Rewriting the Script Around Women’s Fertility with Abby Mercado and Kristyn Hodgdon of Rescripted

Today I’m speaking with my dear friends Abby Mercado and Kristyn Hodgdon, co-founders of Rescripted, a fertility patient education and community platform. Abby was the former founder of Best Shot and Kristyn is the original founder of The Fertility Tribe.

Abby and Kristyn combined their superpowers and created Rescripted in order to provide completely free content, tools and resources to fertility patients, no matter what stage of the journey you’re in-they can even work with your doctors to help you find the right medications. Today, we’re talking about rewriting the script of fertility.

Both women have had their own fertility journeys and experiences with IVF, and both are also mothers to boy and girl twins through IVF. They’re here to help us rewrite the script of fertility and I am so excited to share our conversation with you today.

Dr. Aimee: Welcome to the show!

Kristyn: Hi. Thanks, Dr. Aimee.

Abby: Thank you for having us.

Dr. Aimee: Tell us, how did you meet?

Kristyn: On Instagram. How else does one meet in the infertility community?

Dr. Aimee: What led you to joining forces for your company that’s all about fertility?

Abby: We both had businesses of our own. I’ll briefly touch on mine. When I went through my IVF journey, I just became very passionate about everything that was wrong with it. I was a former VC investor, so I was investing in technology. When I went through IVF, I took that lens to all of the problems that I saw during my journey. This was back in 2018. I specifically became really interested in medication management and mental health, problems with both of those things. I’m a natural born entrepreneur and I’m an Aries, so I ultimately was successful, which was fantastic.

I had these two babies staring up at me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my infertile brethren, and ended up wanting to start a business that was focused on medication management. I did that, and then our other cofounder and I said we’re actually not affecting enough lives here, we’re not helping as much as we possibly could. We decided to pivot direct to consumer and go after the consumer and helping them more closely, versus just with their clinic, and developing tools and resources for them. I ended up saying I wish I knew more about the consumer, how to talk with them, how to resonate with them, how to communicate with them.

Luckily, I met the perfect person to do just that, and that was Kristyn. I slid into Kristyn’s DMs and was like, “Can we chat? I want to get to know you.” Kristyn obviously has an amazing story of her own.

Kristyn: I was joking with a friend that infertility has become my personality because I feel like it has taken up so much of my life over the past five years, in both good and bad ways. The origin of my original company The Fertility Tribe was really that I was diagnosed with PCOS when I was 27, I was having irregular periods or no periods at all. My OBGYN sent me to get some tests run, I got diagnosed with PCOS, and got sent straight to a fertility clinic.

Here I am not even 28 years old, none of my friends were trying to conceive, let alone going through fertility treatments, and I’m sitting in the fertility clinic waiting room, no one is making eye contact. In the one place where I’m like all these people are going through the same thing as me, and yet there were no support groups, no resources, no sense of community where I could find support. Friends and family only understand so much when they haven’t been through it.

So, I started documenting my journey, I started a blog, I started sharing on Instagram. Even though it was only five years ago, it was before a lot of people started sharing on Instagram. It struck a nerve and just grew from there. It went from my own personal blog to then I started sharing other people’s journeys, and it kind of turned into the first and only digital publishing platform for all things fertility and nontraditional paths to parenthood.

My background is in publishing, and I love all things reading and writing and editing. They’re my strengths, I guess you could say. I really felt like this was the resource that was missing, so between the content we provided and then the community we provided for support, those were our two big areas. Because I didn’t want to charge the patient, I didn’t know how to scale it as an actual business so that I could leave my full-time job and do this full-time.

Then I actually ended up leaving my full-time job due to COVID and not having childcare at the time. I actually just met Abby by happenstance at that time. She was like, “I don’t know how to reach consumers,” and I was like, “I don’t know how to scale my business,” and we both just kind of had what each other needed during that time.

Dr. Aimee: I love it. I love that you said infertility became your personality.

Kristyn: Like I said, it’s for better or worse. I’ve been through it personally, I had twins four years ago, but I just came off another journey of about a year of IVF that didn’t result in a baby, so I really am in the thick of it with our community members and can empathize so much with what everyone is going through.

