Reimagining Fertility Care

In an industry often focused on clinical outcomes, Dandi is taking a refreshingly human-centered approach to fertility care. We sat down with Jake Kent, Co-Founder and CEO of Dandi, to explore how his team is revolutionizing the patient experience in the rapidly growing fertility market. From their innovative IVF belt to their commitment to community-driven development, Dandi is proving that true innovation in healthcare goes beyond medical breakthroughs to address the deeply personal needs of patients. In this illuminating interview, Kent shares insights on Dandi's unique approach to problem-solving, the challenges of innovating in a sensitive field, and his vision for the future of fertility care.

Dandi is taking a unique approach in the rapidly growing fertility market. What inspired you to focus on the patient experience with innovations like the IVF belt, rather than pursuing traditional clinic expansion?

There are approximately 500 fertility clinics across the country, but prior to Dandi, zero consumer brands that focused on providing personalized, empathetic care to women at every stage of their fertility journey. We saw a higher-impact opportunity in building something that could support millions of women outside of the clinic – where a majority of the care journey actually takes place. Because behind closed doors, often in the isolation of their own homes, so many women are going through isolating and vulnerable experiences, often without the support and guidance they so badly need. Clinics were not built to show up for women in these moments – we wanted to build something that would fill that gap.

What I learned from living with a family member going through IVF, and then validated from research with hundreds of patients across the country, is that injections were generally the most difficult part of the IVF journey. They are often physically painful and emotionally exhausting. It’s a multi-step, complicated process, which creates confusion and anxiety across many women going through this experience. What we heard from most patients (nearly 86%) was that there was not just demand – but necessity – for tools and resources that could alleviate some of the physical discomfort and emotional stress of this daily process.

Dandi’s IVF Care Kit, and adjacent Live Injection virtual care services, were designed with every step of the patient experience in mind. We learned of all the pain-points – from discomfort of injections to anxiety over injecting in the right location to stress of mixing meds properly – and designed something to bring comfort, accuracy and peace of mind to all the parts of the journey it’d been missing. It’s been amazing to see how much these tools are already helping to transform the IVF care experience.

At Dandi, you're reimagining fertility treatment. What does innovation mean to you in this deeply personal and complex field?

In a time where innovation might more commonly refer to a set of new product features or AI-driven tech, to us, innovation means something different. We think about innovation from a more humanistic perspective, asking ourselves the question: are we positively transforming the way somebody feels as they go through this deeply vulnerable experience? If the answer is yes, then we are on the right track.

For too long, the fertility industry has measured innovation exclusively in terms of stats and numbers. Dandi exists within a broader medical context – so we understand the need to think about fertility relative to hard numbers (i.e. success rates). But having connected with hundreds of women who’ve gone through life-altering fertility struggles, we also understand the need to deeply consider the lived experience for roughly 20% of the global population that is impacted by infertility. There is now much research which shows that roughly 80% of women impacted by infertility experience clinical levels of anxiety and depression. We think about innovation relative to how we can make somebody feel more supported, more empowered and less alone through such moments of uncertainty.

The IVF belt is a unique solution. How does your team at Dandi generate new ideas like this? Are there any unconventional methods you employ?

While I’d love to tout a secret formula that makes us sound like geniuses, the truth is, our approach is simple: listen, build, test, refine. It’s a four-step process, but I think a majority of the magic happens in step one. Before we ever built our first prototype, we spent almost a full year in research and development, doing nothing other than listening to, and learning from, fertility patients across the country. The more intimate and vulnerable a problem is, the more perfect your solution needs be – which means you must become a world-class listener. Especially when you are developing a solution that’s never before existed, and don’t necessarily have a template to work from.

From day one, community has been our north star. We built this brand, and all its offerings, in close collaboration with hundreds of women who’d been through the experience. We deployed an exhaustive amount of surveys, polls, interviews and focus groups. We of course worked with world-class product designers and developers along a highly iterative process to get the IVF Care Kit to where it is today, but we never would have been able to achieve what we have thus far without listening closely to the voice of our customer. We have several new offerings coming to market and we will continue to deploy this approach as we grow the ways we support women along their fertility journeys.

Your patented IVF belt is a novel solution in the fertility space. Can you walk us through the innovation process that led to its development?

After spending a long period in research and development with a large community of patients, there were several more boxes we needed to check along the innovation process. First, we needed to make sure that medical practitioners would feel comfortable (and confident) in recommending this to fertility patients. So we built a medical advisory board made of some of the brightest minds in fertility medicine. Their feedback was integral to ensuring that every feature, every detail of our products, was aligned with the goals of medical care. We want fertility clinics to not only feel the IVF Care Kit is safe, but for them to see it as something that can materially improve the journeys of their patients, and in turn, create efficiencies for their clinics (i.e. reduced after-hour calls tied to injection support).

