Alcoholics Anonymous Meets Bumble for Infertility.
In 2017, Elyse and Brad Ash founded Fruitful Fertility, a service that connected people struggling with infertility, miscarriage, and IVF with a fertility mentor who had been through a similar experience and wanted to provide private, one-on-one peer support.
This was Elyse and Brad’s first time building a product, community, and company from scratch. Below is a case study outlining how the Fruitful team traveled from validating their idea, to building a brand, to attracting and retaining paid users, to raising money and hiring a team, to selling various pieces and closing down the company.
When Elyse and Brad started going through infertility themselves, they were shocked by how challenging it was to receive meaningful emotional support from their friends and family. While their network wanted to alleviate the pain and anxiety they were experiencing, it was simply too hard for people who had not experienced infertility firsthand to truly empathize.
That’s when they had the idea to create a tech-enabled peer support platform to connect those actively struggling with infertility, IVF or miscarriages with ‘fertility mentors'' who had been through similar experiences and were now ‘on the other side.’ But before the couple invested more time or money into the idea, it was important to articulate the problem they were trying to solve and then listen to the community about what specifically would be the most helpful.
Problem Statement: How might we make infertility suck less?
1 in 8 couples experience infertility - and infertility is the 4th most traumatic life a woman can experience. So why is it so isolating and difficult to get meaningful support?
Connect individuals going through infertility with a “fertility mentor” who has been through a similar experience or received a similar diagnosis and connect the two so no one has to feel alone.
While Brad and Elyse were excited about the idea of 1:1 connecting and private peer support, they wanted to make sure this was an idea the community itself could truly support and get excited about.
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After Brad and Elyse felt confident that the service would be valuable for the TTC (Trying to Conceive) community, they started sketching how a Minimum Viable Product might work. They knew it’d be important to consider their users’ privacy since they would be requesting a lot of personal information around their fertility histories to best match users.
Minimum Viable Product = What’s the smallest thing we can build that would prove valuable to our target market?
The team didn’t want to jump into a native app build which would require a long time and a bit of capital. They wanted to launch quickly and start gaining information from users as quickly as possible. So they created a simple marketing website where mentors and mentees could both sign up and where the company could explain how the process worked.
Mentors and mentees each signed up on www.fruitfulfertility.org. Once a mentee submitted their application, the Fruitful team would use the database to find a suitable mentor. Once a mentee and mentor were matched through the Fruitful database system, an automated email would be sent to each person with the contact information of their match. The mentee and mentor could then connect in their own time and in their own way.
A key element that needed to be solved early was how to build a two-sided network with two different, yet similar, experiences and needs: one for mentees (those struggling with infertility and wanting help) and one for mentors (those who had been through infertility and wanted to help guide and support others). The program would not work without a semi-equal number of mentees and mentors. First, the team created personas around mentees and mentors exploring their motivations, goals, and interests.
The team then crafted messaging for the website and for other content pieces that would resonate with both types of users. Roughly ⅔ of the user base were mentees and ⅓ of the user base identified as mentors. The challenge of equality in user types was solved by most mentors offering to assist more than one mentee.
Perhaps more important than designing the marketing landing page, was designing the backend database. With so much sensitive information, it was important to ensure the data was secure and also create a robust search functionality to easily make matches. Fruitful captured and secured all user information using the latest data encryption standards and then used a matching algorithm to suggest the best possible mentor/mentee relationships based on geography, diagnosis, age, etc. The team then finalized all of the matches by hand, which while time-consuming was the most effective way to create meaningful, helpful relationships between mentors and mentees.
Once a mentor and mentee were matched, that would fire off a chain of automated emails via SendInBlue, alerting both mentor and mentee they had been matched and sharing their contact information with one another.
Some questions the team asked themselves when considering the database:
SendInBlue was the email client used to create a robust system of automated alerts and communications. Once a mentor and mentee were matched, they’d receive a message alerting both parties of the match and were free to communicate however they saw fit (options were via email, phone, text or in-person).
