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1 week ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr
Health-tech companies used to turn to a tried-and-tested solution to grow: Google and Facebook. Paid marketing was the fuel to stoke the proverbial fire to demonstrate the rapid scaling that all VCs love to see on pitch decks. That all has changed with how expensive it’s become to advertise on these social media platforms, and investors are no longer willing to back companies that are highly reliant on this form of ad-based, paid acquisition.
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1 week ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr
I’m frantically reading as I just spotted Omada’s S1! Happy Friday, digital health nerds. This would mark Omada as the second major digital health company to file for an IPO this year after Hinge Health. Some highlights before I follow up with more detail and a takeaway: — Revenue is strong and growing, particularly in the last couple of years as the company has moved from selling pre-diabetes to pre-diabetes and diabetes to employers and health plans (diabetes has a higher ARPU).
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1 week ago | 
secondopinion.media | Leah Rosenbaum |Christina Farr
As women entering our late thirties (Chrissy) and early forties (Leslie), one of the big questions we’ve been grappling with lately is how menopause should be categorized. It’s a hectic life stage for most women due to family, work and caregiving responsibilities. And for some lucky women, light in terms of menopause symptoms. For others, it represents something closer to an experience of a disease, given the physiological changes that women experience and the fluctuations in hormones.
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2 weeks ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr |Leslie Ziegler Schrock
This post is Part III of a three-part series by Carolyn Witte (Founder of Tia Health) and Leslie Schrock co-published on Second Opinion and The XX Factor to help women’s health founders raise money in the rapidly growing but still nascent women’s health category. Our goal is to offer a practical, founder-first framework to help you decide if, when, and how to raise venture—and what to do if that’s not the best path for you.
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2 weeks ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr
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3 weeks ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr |Leslie Ziegler Schrock
This post is Part II of a three-part series by Carolyn Witte and Leslie Schrock co-published on Second Opinion and The XX Factor to help women’s health founders raise money in the rapidly growing but still nascent women’s health category. Our goal is to offer a practical, founder-first framework to help you decide if, when, and how to raise venture—and what to do if that’s not the best path for you. ICYMI, Part I covers the foundational question: Is your business venture-backable?
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4 weeks ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr
Paid marketing used to be a lot less expensive. Many of the previous generation of digital health companies could run a fairly slick operation using venture capital dollars to fuel ad campaigns on social media sites, all with a goal of recruiting providers and patients. That could lead to some dizzying top-line revenue numbers within a matter of a few years, and sometimes even months.
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1 month ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr |Leslie Ziegler Schrock
This post is Part I of a three-part series by Carolyn Witte and Leslie Schrock co-published on Second Opinion and The XX Factor, created to help women’s health founders raise money in the rapidly growing women’s health category. Our goal is to offer a practical, founder-first framework to help you decide if, when, and how to raise venture—and what to do if that’s not the best path for you.
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1 month ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr
In many ways, in this market turmoil, healthcare services is feeling like a decent bet. Relative to other sectors, it’s highly domestic, and it’s less unpredictable in periods of economic uncertainty. People still get sick during recessions. And yet, the part of healthcare that most of the readers of this newsletter inhabit — startups, venture and PE firms, innovative care delivery businesses, and so on — are certainly going to be impacted.
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1 month ago | 
secondopinion.media | Christina Farr |Leslie Ziegler Schrock
A staggering one in eight Americans has tried GLP-1s. We know that, in addition to weight loss, they also help reduce the risk of conditions like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and have a role in preventing neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. But GLP-1 use impacts a common and less discussed condition—binge eating. And the effects are transforming big food. As a former food entrepreneur, I know more than I wish I did about that profoundly flawed system.