Dr. Aimee: I can tell, just when I’m on your Instagram page, how helpful the information is for the people who are engaging with it, so thank you for everything that you guys have done. Tell us more about Rescripted and merging your two companies, for people who are listening.

Abby: Rescripted is the number one patient education platform. We provide content, tools, and resources for wherever you are in your journey to build your family. We work with consumers. It’s always free for consumers, which is something we’re incredibly proud of. We see so many different solutions for consumers that they have to pay for. I’m somebody who took out a second mortgage to go through IVF. Paying for something else is the last thing we think a consumer should have to do, so always free.

Essentially, what people really love about us is our ability to write just really empathetic content that is also scientifically driven. We have a medical advisory team, we have a bunch of scientific writers, Kristyn is our editor in chief. In addition to the content that we’re providing, we have what we call tools and resources for wherever you are in your journey to build a family.

What’s really cool about our tools and resources is that they’re crowdsourced. We reach about 9,000,000 people on a monthly basis. We love feedback, we’re entrepreneurs, that’s how we live and breathe is feedback from our community. They tell us what they want, and we have a technology company, so we build what they want.

The three things they’ve told us they wanted to date, the first is our social network. This is a place where people can authentically engage with whatever is on their plate, whether that’s a PCOS diagnosis, an endometriosis diagnosis, whether they’re just starting out or not even experiencing infertility. We touch fertility, infertility, and pregnancy loss. That’s our social network.

Second is our shop. We’ve put together a marketplace for products and services within the fertility industry. We like to say that this is a place for the things you want, the things you need, and the things that you never knew you wanted or needed. A funny example of that, one of our top sellers is lube. Who knew you needed a TTC safe lube on your journey to build your family? I personally didn’t know that. Another great thing about our marketplace is we’re able to support other founders in this space, and that’s one of my absolute favorite things to do.

Third is our pharmacy. This is a place for consumers to buy IVF medications and to work with our network of pharmacies to really get a consumer experience that they’re used to along with our educational tools. That kind of comes from The Best Shot side of things, and obviously the content comes from The Fertility Tribe side of things.

Dr. Aimee: When you mentioned medications, how does that work, how do people actually buy the medications through Rescripted?

Abby: The three things that we’re really best at, best in class service, the pharmacies that we work with are taking kind of a kid-glove approach to taking care of patients. Also, we have some of the best pricing, if not the best pricing in the industry.

Dr. Aimee, you know this obviously, but the way that medication pricing is often looked at in the industry from a volume perspective. If you’re going to a massive clinic as a patient, you’re probably going to get great medication pricing. However, if you’re going to a small boutique clinic, that might not always be the case. I don’t know. It really depends. Our partners look at us as one of the largest fertility clinics in the world, so all of that said, we get great pricing deals for our patients.

Every Rescripted patient gets a card, they take it to their nurse and they say, “I want to go through Rescripted RX to get my medications, and then they’ll receive their prescriptions from one of our partner pharmacies. Like I said, we have great service and we have great pricing. If we don’t beat certain pricing out there, we’ll price match. Those are the three things that we’re really great at.

Dr. Aimee: For me, I work with Enable as my electronic medical record, so when I put medication in, I do it electronically through the pharmacy side of my EMR. Do I just select Rescripted, so that’s going to be there?

Abby: We have a relationship with Reunite with their Cloud RX site, with that side of the business. Essentially, our pharmacy is powered by Reunite, but you get all of the bells and whistles that Rescripted specifically offers to patients, which is more of a consumer-oriented experience versus a clinic-oriented experience, if you will. Something that has a Kristyn lens on it that knows how to talk to the consumer in a Kristyn type of way.

Dr. Aimee: Basically, just to clarify for me as the doctor ordering, if I’m ordering for a patient, because I have to choose a pharmacy when I do it electronically, do I pick the pharmacy?

Abby: Yes. You’ll pick Cloud RX. Let’s say Kristyn is your patient. Kristyn says, “Here’s my Rescripted RX card. Here’s the NCPDP ID, here’s what else you need to type into Enable,” and then you can send the script to Rescripted RX and it will get routed to one of our pharmacies that we really love working with in that network.

