Rescripted_Future of Fertility_Ep2_Priyanka Jain: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Rescripted_Future of Fertility_Ep2_Priyanka Jain: 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 Priyanka Jain, the co-founder and CEO of Evvy. Evvy is on a mission to radically reinvent how we understand and treat the female body, starting with the vaginal microbiome. These first product, the Evvy vaginal health test, is the first-ever at-home vaginal microbiome test, to use Metagenomic sequencing to tell you what's up down there, why it matters, and what you can do about it. I first learned about Evvy because I was targeted with an Instagram ad by Priyanka's amazing co-founder Layne and her badass marketing team. Microbiome is one of those words that makes you sound really smart. The vaginal microbiome, let's just say the Rescripted team had to learn more. After meeting with the Evvy team, we decided we couldn't live without having them on our product marketplace. So welcome Priyanka, so excited to have you on the pod, thanks so much for joining us!

Priyanka Jain:
Thank you so much, Abby, for having me and for that incredible intro, I should just have you follow me around as a hype woman.

Abby Mercado:
I mean, I love to, like more than happy. I like, I have a full time job. Like, I don't know, maybe it's a.

Priyanka Jain:
Rescripted doesn't seem busy at all.

Abby Mercado:
Well, thanks so much for joining us. I'm so excited to talk to you today and just hear a little bit more about Evvy and the founding story and kind of where, where you guys are today. So I would love to start out by having just tell me a little about yourself as a human being, and I would love to end with kind of one fun fact that few people know.

Priyanka Jain:
Great question. So me as a human being, let's see, I think we can date this back as far as we want. But maybe I will start with high school, which is much further back than I think I would normally start, but potentially relevant to this conversation. But when I was back in high school, I got really interested in generally girls and women's rights. I mean, and clearly never ventured far away from that, ever since then. Worked with the United Nations Foundation to help launch the Girl Up campaign and was just always really passionate about this huge gap in access to basic needs, right? Whether that was education, healthcare, documentation, leadership programs, all of these things that I feel like so much we've taken for granted for so long and there's so many girls just like us who are lacking that access worldwide. And so it was really passionate about that for a long time, continued my obsession with everything girls and women related when I was at Stanford and then when I graduated, I actually joined a, at the time very tiny startup called .... here in New York City. And we were focused on helping making, helping to make the hiring process more fair and effective. And long story short, I don't think I need to convince anyone on or listening to this podcast that the hiring process is biased and broken, but we were working on ways that you could actually introduce behavioral science and machine learning to replace the resume with much more predictive data points on whether or not someone's a good fit for a job. And I ended up being the head of product there, seeing us through kind of becoming a 150 person company with $70 million dollars in the bank and a lot of, the largest employers in the world using our product. And it was fascinating because the majority of the work we did was around building fair and transparent algorithms. So how do you take a really biased world? And when you're training an algorithm on a really biased world, unsurprisingly, it can create really biased outcomes. So what are the ways that you can actually engineer algorithms to be fair and to actually promote a different future of the world that is more diverse and looks more like what we want it to, when you have a really biased training set. So we did a lot of really cool, innovative work there and that was before Evvy, so have you, to dive into Evvy and start anything from there?

Abby Mercado:
I love it. Yeah, yes. Let's, let's just go ahead and dive right into Evvy. I think that makes a ton of sense. So yeah, like start at the very beginning. Like how did you come up with the idea? And I also love that your background, your passion and all of this kind of all make sense now knowing what Evvy is today. So let's share that with the audience, tell us, tell us all about Evvy.

Priyanka Jain:
Yes. I feel like Evvy exists at this intersection of like all the things in my life, which is like women's health, and now it's health like just generally, women's rights, improving life for women through technology, and specifically taking this kind of data focused angle, right? And that's what I've been doing for the past five years, at my last company and now here at Evvy as well. But I guess just to kind of start, I mean, at the very beginning of Evvy, I laugh because if you had told me ten years ago that I was going to build companies in HR tech and then vaginal health, I would have laughed out loud. Whenever anyone asked me what I'm doing next, I'm like, okay, first of all, Evvy's got a long way to go. And second of all, I could have never predicted those two moves. So who could say I could predict the next? But really, when I was at ..., I think, I was sitting in data all day thinking about all these different ways that you can use data to predict how things could be better, right? And meanwhile, I was dealing with a myriad of my own, just like mysterious health problems. I think that like literally every girl has her own version of this story that's going to the doctor time after time, feeling like something's wrong, not being able to get answers. Personally, I was told to, like, drink more water and sleep more like way too many times. And I was like okay.

