I am really sorry to hear about your past experience at a fertility clinic. One of the many reasons we are offering an at-home solution is for this exact purpose... performing such a personal process in a clinic is often times scary, unsettling, and uncomfortable (and sometimes downright humiliating - especially when interacting with people who have intolerant views).
Our brand is something that we've given a lot of thought to and that we continually discuss as a team. We work with many different clients who are using our services for various reasons. To your point, we've found that many of our clients are part of the LGBTQ community and are preserving their fertility prior to starting hormone replacement therapy.
I have personally spoken to many of these clients and have heard similar feedback to yours. We, clearly, still have a lot to learn about our clientele - their backgrounds, goals, needs, experiences with fertility, thoughts around family planning, etc.
I would love to set up an LGBTQ-centric campaign for the community, and I will make sure we do soon.
Thanks again for your awesome feedback! And if you would like to try the service, please message me at [email protected], if you're open to giving us this kind of honest feedback, I'd love to get you a free kit.
PS in this field.... puns are always welcome.
Thinking about the types of people who would be interested in your service, I would lean hard into serving the trans community specifically. I can't think of a better way to demonstrate trust than being archivist of choice for people who are planning to stop making sperm.
My partner and I knew we were done having kids before I started transition earlier this year, but if that had not been the case, a service that was more private, especially one that was specifically inclusive, would have been invaluable. I've had negative experiences in other areas of healthcare, and I really would have felt hesitant to go to a sperm bank in person, for the same reasons others here have mentioned.
I'm sorry to hear about your fertility clinic experience - it feels like they are still living in the stone ages.
The whole question of will they cover it, won't they cover it, will they sabotage me, won't they sabotage me is not a silly question anymore if federal protections for patients are increasingly politicized, just looking at the past few months alone. I was only able to push for certain policies in what is covered or offered at all through my provider by basically defeating their arguments with "I won't be your patient next year if the government makes it okay for you to deny me. You need to offer these services now or I will have to seek care outside your system and make it more expensive for you to care of anyways. Work with me here, I'm trying to not die."
Before I started my transition, preserving my sperm was a top priority. At the time, my financial situation was dismal, and it took me almost a year to save up enough to afford it. That’s a whole year my transition was delayed.
When I finally went through with it, the whole experience was pretty awkward. The folks at the cryostorage place were nice, but I felt like I was not 100% welcome. The actual “sample collection” process was very awkward and uncomfortable.
If there had been a trustworthy service like Legacy back then, I definitely would have jumped on it.
As it stands, the site and branding definitely feels targeted totally to men, which isn’t super welcoming to people in my position. It’s a sad fact that I have to deal with feeling unwelcome a lot when it comes to healthcare related things, so if I have to go through that I’d at least like to be able to do it from the comfort of my own home, not needing to physically interact with someone.
If you did find a way to balance your branding to make trans people feel more comfortable, I think that would be a wonderful thing and I think there is a pretty large market there. As odomojuli said, I think using more “family-centric” language would be a great start. If you don’t feel comfortable explicitly catering to trans people, fine, but lowering the emphasis on “MAN” would go a long way.
We live in an age where men can AND do become fathers without a female partner. Both through adoption and through surrogacy. Given that, it would be a disservice to such men who deeply desire to be fathers.
e.g.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/chan-surrogate-gestat... * https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jan/29/i-always-wan...
I will state up front, I'm not trying to police language, just pointing out that deciding specific keywords up front affects how people find your business online or how it's talked about through referrals.
1) Should you ever decide to expand your business to include eggs, the importance of branding and search results is much more efficient by targeting families instead of retrofitting the keywords.
2) Say for instance, the mother is just as interested in their partner's sperm as the "man" is. Here gendered language can be both useful and detrimental to specific targeting campaigns based on the keywords.
3) Storing sperm is beginning to reach wider availability for transgender women under some plans. Most forgo the process altogether, because guess what, most transwomen suffer economic discrimination as it is and can't afford it. Would you ever consider an LBGTQ-centric campaign towards offering assistance for this community? I think it's a really great idea since I'm already going to be referring your business to my community since you're significantly more affordable but obviously I have not tried you yet. There's also people with sperm who don't identify as men.
Point is, I'm only hesitant to refer because some people are more sensitive at being gendered through a service. I'm not trying to be all like, "hey MAN, you should totally freeze your sperm here, DUDE" while someone is just beginning transition. Not saying that's what you have said or done in anyway, but having not experienced your service I can only be concerned at the possibility. No pun intended, more sterile language that is more focused on families is a better story and more inclusive of various backgrounds. I'd have to go through your customer journey before I'd make any reasonable recommendations to my community but I'm already keen on referring you simply because you seem the most economic and high quality. Just the option alone to be able to self-service and not dealing with anybody instead of going to a clinic where there's even the possibility that they might oscillate between whether you should deal with male or female employees and then offer you pornography mostly targeted for straight men is a jarring experience that is fixed by your service.
From my own shopping experience with these services and consulting with others, the amount of effort it takes to compile statistics on price and storage duration from competitors is difficult. Good job making it obvious and easy to digest.
Your price points are definitely attractive considering most of the people I know jump for a $5000-6000 option at a local clinic that only stores for average 10 years. You're doing a lot of good things here. The branding feels warm and family-friendly versus the clunky and tragic design of most clinics. I definitely get the feeling I'm shipping something extremely sensitive with a responsible entity that isn't just going to disappear overnight.
Good job! Best of luck to you in your endeavors. Seems extremely thoughtful.