Overview
Anne Fulenwider, co-founder and co-CEO of Alloy Helath, on why clear, jargon-free storytelling helps healthcare companies earn trust, traction, and scale.
For Anne Fulenwider, co-founder and co-CEO of Alloy Health, storytelling is not a branding exercise. It is the backbone of building a healthcare company.
She believes healthcare companies succeed when they can clearly explain the problem they are solving, the solution they offer, and why it matters, without jargon. At the end of the day, she says, investors, patients, doctors, regulators, and the press are all responding to the same thing: whether they recognize themselves in the story being told.
Fulenwider’s expertise in storytelling is multi-layered. After 25 years as a magazine editor, making complex, often stigmatized topics understandable and relatable, she applied that same approach to building a healthcare company. Alloy is focused on perimenopause and menopause, and by naming the condition plainly, connecting scattered symptoms into a single experience, and explaining treatment in simple terms, it brought clarity to an area often overlooked by the market.
According to Fulenwider, most healthcare founders would greatly benefit from sharpening their storytelling chops when thinking about their business.
View the entire lesson of our Concept to Cure course: The Storytelling Advantage with Anne Fulenwider. All lessons available exclusively to Cure members.
Strip It Down to the Problem and the Solution
Fulenwider’s rule is simple. Know the problem, know the solution, and remove the jargon.
At Alloy, that clarity came from shedding light on menopause, a universal transition that has been treated like a private embarrassment. Many women experience symptoms without realizing they’re connected, and many feel alone. That silence is reinforced by stigma, and by the fact that menopause has historically been under-taught and under-discussed in clinical training and popular culture.
Once Alloy named the problem directly, the response was immediate: people recognized themselves in it.
When People Feel Seen, the Story Spreads
Fulenwider describes this as the “aha” moment. When you make someone feel seen, relief kicks in. Then it travels.
Women tell their friends. Support groups light up with, “Oh, that’s me.” Word of mouth starts compounding, not because of clever marketing tricks, but because the story is finally saying out loud what so many people have been quietly experiencing.
The irony is that Alloy’s core story is almost aggressively simple. Menopause is when estrogen drops. That causes symptoms. Estrogen can help relieve the most acute symptoms.
For founders building in healthcare, the takeaway is straightforward. If you can’t explain the problem and the solution plainly, in a way that makes someone immediately recognize themselves, your story isn’t ready yet.
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Concept to Cure lessons are available exclusively to Cure members.