Abby Mercado:
... I am, like, I drink water, I sleep like, seriously? Like,

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah, I was just like, where is the data? Like, where is anybody looking at what is going on in my body and helping me understand what might be going wrong. And as I started to do some of my own research, that was when I found out the wild facts that then motivated me to leave my job, right? Things like women weren't required to be in clinical research in the US until 1993 and I remember like my jaw just dropping to the floor. I was like, oh. My entire life makes sense now, it's like we've just literally never studied women, so no shit we don't understand what disease and health look like in a female body because we've never studied it, right?

Abby Mercado:
And why, why was that? Like, give us a little history lesson, like what was going on in pre-1993? Like, I don't know, call it like I don't know, mid-forties to 1993. Like why did, why did we make those decisions? Like, why did we think it was that easy?

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah. So actually I think it was the 1950s, there was a certain, basically there was a fear that drugs could affect fertility, or actually. So it's basically like, okay, if you take these drugs, are they going to affect fertility but then also pregnancy outcomes, neonatal outcomes. And so instead of saying like, why don't we study women who aren't planning on getting pregnant or you know what I mean? Like, there are many segments of women for whom that would not apply, we instead just decided it was safer to just study no women. And on top of that, I always laugh because I'm like, okay, but you're still going to prescribe this medication to women of reproductive age, so whether or not you studied them does not change the fact that it's going to end up having that impact, if that's the impact that it's going to have. So it drives me insane for many reasons also people.

Abby Mercado:
I mean, God, we're so dumb. Oh, my God.

Priyanka Jain:
We were also like, they were like, studying women is too expensive and difficult because essentially it was too difficult to control the variations of hormones. And so, like, instead of having to time things with menstrual cycles and deal with the fact that women have hormones, it was easier to be like, let's just study men, make things smaller, and then they'll work for women. And obviously that is not the case. And to this day, women are diagnosed on average four years later than men across over 700 diseases. And that, to me really screamed that like this could actually be a data problem, right? And as you, as I looked at kind of the very quickly evolving health tech landscape, I was seeing so many really amazing and exciting companies using all of this data in the healthcare system to try to make things more effective, more efficient, whatever it is. And I had this moment of anxiety of like, oh my god, none of that data was designed or captured, thinking about people who looked like you and I, right? Like all of even the fields that we decided to measure were based on middle aged, mid-sized white men, and how do we know if those are the best data points to make decisions about my body? And so then I got paranoid about like, oh my god, there's just so much missing in that system, and we're about to automate and scale all of that. And I got really curious about what are the unique biomarkers that the female body is giving off, right, that might not exist in the male body. But those are actually the things that we should be paying attention to for people with female bodies, right? And so we, long story-short, ended, I ended up on the vaginal microbiome, which I couldn't escape in all of my research, which is hilarious.

Abby Mercado:
And how were you researching?

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
And, you know, to speak to kind of the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, like where do you, how do you know where to start? Is it customer interviews? Is it like clinical library? Like what is it to do that?

Priyanka Jain:
Definitely I started in like PubMed, I started Google Scholar, I started in the papers, right? Tried to understand the landscape of the research that had been done, what we understood, what we didn't understood or understand yet. Cochrane Reviews are really helpful for things like that on the science side, I would reach out to all the authors of the interesting papers and be like, can I ask you questions? Here's what I'm interested in. I reached out to tons of other venture capitalists, founders, doctors, researchers. I mean, I cannot tell you how many cold emails I sent, like, truly.

Abby Mercado:
That's interesting because it sounds like entrepreneur to entrepreneur like you and I both know how, how much starting a company is, it's a it's a networking game. And so in the midst of kind of formulating your idea, like you're actually building this this network of people presumably are becoming, become big fans of yours.

