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July 18, 2025

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Scaling Smart: How to Grow Women’s Health Startups

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Contributing Writer

By Susan Schulz

Overview

Scaling a startup is more than just growth. Founders from G9 Ventures, Evvy, Inflect Health, and Kindbody offer six tips to preserve trust, brand, and purpose as your company gets larger.

Founders reveal how to stay on-mission and keep investor trust while scaling from the seed stage

As more investors realize the market opportunity for women's health, more founders are transforming their passion projects into growing businesses. But building a company goes beyond identifying an unmet need. It’s about earning — and keeping — trust in one of the most personal and emotionally charged categories in healthcare.

“Healthcare is such a high-trust experience, but a low-trust category,” explained Anna Doherty, an investor at G9 Ventures, a private fund focused on investing in brands that empower consumers. The dearth of positive healthcare experiences leaves space for new companies, she said. If you can deliver a better solution and experience, particularly at scale, you set yourself up for success.

How do startup founders smartly scale and evolve their strategy when growing beyond the seed stage? Entrepreneurs shared their experiences at the recent SiS Women’s Health Conference at Cure in New York City, which drew more than 300 founders and investors to talk strategy, funding, and scaling. Here's six insights from those who’ve done it well and investors who see where others go wrong.

Evolution Tip #1: Expect education to be part of every stage.

When your company is providing a solution to a problem many people don’t have words for, you're not just selling — you're educating a market and building their trust. Priyanka Jain, founder of Evvy, an at-home vaginal microbiome test, remembers the frustration of having to spend so much time educating investors, but it paid off.

“When you spend that time, you end up getting in the door with those firms,” Jain said.

And education also lets you hook in the consumer. By taking the time to educate them about what a vaginal microbiome is, you’ve got their ear when it’s time to tell them about your products. “It's that transition from doing the education of why you should care, to why is Evvy the best solution for you,” she explained.

“There's a lot of storytelling that can be done, especially in the early days when you're a newer company, that can drive that top of funnel awareness,” added Doherty. If you're delivering a better experience, even as an unknown brand, customers feel seen and start to trust you.

Evolution Tip #2: Partner with larger players to fill their gaps.

Hannah Cranston, a media executive who works with women’s founders to build their brands, said she’s noticed a refreshing tendency towards collaboration versus competition when it comes to women’s health startups.

This collaborative spirit can open doors for startups to work with the larger employers and payers, noted Nika Duan, a partner at Inflect Health, which funds startups at multiple stages. “Now that startups have educated the employer and payer market, there are more pathways to become integrated from a B2B perspective,” Duan said.

Shilpa Patel, co-CEO and chief business and legal officer for Kindbody, underscored that being smaller is an asset. The company is flexible enough to be able to provide solutions the bigger players can’t quickly provide. Kindbody initially operated its clinics around fertility, but has since expanded to include mental health, nutrition, a baby prep program, postpartum services, and menopause.

“The continuum of services was always part of our strategy, but it was very much influenced by the employer customer,” she said.

Evolution Tip #3: Let your customers build your brand.

Women have always talked about their health problems with friends and in online communities. Now, instead of just commiserating, they’re vocal about the solutions they’re discovering. Use that word-of-mouth brand awareness to your advantage. Your superfan consumers are like a grassroots marketing team.

“When we started Evvy, from day one I knew we had to build a brand that people really want to talk about,” said Jain. “Now people always tell me they love Evvy’s Tik Tok, they love Evvy’s Instagram. Brand is why 70 percent of our revenue is still organic.”

Jain pointed out that while she was advised to bring on medical experts to co-found her company, she instead chose a chief marketing officer. “Every day I'm so grateful I made that choice. You need the person who's going to solve the hardest part of your business, and if that's acquiring customers, then having someone who knows how to build a brand is extremely important.” She pointed out that Evvy now also has a team of medical experts on board as well.

Patel echoed that Kindbody was launched with brand recognition in mind. “Throughout the journey, we have leaned into our patients’ word-of-mouth and our customers publicly talking about us.”

Brand storytelling is an important part of continued rounds of fundraising as well. A strong customer story can give you a competitive advantage, because investors want to see that consumers are talking about your product. It gives them more confidence that you’ll be able to make that leap from emerging player to category leader, said Duan.

Evolution Tip #4: Keep your focus on the patient.

Even as a company grows, don’t forget the pain point that started your journey in the first place. For Patel, it was a less-than-ideal experience with an egg-freezing cycle, which she found “opaque” even though she had spent her career in healthcare.

“I was jotting things down when the nurse called me and googling what the results meant,” she recalled.

Based on this unfortunate experience, Patel intentionally designed the Kindbody clinical experience so it would appeal to patients—an infusion of warm yellow, physicians wearing street clothes instead of white lab coats, a round table to discuss your options instead of being made to feel small in front of a big mahogany desk. The entire experience aimed to have the patient feeling educated and empowered.

“It’s what we as a founding team, as patients, would have wanted,” explained Patel.

Jain agreed and said they also approached Evvy’s product design from the patient’s perspective.

“These are difficult topics. They can be taboo. How do you give someone an empathetic experience where they can ask questions, where people spend time with you? We built Evvy as the experience we wish we had had,” said Jain.

As both companies expand, they rely on patient feedback to guide growth. “Listening to the patient is key and core to our growth strategy,” said Patel.

“We were the original customer, but there are a lot of things our current customers want that might not be obvious to us,” said Jain.

So, whether it’s on Whatsapp, in a Facebook group, or something else, tap into the direct line you have to your community and consider them a de facto R&D team for where to bring your company next.

Evolution Tip #5: Don’t sacrifice quality as you scale.

The challenge for many startups is to not lose sight of the customer as they scale.

“You can't build an exceptional brand on top of an unexceptional product or service,” G9’s Doherty pointed out.

Once you get to the growth stage, keep investors confident by making sure your operations keep up with scale. “We scaled from zero to 28 clinics, from zero to 135 employer customers, including Walmart, in five years. Massive scale, mass rapid growth. But you need to still execute at scale,” Patel said.

Founders can easily fall prey to doing what investors tell them, but riding out trends with a solid business model is a good strategy.

“We launched the company in 2021 when DTC healthcare was extremely hot,” said Jain. “We raised our Series A in 2023 when DTC healthcare was objectively not hot. Now it’s hot again. The most important thing is to say, this business model works for us, we make money.”

Her advice is to figure out who will pay the right price for your solution at scale. The trends will change, but your business model shouldn’t have to.

Duan notes that no matter what stage a company is in, customer loyalty is of paramount importance to investors. Metrics that show how much people are spending, how frequently, and whether they’re talking about it is essential for early-stage companies to make it to the next stage. And as the company scales, customer loyalty continues to fuel profits.

“The way we think about is: Is this company scalable? Is it something consumers and patients are obsessed with and will keep coming back to?” said Duan.

Evolution Tip #6: Keep fighting the good fight.

Innovation with the goal of better patient experience isn’t a trend. It’s a fundamental shift due to consumer demand, which also drives new solutions. Healthcare solutions are particularly and largely fueled by women, the biggest consumers of healthcare in the U.S.

“There's way more capital out there than there are good companies,” said Doherty. “So if you build a good company and serve your customer, the capital will undoubtedly come.”

And because women’s health has for so long been overlooked, those in the space have plenty of room to play. The steady influx of investment in this sector indicates it’s only just beginning.

“In many ways, it feels like this is the light. This has to be the future,” said Duan. “So keep at it.”

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