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- “You Don’t Have the Right To Screw It Up”: Kin’s Founder on Starting a Health Tech Startup
“You Don’t Have the Right To Screw It Up”: Kin’s Founder on Starting a Health Tech Startup
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Kin Fertility is on a mission to empower women to take control of their reproductive health. “With Kin, we take the overwhelming reproductive health experience — or a fertility journey experience — and make that as simple as possible,” says Nicole Liu in this week’s episode of The Flipside podcast. “We try to think about it from all the way from contraception . . . into conceiving, the pregnancy, and postpartum. The entire journey.”
The company was founded in a similar way to many successful startups: by someone (in this case, Liu) identifying a gap, or perceived gap, in the market that they can fill. Sitting down with The Flipside hosts Sali Sasi and Julie Stevanja, Liu explains that Kin Fertility was conceived shortly after her own brush with infertility . . . or so she thought.
At 24, Liu was more proactive than many people her age, and on a recommendation from a very savvy friend, she went to see her GP for a general health check-up that included a blood test that checks for any hormonal abnormalities. “I came back for what ended up being like a five-minute consult,” she says. “And in that consult, the doctor looked at me and said, ‘Hey, you have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)’. He was scrolling Web MD to try and look up what the results might mean. And he just says, ‘You are gonna be infertile’.”
To say this sent Liu spiralling is fairly accurate, and though she soon learned that she neither had PCOS nor does PCOS automatically indicate infertility, she was alarmed by the lack of reliable information available on the subject.
The timing of Kin’s launch in February 2020 was fortuitous, since what started as a blog that was all about education and offering people a reliable source of fertility information online, quickly evolved into a telehealth platform for contraception. “It was pretty clear that there was a need for better information,” Liu explains. “Education is healthcare. If you don’t understand your body, you don’t understand your options, you can’t advocate for yourself, so healthcare was kind of the next step [for Kin].” It was around this time that Kin joined forces with Eucalyptus — a digital healthcare collective that has brands like Software, Pilot, Normal, and Juniper — to help launch and scale Kin Fertility into the healthcare space.
Liu explains that starting a healthcare brand is different from launching a consumer brand, in the sense that screwing up the platform or delivering a sub-optimal service isn’t an option. “Your MVP (minimum viable product) can only be so scrappy,” she says, adding that launching Kin with Eucalyptus meant they started with developers, designers, a legal team, and an operations team (basically, a startup dream!).
“If someone’s trusting you with their health, their information, and their body, you don’t have the right to screw that up. So, for us, it was very evident that we needed that resource. We needed to make sure that we were like well capitalized, well resourced, and had all the tools that we need to make sure that the experience that we developed for every single patient, including the first one, had to be like seamless.”
The standout service offered by Kin Fertility is a pill prescription service that allows people to access the right contraception for them, responsibly and without needing to physically visit a doctor. The “telehealth” model is more accurately a text conversation with a doctor through the Kin web platform, where you can ask questions about your current contraceptive (the pill or otherwise) or start the pill for the first time. “Essentially how it works is you do the quiz online and that’s about like 40 to 60 health-related questions,” Liu explains. “If it’s appropriate and safe to do so, the doctor will make a prescription that has about three to four repeats on it, so by the time you are almost done with your first repeat, we send you the second one automatically.” Even more conveniently, you can pause your service at any time or speak to a doctor again about any questions that have arisen.
In case you haven’t gathered yet, Kin Fertility and Liu are constantly innovating. That means, they haven’t stopped with a convenient (and, importantly, safe) pill subscription model, but have also expanded into prenatal vitamins that use more bioavailable vitamins than you may find at your local supermarket. Further, the project Liu is most passionate about is the #WeNeedMoreLeave movement, which is fighting to increase paid miscarriage leave to a minimum of 10 days of paid leave. To date, Kin has had 80 Aussie companies sign up, impacting almost 11,000 employees nationwide.
To hear more about Nicole Liu’s tech startup journey, listen to this week’s episode of The Flipside.
You can listen to The Flipside wherever you listen to your podcasts, with episodes dropping every Thursday — each with an exclusive offer from one of the Her Black Book brand partners. In this episode (which you can listen to below) Aussie-made SPF brand, Naked Sundays, is offering 20% off, sitewide, when you shop via the Her Black Book app. You have until midnight on Sunday 11 September to take advantage of the discount, so be quick! To unlock even more exclusive deals and offers, download the Her Black Book app now.