Priyanka Jain:
Totally. And there's so many I mean, I cannot even begin to make a list of the number of people who were so helpful in the early days who are willing to just say here, this seems like a somewhat smart person who cares about a somewhat important problem, like, sure, I'll talk to you. And we learned so much from those people and each of them would connect us to another person or a friend that they knew. And by the end of it, I had, no joke, interviewed like 300 people and just finally gotten a little bit of a lay of the land. I mean, I'm still by no means an expert the way that some of them are. But I started to better understand the gaps and the opportunities in terms of biomarkers and data sets. And really, like I was saying before, I hilariously could not escape the vaginal microbiome, which is so funny because most people have not heard of vaginal microbiome. And I'm happy to kind of like give a one alone on that, too.

Abby Mercado:
Yes, that'd be great. Let's start out with, okay, what's a biomarker.

Priyanka Jain:
Great question. A biomarker is essentially a marker of something that might happen in your body, right? Whether that's a biomarker of a certain good health outcome, a biomarker of a certain bad health outcome, right? So if you think about when you go to the doctor every year, you get your annual physical, a lot of the things that you're measuring are biomarkers of some type of condition, right? So we were really curious again about those signals that the female body is giving off, right? Most basic could be how long is your menstrual cycle? That's a signal of something, right? What's your discharge look like? That's a signal of something. I always say the female body has so much more complexity than the male body that we should be better at catching things that go wrong, because there's more things to go.

Abby Mercado:
... data, yeah.

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah. So we're really that's, that's what we're trying to capture and understand.

Abby Mercado:
Okay. Now.

Priyanka Jain:
Does that make sense?

Abby Mercado:
That makes total, total sense. So let's foray into the vaginal microbiome. What is that?

Priyanka Jain:
Okay, great question. Well, I'm going to assume most people have heard the word microbiome, right? Usually when you hear the word microbiome, you're thinking about your gut microbiome, maybe your skin microbiome, your oral microbiome, essentially a fancy word for a bunch of microbes, right, whether that's bacteria, it's fungi, it's viruses, other things that live in or on some part of your body, right? And it turns out that we have one of those in our vaginas. And as I always say, if you think about your vagina, kind of like structurally in the female body, right? It's essentially this gateway that the body has between the outside world, which is full of pathogens, tons of different types of microbes. And then on the other side of the vagina is some of your most important internal reproductive organs, right? And it turns out that we've essentially kind of co-evolved with this community of microbes that do more than just like hang out in your vagina, it turns out that they actually play what I would call kind of this really interesting local immune system role. And the way that they do that is if you have kind of an optimal or healthy or whatever you want to call it, protective vaginal microbiome, it means that you're dominated by bacteria that help keep the vaginal environment a low PH or really acidic, right? And you've probably seen a lot of vaginal health products talking about PH, right? And what that's referring to is when you have a healthy vaginal microbiome, the microbes are producing lactic acid, hydrogen peroxide, and they're making that environment really acidic, and what's that? What that's doing is making it so that if those pathogens get into your vagina, I always say, god forbid you have sex with someone new, you sit in your swimsuit for too long, whatever it is, those pathogens can't survive or thrive because it's too acidic for that. Does that make sense?

Abby Mercado:
Yes.

Priyanka Jain:
But then, you know, God forbid you do one of those things. You do have sex with someone new, semen can increase the PH of your vagina, menstrual blood can increase the PH of your vagina, and when that PH elevates, it starts to become elevated, those pathogenic microbes can start to make a home, they can start to replicate. And as people with vaginas, what we experience then is yeast infections, bacterial vaginosis, recurrent UTIs, right? And that's kind of the symptom that we then go to the doctor to treat. But what we're really interested in is that that breakdown of the healthy vaginal microbiome isn't just the cause of these symptoms and these infections, but it turns out that you've now kind of lost that immune system that was protecting all of those internal reproductive organs from that outside world. And what research has started to show is that that breakdown is then also associated with IVF failure, negative fertility outcomes, preterm birth, STI acquisition, all of these other things. But of course, we're not paying attention to that today. So that's obviously what we're trying to change.

Abby Mercado:
It's fascinating and fascinating that this was also all self taught like you didn't major.

Priyanka Jain:
It's all self taught! ...

Abby Mercado:
... Many others, but like you didn't, you didn't get like a degree in this, right? So, okay, all right, amazing. So you got really interested in the research. You talked to a bunch of people. You became an expert on biomarkers and microbiomes, and then you kind of settled on the vaginal microbiome and you were like, hey, I have one of those, and I think actually we could build a business out of this. So what happened next?

