FutureOfFertility_Amy Beckley: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

FutureOfFertility_Amy Beckley: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Abby Mercado:
Hi. I'm Abby Mercado, an IVF mom, former VC investor, and CEO of Rescripted. Welcome to The Future of Fertility, a podcast dedicated to shining a light on the entrepreneurs and innovators who are changing the face of family building. With billions in funding over the past few years, we'll introduce you to the people, the ideas, and the businesses that are changing the fertility industry and in turn, millions of people's lives. The future of fertility is bright. Now let's get into it!

Abby Mercado:
Today, I am here with Dr. Amy Beckley, the founder and CEO of MFB Fertility. MFB Fertility Researches develops and sells in-home tests for fertility tracking purposes. The first product they developed is the Proov test, which measures the presence of progesterone metabolites in urine. Progesterone is a hormone produced in the ovaries after ovulation has occurred, these tests allow couples to better monitor their fertility at home. So Amy and I go way back, we met back in 2019, and she was actually the very first person I met in this field outside of my fertility care team. Proov was well on its way and I was exploring becoming a fertility founder myself. She said, it's going to be hard, but go for it. So welcome, Amy, thanks so much for joining me!

Amy Beckley:
Thanks for having me!

Abby Mercado:
I'm so excited to have you on this podcast, the Future of Fertility. When I think about the future of fertility, I certainly think about Proov and all the good work that you and Elon and team are doing. So to start us out, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, and please include one fun fact about you that few people know.

Amy Beckley:
Uhm, okay, I have a PhD in pharmacology. I thought I wanted to be a doctor that didn't work out when I could not stand the sight of needles, so I did research instead. I worked at a biotech company and did some cancer research, drug development research, really, really loved it. I just wanted to do something impactful that could bring change to people's lives. I didn't know what it was until, fast-forward, I got a PhD, I was working on my postdoc, and I had gotten married. I had built this beautiful new house and had a dog and had the next to the really cool school district. We're like, all right, cool. You know, just, just, just have some kids, you know how easy it could be. So, punch line, is not easy. We struggled, we struggled a lot. Being a scientist, I was just very type A about it. Like, I wanted to be informed, I wanted to track it. I had been on birth control for, I don't know, I would say, 15 years at that point. So coming off of it, it was like my body was not ovulating, I had no idea what a normal cycle was, I was just all new to this. So I did all the things ... mucus, temperature of OBKs, like all that stuff. And I could tell that when you match up my temperature graphs and my LHSs with the ones on fertility friend, they didn't match up and it was, you know, I wasn't getting pregnant. So I was like, all right, cool, I'll just take all this amazing data to my doctor, and they will help me. Yeah, wrong. I hadn't been trying long enough apparently, so they said, Amy, you're only 28 years old. You've only been trying for six months, go back and give it another try.

Abby Mercado:
What is the rule of thumb? A year, they say?

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, if you're under 35 is 12 months. I mean four over 35 at six months, so, you know, chose, I had no other option. But I went back and I tried again. A couple of months later we actually got a positive pregnancy test and it was amazing, and that was probably the happiest nine days of my life. And then all comes crashing down on Mother's Day, mind you.

Abby Mercado:
No!

Amy Beckley:
Yes, we're sitting at church like one of those like outdoor like celebration things at church where they have like the pavilion and stuff. And we're sitting there and I felt cramping and I didn't know, in the night got up, and I could feel this gush. I was like, oh, no, no, no, no. And yeah, sure enough, lost that pregnancy. And I was like, well, you know, the silver lining is maybe I can actually get that help now. I can tell them I can't get pregnant, I had a miscarriage, and so I called them up, and I was like, you know, I would love to talk to you. And they said, well, you know, that's totally normal, one in four pregnancies, you know, 25% of pregnancies just end in loss, and there's really nothing we can do about it and we're really sorry. Go try again. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Like, what does it take to get some bump around here? And so long story short is I actually made the criteria, which is three losses and or 12 months trying to conceive and the OB had, she couldn't help me, she does know how to get people pregnant, ao she referred me to the reproductive endocrinologist in town. And so I went to talk to him, and all my tests were just normal, everything was normal. Baseline ultrasound scans, tubes open, uterus clear, blood work great, everything looked fine. And so I was unexplained infertile, that is the number one cause of infertility is unexplained. And so he's like, you know, and I have a really good relationship with my, with my doctor to this day. I have no idea what's wrong with you, Amy, and since I don't know, you have a very little chance of conceiving what will give you the highest chances to go through IVF. And so that seemed very reasonable to me, and so we did, we went through two rounds of IVF. The second round I did conceive, I think your followers all know the IVF journey. So this is something that not many people know. So I do remember, my first round was beautiful. I had ten embryos, all of them made to five day. They were like beautiful AA quality and they put two in, we froze the last eight and nothing. It was like a beautiful cycle of nothing. Second cycle got seven eggs, only three fertilized, and by day three they call me, and they're like, Amy, you better come in, we're going to put them all in because they're not going past eight-cell stage like we.

