We were approached by Affi, a reputable health & wellness entrepreneur, with a strong passion to address one of the last remaining taboos in women's wellbeing - menopause.

The founder had an impressive overview of the challenges in this space and wanted to use our help to discover a viable business model and an MVP, in order to attract pre-seed investors.

The entire discovery process was aimed at demonstrating evidence that would help the founder build a compelling investment proposition and start proving some early customer traction.

Our research consisted of:

• ‍Problem interviews with the target users - women who are menopausal, peri-menopausal or have already gone through menopause recently. We wanted to learn about their personal menopause experience, how they interacted with healthcare providers, how it affected their workplace, understand their use of technology and current services (digital literacy), and what support systems already exist and how do they use them. ‍
• Competition analysis of apps in the menopause space (lifestyle and medical) and adjacently similar products. We were particularly interested in apps and services that collect user data and help them interpret it as actionable feedback. Research was aimed at discovering proven business models, industry trends, as well as analysing the UX, features, and value propositions of selected products.

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This helped us define a business strategy and a product concept around which we built a prototype to bring this strategy to life.

The Design sprint was aimed at creating a prototype that would translate the product promise into something the end-users and investors could look & feel. We created a facade of a product experience and a Minimum Viable Brand, building just what we needed to make the prototype real enough to get an authentic response from women and validate our solution hypothesis. The conversational design took into account the need to seamlessly blend human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions.

Part of our discovery process was also defining a scalable technology-concept, involving an emergent NLP (natural language processing) approach, an AI-powered way to simulate diagnostic conversations with women in menopause - supported and approved by an AI lead in a later-stage med-tech scale-up.

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• Figma for design
• InVision for prototyping
• Webflow for the landing page
• Typeform for the menopause questionnaire
• Mailchimp for marketing automation
• Google Analytics + Google Tag Manager for analytics
• Iubenda for cookie solution & privacy policy

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We helped the founder build a landing page that showcased the product idea, helped acquire early followers and start building relationships with them through personalised menopause advice.

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In 4 weeks, we have co-created an investor deck that included:

• A value proposition that was based on a series of exploratory interviews with women in menopause.
• A scalable technology-concept.
• A product-concept and design that took into account the need to seamlessly blend human-to-human and human-to-machine interactions.
• A strong hypothesis on the revenue model.
• Assessment of the market size and a beachhead custom segment.
• Positioning and a go2market strategy to get to first 500 customers.
  

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We have also used the preparation of the deck itself to invite multiple investors and a range experts to establish an initial social capital that allowed the founder to rapidly obtain a range of first calls with reputable seed and pre-seed investors. The founder was able to book over 10 investor calls in the first two weeks after the deck was created.