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah. I'm on a storytelling journey, apparently.

Abby Mercado:
No, that's. That's what the plot is all about. I want to hear the story, I want to dig.

Priyanka Jain:
Well, I mean, I was just shocked that there was anything I mean, first of all, I'll just say vaginal infections are extremely prevalent. I mean, I'm sure most people listening to this know that. But I mean, over 30% of women every year have DD alone, let alone UTIs yeast infections, ... vaginotis, cytotec vaginosis. Vaginal discharge is the number one reason that women seek healthcare advice. It is an extremely prevalent problem, right?

Abby Mercado:
Wow and it's, that's a, that's a cool stat. I did not realize, but it makes sense.

Priyanka Jain:
I mean, it's crazy, right?

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. Yeah.

Priyanka Jain:
It's like a huge, huge problem, right? And then you look at kind of the existing diagnoses, treatments, etc., and I mean, it's offensive. You're like, the way in which we diagnose these conditions right now is literally like looking under a microscope and like looking at shapes, looking at PH, which I was explaining changes for a variety of reasons, looking at whether or not it smells and asking people if they have symptoms. And that's the kind of high fidelity, quote unquote, way that we get information about what's going on. And as you can imagine, it's far, far more complex does than doesn't smell or not, right?

Abby Mercado:
And I also like, I don't know if you've experienced this as a fellow like vagina owner. I think I have like, I think in my twenties and I'm a mom of two, so I, it's like your doctor is kind of all about the OB side of it. Like the guy inside is less like interesting, less fun, but right? And like, maybe that's a story I'm telling myself, but it's, it's something that I, I felt like, I don't know, I kind of experienced in my twenties when I was going to like an OB-GYN, but I, you know, it was all about the gynecological issue, like not the OB issue.

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah. No, I think that's really interesting. And I do think that like, to be fair, there is a huge, there was a huge lack of training, understanding with anything related to vaginal health, right? It's not like doctors knew anything about the vaginal microbiome in med school, right? I mean, we, I, I have friends in med school now who are like, yep, still haven't heard the word vaginal microbiome, still haven't heard it. My friends grew up with GYN programs that are like, oh, we spent an hour on the vaginal microbiome today. And you're like, okay, well, no wonder we can't get better answers. It's like, these are not things that our doctors are being properly trained on, right? And to be fair, a lot of this research came out in the past decade or two decades, right? So a lot of this is really new learnings. And so a lot of what we're also trying to do is education of physicians, education of people who care about this, because I think that you can do much better than the standard of care if you even take into account the research that's already been done. But all of that to say vaginal microbiome, really big problem, antiquated, really archaic diagnoses and treatments, nothing works. So it's extremely frustrating. I mean, I think as people with vaginas, as we can speak to the fact that when you have a vaginal infection, it is not in the back of your mind, it is very much in the front of your mind.

Abby Mercado:
I was talking, I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day about Evvy like it is at, like when you have a UTI, like try behaving normal, like at an office on a work day with a UTI, like you just can't, you just can't, it destroys your day.

Priyanka Jain:
And it's crazy to me that there's literally anything in this world that is as prevalent, as frustrating and as expensive for the healthcare system, not even just in terms of like going to the doctor for your UTIs and BV, which that costs the system billions of dollars. But then when you think about the longer term impacts, like whether or not someone's IVF cycle works, whether they have a preterm birth, whether like all, like I just cannot believe that there is this intersection of anything this prevalent, this frustrating and this expensive. And yet there was just white space, like there was just so little information, so little access to this information on your own body. Then it just felt like where better to start, right? Like it was a perfect example of a female set of biomarkers, a data set on the female body that we were not paying attention to, both to improve our quality of life, but then also our overall health outcomes. So we started building it in Nov, I want to say I quit my job July 2020 to start working on this, brought together my team like late 2020, early 2021. And then we launched Evvy's first product, the Evvy Vaginal Health Test in July 2021. And so our actual first birthday is this week, which is crazy.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah. Happy birthday!

Priyanka Jain:
And it's been just a wild, wild year.

Abby Mercado:
I thought! So, how did you, how did you bring your team together? How did you meet your co-founder? That story.