Abby Mercado:
Put them all in?

Amy Beckley:
Yes.

Abby Mercado:
Wow! Okay.

Amy Beckley:
So this was back in 2009.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. Fair enough.

Amy Beckley:
And it wasn't as good of a procedure, right? So there's been so many advances, this is 2009, we're like all of them, just.

Abby Mercado:
Like, right?

Amy Beckley:
This is ... mom time, right? So okay, and so they put them all in, and here I am thinking, okay, what am I going to do next cycle? I'm going to do, like, acupuncture and do this and like how you know, all the different meds, we're going to change this and that. And I spotted the entire time in my luteal phase and I went for the pregnancy test. I didn't take one at home and it turned out positive. And that's my 12-year-old. He's turning 12 on, on Saturday. I was like, wow.

Abby Mercado:
Happy birthday!

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, that was really cool that that happened. But it always was like in my mind, what was wrong with me? Like, why could I not conceive right? And so I go through, okay, this, this IVF, we did this, we did that, and like my scans and I knew I was making follicles, I knew I was getting the right size, I knew I had adequate estrogen levels, like all these different things. But what always struck me was on those charts is my luteal phase for the time from ovulation until my next period was very short. I would be lucky if I got nine days between positive ovulation tests and next period. And you can see my temperature was great and then we just crashed real soon. And so I went back to the doctor and I said, I think this just means I don't have enough progesterone, right? So your ovary makes progesterone after you ovulate, and it has to make enough so that when that egg gets fertilized by the sperm, goes to the uterus, and then it can implant, and then once it implants, it rescues the body into saying, okay, don't, don't have a period right now because we're pregnant and we got to keep this. And so mine was crashing too soon. And so I said, okay, well, maybe I'm just, I'm, problem with, problem with ovulation and they're not making enough progesterone. And what he said to me was very shocking, was, well, we don't really know if that works. And I said, but you have every single person in the world that does IVF on luteal phase progesterone, correct? And he's like, yes, because we know that works. And I said, okay, tell me the difference, and he goes, This is a natural cycle, we don't know if there's such a thing, we know there's such a thing in the context of IVF, but we don't know if there's such a thing in the context of a natural cycle. I said, could I just have it and see what happens? He's like, yeah, sure, it's not going to do any harm, you know, like.

Abby Mercado:
I'm sure not many patients had that, have that reaction and those complex scientific questions.

Amy Beckley:
Right, right. Yeah. No, that's why I love him. Like he's, he's a great human being, we're actually Facebook friends, so it's cool to ... It's family. Yeah, I know, right? So he's like, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. And so I took it, and we just did it naturally the second time because I was not doing IVF again, it was just so hard emotionally, physically.

Abby Mercado:
Financially.

Amy Beckley:
Everything, all of it.

Abby Mercado:
All the things, yeah.

Amy Beckley:
Exactly. So we went through it, and I wish we would just time intercourse and I would just take my progesterone, it was ... at the time, that was what my insurance covered.

Abby Mercado:
Where did you get it? Like your doctor just wrote you a prescription and you just picked it up?

Amy Beckley:
So he wrote a prescription, and then, there's another thing that people don't know about me, is I got it from a Canadian pharmacy.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, man, oh, wow.

Amy Beckley:
I don't know who's ... again, but yeah, it was stupid expensive in the States.

Abby Mercado:
Sure. How much do you think you paid for it?

Amy Beckley:
I would say a couple hundred dollars a month, I think.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, yeah.

Amy Beckley:
But I mean, a couple of hundred dollars a month for a medication versus 40,000 for the IVF. I mean, it's really a no-brainer.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Amy Beckley:
So, yeah, so we did that. And within two months I got pregnant and I stayed pregnant and she's eight.

Abby Mercado:
Wow. What a story!