Dr. Aimee: I know that there are patients who might be telling their doctors, “I want to use Rescripted,” and they might not know exactly the language that they need to use, and maybe their doctor didn’t watch or listen to our podcast, although they should because this is super helpful. Awesome. Thank you for that. I’ll try that and see how it works immediately.

I also think you should have my Egg Whisperer pants in your shop, just saying.

Abby: I’ve always been such a fan of those pants, they’re amazing. We’re excited to offer those for our patients.

Dr. Aimee: You guys have created a podcast, Dear (In)Fertility, which is so unique. Kristyn, you host that. I think it’s with Ali Domar. Is that right?

Kristyn: Ali was our first season co-host, and every season since we’ve had a different co-host. Season one was Ali Domar, and that was specifically around mental health. Season two was with Dr. Lucky Sekhon, a reproductive endocrinologist at RMA of New York. That one similarly, 30-minute episodes, all very specific to a stage of the journey, so IUI, IVF, transfer, genetic testing.

Season three was really exciting for us because, like Abby said earlier, we’ve been trying to reach the people that might be just starting out on their journey to conceive. We really believe as a company that sex-ed in the US is broken and that’s why so many people are completely blindsided by their infertility diagnosis. So, we actually did season three of the podcast with Dr. Staci Tanouye, and every episode was a different topic related to that. The first one was sex-ed rescripted. There was one about sexual health, one about vaginal health, one about endometriosis, one about the menstrual cycle, if you’re having irregular periods, what are the red flags, when should you speak to a doctor, when should you go to a fertility clinic.

We think that those conversations are really important to have to catch people early. I say this all the time, but I was 27 years old with a college education, married, and didn’t know that if I didn’t get my period regularly or at all, that meant I was not ovulating regularly, which meant it was going to be really hard for me to have a baby or get pregnant. That shouldn’t be the case. We should be learning this way earlier on. That’s what we’re really trying to do at Rescripted.

Dr. Aimee: That’s great. Dr. Allison Rodgers has a book that should be out soon about puberty, and I invited her to come on the show. She said, “Aimee, it’s about puberty.” I’m like I know, we have to teach people about puberty. That’s important because if they don’t know about puberty, how are they going to know all the other stuff?

Kristyn: Yes. And it’s important as moms of daughters to be teaching them the proper anatomical names and teaching them things early. I know that I didn’t really get the talk when I was a kid. Helping them understand that it’s not weird. Dr. Tanouye and I talked about how your vagina is normal, your vulva doesn’t need to be washed with this magical formula that is being marketed that smells like flowers that just feeds into the same message. These are our bodies, it’s normal, sex is normal, wanting to have a baby is normal, infertility is normal. We just want to normalize and rescript the conversation around all of this stuff.

Dr. Aimee: You mean front-butt and back-butt isn’t what we should say?

Abby: No. My 3-year-old little girl says vagina, it’s pretty awesome. Not only are people blindsided, but it becomes, “infertility is a disease state,” but obviously there’s so much that builds up to “what is infertility, what is causing your infertility.” Because we didn’t learn, not only are we blindsided, but this feels stigmatized. That’s one of the reasons that Kristyn and I are so focused and our team is so focused on shattering this stigma and normalizing these conversations. Everybody should be talking about this. It’s just sex. Let’s just chat about it. Why is there so much stigma? One in five of us will have trouble.

Kristyn: I think the three of us might forget sometimes, or I know I do, that not everyone is comfortable talking about it. I think people feel really awkward sometimes when they’re like, “Are you done having kids? You have a boy and a girl,” and I’m like, “No. Actually, I had a year-long fertility journey that didn’t end in a baby and I had two miscarriages.” They’re like, “Whoa.”

But there are so many people who don’t want to post on social media or even show anyone that they’re following fertility accounts on social media, so that’s why our social network off of traditional social media is helpful because it’s for those people who maybe don’t even want to tell their mom, but they still need that level of support.