Priyanka Jain:
Great question. So my co-founder and I actually went to Stanford together. So we've known each other for over a decade and we had been like great collaborators and in college, we did all of our group projects together and we always had this shared thought where it was like every time we had an idea and we brought it to the other person, like we always left the conversation with a better idea, you know? And it's great because we're actually really different. She comes from an incredible creative, design, like that side of her brain. I'm very much like the data product, that person, and we, we joke that we will spar on like so many different things, but we have this like very shared mutual respect for each other and also this kind of pattern recognition of every time we disagree on something, we end up in a place that's better than we're either of us started, right?

Abby Mercado:
I love that!

Priyanka Jain:
And so it's been very, really special and also really fun, right? We've known each other for so long and we reconnected probably, I guess when we were starting I was starting Evvy and turned out that Layne had suffered from many, many vaginal infections in her lifetime and cared a lot about destigmatizing that topic that, again, one of the most common problems and yet such a taboo, and it was just a perfect match. So we, we, actually she came over one day, November 2020, peak of COVID, we hadn't seen each other in a while. And she came over for a glass of wine. And I remember she had a dentist appointment an hour later and she never went to her dentist appointment. And we sat on the couch for like 7 hours talking about Evvy. And then she was like, should I quit my job? And I was like, maybe you should quit your job. And then she came on full time in January.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, what an amazing story. Also, the thing I am most shocked about is that there are people doing group projects in college that are like equal contributors. I was always the one who, like, I'm type A, like, you know, you are too. Like I felt like I was the only one who ever did any work. So it's good to know that that's not always the case. ...

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah. When you find someone who carries their weight, no, when you find someone who carries their weight in a group project, you marry them through becoming your co-founder basically.

Abby Mercado:
Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Okay, so tell us, tell us about. So like you put the team together, you formulated kind of what the idea was, what the product was. Tell us a little bit about the product, the first product that you launched.

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah, totally. So the first thing that we wanted to do was give people access to this information, right? Whether that was someone who had been chronically suffering from vaginal infections, never able to get information about what was really going on or what might be causing it, who really, you know, I always say these, people are so smart when you have a chronic problem, like you become the expert on your own body on these problems. And I cannot tell you how many women and people with vaginas just wanted access to information. And we realized like, okay, that's a really great place to start. We can kind of combine, build an amazing database of all of the research that's been done, make it really accessible to people and offer an at-home test. And I can only begin to tell you that everything is hard. I mean, from entrepreneur to entrepreneur, you will understand that, truly everything that I thought would maybe be easy was not. So that was a journey for sure. But we really wanted to bring the best technology to this problem. One of my biggest frustrations was that nobody was using high fidelity, newer sequencing techniques, when you look at all the research, it's all using older technology. And I'm just like, we're never going to solve these very complex female health issues if we don't finally use the new technology that we now have. So we were very adamant about being able to use a new, a newer type of sequencing called metagenomics that enables us to look at all bacteria and fungi in the vaginal microbiome, look at the strain levels, look at their function, and be able to actually not only share that women, information with individual women, but also finally leverage that information to get much better answers, right? And to enable all of the doctors to provide much more personalized care, so building that was wild.

Abby Mercado:
Is that done at a lab?

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah.

Abby Mercado:
Like who does that? Like who's smart, who's smart enough to do medicine and mixing ....?

Priyanka Jain:
Great question. So we ended up partnering with a lab who helped co-develop the test with us and everything from what is the wet lab assay, how do you actually do the sequencing all the way through to how do you analyze these massive multi-gigabyte files that come out of the other side? And when I say that, like the vast majority of the tools kind of open source tools that exist around microbiomes are heavily based on the gut microbiome and they just don't apply to the vaginal microbiome. So we actually had to do a lot more building on that front than I expected. And then we also built out this full kind of interpretation engine, right? So what we'll take in everything that someone tells us about their lives, their symptoms, their sex history, their contraception, all of that, contextualize it with the results of what we find and then provide this really exciting, engaging and educational experience. That's kind of like a personal Wikipedia about your vagina for everyone who goes through the experience.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. So was it, a couple just like quick hitting questions, was it difficult to find a lab to, like, go for this with you?

Priyanka Jain:
No.

Abby Mercado:
No? Okay.