Amy Beckley:
Yeah. I was like, holy moly, like why? I was just I was just shocked. I was like, that's, that's all it took. And, like, doctors don't know that we could just do this for natural cycles? So I tried to kind of unpack what was going on and all the blood work came out great, and so one of the things on the blood panel was the cycle day 21 blood draw, right? So I know cycle day 21 is not the correct blood draw because nobody ovulates, not everybody ovulates on day 14. So basically you're trying to get seventies after ovulation. And so I would call the office and I would come in seven days after my LH surge and I would get a progesterone draw, so those always looked fine, they always looked normal. But I later learned that it was just did you ovulate or not? Because the real test is not diagnostic to tell you if you have enough progesterone to support a pregnancy, it's just did you ovulate or not. And so the blood work was fine. But then my period would start like the next day or the day after, and so it was basically like my embryo didn't have enough time to get out of the ovary, get fertilized, get down to where it's going, implant, rescue the ovary to keep making progesterone before it just crashed and my period came. And it was because they weren't doing testing, they stopped testing at seven days after ovulation. And so I was like, well, we need to test more, okay, how are you going to test a woman more? And you can't, how you make her go to the clinic a million times. So we developed a urine test and that measures the progesterone metabolite in urine over the implantation window, which is seven, eight, nine, and ten days after ovulation or after a LH surge, if you don't have your own personal ovulation ultrasound machine, you can't.

Abby Mercado:
Wait, you don't at home? You might, I don't.

Amy Beckley:
This is another story, I had doctor once tell me this is the stupidest test ever, I could just tell somebody that they ovulated immediately with ultrasound. I'm like, that would be a fantastic invention to get everyone their own ultrasound machine, and then we wouldn't have to pee on sticks anymore!

Abby Mercado:
Oh, my goodness. So I feel like so many people, we talk about HCG as being so important to pregnancy, but it's actually progesterone.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah. So let me tell you the science, so basically when you ovulate, your body produces LH and that ruptures the follicle and your egg hopefully leaves, becomes fertilized, and goes to the uterus. Your ovary will make progesterone for hopefully 12 to 14 days, and then it'll stop making progesterone if you get your period. Now, if the embryo comes in and implants and starts making HCG, it looks very similar to LH, this is why an LH test will turn positive when you're pregnant, is because the two hormones look very, very similar. To the embryo, what it does is it releases HCG which goes on to, to ovary and says, don't stop making progesterone and it rescues it to tell it, you know, we need you to keep making progesterone for a few more weeks, to give us time to make a placenta so that the placenta can make the progesterone. And so HCG is very, very important, and it's, I know it's got multiple jobs, but one of the main jobs it has is to tell the ovary to keep making progesterone and estrogen to support that pregnancy. And so that is very, very important for HCG, the role for HCG, but it's the progesterone which allows a woman to get pregnant and to remain pregnant. And at any time during the pregnancy, if she doesn't have enough progesterone, it causes infertility because is miscarriage or causes preterm labor, preterm birth ...

Abby Mercado:
Do we know how many women are, are affected by, like how many women do you think you've helped by creating some of the testing resources?

Amy Beckley:
So we've sold over 100,000 kits.

Abby Mercado:
Wow!

Amy Beckley:
So there's a lot of women in there, thank you. We've done some clinical studies and for women that are using Proov already, so it's kind of a little bit of a biased population, it's about 45% of women don't have adequate progesterone. But it's, they're coming to us because they already know they have a problem, right? So if you look at like literature, it's about 25 or 30% of women just don't have adequate levels of hormones. And it's just because our lifestyle is they're stressful, and the stuff we put in our body as we eat, this, you know, working all the time, COVID didn't help all these different things, it just, we're just, it's one of those like slow fertility decline.

Abby Mercado:
Well, thank god you guys, and just the democratization of testing.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, there was a study, so I go back to where my doctor was like, well, we don't know. It's never been tested a natural cycle. So there's this thing called egg freezing, which is really popular ...

Abby Mercado:
I think, I think I've heard of it.

Amy Beckley:
I know. So what's really popular now is once you've frozen your eggs and you want to put them back in, they do what's called a natural transfer, right? So you work with your own ovulatory body and you wait for the positive ovulation test, and then you come in five days later and you transfer, right? And so during those studies, 50% of those women, on a natural cycle, needed progesterone support in the luteal phase, 50%. So that was the study I was looking for back in 2009 that didn't exist, but it's like thanks to egg freezing now we know.

Abby Mercado:
Now we know. Yeah. Well, okay, so you've told me all about yourself and about how the idea for the Proov test came to be, I didn't get your fun facts, though.

