founder's spotlight: Ashleigh Brown

In March, our editor Fern O’Shaughnessy spoke to Ashleigh Marie Brown to hear about her journey through the tech startup world, and what experience has been in starting FemTech company FeelBetr Health .

Ashleigh is Co-Founder and Chief Customer Experience Officer at FeelBetr Health. Alongside her co-founders, Erin Nance, MD and Jillian Miranda , Ashleigh founded FeelBetr to help foster a community for women with chronic conditions, and, through the social media platform, help them receive insights about their health. Her full bio can be read on the FeelBtr Health website; here.

the journey so far.

carving new pathways in women's health: a fundraising perspective.

As a now second-time founder with a background in clinical reproductive health of nearly a decade and a half and a history in HealthTech now spanning almost five years, I have a unique perspective on innovation in women's health.

On one hand, it's essential to the marketplace and to progress to carve new pathways and create new ways of connecting dots. On the other, pitching an innovative concept, specifically to investors and strategic partners, involves some education on the problem you're solving and the consumer group you're serving. That education piece has to be so finely ingrained in the larger conversation you're having that the people you're pitching don't feel preached to or even "educated" or enlightened so much as armed with new information and, ideally, new passion for the audience your startup is engaging.

This can be a fun challenge, but it's no easy feat.

FeelBetr Health is a health informatics startup that operates with a social media sensibility. We're leading with the social power of women to aggregate the data that will begin to really chip away at the tremendous disparity in medical research and development (R&D) focused on women. While those of us in FemTech are especially well-acquainted with this stat, most people are wholly unaware that only 4% of medical R&D to date is from studies performed with a concentration on women. In short, 96% of the treatments for, and understanding of, nearly every type of disease or disorder were created without even a consideration of how that illness may behave or present in female biology.

96% of the treatments for, and understanding of, nearly every type of disease or disorder were created without even a consideration of how that illness may behave or present in female biology.

Women die every single day because we collectively--physicians included--lack fundamental knowledge of symptoms and signs that a woman is sick. The example we at FeelBetr use most often is around cardiac events--who do we all think of first when think "heart attack"? If you're like most, we see an older gentleman clutching his chest in pain. BUT women rarely experience a heart attack this way; for us, common symptoms include jaw pain, nausea, shortness of breath. If a woman wakes up with these symptoms, she's probably going to take an ibuprofen and some antacid and go about her day. And by the end of that day, she could be dead.

Until we have comprehensive knowledge that impacts not only the public's understanding of these variations in women, but also updated science that informs physicians of these unique presentations in female biology, we will continue to lose more women than we should.

Our team at FeelBetr, which includes my co-founders Dr. Erin Nance, our CEO; and Jillian Miranda, our COO, have spent a great deal of team crafting messaging for not only pitching but marketing that helps explain what the necessity of what we're doing as well as we explain what we're doing. There's a quote I love so much that I included it in my pitch deck for my last startup: "The greatest danger in times of turbulence, is not the turbulence, it's acting with?yesterday's logic."

What we're building is complicated in the technical sense--algorithmically and all--but it's a very simple idea. However, it's not a simple endeavor, and there are naturally the occasional questions and challenges to our methodology. However, we're clear that age-old problems deserve contemporary solutions, and that's what we're delivering.

age-old problems deserve contemporary solutions

We're proud to be charting new territory in a space we're all so obsessed with advancing.

the motivations and influences.

I encounter women I admire all the time--there are so many incredible women doing amazing things in all industries. I tend to gravitate towards women who've made space in male-dominated worlds, and to that point, one particular mentor I always recall is my first boss out of college at MonsterCampus (Monster.com). She was an SVP and routinely the only woman in the room for board meetings and interaction with the C-Suite who was not an executive assistant. Not only that, she was also the only senior executive on the West Coast at the time, when the company was based just outside of Boston. She had a family, including her young daughter, in the Bay Area; an office with about 50 employees in Los Angeles; and an executive team in Massachusetts. So the travel was intense, the workload was intense, and the responsibility was profound. Somehow, she handled it all with such skill and grace, and I thought of her often as I worked on my first startup. I was her EA, and as a 22 year-old who was still refining ideas around what she wanted to do and be, it was inspiring to see a woman having and managing so much life.