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Elyse’s professional background of working for 10+ years as a creative at ad agencies, meant that creating a strong, ownable brand was of the utmost importance. Here’s how Elyse and the team went about building the Fruitful Fertility brand from scratch.
Elyse worked with an amazing graphic designer, Diana Quenomoen, to help bring the Fruitful brand look and feel to life. The team was able to design an impactful, beautiful brand look while also creating an inimitable voice that resonated deeply with the infertility community, lending itself well to merchandise, memes, and other spaces and uses.
Fruitful’s Mission: To support, empower and educate the 1 in 8 couples struggling with the emotional fallout of infertility.
Elyse wrote the core values of Fruitful before hiring even a single employee. As the CEO, she wanted to make sure the company had a strong set of values against which they could hire, fire, promote and work against. These were Fruitful’s core values:
Fruitful was designed by fellow fertility warriors to be a private, safe place to open up about the emotional struggles specific to infertility and child loss. It became a trusted resource for thousands of people around the world trying to grow their families. Despite there being hundreds of fertility-related apps, groups, tools and other platforms, three key items differentiated Fruitful from competing brands and offerings:
Fruitful received hundreds of testimonials from mentees who found true connection and care through the service and mentors who found purpose and meaning in helping others. The company shared testimonials on its website, social media platforms and in other places, as well.
“Thank you for putting together such a wonderful program! My mentor is wonderful and it has really made a huge difference in my outlook! I am so grateful to have found your program and for my mentor’s support.” —Fruitful Mentee
“WOW. You made an amazing match; my mentee is just amazing. Our backgrounds are SO similar! And while this might not be so interesting for most participants: we both grew up only a few hours from each other, both have the same infertility issue, were both diagnosed at the same age, and both are doing/did donor eggs. I could go on, but I mean, really? You guys are some intuitive fruits!” —Fruitful Mentor
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The Fruitful Fertility platform launched April 2017, during National Infertility Week. The team knew that the mainstream media would be more likely to promote their story and platform when a spotlight was already on the topic of trying to conceive. The strategy paid off, with Fruitful getting strong PR traction in a variety of publications right from the jump.
Free at First: The team decided to launch Fruitful as a free service for mentors and for mentees. They wanted to work on gaining traction and building a committed, engaged user base before charging a fee and creating additional barriers to join.
Press became an integral piece of Fruitful’s growth strategy, primarily in attracting more mentor signups. While mentees tended to find Fruitful via organic content, social media and SEO, mentors who had moved on from their fertility journeys would mostly hear about the service via press or in more mainstream conversations. Some of the company’s most impactful press coverage includes stories from:
While mentors primarily heard about Fruitful through press, mentees heard about the service via strategic partnerships and giveaways with other fertility brands. Fruitful proudly partnered with many other fertility-related communities, services, clinics and other brands like Fertility IQ, Stork OTC, Beli Baby, Fertility Rescripted, MyMindBodyBaby, MyVitro and more.
The decision was made early on to invest in the creation of organic content across multiple channels. Since the fertility community is highly intelligent and Google-savvy, the Fruitful team prioritized writing blog content that focused on the most frequently asked questions around IVF, trying to conceive, reading pregnancy tests, optimizing health for fertility and information around miscarriages. The team then expanded their content to audio by creating a podcast, Been There, Injected That. The primary media channels used to promote Fruitful’s organic content included:
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In August 2019, with a couple thousand users, Elyse made the decision to leave her full-time job and commit to Fruitful. She’d been trying to balance working as a Creative Director at a digital marketing company, growing Fruitful and (finally!) being a new mom and it was too much. Elyse decided to quit her paying job to give Fruitful a real shot.
