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- [00:00]
A
It was broken. Health care 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 will back our consumer from Amazon. 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.
- [00:53]
B
Amy, welcome to the D2C podcast. Today we're talking about your brand prov. There's a personal connection to this for me with, you know, 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 Proove and what exactly it is.
- [01:19]
A
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, get married, buy a house, get a dog and then decide I was gonna 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 then 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. 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, cos pcos. A huge one. Yes. Endometriosis, menopause, like, it's just. 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, you know, the professional healthcare world, they don't have time for us, right? They. It's just a very complicated thing. You only get like two minutes with the doctor. It's. 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. 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.
- [03:32]
B
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.
- [03:39]
A
Yeah, so we measure something called pregnant D gluconarate. 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 Oura 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, staying pregnant. And so when we built Pruv, 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. 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, patients, 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. 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 medications sooner, to track our symptoms, to manage our symptoms. And so my goal is really to create this hormonal wellness platform that, that all women can have. I mean, selfishly, I also have 11 year old daughter and she's not gonna be put on birth control or get an IUD because she has acne or bloating or something like that. She's gonna get educated on her hormones. And you know, I, I want that for our younger generation going through it.
- [06:23]
B
I, I can only speak to it because my, 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 care. That's, that's got to be just a horrific, they can be such traumatic things to go through during that whole emotional cycle. And 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. It's just they, they want you going through the square. 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. Do you get exogenous progesterone essentially added if you're not. If you don't have enough progesterone via one of your tests?
- [07:23]
A
Yeah, sometimes. I mean, doctors are humans. They have, you know, 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. 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. To kind of decrease that red tape?
- [08:10]
B
But it's got to be. So many people don't know, like, like, you know, your assumption, like everyone's assumption that, like, hey, let's do. 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 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.
- [08:39]
A
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 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. 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 this huge rapid decline, you know. And the other 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, we're having one. 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. 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 gotta be other, other things. So it's just really high infertility rates. Women are. Couples are choosing not to have kids for various reasons.
- [10:48]
B
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, 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?
- [11:21]
A
Yeah, so I have a business degree on paper, no experience at all. And I was like, oh, we'll 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. Um, 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 can 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 in different groups, whatever. 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. 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. 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. And the first people that bought it were trying to not get pregnant.
- [12:56]
B
Oh, nice. Yeah.
- [12:57]
A
You know, 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 I owe that community everything pretty much.
- [13:25]
B
I 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, as a layman, from the outside, I've always that idea that you're gonna 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. For a reason always seemed to me to be like a pretty outrageous concept. Talk to me a little bit about birth control and. And it does. 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 what birth control really is?
- [14:07]
A
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 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, bone strength, cardiovascular health, so much. And we're learning this because the generation of women that went through menopause without hormone therapy age 7 times faster than women on hormone replacement therapy. And their lifespan, so their active, you know, healthy life is diminished. So they're, you know, healthier than men hit menopause and it's just like down the toilet. And so hormones are just so important for, for women. And we just thought, hey, they're just, you know, you'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. 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 had the same problem you had as a teenager and you just masked the whole thing. And so if you put on birth control for anything other than pure birth control, you're probably going to be at an increased risk for infertility. 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 hormone imbalance. Can we do some testing now? I don't wanna wait a year.
- [16:35]
B
With this awareness dawning on everyone, are doctors becoming more and more open to this Line of medicine.
- [16:43]
A
Yes and no. Again, doctors are individuals, they're human beings. They all have different training. Typical healthcare, at least in the U.S. you know, you only get like two minutes with your patient. It's very basic. I mean, I went to my last OB appointment and I was, you know, telling her my symptoms. 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, 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, 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.
- [18:03]
B
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.
- [18:15]
A
Yeah. Healthcare is not healthcare. It's not like I'm gonna promote and be proactive to keep you healthy. 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 an operation, let me fix it. You know, so if you think about it the other way, as like true healthcare, you wanna be proactive and healthy and maintain healthy. That's not what, you know, traditional healthcare has been designed to do.
- [18:37]
B
And then there's second order ramifications quite often too, with that, with the current modality of medicine where the treatments can cause other down the line that you weren't perceiving, what a great mess we found ourselves in as humans. So 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 the people's problems are 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?
- [19:09]
A
Yeah, eventually, yes. So. So we sold on Amazon first because that was, I mean, anybody who's trying to launch a product, you know, Amazon, this is before the days of Shopify, to be honest. You know, this is the easiest thing. You could just barcode some stuff, go in, and anybody can kind of sell on Amazon. 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.
- [19:52]
B
Nice. Okay, so how was that, how was the fundraising process outside of Indiegogo?
- [19:57]
A
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 raised way more dollars in venture than females do. But, you know, having that initial traction, having that bootstrapped and like, look, this 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.
