E5: the OVERcast SHINE - Expect Fitness
Hey everyone. Welcome to another edition of the OVERcast SHINE where we shine a light on a successful emerging startup in healthcare. As we do in each shine episode, after our founder interview, OVERLAB Program Director and three-time entrepreneur David S. Williams III will share his insights into two questions that should be familiar to every OVERLAB Member and founders who are listening to the OVERcast: 1) what obstacles are you facing right now, and 2) what are you doing to overcome those obstacles? You'll learn how to approach and overcome real obstacles to your success from people who are making it happen today.
If you like the OVERcast, please give us a five star rating and even a review. It helps the podcast expand and reach more founders like you who are transforming healthcare for all of us.
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Welcome Dara Cook, founder and CEO of Expect Fitness to the OVERcast.
About Expect
Expect is a streaming fitness platform optimized for pregnancy and postpartum care. Founded by Dara Cook, Expect offers doctor-approved workouts for every stage of pregnancy and the postpartum period. The platform aims to improve maternal and infant health outcomes by providing accessible, flexible fitness solutions, with a focus on inclusivity and representation of diverse body types. Expect has partnered with leading medical experts and is pursuing both direct-to-consumer and business-to-business revenue models, including partnerships with health insurers. The key challenges the company currently faces are around fundraising in the current macroeconomic environment, but Dara is optimistic about the company's growth prospects.
Transcript (AI generated)
David S. Williams III (00:04):
Hey everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Overcast Shine where we shine a light on a successful emerging startup in healthcare. Today we focus on a company I've known for a couple of years now and whose founder I've known since undergrad at Penn in the Wharton School. Dara Cook. As we do in each shine episode, after our founder interview, I will share my insights into her answers to two questions that should be familiar to every Overlab Member and founders who are listening to the Overcast one, what obstacles are you facing right now, and two, what are you doing to overcome those obstacles? You'll learn how to approach and overcome real obstacles to your success from people who are making it happen today. Now, before we jump in, if you like the overcast, please give us a five star rating and even a review. It helps the podcast expand and reach more founders like you who are transforming healthcare For all of us ready, let's go. Welcome to Dara Cook, founder and CEO of Expect Fitness to the Overcast.
Dara Cook (01:25):
Thank you so much for having me.
David S. Williams III (01:28):
Well first, like all of the companies that we're featuring in this series, tell us who you are and about expect.
Dara Cook (01:37):
So I'm Dara Cook Expect is streaming fitness optimized for pregnancy and postnatal, and we are the only platform where every workout is approved by OB GYNs. The reason we started this is because as you know, as many of us know is the United States is in a maternal and now infant health emergency. Our maternal mortality rates have been rising steadily for over two decades and now for the first time in 20 years, our infant mortality rate is rising and it's rising across races. So unfortunately it does make sense. You can't have an increasing maternal mortality rate for so long without babies being negatively impacted. And so that's where we are right now. Exercising in pregnancy and after pregnancy is proven to improve outcomes for moms and babies. So that's why we're doing this.
David S. Williams III (02:38):
That's fantastic. So is it a video platform? How would somebody view the videos?
Dara Cook (02:44):
Yes, so it is a streaming video platform. While we say if you can access YouTube, you can access expect it's that easy to use. We're in the app store. We also have a beta that's in the Google Play Store and we have an array of workouts, so we have all three trimesters of pregnancy. We do pre-pregnancy, which is fitness for fertility. We do postnatal, so you can work out with us after you've given birth and we believe the broadest variety in the pregnancy space and that's because we are O-B-G-Y-N approved. So that means we have an advisory of 16 OBGYNs, including Rachel Villanueva, who is the former president of the National Medical Association, which is the largest and oldest association of black physicians. And Iman Lee, who is the leading global expert on physical activity in particular physical activity in women. She's a professor at Harvard Medical School and she co-authored to the landmark studies on the impact of prenatal fitness. So she's also on our advisory. So before any fitness content gets on our platform, we run it by our advisory of OBGYNs. And so in the app itself you'll see that we have doctor's notes. Literally these are notes from the doctors about each of the workouts, the stages of pregnancy that it's approved for or postnatal and any other special tips and guidance
David S. Williams III (04:24):
That is impressive and what a great advisory board you have convened. You talked about the mortality rates, you talked about how they seem to be distributed among races. Can you go deeper on that?