With traction being made in user signups and brand engagement, it was time to focus more specifically on monetization. This occurred in a few ways:
In Q4 of 2019, the company decided to raise $100,000 in a family and friends round of fundraising in the form of a convertible note. The company was not one which would attract venture funding, so this decision was made to raise the funds needed to invest in supporting the launch of a native app and also building out the team to pursue a B2B revenue model. Fruitful closed on the $100K in February 2020, weeks before the Covid Pandemic hit.
The $100K was budgeted to:
Fruitful received quite a bit of traction and prestige in the Twin Cities startup ecosystem. It was included in many accelerators, won a few awards, and was viewed as a promising company with a strong future.
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As Fruitful continued to grow, it became apparent to Elyse and Brad that the next step was to build and release a native app for Fruitful users. The team was missing out on important data by allowing users to connect directly via email or texts/phone calls. There was no way to measure the frequency or quality of the connections and it was also tough to know when mentors were dropping the ball, which created poor user experiences.
Creating a private app also helped alleviate some privacy concerns users had around sharing their personal phone number and email address with strangers over the internet. The team learned by asking users that while they respected the low-fi solution at first, it was necessary for more privacy to be built into the process regarding their personal information.
After surveying and speaking with both Fruitful mentors and mentees, the team determined that the app would need to:
The team chose to build the Fruitful native app in React Native, which would allow them to use packages of code that would help them move fast. It was decided that the best strategy for the build would be finding a balance between off-the-shelf packages and also being able to customize enough of the code so the product wouldn’t be too restricted. Fruitful users had requested a private app, so while it wasn’t necessary to prove out the need, the biggest challenge was managing expectations for the technology.
Users were comparing the Fruitful chat experience to feature-rich products like FB Messenger and iOs so the team had to find ways of building and delivering a product that worked reliably, sent messages in real-time, was easy to use and also secure.
The other big priority when building the app was privacy and security. The team had to balance protecting user privacy from someone who had access to the backend while also leveraging information to create a seamless, safe user experience. As any technologist knows, it’s challenging to use proper encryption and build an application that runs at speed. Encryption is notoriously for adding layers and slowing down processes. The team needed the app to function at a reasonable speed, ,but also didn’t want to sacrifice privacy for functionality.
While Fruitful’s production environment had very secure and limited access, things could become more permissive when migrated into development environments. Therefore, the team built a system that would anonymize and rotate data for its development environments. They needed the real size of user data, but the data itself had to be anonymized and cleansed of user associations. This was a priority for the development team and one that proved very helpful.
The native app was launched to both the App Store and Google Play Store in March 20202. You can watch a demo of the app here from the team’s MinneDemo presentation.
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In January 2021, Elyse and Brad made the challenging decision to close Fruitful in the spring. It was not an easy decision to close the business, especially when its mission was so personal and purposeful. However, the team faced a challenging year and costs associated with operating and maintaining the platform continued to outpace internal revenue projections.
The pressure to perform was real. When you’re running a full-time business (with the goal of transforming it into an enterprise) rather than a passion project or side hustle, it needs to make real money. There are vendors and contractors to pay. Servers to scale. Content to fund. Fruitful ran lean and mean for a while, but the team struggled to transition from a self-funded (literal) mom-and-pop business to a self-sustaining startup with hockey stick revenue that could attract big investors down the road. The choice came down to either going out and raising more money during a global pandemic, or giving back investors some money and closing the service with dignity and intention. By taking action early, the team was able to close the company with the highest levels of integrity and compassion possible, maintaining their relationships with investors, team members, advisors, customers and the community.
The team was able to sell some of the IP, which not only helped them recoup some dollars, but also felt good. One of the hardest parts of letting go of Fruitful was saying goodbye to all of the educational, inspirational content and marketing work created from scratch. Knowing that other companies with similar missions will now benefit from that work has been a silver lining.
At the height of the company, Fruitful had 4 employees, over 5,200 users and notable partnerships with trusted healthcare companies and fertility brands. The program helped thousands of people get emotional support during a traumatic time in their lives.