Amy Beckley:
The fun fact was that I did two IVF cycles, one look beautiful, didn't work, one looked like complete garbage, it worked. Another fun fact is my son's name is Cash. We kind of joke, we called him Cash because he took all of our cash.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, IVF'll do that, to you.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome. Well, thank you for that fun fact. So tell me a little bit about just the founding story of MFB Fertility and kind of the moment that you knew that you had to take that leap and you've already shared kind of your personal fertility challenges. But kind of walk me through, like, how did you make this science a business, that is so hard for so many people, how do you do it effectively?

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, I mean, so I had the one IVF baby and then the one natural that just needed that, that progesterone luteal phase support. And after I had my kids, I kind of came out of the closet, like I was completely silent. I mean, I was the one that never announced pregnancies on Facebook. Like, I was just, I just never did it because I was so scared. You know, in my entire history, I've had seven losses, so this gives a lot of the story. But like, it was a big, it was a battle, it was really, really hard to get the family. And so I was just, I didn't want to, it didn't feel good celebrating, so I thought I was going to jinx it, ...

Abby Mercado:
No, it doesn't sound weird at all. I mean, I think that, for some it's totally normal, to so many fertility patients including myself so.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, so I had my kids and I was like, all right, I'm going to tell the world what happened and kind of share my story. And I was just shocked at the number of friends and family members that came into my DMs. I don't think they were called DMs at that point in 2012. They were like, what did you do? Like, tell me, I'm struggling right now. And I was just like, well, this is my story, this is what I did, this is what you should ask for, like this, and I was getting my friends pregnant, like I was telling them information that they didn't know, that they could really just help guide their treatment, right? It was like I knew this piece of information that even doctors didn't know. And so how, how were they going to know this even existed, because it was like something that they didn't know about? And so I told them, they all got pregnant. And then I was, my friend called me, who also has an IVF baby, she has PCOS, she's like, Amy, we got to do something, we got to do something, you know, I just, we just do it. And so literally one day went on the FDA website for like, all right, what are you going to do?

Abby Mercado:
It seems like, it seems so daunting. That seems like a really, oh, my goodness, it's like, yeah. Tell me more, keep going.

Amy Beckley:
What do we do to make a test that like test for progesterone and you know? And so I went on like PubMed, I was looking at all the research and it was astonishing how much beautiful research there was on PDG, which is what we measure and the levels and what are good levels? What are bad levels? Like how it correlates with serum levels and how it correlates with BBT and like all this stuff and like I remember reading this one paper, it was like, this is ... All we need to do now is create an at-home test, period. And so I was like, where is the test? This was published like five years ago. And so I emailed him, I legitimately emailed him like I read this, you know, he's like, yeah, the company decided that it was too hard to go into women's health, and so they just took away that entire branch and now they're doing an infectious disease, so there will be no home test. I was like, if I developed one, would, would you like want in? He's like, oh yeah, absolutely, I definitely, right. So I, like, you know, I just went through like into like talk to everybody and kind of figured out that it was, it was possible. So I went into my basement and I ordered some stuff online.

Abby Mercado:
What, like, okay, stop there. What what did you order? Like, I mean, I guess, like you, you have this insane education, so you probably knew, but you just, like, checked out on Amazon, like how ...

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, it was, it wasn't Amazon. So I am a scientist and I do lots and lots of essays and tests and experiments in the lab. And so we look at proteins all the time, we look at, so there's technology where it's an antibody that binds to a specific protein, and then you can see how much of it is in the tissues or how much is it in your sample or whatever, you can look, you know? So there's all these techniques that I knew from working in the lab, and so I was like, okay, well, how can I apply the idea of detecting progesterone metabolites in urine to a home device, right? So I tried to piece together certain pieces of what I already knew, to put together something. And so there were like, do it yourself at home tests that were like proof of concept type of things. So you could order a kit, and you can order some of the reagents, and you can just see if it works or not, and I got it to work. I had a sample of pee from myself, that was.

Abby Mercado:
That's your fun fact.

Amy Beckley:
Well, I mean, my husband always says that he's like, are we ever going to get to a point where there's not a cup of piss on our sink? I don't know, I honestly don't know.

Abby Mercado:
No one else's husband ever.

Amy Beckley:
I mean, I just have, like, pee sticks everywhere. I, like, have cups of urine hanging around. I had to buy a whole new freezer for all the urine that I was saving.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, my goodness.

Amy Beckley:
So we have two.

Abby Mercado:
That's amazing.