Dr. Aimee: Yes. I love the name Rescripted because you don’t necessarily know exactly what it is.

Abby: Totally. That’s why we went with the name Rescripted. It’s complicated to put two brands together and put two founders together and say we’re going to create something new together. For us, it was all about going back to basics.

We cover fertility and pregnancy loss, but our future is really exciting. As we write, as we record video, as we record podcasts, as we continue to put out media and put out content, we cover 10 different categories, and that doesn’t even include menopause. We’re really excited about going into menopause in the future.

The only thing that we will probably never touch is babies. Babies are really cute, but that’s a 47-billion-dollar market and we think that there’s an untapped market where women really need answers for their reproductive, hormonal, and sexual health and wellness.

We’re seeing a lot of investment dollars coming into this industry. As a result of that, we’re seeing the consumer get really confused. 40% of women don’t understand what ovulation is. How is that possible in this golden age of fem-tech? It’s not okay. That’s really what we want to be is if you’re a woman, from your first period to your last period, we’re there on this journey with you, for you, providing you with content, tools, and resources. That is us and that is what we’re proud to cover.

Kristyn: Patients are always Googling, and we don’t want them to find these articles where it’s like super medical and the information is not being broken down for them, or if it is, it’s not spoken to them with that emotional vantage point that so much of this entails when you’re going through this process. We offer patient-centric content that’s always free, but we tap into some of these brands and clinics that we work with to help make sure that it’s expert-driven and science-backed.

Dr. Aimee: How do you hope to see the fertility industry change in the next five to ten years?

Abby: It’s more like how we want our education system to change in the next five to ten years. I think for us, since we’ve already talked about it at length, sex-ed is broken. We know how to put a condom on a banana, but use birth control or whatever, it’s just so much more multifaceted than that. I think that’s where you start shattering the stigma.

Jessica Bell van der Wal, the founder of Frame Fertility, who is a good friend of ours, she and her team did some research that reproductive anxiety starts in the early teens. I think it’s really taking down that emotional burden for that individual.

Kristyn: On the other side of the coin, I think that by changing the conversation and working towards ending the stigma, my hope is that more companies will start covering fertility treatments and that more states will have IVF insurance mandates, and things will move in a better direction when it comes to infertility being treated like a disease, because it is.

I think we see so many people who feel like IVF is completely unattainable for them. We really want to speak to those people and show them that there are options out there, but we can only do so much. Change has to happen from these companies that are providing the insurance.

Dr. Aimee: Great. I have chills listening to you guys, I can feel your passion, and I love you guys.

Kristyn: We love you.

Dr. Aimee: Do you guys have anything coming up that you want to share with us, maybe in the next couple of months that’s coming out soon?

Kristyn: The holidays are not fun when you’re struggling with fertility, so we’re really going to try to create a lot of content that helps people navigate that time. Also, in the new year we’re launching season four of the Dear (In)Fertility podcast, which is going back to our roots and each episode is going to be a different personal story from a celebrity that has been open on their platform about their fertility struggles or journeys through pregnancy loss and they were gracious enough to share their story with us. We’re in the middle of recording that and can’t wait to bring it to everyone who listens to the podcast.

Abby: We have IVF medications in our pharmacy, and we’re really excited to go upstream and to carry more pharmaceuticals that are helpful for women who are maybe not going through IVF, like for BV, STIs, UTIs, all the things that we have all dealt with but it’s sometimes difficult to get those meds.

Dr. Aimee: Thank you for joining me today. Is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners before we sign off?

Kristyn: You can find us at Rescripted.com and on Instagram @ Fertility.Rescripted. It’s a safe space, so come join us.

Dr. Aimee: Thank you for joining us today. I really loved talking to you. I could sit here all day long and sip on my coffee and chat with you guys about fertility. Thank you for creating such a safe space for my patients and for everyone out there who is going through such a shitty thing, which is being a fertility patient. Thanks again.

Kristyn: Absolutely.

Abby: Thank you, Dr. Aimee, for everything that you do. We’re happy to help as well.

Dr. Aimee: Thanks again.

Originally published at https://draimee.org.