Priyanka Jain:
It was not easy. It was like, very well, first of all, there aren't that many labs that can do actual, that can do this type of sequencing at all. Second of all, there's not a lot of labs that can do it in a consumer facing fashion, meaning that most microbiome testing labs, their customers are Pharma. And so people are sending like 500 samples at one time, they're being processed over three months, and then they're generating all of the data in like one report. But we had to build like a software integration, day to day sequencing, samples arriving all day every day, like it's a very different business. And we had to convince someone else to change their own business to serve us. And that means that you have to convince them that you're going to be a big enough business, that it's worth it for them to do that, so it was definitely a journey.

Abby Mercado:
No, that, that makes, that makes sense. I can, yeah. But that seems like it was probably a little bit difficult, especially as you describe it. So, so let's talk a little bit about well, one more quick hitting question there. So when people get their results, you know, it's amazing that it's like beautiful, engaging, like, I love the Wikipedia of your vagina like that. That's awesome. Like, I want one, that's cool. Do they, like if there's like an issue spotted, like are you guys providing telehealth? Is that next? Do they know what to say to a doctor? Like, how do they actually take action after they get results from you guys?

Priyanka Jain:
Great question. So today, what we do is provide everyone with like a step-by-step plan, right? And part of that plan might be like we actually think you need to talk to a doctor based on what we found as well as your symptoms and health history. But what we do is we make it like very specific what you should talk to your doctor about, right? Because I think a lot of people go to their doctor, their doctor doesn't know exactly what to do either. So we actually for every single type of results and combination that you could have, we provide, like here is the exact research that you should talk to your doctor about that's most likely to help you get better. Here are the things to bring up that have been like issues with this condition in the past, right? So research has shown, for example, having ... vaginitis can be related to certain immune conditions or could be related to certain medications or birth controls that people could be on. So making sure that we kind of flag that holistic perspective for people to have that conversation with their doctor. And then we also provide where it's relevant, certain supplements, where we've seen really good research for specifically what we found in their vaginas and then also around kind of like maybe pelvic floor therapy is something that could help some people or there are ways to think about hydration in the vagina. And so it's very much kind of like a step-by-step, how do we help your vagina get to a better place? Part of that will be through products, part of it will be through our one-on-one coaching that's included in all, all of our, for all of our members. And what we've seen is that a huge part of it is actually prepping women to have conversations with their partners, to have conversations with their doctor, right? Sex plays a huge role in this, thinking about the use of condoms and sexual activity around your menstrual cycle and all of that. So really providing that kind of one on one guidance and then additionally helping people really get access to the right medications and the right treatments with their doctor.

Abby Mercado:
Got it. Great. It sounds like you're providing a lot of answers to a lot of people, and that's amazing. And that's the goal, of course, right? So you're direct to consumer play, Evvy is, so and you know, the words vaginal microbiome and metagenomic sequencing like not typically words that the consumer is used to hearing. So tell us a little bit about just like the marketing challenge, like the focus on education, like how is that going? Like what is your strategy, all that good stuff?

Priyanka Jain:
Yeah, totally. I mean, my co-founder deserves all of the credit for all of the things that I'm going to say, but I would. I mean, Layne always said, she's like, I have the ultimate challenge, I have to sell a vaginal microbiome test and nobody knows what a vaginal microbiome is or why they should care about it. So that's the first thing, right? And I would say that there's different types of customers, right? I would say that there is actually a huge percentage of people with vaginas that do recurrently suffer from vaginal symptoms and infections. And let me tell you, you do not need to tell her what a vaginal microbiome is. She gets on the phone and knows just as much as we do, has read all of the studies because like I've said, these, people are experts on their own bodies, right? And especially when you have to be because you're not getting good answers anywhere else. So that segment of the population, we do not have to do the education, we are the tool that they've been looking for, right? They've been trying all these things at home. And finally, they can get answers to, is it working? I'm spending $50 a month on this wash or this probiotic or whatever it is, is it doing anything for me? And we can finally actually answer that question. And then I would say there's a different subset of customers, which is maybe more of like the Rescripted customer who's thinking about fertility, thinking about pregnancy, is more proactive about her health, who wants to better understand how vaginal health plays into the rest of her life. And that person, of course, we like, have to win her over, right? We have to explain, gere's what the vaginal microbiome is and why it matters, here's what learning about yours can do for you, etc.. And I would say that Layne has done an amazing job building a massive educational platform across our website, our blog, our Instagram, our Tik Tok, where if someone wants to better understand vaginal health like there is no better place to go than the platforms that Layne has created. And by having those platforms now, it's like creating an engine for people to want to learn more about their vaginal health, and then our tests can really serve that purpose. Does that make sense?

