Kindbody has been dubbed the “SoulCycle” of fertility by The Verge, which notes that it promotes reproductive treatments and “empowerment” to 25-year-olds. Although it’s a stretch, I can see how the company may be likened to The Wing’s aesthetic-driven facade. Kindbody isn’t only marketing a sense of belonging; it’s also emphasizing the commercialization of patient care. Kindbody is attempting to fit into the lives of individuals trying to conceive by focusing on making patients feel like they have control over their reproductive journeys.
“When you’re building a business, you have to consider how consumers act now and what’s happened in the previous five, ten, or fifteen years,” said Gina Bartasi, founder and chairperson of Kindbody. “Consumers, on the other hand, seek for and get content.” She notices how different the environment is today compared to when she was trying to conceive.
“I believe the most difficult thing is adapting, whether it’s to the media or to healthcare,” she remarked. “You have to keep going back and forth with your consumer and their behavior, and how that’s evolved.” The patient, of course, is your consumer in healthcare.” Our lives have altered dramatically in the previous decade as a result of easy access to information via social media platforms, and the COVID-19 epidemic has only contributed to our sense of insecurity. Businesses were forced to close for months at the end of 2020, schools have vacillated between requiring physical attendance and hosting virtual classes throughout the country, and businesses that previously prohibited remote work have been exposed to hybrid arrangements such as “hoteling.”
“The majority of patients require calendar flexibility,” Bartasi remarked. “I believe that historically, in health care, the patient did whatever the doctor ordered them to do and that with Kindbody, the patient is in command, not necessarily the doctor.” This method may be found in practically all of Kindbody’s offerings. Kindbody not only aims to respond to the way its potential patients live their lives, but it also wants them to have a familiar experience. When you visit Kindbody’s website, you’ll see a user-friendly landing page with photographs of well-designed workplaces and social networking links. At this point, it’s a familiar appearance for the 2020s, and that’s on purpose.
At the end of the day, you may have the finest technology and data in the world, but [patients] are still sobbing at home; it’s awful, and they can’t get out of bed in the morning. This startup is attempting to drastically disrupt the women’s healthcare industry by concentrating on educating, making patients feel cared for, and giving answers to major pain areas through employer-provided benefits, employing both B2B and B2C revenue streams. Bartasi said in part 1 of this TC-1 that she felt like a subordinate to the doctor during her reproductive journey, and her team at Kindbody has worked hard to avoid that.
“It’s a completely broken system.” Both Bartasi and Dr. Fahimeh Sasan, Kindbody’s current chief innovation officer and an experienced board-certified OBGYN, are familiar with the challenges of the fertility journey from two different perspectives — the patient and the provider — due to the nature of their relationships with the space. The fragmentation of care, they discovered, is the overall obstacle that makes every stage of this process more challenging.
