and what I'm excited about is to try more integrate courseware it's like AI agent that you can talk to and give exactly like it's connected with all the services you so you can say like go to this file and find this information and input in another file. Kind of like really feeling like in the future to try integrated more into analytics and yeah just like a basic operational task.
Eric Dick
Nice. Well if they're listening you should sponsor the DTC newsletter because this is the kind of stuff we talk about. Katherine, I want to thank you so much for coming on today. This was super cool. I think we've got a lot of CMOs and people who want to be CMOs and probably founders who want to hire CMOs. So hopefully people find a way to reach out. Do you think LinkedIn is the best place to find you then there maybe.
Katherine
Yeah sure.
Eric Dick
Nice. Well I will include your your page there. But yeah, thanks again for coming on. I look forward to getting an update because I know you're headed I think probably pilot house is deep in Q4 prep already thinking about how we're gonna make this. Is it. Is it a really seasonal. Is it. Yeah. Q4 is big for everyone I guess regardless of but still people still have to be in that phase of their life at the same time as Q4 for but yeah, big plan.
Katherine
Yeah. I think yeah it's still seasonal. Back to school.
Eric Dick
Yeah.
Katherine
After summer going after vacation and like really preparing for life changes so feels really optimistic and with CTV and all the top of final we'll see how meta start to perform better as well.
Eric Dick
Nice. Well, I look forward to catching up with you. Thanks for coming on.
Katherine
Thank you for inviting me.
Eric Dick
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now at directtoconsumeralloneword co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.
Host: Eric Dick
Guest: Katherine, CMO of Mira (the world's number one hormonal tracker)
Release Date: August 11, 2025
Katherine, the Chief Marketing Officer at Mira, shares her journey and the evolution of Mira into a leading femtech brand. With a background in agency work and fintech startups, Katherine transitioned to women’s health to create a product she deeply connected with and believed could make a significant impact.
Katherine [00:51]: "Mira is a at-home hormonal monitor device that helps women to track their hormones... It's my first company that focuses on women's health."
Upon joining Mira five years ago, Katherine found the company freshly FDA-approved and preparing for a product launch amidst regulatory compliance challenges. The initial growth strategy emphasized organic marketing and product seeding over aggressive paid advertising.
Katherine [07:13]: "We started to grow pretty fast especially during the pandemic and that was a turning point when we started to expand and hire a marketing team."
Katherine highlights the importance of strategic hiring during Mira’s early growth phase. She initially worked with contractors and freelancers, gradually bringing on full-time team members who played pivotal roles in content creation and media buying.
Katherine [05:11]: "We found a copywriter and yeah now she's a creative director in the company."
Katherine explains the deliberate choice to prioritize organic growth and community engagement over immediate large-scale paid advertising. By fostering a robust community of 18,000 women, Mira built significant social trust and brand advocacy.
Katherine [07:13]: "This community starts to grow and now It's I think 18,000 women who are like a really army of brand ambassadors."
Influencer marketing and strategic partnerships were crucial in Mira’s early success. Katherine focused on authentic storytelling and user-generated content to convey product value, thereby enhancing credibility and trust among potential customers.
Katherine [09:13]: "We were sending... asking them to like, if you will get pregnant, share... It was very difficult to be patient because... when some first stories come it came in it was huge."
Content played a significant role in educating Mira’s audience about hormonal health. Webinars featuring medical professionals and collaborations with experts helped position Mira as a trusted authority in the femtech space.
Katherine [12:42]: "Our funnel starts from problem awareness. It doesn't start from a product awareness. First we need to tell them oh you can't get pregnant..."
Katherine discusses the effectiveness of webinars in nurturing leads and converting them into customers. Despite low live attendance rates, recorded webinars with limited-time discounts proved successful in driving conversions.
Katherine [15:03]: "We recorded them, send them, link, we sent like a limited time discount and eventually we start to do prerecorded webinars."
Mira’s product strategy is heavily influenced by consumer demand and feedback. Regular product launches addressing different hormonal aspects have been pivotal in sustaining growth and expanding Mira’s market reach.
Katherine [15:49]: "Every launch was really a game changer... new products are very important and having them regularly like every year."
Successful partnerships with apps like Sveltori and Flow Living have expanded Mira’s reach into new audiences, particularly in menopause and overall wellness. Long-term collaborations involving joint campaigns and research initiatives have strengthened Mira’s market position.
Katherine [23:31]: "What works the best is more like long term partnerships where we not just exchange social media posts, emails about each other, but doing campaigns."
Katherine elaborates on how Mira integrates AI to enhance customer support and streamline marketing processes. An AI agent now handles 30-40% of customer support tickets, improving response times and customer satisfaction.
Katherine [30:01]: "Around 30 to 40% of our customer support tickets, it's answered by our AI agent... people like her."
Looking ahead, Katherine identifies product innovation and expanding into new market segments as key drivers for future growth. She emphasizes the importance of brand awareness campaigns, including high-impact advertising channels like Connected TV, to elevate Mira’s presence.
Katherine [26:07]: "Big growth will come from new products and reach a new audience... brand awareness will play more role."
Katherine shares her experiences experimenting with AI in creative processes, such as voiceovers and video editing. While acknowledging current limitations, she remains optimistic about AI’s potential to revolutionize analytics and operational tasks.
Katherine [30:01]: "For video editing, for video creation, for voiceover... around 30 to 40% of our customer support tickets is answered by our AI agent."
Katherine’s insights underscore the significance of building a strong community before investing heavily in paid advertising. Mira’s success story illustrates how authentic engagement, strategic partnerships, and continuous product innovation can drive sustainable growth in the direct-to-consumer landscape.
Notable Quotes:
This episode of the DTC Podcast offers valuable lessons on prioritizing community building and organic growth strategies for DTC brands, particularly in the femtech sector. Katherine’s experience with Mira provides actionable insights for marketers and entrepreneurs aiming to scale their businesses through authentic engagement and strategic innovation.