Amy Beckley:
In the basement. There's one that's for all the meat and there's one for all the urine, and sometimes my urine freezer is too full. So I put it in the meat freezer and he's like god damn it, Amy, don't do that!

Abby Mercado:
That's the sign of a true entrepreneur. What will you do? What will you do to make this company successful? I love it.

Amy Beckley:
I remember my sister-in-law was one of the ones that really helped me prompt getting this company started because she was just having a really hard time. She lived in Boston and she came back for Christmas and she surprised everybody that she was pregnant. And we were like, oh my god, it's so amazing. And I said, that's so amazing, can you pee in this?

Abby Mercado:
She's like, all right, weirdo.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah. And then, you know, she was having her second child, she was doing fertility treatments. And so there was days of her cycle where she'd go in and she'd get a progesterone blood draw. And so I would save the urine, I would have her, give her all the little tubes, and I'd be like, save the urine, and I'd write down what progesterone level was. And I'd use those to kind of refine and get the proof of concept stuff down. Obviously, none of this is like what actually happened to the device, but it helped me tell the people who actually make the device, which is, you know, punchline, not me in my basement, to tell them what to do to create a good test system.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. So you figured it out and then did you like apply for FDA approval? Like, did you have to do that before you started selling the test commercially? And how do you do that? Was that hard, since like it might have been hard.

Amy Beckley:
Is really another, another cool fun fact or not so fun fact is that the FDA, you read the website, it's like you have to do this, you have to manufacture in a certain environment, so we found somebody who would manufacture under those conditions or FDA registered all that stuff. Then they, they have codes for each of the products, and our particular product was in there, and it was a class one exempt product, which means that we didn't have to get approval from the FDA to market and sell our device. So fun fact, ovulation tests are all class one exempt, so anybody who has an ovulation test does not need to get approvals from the FDA, they just can sell it. So that's what we did. Well, we had to get money, right?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. Yeah. That was going to be my next question. Like starting a company, you kind of have to, kind of have to have money, like, how did that all go down?

Amy Beckley:
Yeah. So, I mean, it was myself and my co-founder, we each put in like 1,000 bucks and got the reagents, got like proof of concept, we went to Upwork and we got like a $50 logo.

Abby Mercado:
Nice.

Amy Beckley:
It's funny because like all of my, like first decks and stuff were all made in PowerPoint and my favorite font was Comic Sans.

Abby Mercado:
Oh God, I love it.

Amy Beckley:
And everybody, like my entire team now makes fun of me. Like, it's hilarious, like whenever they see a reference for, like, comics san.

Abby Mercado:
Like Amy air quotes, like.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we did a crowdfunding, we went on Indiegogo and we're like, all right, here's our, here's our proof of concept, tis is what we want to do, and we calculate we needed about 50,000. Well, we calculate a little bit more than that, but if we could get 50,000, we could have enough money to go and see if it could work and we could figure it out as we went. And so we posted and we just waited, and I approached different Facebook communities. And the hard part was women that were trying to conceive didn't understand it yet because they were like, well, how is this going to help me time intercourse? And I'm like, it's not going to help you time intercourse, but it's going to tell you if you even have a chance of conception if you're actually ovulating. Because what people don't know is that even if you have an late surge, there's like 25, 30% of women that just don't make enough progesterone after ovulation, and it's causing them to be so infertile. So finally we hit on a population of women that knew all about their cycle and they knew exactly what a progesterone test was, we got immediately funded within 24 hours, it was 5%.

Abby Mercado:
Wow! And that was by finding a Facebook group? Like, how did you find this population? Wow. And so they knew all about their cycles because they were using EKS and they were using apps, and what year was this?

Amy Beckley:
This was 2016.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. So the apps were there, the apps were out there, people were using them. And this was more or less a pretty educated population of females.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, yeah. It was the natural family planning community.

Abby Mercado:
Ah, yes.

Amy Beckley:
Yes. Who, and they know their cycle inside, outside, around the corner and they are amazing, amazing people. They've done this research. And so actually all the research that I was reading was this population of people because they're, when you have, they love the menstrual cycle, like they just they love studying it and analyzing it and understanding it and they love it as much as they love kids.

Abby Mercado:
Wow. Yeah, because understanding it might give them gifts.

Amy Beckley:
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So we got funded and we just did it.

Abby Mercado:
So money, money in the bank, how did you create it, like you, assume, assume you create more tests. Like you, you found a place to kind of outsource the creation of tests and you started selling them. Like, tell me about some of their early traction and how you were resonating with customers, was it still all of that community, or were you able to kind of like early stage go outside of that community? So tell me about your traction.

