Through user-oriented progressive verification, Maven has found a huge neglected female medical service market. As a pioneer in female medical care, Maven has served more than 15 million users, and its current valuation has reached $1.4 billion. This article will explore in-depth the three stages of Maven's product-market fit, from how to verify the initial market opportunity, to using the community for rapid verification and subsequent product strategies to promote large-scale growth. It is hoped that it will provide new inspiration for more SaaS entrepreneurs, especially those companies that hope to leverage growth through community effects.
01. Starting from the commitment to women and parents-to-be, Maven started the road of telemedicine innovation
Many successful businesses were built by founders who were not core users of their product. But telehealth platform Maven is built on founder and CEO Kate Ryder's commitment to creating better women's healthcare outcomes for women, expectant parents and the broader parent community (like herself and her circle of friends). of.
It's one of the most pivotal moments for any new parent: You step out of the hospital gates, carefully lift your newborn into the well-chosen car seat, and drive home for the first time—with the safety of the hospital (and doctors Nursing expertise) is left behind. "It's a very vulnerable feeling. You leave the hospital and you're just like, 'Okay, what now?'" Ryder said.
"An ob-gyn once said to me: 'When you start a family, there are five things that need to happen. The pregnancy, the actual pregnancy, labor, postpartum recovery – and then the cost of the whole process. Usually, of the five things Two things will go wrong,' she said.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and early parenting form a complex and tangled network of health care: infertility doctors, genetic counselors, pediatricians, midwives, lactation consultants, pelvic floor physical therapists, and more. "None of them are connected, many are not covered by health insurance, and families are expected to navigate the maze themselves to find the right team to meet their needs," Ryder said.
To directly address this gap, she founded Maven, now the largest telehealth clinic for women and families. The company became a unicorn after raising a $110 million Series D round in 2021 — making it the first female-led telehealth startup to hit that milestone (on the way to building a $1 billion business, she herself also had three children). Maven recently announced a $90 million Series E funding round.
Maven's platform combines an extensive, specialized telehealth network (including more than 30 medical providers) with personalized medical navigation to support all parents and their soon-to-be parents, covering fertility, pregnancy, parenting and Pediatric medical services, etc.
Although Maven is a B2B company (most people can use the platform for free through employers or payers who partner with Maven), the path to product market fit (PMF) begins with a B2C community of women looking for information about their Conversations and solutions to the most intimate questions of health and family planning. As Ryder stated, the company's consumer-oriented start-up was critical to unlocking her ability to build B2B products.
02. Progressive verification, Maven realizes the three stages of PMF with lean innovation
Kate Ryder has always had a mission to improve women's health but at first she didn't know where to start, but she took a sensible verification-driven lean innovation approach to find the product-market fit point step by step.
At first Ryder conducted a series of in-depth interviews and focus groups. She found that medical services related to pregnancy and childbirth were a huge blue ocean that was not well served.
Immediately afterwards, Ryder tried to launch a beta version of an online community, which attracted a group of professional service providers and early users in the field of women's health, and achieved preliminary product applicability verification .
So Ryder began to expand the community and enrich the product line. Through channels such as enterprises, Maven quickly realized the effective matching of products and markets and achieved excellent growth. Ryder did not achieve it overnight, but took gradual verification from point to point to find the gold mine that matches the product and the market.
2.1 Problem-Market Matching Stage: Find the largest market space to display your strengths, and focus on core issues with in-depth interviews
To build a company, some founders first go to gain industry experience, or start diving into product building, learning by doing. Ryder took a different path, taking on relevant roles at different levels so she could gain a comprehensive understanding of various markets and target where there was the most room for growth.
"I've been working as a reporter, writing about finance and business for The Economist , but I wanted to start a business. My father was an entrepreneur, and my mother and aunt did business together. I'm grew up in that environment," Ryder said. In order to act faster, she accepted an assistant job at Index Ventures' London office in 2012, and expressed her core purpose in the interview. "I didn't know what company I wanted to start, but I knew I wanted to start something. During the interview, I made it clear that my vision wasn't necessarily to be a venture capitalist. But I wanted to get a closer look at how to start a company , and I'm willing to do whatever work they need in the meantime, so I can learn something quickly, too," Ryder said.
Over the next two years, she absorbed knowledge like a madman, learning the ins and outs of fundraising, what companies look for or verify when they write a check, and building a network of founders and investors — many of them Later, angel investment was made in Maven founded by Ryder.