She was an SVP and routinely the only woman in the room for board meetings and interaction with the C-Suite who was not an executive assistant.

It was also useful to see the things she wasn't able to do--she very simply couldn't be everywhere all the time, and so sometimes choices had to be made. I saw how difficult it was to make balance everything she wanted to do with what she needed to do, and while she frankly didn't choose herself very often, I did note the few times she made space for herself when absolutely necessary to her health or the health of her relationships. And I learned that this actually made her even better at her job.

Being a startup founder is extremely difficult, and it's valuable to know and remember that other women have attacked professional goals head-on, without complaint, and made it through stronger and better. That said, nothing matters more as a founder than a real connection to your 'why'. That connection is absolutely imperative. The 'why' is what keeps you going when the hits keep coming (and they will come). The minute you lose that connection, you lose everything. It must also be noted, and I get to say this because I'm in FemTech when nearly every founder you encounter has a personal and direct connection to the problem they're solving, that founders whose 'why' can be reduced to wanting to be a founder or wanting to rich, will ultimately fail. There are laughable stories about men who've tried to build FemTech companies that had nothing to do with their lives or interests and were designed simply to exploit the buying power of women, and you don't hear about those companies now.

The 'why' is what keeps you going when the hits keep coming (and they will come).

That's not a dig at men whatsoever, because there are some wonderful guys building in the FemTech space. However, more often than not those men have wives, sisters, daughters, or mothers affected by the problem they're solving, and this is what makes their mission even more urgent for them.

Fundamentally, founders need mentors and they need purpose. Everything else is icing; those two things make the cake.

the challenge, and the takeaways.

Like most founders, I would say that funding has been the biggest challenge simply because lack of funding kills everything. But since that's such a pervasive and universal challenge, I'll name the second biggest challenge, which, for me, was team-building and balancing leadership with navigating a new venture. Finding and selecting the right team and the right partners for what you're building is so important to your success, and I didn't have a complete respect for that fact. It's easy to look at the fact that someone is good at their job and likes what you're building as qualifying factors for your team, but there's really so much more that has to considered.

Partnership with people who are strong where you're weak and vice versa is really the key to the win.

I did a healthtech/BioTech accelerator (gener8tor) in Birmingham the fall before last, and I got to see up close how other startups with multiple co-founders worked. In short, it was amazing. They operated with such force, force that is preternaturally difficult to have as a solo founder. They got done in a week what took me a month (or more). And it was there that I realized that I had over indexed in collecting smart, capable people but hadn't really taken the time to identify the partnership that I needed to grow.

In the new startup, I'm so thrilled to have two cofounders who are yes, brilliant and accomplished, but also skilled and educated in areas where I'm not. I am also skilled and informed in ways different from them, and in this way we complement one another to form a much stronger unit.

My co-founder Erin is our CEO, and I must admit that it's really nice to have someone else in that role this round. In all honestly, while I've always cherished the "founder" label, I was never crazy about "CEO". I liked the challenge of it (sometimes!) but the title often felt weighty, or like self-aggrandizement--although I knew that it technically wasn't. The CEO flow was an amazing test of my fortitude and will; it made me so much stronger and smarter, and I do believe that I will do it again at some point in the future.

But for now, as CCxO (Chief Customer Experience Officer), I get to concentrate on the areas where my expertise and passions squarely rest: branding and brand experience, marketing, company culture, and strategic partnerships. I get to focus on the careful crafting of a brand experience in which every touchpoint of our brand by a user and/or a customer or partner is consistently resonant and authentic to our values and mission; I get to focus on user experience and getting in the heads of those who engage with our platform; I get to nurture and develop strategic partnership relationships; and I get to strategize about innovative growth opportunities for our company and product.

The division of labor between the three of us as co-founders has been the best possible way to jump back into the fray of FemTech leadership. I'm incredibly grateful for the partnership and all that we're able to achieve through the convergence of our respective talents, skills, and resources.

the best advice Ashleigh has received.

The best advice I've ever been given in general came from an English Literature professor in college. He said it completely in passing— honestly, I think we were reading Flannery O'Connor and he was saying it in relation to fictional characters— but it was one of those statements that smacked with its complex simplicity. He said: "we should not treat people as [we] want to be treated ("The Golden Rule"), but instead treat people as they want to be treated"("The Platinum Rule").

