Right to Exist Episode 1: Simplifed - Lactation Support at Population Scale
The concept of Right to Exist has been a cornerstone of how I mentor founders and teach graduate students for years. Too often, builders and investors think of stakeholder alignment, go to market, and venture design as distinct functions. The best builders look at these as an integrated whole.
The arc of success digital health startups is a thoughtfully crafted wedge grows to become your moat, which then defines your right to exist and ability to have human impact at population scale.
Andrea Ippolito has built Simplifed into a national scale telehealth platform delivering lactation and post-partem support in all 50 states. She has contracts with all of the major payers and just raised a $10M series A. When she started Simplifed 6 years ago, the ACA Lactation mandate was almost a decade old, but fewer than 15 percent of lactation consultants billed insurance and less than 5% of those claims got paid. In this interview she shares the steps that she took to get here.
Clip #1 Building for Understaffed Healthcare Mandates.
One reason that I asked Andrea to be my first guest on Right to Exist is that lactation support is structurally similar to many other spaces, pediatric asthma, osteoporosis, menopause, hormone replacement therapy, and others.
What does it take to build for a population or condition that is understaffed or under-resourced by conventional enterprise healthcare?
Clip #2: Integration Friction vs. Product Perfection
One of the common questions that founders have at pre-seed and seed is how much to invest in integration rails with existing healthcare infrastructure.
In Andrea’s case, the signal from OBGYNs was that smooth integration with care flows, and more importantly, feedback loops about how referrals had been handled, would be the driver for adoption.
Clip #3 When Lactation Support Drives more than Lactation Outcomes
Part of the secret sauce for Andrea, was the realization that Simplifed’s contact area with patients was much broader than that of the intermittent visits to OBGYNs who drove the initial referrals.
This meant that they were able to catch things like post-partem depression, preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes and route the patients in need of additional care back to the clinic.
Subscribe below to watch the entire 30 minute conversation.