In addition, she began exploring a few different ways to play, including custom vitamin subscription boxes for people with genetic diseases in the family, an idea she abandoned after realizing the enormous complexity of the physical supply chain business. She's also thought about the idea of making ramen healthy—a bowl of cup noodles is like a shot of B12, for example. But the lessons she learned in the venture capital world told her to pursue the largest possible market, so she expanded the scope further.
Whenever she and friends sit down for a drink to catch up, the conversation always seems to come back to one topic: family planning and fertility. "As my friends and I entered our 30s, sometimes it was the only thing we could talk about. I had friends who were having trouble conceiving and needed fertility treatment, and others who had very complicated pregnancies or were very emotional. Debilitating postpartum depression. There doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all experience when it comes to having a baby ," Ryder said.
As a venture capital associate, Ryder began to feel the winds that the industry was beginning to shift, opening up new avenues for increasing opportunities for high-quality care. "At Index, I see that digital health is really starting to be noticed by capital . In 2013, telemedicine began to gradually gain attention. However, women's health and family planning are still largely underappreciated . There is no corresponding service provision," she said.
Ultimately, Ryder is looking for space to flex his muscles. She has observed closely in the industry that the most successful founders always leave room for their original vision to pivot and iterate. "
Healthcare is a very complex proposition. But it’s also a huge industry, which means that if your first idea doesn’t pan out, you still have leeway to tweak until you find product-market fit (PMF),” she said.
Having steering power is the key to creating a lasting business. Don't choose a problem so narrowly scoped that you don't have room to explore other ideas.
Ryder, who still works in venture capital and lives in London, quickly traveled across the Atlantic to the United States, where he conducted several focus group interviews, assembled a group of about 50 women, and delved deeper into the issue. "I wanted to really verify if this was just a problem with my friend or if it was a general problem," she said. Too often, people who build a company based on the needs of their target audience skip this step and jump straight to getting started building it. But conducting extensive validation is critical, even if you have a super strong hunch and some user feedback to back up your hypothesis.
To further solidify her footing, Ryder facilitated discussions with 10-15 women around all pregnancy and family planning issues. "I asked a lot of questions about what would come up between them and their health care. A particularly key theme was access to care—whether it was issues of not being able to get specialist services through insurance, or not being able to get targeted care for a long time. Mental health care for postpartum depression, whether it stems from the need to care for a newborn at home or the financial burden," she said. "
You'll hear the story of a woman who needed to see a pelvic floor specialist after giving birth, only to find out that there wasn't any doctor in their current network available for an appointment for three months. She said: "Through these conversations, it became clear that this was a problem not only in my circle of friends, but more generally.
To further assess the existing situation, Ryder also brought possible competitors into the circle of focus group discussions. “There were a couple of telehealth companies and health communities, and I put them on the screen to see what the focus group members thought of them,” she said.
“We just talked about these issues in healthcare, and these are companies trying to solve some of these challenges. I wanted to get their perspective on these business value propositions. I distinctly remember one of the women saying she thought it looked like A real estate company," Ryder said. "The first wave of digital health companies seemed to be more focused on compliance and smoother cooperation with suppliers. They were not technology companies that were oriented towards a pleasant user experience. That's when I knew there was a huge opportunity here."
Women are asked to be the chief medical officers of their families. I want to form a team of experts to support them.
2.2 Problem-Program Matching Stage: Attract Women’s Health Evangelists and Launch Online Community Beta Version for Rapid Verification
Ryder threw a dart, and she thought she had hit the bull's-eye on the question. She still works full-time at Index, but she knows that her career turnaround is coming and she needs to focus 100% on Maven. In December 2013, I had lunch with Kevin Johnson, a partner at the biotech-focused Index, and I briefly pitched him my idea of building a virtual Health clinic. He agreed immediately and wrote a check for $50,000 on the spot," Ryder said.
This is a very positive sign that it's time for me to fully commit to Maven and start building the early team. However, instead of spending her experience finding the person with the most credentials, she focused on Maven's consensus vision . "We don't look like a traditional founding team. I see other founders obsessed with bringing people with dazzling resumes into the company. But I want people who are willing to risk everything to achieve their goals," Ryder explain.
Entrepreneurship must be very hard work, and it requires perseverance. What gets you through these tough times is a heartfelt commitment and deep belief in vision and problem solving.