Dara Cook (04:44):
Maternal fitness has been the secret of the wealthy for a long time. One of my best friends from college, she has four kids, you probably know her. We went to college, I probably do. She is a medical doctor. She has her own practice and she had great laborers with all four of her children and they're absolutely fantastic and beautiful. She hired private trainer, certified in pre and postnatal fitness to work out with her while she was pregnant and she has a beautiful family. As a result, this is something that has not been typically available to the average woman, so to speak.
(05:26)
So what we're doing is we're democratizing access to high quality doctor approved pre and postnatal fitness. Like we said, if you can stream videos on YouTube, you can access expect. We have a study with the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which is the number five OBTY department in the country, and they have a brick and mortar exercise and pregnancy clinic at UAB. I've been to the facility, it's a fantastic state-of-the-art, huge facility where you're pregnant, you come there and you work out and UAB has invested in this because women who exercise in pregnancy have much lower risk of complications as do their babies. But they did say that there is an issue with women accessing this gym that what they tend to get is women who are upper middle class wealthy women who are able to access this facility because it's open during business hours, right?
(06:28)
Work hours. So what they're saying, it's women who aren't working who are being taken care of by their husbands, so they can come to this facility on a Tuesday at 11 o'clock, they have childcare if they have other children at home, they have accessible childcare. The problem is that the women who are most likely to experience complications are women who are not in that category. They needed to partner with a platform, a company, and a solution that empowers women to work out in their own homes on their own time. So we know that if you're working odd hours, if you don't have transportation, if you don't have the ability to have someone watch your kids while you work out, that's what expect does is that we have workouts that range from five minutes on up to 45 minutes. So if you're dealing with time confetti, meaning you have just strands of time, you don't have long blocks of time.
(07:31)
That's the reality for so many women. You've got 10 minutes here while their 2-year-old is taking a nap. You've got 30 minutes in between Zooms. That's not enough time for you to get up and go to a gym, but it is enough time for you to pop up one of our videos and work out in your own home. We noticed that the pre and postnatal fitness platforms, the few that are out there have largely ignored black women. They don't include them in the content. A lot of the big ones only have one black woman featured across all of their content. We oftentimes have more than one in one video. So I say they only have one in their entire platform. We know that black women have the most to gain from exercising and pregnancy, and I spent 20 years at MTV where that's I learned how to create content and I was head creative of the MTV Video Music Awards and brand manager of Walden out. And what we all know in world of Entertainment is that people need to see themselves reflected on screen so that it will resonate with them. So we bring that ethos into how we produce our content. Our instructors are all fitness professionals, but our background talent, these are women who look like people. We know
(08:46)
These are women who have day jobs and sometimes they order pizza because that's the easiest thing for them to get. They're not rail thin. So even in pregnancy you see a lot of these fitness apps, they show women who are pregnant, you can't even tell they're pregnant. They're so thin.
David S. Williams III (09:05):
Yeah, and I've seen those and it's interesting that you bring this up because the representation matters. Movement is also getting pushback in and of itself. The question I have for you on that front is what challenges are you facing in growing out access to expect, and how do you plan to overcome those challenges?