- [20:49]
B
Okay, so you've got venture capital, you're reinventing the, the packaging, the branding. Did you have to do a lot of work on the. I, I, when I first actually started with Pilothouse, we worked with a telemedicine client and I was working with all the different sort of like flowchart 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.
- [21:21]
A
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. Like, 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. That's going to help you grow. You're going to hear, I wish I had this. Or like, oh, my God, that was so horrible. You hear negative reviews, you're like, wow, I did not explain that perfectly. I need to fix things.
- [22:32]
B
Yeah, but you got to build the. Build the plane as you've jumped off the cliff.
- [22:35]
A
Pretty much. Pretty much, yeah.
- [22:38]
B
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. They were kind of set in their ways. Is. And then my next question is, if you're selling D2C, how do. How does your customer know what they don't know? Like, how. If they are looking for pregnancy tests and this is what their. 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. You need to know this as well.
- [23:08]
A
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's different about this. And they're like, they look the same, but it forced them to kind of read the text to see stop and be like, oh, my gosh. There's this whole other technology, you know, and that was a really good kind of educational point to it. You know, finding those early adopters and having them talk about it and tell friends, you know, leaning into the community. I was, yeah, I'm still very active, you know, listening and trying to be supportive. But, yeah, it's really hard to tell someone, you need to know this, but you don't know it.
- [24:25]
B
I'm thinking of the checklist, right? Is that. 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?
- [24:41]
A
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 you couldn't tell the difference on the picture. You had to read the text. And so we're like, the pink one is a pregnancy test. The blue one is an ovulation test. The purple one is approved 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. 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, there's more than one way to ovulate. That was very intriguing to be like, wait, what? I thought it was like, you have an egg or you don't. Then we took that 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. Here's a test that can help you understand your progesterone production.
- [25:51]
B
So you're on Amazon, and it's funny, we just released a podcast a couple of weeks ago about meta making it harder for health brands because they can consider your ability to retarget someone who's. Who's bought one of your products as private information. And so you're not. So they've sort of reduced the ability to target on meta. How have you evolved off of Amazon to also be on platforms like Meta and how has this recent update impacted you?
- [26:16]
A
Yeah, so I did listen to that episode and I love the idea of being more proactive as opposed to disease state. Right. So I think of our tests as proactive. We're not treating infertility, we're trying to prevent you from being infertile and preventing these things. So that was really helpful. We've done clicks, click through rates is what we're tracking. And we're just kind of blindly spending money. But we really, really cut back on meta significantly because we just can't track know. If they clicked, did that mean they bought? I don't know. They clicked it, they liked the video. We don't know. And so we do spend a lot of time on Amazon and Google. Those are the two places that we advertise the most. But Amazon is super frustrating because, you know, the attribution is almost impossible. You can't like we know someone will Google prove and they'll find Amazon because they advertised more and they click on Amazon, they buy on Amazon. We have no idea how to track any of that stuff. And so we were losing a lot of consumers to Amazon and we were like, well, wait a minute, we want our consumer, we want to own them, we want to educate them, we want to have email chains, all that stuff. And so we actually found a way to steal back our consumer from Amazon because we have an app that is a companion app to our product and they have to put in their email address. And so we just say, hey, sign up for our newsletters, get discounts. We have little things in the, the app that says, like you're a returning consumer, you know, don't buy on Amazon, get 25% off here. You know, we have a platform to educate through the product itself. And so we don't really necessarily care anymore that they're buying on Amazon over the website because we still can't own that consumer and help her because when you have a better conversation with her, it's just better for the consumer. And they get their goals faster, they understand the product, they get the need. I think that's been really helpful. Our consumer is on Amazon. We tried to fight it tooth and nail to get off Amazon, but they got to get it quick. They didn't get pregnant that cycle. They put off getting supplies for the next cycle. We have to start on cycle day five for the testing. And it was like, you got two days to do it. I got to get it on Amazon. I can't get it on the website. You have to be where your consumers are, and you have to figure out how to do that. Not consistently, like, try to push water up a hill. It's just. It's a losing battle.
- [28:47]
B
But very innovative to have a way to get customers off of Amazon. I talk to people all the time on this podcast and no one has really hacked that. People. You can do, you know, QR codes in your packaging. But to make an essential part of your. Well, the fact that an essential part of your product is this app experience is a great. A great way to get that customer back. Especially because you've got these other perimenopausal and hormone health kind of products that you can kind of extend the life of that customer. So it's not just during the few years, you know, where people are trying to conceive that you can ideally have them as a customer. What platform have you built your app on?