So the members of her early team were not found through the recruitment channels we traditionally think of:
1. Determined to fight a protracted war
"The first person I called was my friend Sally Law Errico, who I used to work at The New Yorker. She approached me with an idea for mocktails for pregnant women a few years ago, so I knew She was interested in working in a similar field. She agreed to be our first part-time employee as our editor and community director," said Ryder. While not a traditional start-up first hire, Ryder firmly believes that content will play a huge role in the behavioral mindset shift necessary to get people comfortable using telehealth solutions .
2. Face-to-face communication
Non-technical founders often struggle with finding the technical talent they need to realize their vision. Ryder's suggestion is to let go of yourself to make more people, to ask, to talk, and to persevere in telling each other what you need. To find her founding front-end engineer, she canvassed engineering conferences, where she met her next hire. "I basically went up to everyone and asked them if they were engineers and if they were interested in healthcare. Suzie Grange was the first to say yes. We went to lunch and I told her about the company and Mission, she agreed to do some part-time work,” she said.
3. Remember that you are a founder — even after hours
Even Maven's founding CTO, Zachary Zaro, met Ryder in an unusual way. "I was at my best friend's wedding and knew that Zach would be there, and he's a top-notch engineer," she said. "I switched the seat cards, and I ended up sitting next to Zach, basically for the whole wedding. They are all throwing an olive branch to him to join Maven.
Leveraging her network of investors and entrepreneurs, Ryder acknowledged, the company’s early-stage fundraising efforts went extremely well, culminating in a $1.2 million family and friends round.
Ryder and her husband then moved back to the U.S. and began building an online health clinic for women's and family health, where people can consult specific specialists based on their unique needs, rather than just the one-size-fits-all traditional medical system. solution.
Immediately afterwards, they began to build the approval process for medical service providers from choosing to work with Maven to finalizing their participation, creating a web-based practitioner onboarding assessment to screen potential leads and review service quality. "Getting the first few dozen providers to sign up was actually pretty smooth. Women's health services are so underserved — we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world." She said: "Those who recognized our value of people are very excited to join our team."
These early evangelists were not enough, though, and Ryder took her initiative a step further. She looks for providers' addresses on the insurance company's website and sends them a marketing postcard that reads, "Would you like to revolutionize women's health together?" and directs them to a service provider's webpage where they fill out further screening questions .
Inspired by focus group interviews, Ryder also started building a B2C community where people could connect with each other. "I wanted to create an online community where women could continue these conversations, ask questions, and help each other to temporarily address the still-cluttered network within the current healthcare system. This approach will also help us continue our proof of concept , as we are considering further financing ," she said.
They built a rudimentary online community within a few months and launched a beta version with the goal of eventually converting those community members into patients in the online clinic once the telemedicine platform is in place.
Ryder remembers the moment when she felt that the online community was really embraced. "A community member asked a simple question and we had four different types of respondents provide their input - an ob-gyn, a nurse, a midwife and a nutritionist. Typically, fertility and parenting The answers to questions aren’t black and white.” She said: “ It’s pretty incredible to see so many different viewpoints popping up on one community forum. ”
As the community grew faster, more capital was needed to build an online clinic, so Ryder set his sights on raising more money from institutional investors to get the company off the ground. But at this stage of her financing, she faces a sharper resource tilt. "Back in 2013 and 2014, very few VCs had women investors on their teams. And at the time most men didn't believe in our core beliefs — and our data — it was a common problem. When we bring up issues like pelvic floor muscle therapy, they think women's healthcare is a niche issue and find it embarrassing to discuss it.
But Maven's user base, the stories of women who are underserved by the health care system, kept her going despite repeated rejections. After 40 rejections, Maven’s Series A round was eventually led by Lauren Brueggen, a mother of three from a small B2B fund who believes this is a problem. Since then, most of Maven's additional rounds have been led by female investors.
When they built the MVP for the online clinic, Ryder and her team turned to the consumer community for feedback. "We knew that the economics of Maven ultimately depended on selling to employers, but we wanted to learn as much as possible from consumers and what they wanted.
Even if you're building a B2B product, find ways to connect directly with your customers early on.
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2.3 Product-Market Matching Stage: Community Leverages Early Expansion, Continues to Enrich the Scale Potential of Product Line Layout
Eventually, Maven launched an online clinic in April 2015 with 300 service providers. Ryder and the team were expecting a massive influx of traffic and bookings on launch day, but that simply wasn't the case.