Abby Mercado:
Yes. No, it makes total sense. But it's also like the Rescripted customer, like convincing, convincing her or the Rescripted community member, like convincing her that she needs something like Evvy or she needs to know Evvy, it's like what woman, maybe you, maybe you actually have the stats on this. Like what? What woman has not how to use .... Like what woman has not had PV? Like, and as we kind of look to kind of the early funnel person and help those people who are they're like, okay, someday I want to have that family, what does that mean to me? Like a question has come up like, you know, what, I've had an STI, does that affect my fertility? I have yeast infections does, do those affect my fertility? Like I've had UTIs like all the time, I had them all the time in college, like, what does that mean for my fertility? Like, am I infertile? What does that mean?

Priyanka Jain:
Exactly?

Abby Mercado:
So every woman I mean.

Priyanka Jain:
The short answer is no. The short answer to all those questions, is no. All of these things, I mean, the answer is that, yes, it can affect. And I would say the amazing thing and what I find very empowering about information, especially when it comes to the microbiome, is that the microbiome can change, right? Like unlike your genetics that like you're kind of like, oh shit, this is my life forever. It's like a microbiome is modifiable, right? It changes with treatments, supplements, behaviors, diet. It changes with so many different things. And like, if you can give people the information, you can also give them an action plan, and you can close the loop for them. You can say, this is working for you, it's getting better or this is not working for you, right? And I think in that way it can be less anxiety inducing and more kind of empowering to actually do something about it.

Abby Mercado:
Oh, love it. Well, so tell us, Priyanka, what is, what's next for Evvy? What should be, what should we be on the lookout for?

Priyanka Jain:
So many things. I think we're, we're thinking a lot about connecting people to ways to get better. I mean, one of the things that we've really learned, unfortunately, and I'm sure you've heard this from your community as well, is like people just struggle to find the right doctor, they struggle to be listened to at the doctor's office, they struggle to get the answers and care that they need, and even though Evvyy can provide incredible answers, if you don't have the right doctor, you end up kind of back in a in a bad place, right? And so we're really trying to help solve that problem. And really, we are so incredibly excited about all of the research that we're doing right now. We now have the largest dataset on the vaginal microbiome that's ever existed, and we're finally trying to say, okay, can we publish and show that there are different conditions that we should be testing for? How can we use this to start advocating to doctors that like women aren't crazy, right? Like this isn't in our heads. We're seeing huge, so many, without getting too in the weeds, essentially there are subsets of vaginal microbiomes that forever have been considered healthy, but clearly there is genetic variation that's associated with difference in symptoms, right? And so all of these people have been going to the doctor saying, I don't feel good, I don't feel good, and being told you're healthy, you're fine. And what we're realizing is there's much more nuance to it than that, oeople aren't alone. And so we're very excited to start kind of taking this information and bringing it out into the healthcare community, the research community, through all of our educational platforms, so that people can get much more, what we always say, which is precise, holistic, and preventative vaginal healthcare, which unfortunately is not where we are today.

Abby Mercado:
But it sounds like, after talking to you, after knowing Layne for a handful of months, it sounds like you just might get there. And I am so excited for you guys. Fingers crossed. So, Priyanka, where can people find you if they'd like to get in touch?

Priyanka Jain:
Yes, we're at Evvy.com. Evvy on Instagram and at Evvybio on Tik Tok, or Tik Tok is hilarious for all of you, all of you who have suffered in all of these places as well, it's both a place to laugh and a place to learn. And I'm just Priyanka@Evvy.com.

Abby Mercado:
Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Priyanka, and congrats to you. Congrats to the whole Evvy team on just all of the success to date and so excited to see where you take us next and thanks for joining the pod.

Priyanka Jain:
Thank you so much for having me and right back at you. We are such big fans of you and your team.

Abby Mercado:
Thank you for tuning in to the Future Of Fertility. We hope you live here feeling empowered about all of the exciting innovations taking place in the fertility space. If you like today's episode and want to stay up to date on our podcast, don't forget to click subscribe. To find this episode, show notes, resources, and more head to Rescripted.com, and be sure to join our free fertility support community while you're there.

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