Amy Beckley:
So the first year, which we launched in 2017, February of 2017, and we sold only on Amazon and we sold in plastic bags. So think of like a Ziploc bag. So similar to how like the one-foot test come in the mail. That was my predicate, right? That was my example, oh, well, you know, these other companies, they just sell their LH tests in those bags, so that's what I'm going to do. So we had no branding, we barely even had like a, like a name and a logo and sold them in plastic bag. We literally couldn't afford anything else than that. And we would just, we sold them and this community would use them, and they would tell their friends about them, and they'd use them, and then it just grew that way. We sold about 100,000 the first year, and at the end of that year, my co-founder, she had to exit due to medical reasons. And so it was just me and I was just, I had a job, right? I couldn't afford, like every single penny that came from the sell of this product would go towards building the next lot. And it was just like, that's kind of what we did to just keep going, quote unquote doors open. But it was a great product because I kept getting emails with, this is so amazing. Like you identified an issue like nobody would take me seriously and now I have this data and now I'm getting helped. And it was amazing. Or even like I worried that I wasn't making enough ..., I wasn't ovulating and now do confirm that I am, and so I can stop worrying about it. And so it was like I was faced with that choice with, well, do I shut the doors and just give up or do I find somebody else to help me run it? And so I went to San Francisco, JPMorgan week, probably the audience knows very familiar. Now, mind you, I was not at JPMorgan, it was that, and I wasn't even at one of the main sideshows. I was at a sideshow of a sideshow of a sideshow.

Abby Mercado:
Like so-and-so's happy hour, open bar.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Medical devices. And it was like this weird building, it was like way at the top floor. And I paid, like, literally all the money I had. It was like, and this, this drives me crazy too. This is an excellent tip I can give to founders, we paid to pitch, we paid like 5000 to pitch, and I got there.

Abby Mercado:
Wow, don't do that, right?

Amy Beckley:
Don't do that. Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah.

Amy Beckley:
I think this is going away, there's like, pitching opportunities is going away because they should be charging the investors the opportunity to get in early. They should not be charging founders who have no money to pitch. And if you come across that situation, don't do it anyways, but I do have a happy ending. So maybe this is a bad story to tell.

Abby Mercado:
No, it's a great story to tell. Founders, listen up.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, but there was literally like five people there. And then they did this thing where after your pitch you can go to this, this other weird room, where you could talk to people. And so you finish your five-minute pitch and you're like, okay, if anybody wants to go you're in room whatever, whatever, and you walk out and you hope to god that somebody is going to follow you and talk to you because you paid all your money to be there. And I did. I had people follow me and I would say four out of the five wanted to sell me something, it was really annoying, oh, don't you need a social media person or don't you need a whatever, whatever? Like, no, I need money.

Abby Mercado:
Yes! Can't pay you, would love to pay you, but I can't.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, exactly, exactly. But the fifth one who waited for all the riffraff to leave the room after I said no, she was like, you are amazing. Like the fact that you bootstrap this off of crowdfunding and you did this and then the passion like, I would love you to be part of my accelerator. So it turned out to be minority women-owned businesses away from the coast. You couldn't be San Francisco and you couldn't be Boston. You had to be somewhere else. It was accelerator program and it was in Cincinnati. And so if anybody's not familiar, Cincinnati is a home of Kroger as well as P&G, so a lot of really good CPG kind of retail opportunities. And so they funded this accelerator program for companies that had products that were either CPG or retail focused or whatever. And so I came and I got to learn from like P&G execs and like Kroger execs. And I mean, it was, it was fantastic. Like, it was truly transformational. She was the first outside capital on our cap table. This is another hot tip, if you're going to do an accelerator program, do one that gives you money.

Abby Mercado:
Yes.

Amy Beckley:
Don't do one that costs you money and don't do one that's quote-unquote free. They just take you, take equity. You need money, you are hard for money, so it's another hot tip. But yeah, they gave us money and then all the mentoring, got to spend a few weeks in Cincinnati hanging out. But yeah, that was just going out there and meeting people. And our state, Colorado, has a grant and I applied for one of those and I got that. It's basically $1 dollar from the state of Colorado for $2 dollars of outside investment. And so it's.

Abby Mercado:
That's ..., right?

Amy Beckley:
Yeah. Yeah. It's supposed to like spark innovation or whatever in the community. And so it's basically like, well, if we invest 500,000 dollars, then they're going to give an extra 250 for free, that's actually going to help this company be more successful because they're getting more money, and so it's a really good opportunity. So we got a lot of angel investors raise that initial round of funding, went through the accelerator, put our product in a box, and I got a co-founder.