Beyond approval from the medical community, there were specific problems that we were trying to solve that had never been considered for this kind of experience. As an example, one of the biggest things we heard from fertility patients was that the IVF injection process was cumbersome, often hindering all mobility. Poor UX products like cheap ice packs or old pharmacy heating pads that required plugs/wires meant patients had to often use their hands and/or couldn’t move from an outlet. When approaching the design of The Kit, we knew we wanted a UX that allowed for more mobility, comfort and convenience – so that women could continue on with other parts of their daily routine, as they went through IVF injections. The Belt system we designed with our industrial design team as a perfect example of how we thought about an innovative solution to this problem. The Belt, along with its clip-in window technology, now allows women to wear multiple therapeutic components such as our redesigned Cooling and Heating Pads. Now, women can experience hands-free numbing prior to injections or soothing heat therapy after injections, while getting out some emails, preparing dinner or driving to a nearby appointment.

The fertility landscape is rapidly evolving. How do you identify emerging trends in patient needs and treatment approaches? What resources does Dandi use to spot these trends and gather consumer insights?

We focus on emerging trends by spending a lot of time connecting with the patients seeking care and the clinicians providing it. On the patient side, we have an ongoing (and fast-growing) community of 200+ women who are navigating various points of their fertility journey. We use this community not only as a safe space to provide peer to peer + expert-led support to patients, but also as a forum to continue to listen and learn. Every single day we are seeing what patients are asking for. We see the areas where they feel confused or undersupported. We see how that confusion can quickly translate to frustration, anxiety, or even anger. We engage with this community and continue to deploy regular surveys, polls and focus groups – tracking closely the trends in where care gaps remain, and in some instances, are growing.

Similarly, we engage regularly with our B2B partners – some of the largest fertility clinics and pharmacies in the world. These are wonderful relationships, in which we hear from the providers, some of the challenges they are facing. It helps us to better understand how some of our solutions can not only be in service of patient experience, but could also help to create operational efficiency for clinic partners. It is no secret that private equity has had profound impacts on the fertility industry, driving significant acquisitions and mergers, which in many cases, is coming at the expense of patient care. Private equity’s primary focus is profitability and we are already seeing distinct areas in which this cuts into patient care. We believe this trend will only worsen in the coming years and we will continue to double down on listening to patient and provider populations in our pursuit to develop solutions that can improve the lives of both.

Innovating in the fertility sector comes with unique challenges. What's the biggest obstacle Dandi has faced when bringing your innovations to market?

The biggest challenge has been awareness. With almost 20% of the population impacted by infertility (inability to conceive after trying for 12+ months), we assumed early on, perhaps naively so, that everybody would understand why Dandi’s solutions were needed. After all, we are talking about a global endemic that is not only upending the lives of millions, but is also threatening population decline.

But as we pitched investors early on, we quickly realized that there was a huge gap in awareness. So much of the struggle is happening behind closed doors, and though many women are sharing their journeys today, there is still a lot of stigma and shame that comes along with infertility and IVF. As a result, knowledge of the problem is not where one would expect relative to the TAM – which presented as a challenge early on.

Thankfully, we found an amazing team of early investors who not only understood the problem, but brought a great deal of empathy and compassion in wanting to support us to solve it. As we scale Dandi into a preeminent consumer brand that offers more solutions for more stages of the fertility journey, we will remain passionate about the opportunity to continue to educate and grow awareness for not only fertility, but broader women’s health.

Dandi seems to have a strong innovative culture. How do you cultivate this environment, especially given the sensitive nature of your work?

I think it all starts with empathy and understanding for the underlying problem. Our founding team was either first-hand impacted by fertility struggles or one degree away. This forced us to bring a lot of emotion and compassion to what we set out to build. We realized early on that this was part of our secret sauce. As we started to bring on others to support our mission of innovation, we saw how important it was to replicate this emotional sensibility. From our branding team, to product partners, to even fractional support in areas like ops + accounting, we surrounded ourselves with individuals (primarily females) who’d been impacted by this experience. In doing so, we built a team that had an innate gravitational pull towards empathetic problem-solving – innovation that put the human experience first. Continuing to scale Dandi with an embedded culture of human-first innovation will hopefully always be a big part of our DNA.

. Looking to the future, how will Dandi continue to be a leader in innovation as the fertility market expands to an expected $8B in the next five years?

1. Community: We will remain steadfast in our commitment to growing with the fertility community and listening to them every step of the way.

2. Partnership: We will continue to work closely with the industry – ranging from clinics to pharmacies to insurance companies – to identify strategic opportunities to improve the patient experience together (something we are seeing work well early days).

3. Digital Health: we will continue to invest in our digital health solutions, creating a comprehensive care offering comprised of both physical products and virtual care. While a lot of our focus early days has been on products that are perhaps more marketable, we’ve also built a robust digital health solution that is able to provide personalized, medically-credible fertility guidance to millions of women in ways that have not previously existed.

4. Flexibility: We will remain nimble, never being stuck on what we thought was right yesterday, and always being willing to consider the pivot of tomorrow. Already, we are seeing 3-4 compelling expansion opportunities that we never would have envisioned 12 months.