Dara Cook (09:33):
It's really about fundraising, but we've been fortunate to have an amazing group of angels and they truly deserve the name Angels. They're angels in many ways, and we have some announcements coming up soon I can't talk about right now, but really it's fundraising. That's all it is. The macroeconomic environment is turning around. We heard some good things from Jerome Powell or some good signals, so I'm optimistic
David S. Williams III (10:05):
Now. Are you a direct to consumer platform with a subscription service or how else would somebody be able to access
Dara Cook (10:12):
Expect? Yeah, two ways you can access it directly. We are also direct to consumer. We were fortunate in that the great McKinsey and company selected Expect as one of three startups. They would consult for pro bono. So that was really fantastic and we went into our engagement with McKinsey with a strict B two B2C model selling into health insurers, providers, employer sponsored health plans. McKinsey said, you also have this huge direct to consumer opportunity. We believe in it so much, we're going to dedicate a dedicated team for you to explore that and do your first direct to consumer campaign. So we did that and Google was a huge help to us on that and so big shout out to Google and Dale also at Google. And also we ran tests through Meta and we got our first paying direct to consumer customers that way. We're also going to have an announcement soon about a payer arrangement that we have Payer
David S. Williams III (11:18):
Mean Health plan.
Dara Cook (11:19):
Yes. Health plan, yes. That's really huge in terms of validation of our business model and the cost saving impact of maternal fitness because women of childbearing age are so expensive to ensure they're almost three times more expensive to ensure than men and all of the same age. And all that is driven by the high cost of pregnancy complications, which can be prevented through fitness. This is a really effective and elegant way to reduce costs for this high cost population.
David S. Williams III (11:52):
This is incredible. I really am excited about Expect. How can people learn more and contact you with more questions or if they're interested in a DTC subscription?
Dara Cook (12:06):
Yes, absolutely. So expect Do Fit is the website. So instead of.com, it's FIT short for fitness and they can email me directly D ara at Expect Fit. Mark Cuban gives out his email. I might as well too. Right.
David S. Williams III (12:23):
That's great. Thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast. We are going to keep watching. Expect and hope you can come back and give us an update here later on.
Dara Cook (12:35):
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Dave. Thank you.
David S. Williams III (12:37):
All right, now let's shine the light even brighter on Expect we can break down, expect progress and success to date using the over formula as a reminder to OVERLAB members and for OVERcast listeners, The OVER Formula includes five steps to starting and growing a new business. You open the opportunity, you investigate the industry, overcome the obstacles. That's where the money's made. You model the money and then you come to whatever, yes, no decision you're at at that time. Okay, so first let's talk about open the opportunity. Rah immediately identified the opportunity, pregnancy optimized fitness, improve pregnancy, maternal and infant health outcomes through exercise that is virtual, accessible and flexible to the mother's pregnancy progression and lifestyle.
(13:43)
The benefits of exercising during pregnancy are well-documented in medical literature, which derah points out, but the ability to engage in exercise is limited by socioeconomic means. The opportunity is to democratize access to high quality doctor approved pre and postnatal fitness. She says it simple as day right there, and you can get your opportunity down to that one sentence. Keep working on an iterative process to get you there. Keep talking to people so that when you know have that one sentence winner, everybody will be responding. Next. Number two, investigate the industry. Darrah had to investigate what was necessary to bring expect as a concept to market. That means knowing what matters to all potential customers, enterprise and consumers. As platform users, she then had to define and design a product to gain acceptance and traction. That means understanding who the consumer user is and who the paying customer is, especially in healthcare because they are often not the same and you have to build in for each when you're building out a platform. That's how she investigates the industry.
(15:18)
So once she understood the overall industry environment and where expect would fit upon, not intended, then she had to identify the risks to success, the obstacles she would have to overcome. And that brings us to number three, overcome the obstacles. Like I said before, this is where the money's made. Now let's talk about marketing because she gets into that in the interview. So her marketing obstacles to overcome were first can users access expect videos, right? The next one, where will people see expect videos? Will women have time to complete the workouts? Will users see the expect concept overall as credible users being consumers and customers in order to overcome the obstacles? Derah builds a business around exercise that is medically endorsed, right? She said it in the interview.
(16:34)
She showed there is clinical evidence for exercise during pregnancy leading to better outcomes for mom and baby, and she created a risk reduction strategy around having all content reviewed by OBGYNs. That's a differentiator right then and there. Dera also had to deal with operations risks and obstacles to bringing expect videos to market. She had to find a way to make video content and distributed it at a reasonable cost. Here she used lived experience as the key to risk reduction. This every founder should do, every single founder. You should use your lived experience for competitive advantage, for risk reduction, for overcoming obstacles because you will know better than others how to achieve success. For Derah, she knew how to create content after working 20 years in the entertainment industry. How big of an advantage is that she knows how to make content, she knows how to make it affordably.