Abby Mercado:
Instead of a baggie.

Amy Beckley:
Yes, yeah, yeah. One of the conferences that I kind of went around to, one of the judges was my co-founder, my co-founder's husband, I should say. And he was like, this is amazing. He like, text Ellen, text Ellen. Oh, my god, you've got like this really amazing woman, she's got great tech, zero branding, she needs you. And so that's when Ellen came in. And that's when I say that the product turned into a, you know, the test turned into a product and a company. So we were able to give it a name and a brand and we got turned MFP fertility into Proov. So MFP fertility is actually my fabulous basement and it was.

Abby Mercado:
Oh my goodness, that's another fun fact.

Amy Beckley:
It is.

Abby Mercado:
So really, that's amazing. Oh, mad scientist Amy Beckley.

Amy Beckley:
Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's also a non-PC friendly version that I think you can probably figure out yourself.

Abby Mercado:
My listeners are pretty smart, so yeah, I'm pretty sure of that.

Amy Beckley:
That was that initial conversation, I was like, well, if these idiots aren't going to do it, we're just going to go do it ourselves.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, I love it.

Amy Beckley:
Like go into the basement and do it yourself.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, yeah. I love it. Okay, so tell me, tell me a little bit about kind of the current state of the business and how do you listen to customers such that you're continuing to innovate, tell me about that.

Amy Beckley:
So it was really important for us not to just create a technology, but to create an education platform and a support platform as well. Because like I said, this is something new that people come into and it's not something they really want to learn, they're forced to learn it. And if we can educate them and empower them to have an equal say during their doctor visits, during their journey, they can achieve their goals faster, hopefully cheaper, with less stress, less miscarriage. And so we really wanted to create a community where women could not only test, but they can have somebody hold their hand through the entire time. Whether that be emailing our support and saying, I don't know what this test means, can you tell me what it means, to getting on Facebook and sharing positives and negatives and questions, and so we have a really great community who really, like our company is built around support, one on one support. We have an internal tracking system where we log all the issues, all the questions, and we trend them over time, we see the questions coming up, ... quite frequently we'll change the instructions, we'll clarify it, we'll create a blog. We'll change how we're approaching it, we'll, all of our email, women to answer the email, are all 100% trained like they're fertility experts. They are not there to tell you like where, where's my order? Okay, I tracked FedEx. They're there to help you during the journey. And so everybody in the company is just so passionate about what they do and in supporting her as best that we know how. And so that is how we approach it, is it's not about turning a profit like, okay, we're going to make this test, we're going to be millionaires, we made this test because it's so innovative. No, it's we're providing this information, we're going to support you along the journey, we're going to educate you, we're going to help you help you through it. And so that's 100% what, what we do. And so we always ask women, what do you like, what you don't like? What made sense, what didn't make sense? What kind of products do you want? What are you struggling with? And one of our turning points in our product journey was, so we have a test that tells you if you have a problem with ovulation, ..., right. So ovulation tests like LH test, clear blue, those kind of things, they tell you when to have intercourse, right? And so if it's positive, what is, what doess the couple do? They go have intercourse? They can do that. That's within their capacity to do. We have a test that says, you know what, I have a problem with ovulation, meaning it might be harder for me to conceive, what do I do with that information? And so this woman was like, I actually hate this because you told me I have a problem and you aren't giving me the solution. And that was transformational to us because nobody likes to get a test without having what do I do next? What do I do with that information? How do I move forward from that? And so that's been the big shift up until I would say about a year and a half, two years ago or so, and that's what we've been shifting to. So we have positioned our product as this is a platform where you can learn about your hormones and then we'll give you personalized action items to improve your hormones and create a better chance to conceive, right? So we give lifestyle tips, we give diet tips, exercise different times in the cycle, and then we also connect you with doctors. So we want to meet the woman where she is in her journey, and so we're always looking for partners and resources to help these women. So we've partnered with fertility coaches, we partnered with supplement companies, I mean, I like fair logics. I think they have great quality supplements. So we talk about their, their supplements and the benefits of those. We partnered with a sperm test company called Yo because it's shocking how many women think it's their fault. And they're doing all this testing and the male is sitting over here, doing what he wants and gets to go have lots of sex, and that's really, you know? That's it, nobody, you got to do them too.