“At the time, we were one of the first apps to use Swift [an iOS programming language developed by Apple]. When talking to people on the Apple side, they must have put us in a perfunctory way, saying they would be in the Introducing us on the App Store. I remember writing to all the medical organizations saying they should be ready to open up their timetables because there might be an influx of patients with this Apple feature," Ryder said. "However, Apple didn't end up recommending Maven. I remember the day of the launch, and it seemed like we just got a maternity appointment because we saw us on TechCrunch."
Changing consumer behavior at a time when telehealth is just on the horizon has proven tricky, too . "It was 2015. Talking to doctors over FaceTime was really new, but it was also really weird," Ryder said.
What's her advice to other founders? Don't be intimidated and don't do things that don't scale. To attract more user registrations, the Maven team encouraged healthcare providers to join Maven's user community and answer questions people posed to the group , which drove some community users to sign up for the online clinic to gain more expertise. Ryder and his team also made more publicity. "We'd stand in parks and try to get people to sign up with on-site marketing. We'd hire a bunch of interns to push around the city, trying to get an appointment. We also had a table at the New York City Marathon. It was a grind," recalls Ryder.
Make sure the early-stage team is truly mission-oriented and ready for bumps and challenges as they come - because they can't be avoided.
Maven then moved on to their ultimate goal: selling to employers . Ryder adjusted the pitch accordingly. "Employers are the best buyers—they want their employees to be happy and healthy, and they want women to come back to work after having a baby. So I go around and talk to different employers, speaking their language about how Maven has helped them reduce costly healthcare costs. costs and offer compelling benefits that set them apart from the competition," she said.
The company's initial pitch to employers centered around its first enterprise product, Maven Maternity. The value proposition is that by offering Maven as a free benefit, their employees can have safer and healthier pregnancies and deliveries, and have access to the expert services they need —thus helping them return to work happier and healthier . They also have access to maternity care that is lacking in the care system: such as support for women through miscarriage and the postpartum period .
The first company to sign up was the Clinton Foundation, which was soon followed by Snap. By 2017, Maven launched a second enterprise product, Maven Fertility. The product covers all parenting pathways including surrogacy, adoption, egg freezing and IVF/AI. This is another critical area of home care that has been overlooked in the current care system, and Maven's products support couples struggling with infertility as well as LGBTQ+ people looking to start a family.
03. The network effect of the community has laid a strong growth foundation for Maven development
In retrospect, Maven's road to PMF is a story of network effects . From the initial idea from a conversation among friends, to her earliest employees and first check, there were multiple personal touchpoints that had a huge impact on the company's trajectory. Even the name Maven was settled on after Ryder emailed a list of 10 names to her closest friends and had them vote for their favorite.
Today, there are more than 2,000 doctors, nurses and experts in the Maven platform network, covering more than 30 specialties and more than 350 subspecialties, serving 15 million lives. Most clients access Maven through their employers, including more than half of the Fortune 15, and the company also sells its services to health plans, recently partnering with Blue Shield of California and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. Shield of Michigan) established a partnership.
As for the next step, Maven’s community roots have once again influenced the company’s development direction. According to discussions and interest directions in the Maven online health community, they have recently added menopause-related services and introduced relevant expert support. They also continue to expand their global services. Maven now covers nearly 1 million people outside the United States, and they continue to find that family building with fair financial support and care support is a huge global proposition.
04. The key inspiration for SaaS companies to realize PMF with lean innovation
The PMF journey of the telemedicine platform Maven presents a brilliant legend of a digital health empire.
At first Ryder locked a huge neglected market, which was verified by extensive collection of user feedback. With the support of the community, Maven has quickly accumulated seed users and obtained valuable product feedback, which is a shortcut for platform-based products to verify PMF.
Maven's lean innovation has given us three revelations: first, we must choose a market that is large enough to leave room for steering. Second, building a community from scratch will provide a solid foundation for the development of the platform. The third is to always maintain close contact with users. Only from the perspective of users can we continue to innovate.
For all SaaS entrepreneurs, Maven provides a best practice. Don’t be afraid to start from scratch, stay humble and learn from users. In a market with sufficient development potential, it is only a matter of time before PMF can be realized only if users’ pain points are truly solved.
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