(17:54)
The lesson here is use your lived experience as competitive advantage. RAH was able to do that to reduce her operations risk and overcome those obstacles. Now let's talk about competitive obstacles. Derah had to look at what the competitive products were like, and she said there aren't that many. So the first thing she did was she recognized that delivering breadth of workouts throughout pregnancy tailored to the trimester and the lifestyle of the mom was going to be key to success. No matter what stage the expectant mother is in there are expect workouts. Secondly, Dera uses inclusivity to overcome the obstacles that are presented by her competition. The unattainable paradigm of the skinny pregnant mom is just not attainable for everyone. Not everyone is that body type. So inclusivity makes the video experience realistic and accepting that appeals to the audience of everyone, not just those who might have some kind of unattainable aspiration that may or may not be healthy anyway.
(19:27)
So those are two ways that she overcame obstacles that continues to overcome obstacles from her competition, breadth of workouts throughout the lifestyle of being pregnant and inclusivity to appeal to a larger audience. Now, technology always a risk these days. First, expect videos had to be as easy to use as YouTube. That is the gold standard because everyone knows how to use YouTube, and what RAH does is she makes that part of her pitch. Expect is as easy to use as YouTube. If you can access YouTube videos, you can use Expect. That's what she said. This is a powerful statement because it uses a well-known comparator to show how easy it is to view expect workout videos. This is a strategy that you can take if your company, if your technology uses the same kind of mechanisms that a well-known comparator has, then you can make your technology as easy to access as they do and then use their brand equity that everybody knows to show how easy your product will be to adopt. You can do this. Those are the real obstacles that Darrah was able to identify and overcome. You heard all of those in the interview. Now let's talk about Model the Money. Darrah is at the point where modeling the money is key on the expect journey. She mentioned B two, B2C as her preferred revenue model at the outset, working with health plans and provider groups as customers, paying customers to offer expect to their patients as consumers.
(21:27)
But McKinsey encouraged her not to overlook the B2C subscription opportunity. So now she's testing both business models to see which is most viable and scalable. And here's the reality. Both may be possible, but she'll have to decide which one she'll pursue first. With limited resources, it's great to do testing, but when you want to scale, you have to choose one first. That's the lesson. So let's wrap this up. Remember I asked her what she's doing to overcome her obstacles. She went directly to fundraising. She said it's all about fundraising. And you hear this a lot from entrepreneurs, but the context that I gleaned from her interview is it's because she's overcome so many obstacles already. She used early funds and her tech team and her planning to overcome the obstacles that she knew she was going to have to do early on. So now it's about making expect available to as many people as possible. That's where fundraising becomes the key obstacle.
(22:52)
So in today's environment, fundraising is difficult, so you have to have a story to tell, but there also has to be a real economic opportunity. There has to be passion and a financial story. And these days, one without the other sounds risky to investors. And if they feel risky beyond their normal tolerance level, they're very, very unlikely to invest in your company. Now here's how we're going to help for OVERLAB members. We have two exclusive webinars on fundraising. One is specifically for non-dilutive capital and the other is for more traditional venture fundraising. Both are driven and delivered by people, experts who've done it.
(23:56)
So if you haven't joined OVERLAB, go to overlab.co and sign up. It's free. I'll also say this, if you do have questions for Derah, seriously send her an email. She'll respond, and perhaps there are some introductions and or partnerships in your future. I've known her a very long time. She's as genuine as they come. That's it for this episode of The Overcast Shine on Derah Hook and her company Expect Fitness. If you like the Overcast, give us that five star rating and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify podcasts. You can also listen to each episode on our website@overlab.co. My name is David S. Williams III. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Overcast, where the days of being underrepresented, underserved, underfunded, and underestimated are over.