- [29:24]
A
So I often tease that the worst thing I did in my entire life was build an app. Because I'm not a tech person. I'm a scientist. I'm old. I'm 44. I was like, right on the bubble of tech. We learn on, like, Apple Iie ease at school. I'm not the tech savvy person. And everyone's like, oh, it's just so easy. Just build an app. It's so easy. You can outsource it. And so I didn't know what I was doing. We outsourced it to this Indian firm and they built this beautiful thing, and then we tried to upgrade it with additional features and it just fell apart. And then the language barrier got in the way because we're trying to explain the menstrual cycle to, you know, this language barrier, you know, men and disaster. So we had to rebuild it from scratch. That was V1. We had to rebuild it from scratch for V2. This time we got a European developer from a friend and he again built this wonderful app. It was this upgraded system. And then we ran into the same issue with, like, only he could add to things, and he had other things going on. And finally we're like, this is ridiculous. We need somebody on our team that knows apps that's internal, that can build it to scale. We call it Lego bricks now. So if we have something, we can just Lego brick it on and take something out. And so it's really built to scale. But I never would have told people to Build the app that way, because I knew nothing about that. So the biggest piece of advice is if you're going to do something in your company that you don't know what you're doing, you need to hire somebody who does know what they're doing to do it before you do it. Apps are like, it's so easy to get to 90%, but people expect 99.9%. Getting that last 10 is so difficult. And so, you know, tech is a thankless job. You can do 90 things right, but you do that 91st one wrong, and it's one star every day.
- [31:22]
B
Yeah. Ruthless.
- [31:24]
A
Yeah.
- [31:26]
B
What are your. What are your growth plans? Like, what. What. What's on your roadmap for 2025 with prove?
- [31:31]
A
Um, you know, we want to help all women understand their hormones and not just, you know, help women get pregnant, but just understand more education about. It's not just about timing, but, you know, hormone imbalances create more solutions. So I talked earlier about, you know, we've integrated the ability to get progesterone through our platform. Now instead of having to go through the red tape of convincing your doctor to do it, you can actually just click a button and talk to a doctor. We want to increase that to other medications, other solutions across different platforms. We sell supplements. We just started doing that, so it's a little bit kind of a lower thing of our business. But when you know your hormone information, you can select the right supplements as opposed to, like, going through Amazon and it's like, oh, this one has the best reviews or that one's the cheapest or whatever. You can actually take what your body needs to support the hormones you need supporting, and they just work much better. So instead of like, okay, I'm gonna try this one that didn't work. Okay, I'm gonna try this one that didn't work. You actually get kind of better effects and faster.
- [32:40]
B
And this maybe feeds into what you were saying about your meta plans, where you can be maybe more proactive, where it's not just like, hey, you missed your window this time. You got to order this product right away. But it's more of this broader message about really understand your. Your. Your hormones. This black box of your hormones. Better.
- [32:56]
A
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you take the. The, you know, the reactive approach that Meta doesn't like anymore, it's like, well, hormone imbalances cause infertility and miscarriage and PCOS symptoms and this and that. If you take more of the proactive way, it's healthy hormones or a woman's superpower. It helps her conceive on her timeline, it helps her be focused, it helps her be creative, energetic, all these things. And so if you see a woman with imbalanced hormones, she is like stressed out all the time, she's not sleeping, she's just flies off the handle at her kids all the time, versus someone who's got nice balanced hormones. It's just she carries herself better, she's more in control, she's confident, she's happy, she can manage the daily stressors. Hormones are women's superpower. They shouldn't be something that we want to shut down because they're inhibiting our life. And that's the overall kind of mission. Right. So our tagline is women are innately powerful. Given the right information, they're unstoppable.
- [33:53]
B
Beautiful. Love that sentiment. Thank you so much. This is a little different topic for the DTC podcast, but I think it's really just interesting. It's very multi dimensional product. It's a product. Who's. The, the time has come for things like this. I do you think with the, you know, the, the more attention that's, that's happening in infertility, there's sort of a rising tide type situation with products like yours, I think.
- [34:16]
A
So the problem with this for this industry is that IVF dominates it. And we said it's $58,000 per live birth. So there's a lot of money around there to push the IVF agenda and that narrative. And so for companies like ours, which our products are $100, you know, like, we try to get you pregnant with under $200 worth of stuff, you know, we don't have as much money and profit than these bigger companies who are constantly, you know, trying to kind of go against the system. So we are definitely trying. And I think the younger generation, you know, millennials, they're just, we don't want to put synthetics in our, in our bodies. We don't, you know, we want to eat healthy, we want to be vegan, we want to do, you know, electric vehicles. Like that kind of mentality is shifting into, you know, what it is that we're building. So I think it's a matter of time, but we're getting there.
- [35:14]
B
If people want to follow your journey, the proved journey, first of all, if anyone in our audience is in, you know, in this modality of life, we have a large amount of women on the podcast. But go to provetest.com and check it out. And if people want to get in touch with you about your journey. Would you recommend LinkedIn?
- [35:31]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
- [35:33]
B
Well, thanks for coming on the D2C podcast today. This was educational and inspiring. Thanks again.
- [35:38]
A
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
- [35:47]
B
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you're not a subscriber to our newsletter, you can do that right now @directtoconsumeralloneword.co. i'm Eric Dick, and this has been the DTC podcast. We'll see you next time.