Building a consumer health company has never been easier. Labs, eligibility checks, telehealth, revenue cycle management, medications, and medical records are now an API away. That’s great for builders, but it also means the real competitive battleground has shifted.

Today, distribution and customer acquisition are where consumer health companies win or lose.

Most growth advice falls into one of two camps:

Big swings can be transformative. Think Prenuvo and Kim Kardashian, Function Health with Mark Hyman, or Oura’s NBA deal. But these wins are notable precisely because they are rare.

In practice, most value in consumer health is created through slow, unsexy compounding. But the high-velocity experimentation playbook has historically been out of reach for early-stage companies. Until now.

Over the past 18 months, we’ve reduced our CAC 3-5X by running hundreds of experiments with less than one full-time growth hire. Increasingly, other seed- and pre-seed-stage consumer health companies are doing the same.

The goal of growth experimentation is simple: build a scalable acquisition funnel that produces healthy customer acquisition costs relative to expected lifetime value.

We are adamant about using the word experimentation internally because language shapes culture. It reinforces a scientific mindset (assumptions, hypotheses, measurement, decision rules) and normalizes being wrong.

This approach used to require deep pockets. Companies like Noom can afford 15-20 “growth product managers”, but most of us don’t have that luxury.

Two structural shifts have changed that:

Landing pages, quizzes, drip campaigns, and ad variants can now be built in hours or even minutes, often without engineering support. Early-stage teams benefit even more because they have less legacy complexity.

Modern analytics, CRMs, and website builders increasingly include built-in experimentation and attribution capabilities.

A few years ago, high-velocity testing required a growth PM, multiple engineers, a designer, and a data scientist. Today, early-stage teams can approximate the same loop with a founder + Devin, an engineer + Claude code, or a marketer + Lovable.

To be clear, experimentation is useless (or even dangerous) without a compelling offering that actually improves health outcomes and sustainable unit economics. Great marketing can't fix a bad product. And you do need enough traffic to reach statistical significance in a reasonable timeframe.

But if you clear those hurdles, building a differentiated growth engine using experimentation can be critical in an industry where gross margins don't support lavish customer acquisition costs.

A reminder on upcoming webinars:

So let’s start with a simple question. What are we experimenting on?

To keep the scope manageable, we focus experimentation on conversion-driving funnel steps. This applies equally to DTC and B2B2C health companies, which in practice often operate like direct-to-consumer models with subsidized pricing.

After spending months thinking about this obsessively, here's how we map the terrain:

Each item offers a significant surface area for experimentation. However, many teams over-index on the edges:

The middle consideration phase is often under-explored, and in healthcare, it is frequently the highest-leverage surface area. That’s because healthcare is rarely an impulse purchase. Clients need reassurance, clinical credibility, and clarity about whether the product is right for them.

So let’s talk about what has specifically worked for us within this underutilized middle bucket and why.