Committed to 25 million Americans dealing with Hypothyroidism, Paloma Health is facilitating the access to expert and personalized treatment for this chronic condition – all from the comfort of home.

Paloma Health, based in the USA, is a telehealth company focused solely on hypothyroidism – a condition of the thyroid gland that causes fatigue, weight gain and metabolic disorders. Paloma Health offers online access to thyroid specialists, at-home thyroid blood test kits, medical guidance and prescriptions to deliver the best care available. They joined TheVentureCity last December 2020 to work with our team in product, growth, data, culture and fundraising.

The beginnings

Marina Tarasova and Guillaume Cohen-Skalli are the founders behind Paloma Health. Back in 2018, they found that hypothyroidism patients in the USA were underserved and unsatisfied with their care due to a lack of certified endocrinologists and an average wait time of 37 days for an appointment. Paloma Health was created to fulfill this need, combining an online care solution with a more holistic approach, offering diets and lifestyle guidance as well.

Marina, the co-founder and COO, has extensive sales and marketing experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries. On the other hand, Guillaume, the co-founder and CEO, is a two time founder with experience in Venture Capital. Their skills perfectly complemented to build this business together.

What they saw in TheVentureCity

When Paloma Health joined TheVentureCity, they were focused on their product development and the implementation of their subscription model. It seemed to be the perfect timing to work with TheVentureCity, as they valued our Product-Led Growth and data-driven approach, as well as our team’s expertise. In Guillaume’s words, this is why they chose us:

“THE TEAM, THE TEAM, THE TEAM! BUILDING A COMPANY IS HARD ENOUGH, WE WANT TO DO IT WITH PEOPLE WE ARE EXCITED TO BE WORKING WITH. IT IS NOT ONLY ABOUT SKILLS AND CONNECTIONS, IT IS ALSO ABOUT HAVING FUN WORKING TOGETHER. FROM MY FIRST PHONE CALL WITH LAURA TO ALL THE OTHER TOUCHPOINTS I HAD WITH THE THEVENTURECITY TEAM, I HAVE ALWAYS ENJOYED OUR INTERACTIONS. THE QUALITY OF THE DUE DILIGENCE PROCESS AND THE FOCUS ON DATA SHOWED ME HOW WE CAN BECOME GREAT PARTNERS AND FRIENDS.”

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What they achieved working with TheVentureCity team

At first, Marina and Guillaume admittedly were a bit hesitant on how we could impact their business in a short period of time. But, once they got started with our team, those feelings were left behind. Shortly, the added value was evident in the performance curves and metrics.

Here are some highlights of their progress and product updates during our work together:

• Introduced the upsell of new biomarkers as add-ons that contributed to increase the AOV by 42%.
• Launched the membership program with great traction. After 3 months, 40% of their doctor consultations were coming from Paloma Health members. The company keeps a close eye on the progress of the membership program with rolling monthly dashboards that update daily. Working with the Data team, they extended Segment instrumentation to capture all purchase events; backfilled historical data from other sources; and created real time Google Data Studio dashboards connected to a data warehouse. Having this information at their fingertips allows the Paloma Health team to see up-to-date annual and monthly subscriber counts; gauge retention and growth accounting from one month to the next on a rolling basis; and calculate customer lifetime value.
• Paloma Health’s marketing team benefitted from the data-driven approach as well.  They worked with the Data and Growth team to build dashboards that measure the performance of paid acquisition campaigns.
• Implemented a new paid social strategy that will allow the company to scale their user acquisition within the desired levels of ROI and align their unit economics to the budget allocation of each channel.
• Deep dive analysis of attribution in organic acquisition to understand the impact of conversions that comes from their content and SEO positioning.
• Implemented Company-wide quarterly OKRs to keep the team aligned and focused on what matters the most.
• Closed a Seed+ round, in which TheVentureCity invested and helped them to talk to other interested investors.

What is the next stage for Paloma Health

They will keep scaling up their user acquisition strategy through the membership and expanding their offering to existing patients, who require less intensive care. One of their takeaways from the experience working with TheVentureCity is the importance of the product-channel fit. Having found and proved their product-market fit, they will focus on finding the right channel to reach that market. It will enable them to scale and achieve their goals in terms of growth and retention to be ready for their Round A at the end of 2021. We at TheVentureCity will be following their progress closely and will continue supporting them from other fronts.

TheVentureCity’s experience working with Paloma Health

We love to work with founders that challenge us as a team, taking us to another level. Certainly, we also learnt a lot from this amazing team. Luis Guzmán, our Growth Marketing Lead, who worked with them very closely remarks: “The biggest strengths of Paloma Health are their fast pace of execution and hands-on approach while keeping the high-level strategy in place. These are some of the traits we have identified that are key to the success of a startup.”

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