Abby Mercado:
That's amazing. Well, so, in terms of big problems in the fertility industry, barriers to access to care, the process is not super efficient, the process is not super human-centric. Can you touch on essentially how do you hope that people remember Proov and all of your products for helping to address some of those issues in the industry?

Amy Beckley:
Yeah, I mean, we developed Proov to be the first step. We developed it to be proactive and a screening tool and something that women can have access to sooner than later. During my journey, it was just frustrating that you just, you had to wait, you have to wait, you have to wait. And then when you're done waiting, you have to go to an IVF clinic where what they're trained in doing is IVF. And also you're so stressed out and you're so like, oh my god, I don't want to wait any longer that you're like ready to jump on the IVF train. And so it's like if we can catch women who are thinking about conceiving or have just started to conceive and just understand if there's any barriers, if there's any conversation, that there's any medication, if there's any lifestyle changes that they can do today that will make their journey different. And so that's just, it's hard, though, because nobody wants to fail, right? So everyone's like, oh, no, it's going to be easy, right? Oh, it's totally easy, it's totally easy. But it's, you got to think about where you are in your life, how old you are, what cards you've been dealt. And the other thing is a lot of women don't think it's fair, right? And it's not, it's 100% not, right? How can 17 year olds got drunk one night, had sex the very first time, and now she's pregnant and did everything wrong? How was she allowed to just have a baby? I have to inject myself with needles, I have to drain my bank account, I have to this, I have to that. Like, it's not fair. And so women are.

Abby Mercado:
It's not fair, but it's so common. So, so common.

Amy Beckley:
It is. It is. And we've helped so many women avoid IVF by figuring out an issue that, frankly, IVF doctors don't know about. They just, we're advancing as a population so fast that these physicians that were educated 50 years ago or 30 years ago or even ten years ago have no idea, all this amazing, innovative stuff that's out here right now. So there's this clash, there's this block, right? And so women are like, women are being told by doctors, hey, don't go buy that because I have nothing, I don't know, oh, you got that off Amazon, w, obviously it's inaccurate. They're just trying to take your money, just do this $40,000 IVF procedure instead.

Abby Mercado:
Totally makes sense, right?

Amy Beckley:
But don't pay $200 dollars for that thermometer because they're trying to scam you. But this ultrasound over here is only 280 and you only have to get ten of them, right? So it's like, my advice is be as proactive as possible, spend some money upfront, it is unfair and that is very unfair, but if, if we can help you early and you can identify things early, we can change your pathway and hopefully avoid IVF like we, obviously IVF is an amazing, wonderful procedure, and if I wasn't available, I would not have my son, but it's not, everyone doesn't need it. Our health system is broken and we have this, like this gap of care where we have these doctors and we have these women and they don't talk to each other. And so that is the biggest problem, is like, how do you talk?

Abby Mercado:
Right.

Amy Beckley:
And so we want to try to help women know the language just to help speak doctor, because a doctor's appointment is, I don't even know, $450 dollars for an initial consult. You only get, what, 10, 15 minutes? It's so expensive. You know, if you had some information going into it, you could guide the conversation, you can get more answers. You can move faster forward, you know forward faster. So, sorry, a little bit of a tangent.

Abby Mercado:
No, not at all. Well, this was so incredibly inspiring. Thank you so much for coming on today onto the Future of Fertility podcast. Thank you so much for for what you're doing for just millions of people in the country and the world helping them understand their fertility hormones. So tell the listeners, where can they find you and where can they find the Proov test?

Amy Beckley:
So we're on our website ProovTest.com, so P R O O V T E S T.com, many of our products are also on Amazon. We are available on social media channels. We have a Facebook community, just shy of 10,000. Anybody can come in and get support, you don't have to be a current Proov user. Instagram, we have a lot of amazing educational content on Instagram. All those handles are ProovTest, LinkedIn as well. For all the other founders out there, the biggest piece of advice is you've got to have the passion to make this work and it's very, very difficult. But if you have the passion and you refuse to fail and you have to have a good idea, it will help.

Abby Mercado:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, very good. Well, thanks again, Amy. And I'm sure I'll see you soon.

Abby Mercado:
Thank you for tuning in to the Future Of Fertility. We hope you'll leave here feeling empowered about all of the exciting innovations taking place in the fertility space. If you liked today's episode, don't forget to click subscribe, and be sure to check out Dear (In)fertility, our popular podcast/advice column, where we chat with experts about all things fertility and fertility and pregnancy loss. To learn more and to join our free Fertility Support Community, head to Rescripted.com.

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