This advice serves me across the gamut, in my personal relationships, in professional relationships, and even and especially in my user- and customer experience work.

We should not treat people as we want to be treated [...] but instead treat people as they want to be treated.

Ultimately, presuming that everyone I engage with knows what I know or feels how I feel is myopic and low vibrational. Assessing how people want and need to be engaged, what's important to them, meeting them where they are, and respecting their experience and values even if they're different from my own, is my goal for every interaction.

This cheat sheet for emotional intelligence serves me daily in life and in my career.

the advice.

My advice is for first-time founders, because as a first-time founder journey survivor (!) I have such deep compassion for the people, particularly women, out there pushing their idea and hard work up a steep hill. It's grueling and difficult, but my general advice is to expand your knowledge. Founders have to be sharp and agile, and the journey requires you to know things you don't know and do things you don't know how to do regularly. Never be afraid to say "I don't know" or "please explain that to me", but also make sure you learn three new things every single day.

Never be afraid to say "I don't know" or "please explain that to me", but also make sure you learn three new things every single day.

My resolve to do that began a couple of years ago, and my methodology has evolved to a place where I have buckets and try to learn something new in each bucket daily. My buckets, being in HealthTech, are 1) healthcare-related facts or statistics, 2) market and/or industry current news, and 3) women's health information or facts. We don't even realize that we gather these facts organically from social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok), reputable digital news outlets, self-initiated research (aka curiosity), even conversations.

It's helpful, at the end of each day, to contemplate and write down those things you learned in each of your buckets, whatever those buckets are.

inclusion through exclusion.

I think, in order to truly work towards equity socioculturally and in our institutions, we must be careful with our language. I'm particularly sensitive to the term "exclusion" as a diametric opposite to "inclusion", because that's not always the case.

For instance, FeelBetr Health is focused on women's health, certainly not to the exclusion of men, but as a means to equity and filling a vacuum of data where women are concerned.

It should shock and disgust everyone that 96% of the empirical medical R&D that exists has been performed on men. And that consequently, 96% of the therapeutics, diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals we ALL use are based on that medical research. My cofounder Erin, who is an orthopedic surgeon and therefore literally uses some of this research in her practice, reminds us that "even the mice were men" — meaning, even the lab animals used historically in experiments in the past were male. Male was always the control. Women have occasionally (heavy on the occasionally) been a variable, but certainly?not a priority.

Male was always the control. Women have occasionally (heavy on the occasionally) been a variable, but certainly?not a priority.

It should seem ridiculous to everyone that a therapeutic developed based on the study of a 55 year-old would also unquestionably be appropriate for his 16 year-old daughter. It should be common knowledge that, in many cases, women symptomatically experience diseases and disorders far differently than their male counterparts. We're all aware of the reproductive differences when it comes to male and female biology, so why wouldn't we extrapolate to consider that there are differences in other systems in our bodies as well?

The issue is not just the data we have, which is based on the historical inclusion of men, but the absent data that we don't have based on the historical exclusion of women. The absence of this data has been all too often fatal for women because we don't have the data to recognize the unique ways in which women might present a wide range of symptoms that indicate disease or disorder.

"Health" in our country (and many other countries, if we're being honest) has been synonymous with "men's health", and actually white men's health, for lifetimes.

There are so many people who have been excluded in clinical research, such as communities of color. "Health" in our country (and many other countries, if we're being honest) has been synonymous with "men's health", and actually white men's health, for lifetimes. And it's far past time we practice health equity in the form of a fundamental understanding of how women experience and present various conditions. It is literally the least we can do.?

And it's far past time we practice health equity in the form of a fundamental understanding of how women experience and present various conditions. It is literally the least we can do.?

finally, the problem Ashleigh is most passionate about solving.

If it's not already clear (!), I'm diehard about women's health. I will always double down on issues regarding women's health.

The healthcare system in this country is a mess, literally, and it doesn't work for women. It costs women too much money, time, and too often their livelihoods--and their lives.

?The healthcare system in this country is a mess, literally, and it doesn't work for women

My cofounders and I are particularly set on closing the women's health data gap. It's the first step toward advancing the healthcare landscape for women.