Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Tess Cosad, Co-Founder and CEO of Béa Fertility, a start-up providing at-home affordable clinical grade fertility treatment. Having a Beta.B marketing agency, Emberson Ventures and scaling it in three years to lead global advertising campaigns for Fortune 500 companies, Tess launched in 2018 the Femtech brand Hers By Design and later that year was the first woman to lead the digital start-up accelerator programme in Saudi Arabia. A passion for women focussed solutions turns the problems in the broken fertility care industry with infertility affecting one in six of us and families desperately seeking care they can’t access or afford. Béa Fertility was launched in 2020 and recently announced it’s raised 3.2 million dollars to release it’s at home fertility treatment to earlier doctors in the UK. It’s great to have you here, tell me in your own words, this Béa Fertility thing because I think, obviously we are going to talk all about this, it is a very specific product which does a very specific thing.
Tess Cosad
It is.
Elliot Moss
A very important thing, I think it’s important that we are clear what it is.
Tess Cosad
Absolutely, it is a very specific product so what we have built is an insemination device. It sounds kind of scary but essentially it is an applicator that contains what’s called a cervical cap. Now a cervical cap you can think of it a little bit like a menstrual cup for anyone familiar with what that looks like, imagine a small sort of egg cup shaped thing made out of silicon. So I am making something quite complex sound really quite childish actually but um…
Elliot Moss
But clear, I think it’s important though because I think sometimes that the science can get in the way of the, obviously the importance is the efficacy of the thing but also its important to know what it looks like literally in this case.
Tess Cosad
Yeah totally, totally.
Elliot Moss
So it is a silicon cap.
Tess Cosad
It’s a silicon cap and it is folded and placed inside the applicator. Now what happens is you pour semen down into the cup using a funnel and then you remove the funnel and you use the applicator to insert that cervical cap into the vaginal canal where you turn a handle at which pushes the cap out on to the cervix. So it is delivering an older clinical treatment actually called intracervical insemination – ICI.
Elliot Moss
Yeah.
Tess Cosad
And ICI was sort of the defactor fertility treatment up until around the, I want to say the late 70s when IVF and subsequently IUI were commercialised and ICI are kind of friendly neighbourhood fertility treatment really fell off the menu of available options and all we’ve done is bring it back and bring it back in a way that you can do it at home for a twentieth of the cost of IVF.
Elliot Moss
And that’s really the thing isn’t it, it’s… and I think it’s important to be clear as I said because I know some people go ‘oh it’s very, very early to be, to be hearing this’ and I think it doesn’t matter when you hear it, it’s just the practicality of changing, literally changing someone’s life, changing an individual’s life…
Tess Cosad
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
…or a family’s life or whatever.
Tess Cosad
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
But the at home bit is the big bit isn’t it. What we are in the middle of now is a revolution.
Tess Cosad
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
Where it has been taken from the institution over there but now it’s in your home because we can do those things and why that appeal to you. Why is Tess sitting here talking to me about this.
Tess Cosad
Yeah, I, I absolutely abhor anything that’s unfair and I think when I started looking at the fertility world I started to realise well hang on a second, there’s whole groups of people that are completely excluded from receiving care. Let’s, let’s talk about same sex female couples and what they have to go through to conceive with sort of donors and twelve rounds of self-funded IUI before they are eligible for IVF on the NHS. I mean there’s, there’s so many instances in which I looked at this and I just thought, wow talk about human rights you know, making a baby, having a family, having sort of autonomy and ownership over that part of your life, talk about it being stripped away and it just seemed wild to me so it seemed like an industry in need of a shake-up.
Elliot Moss
And the science piece obviously because it’s important, your relationship with science.
Tess Cosad
Honestly, a very failed astrophysicist who then went to the dark side which is also known as the business school to finish my degree and I am honestly at my core, I am a marketing person so I come to life when I am telling stories, that’s really my jam.
Elliot Moss
Now of course when you described how this works, I imagine if I’m one of the 280 plus people that you spoke to, most of whom are men as we know in the venture world.
Tess Cosad
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Some of them would have been possibly uncomfortable hearing, for some reason, for unknown reason to me, uncomfortable hearing anatomical details and so on and so forth, is that true Tess?
Tess Cosad
Yes, unequivocally. Let me preface this by saying when I raised my very first funding round, I had sort of 284 conversations I think it was to end up closing that round.
Elliot Moss
A very precise number.
Tess Cosad
It’s quite, well once it passes about 150 you become so incredulous you keep track um and so I kept track which means that you end up having a lot of conversations with strangers where you are using words like vaginal canal to describe the thing that you are building and I had a great sample of these conversations and I’ve got to say there were a number of moments where you have to explain what you’ve built, where it goes, how it works and there were a number of moments where you know, I remember one so clearly, I had a conversation with quite a young VC and he was trying to ask me questions about the product so he started his questioning very earnestly, really lovely, lovely guy saying, ‘so it goes in the va, it goes in the va’ and I just remember thinking oh god if you can’t say the word vagina, you’re not allowed on my cab table. It just, it really was such a pivotal moment for me raising.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of obviously connecting the science of it and how it works with the bigger vision.
Tess Cosad
Yes.
Elliot Moss
I imagine that was also critical. What did you learn on the way about the story telling and you mentioned that you liked telling stories. What was it that you learnt that unlocked the money that you finally raised?
Tess Cosad
That’s a really great question. I think you can have the best product in the world but it is all about how you position it, it’s all about how you tell the story of what you’ve built, you know that allows people to really see the potential and when you are raising from venture capitalists in particular they are looking for a bet that is going to pay off and their bets are big so you have to tell a big story and I think the thing that I learnt time and time again was to, to not back off from telling that story. It kind of feels like you’re leaning forward on your skis when every fibre of your body is telling you to, to sort of step back and turn and for me the bigger story was transforming the fertility industry. You know for too long we assume that you are either having really frustrating sex at home or you are ending up in a fertility clinic faced with a £14,000 bill and a really invasive medical procedure and it just doesn’t have to be that way, it doesn’t.
Elliot Moss
And just in terms of the more serious side of the number of men in the VC world or rather the percentage of, to put it the other way, the percentage of money that goes to female founders, I’ve talked on the programme a number of times with female founders and it’s about 2%, 2p in every pound I think goes to female founder lead business. What’s going on to fix that and is that something that Tess is interested in on a macro level or is it something that you go, I’m doing what I do and I can control that?
Tess Cosad
I’m doing what I do and that’s all that I can control right now. Honestly my goal is at some point in my career in the future to tackle that problem. For now the way I see it is if I can solve the fertility problem and solve it well through Béa, I will get the resources that I need to be able to make a much more impactful difference to the amount of VC dollars that goes to female founder teams.
Elliot Moss
I think that makes sense. Stay with me for much more from my guest, it’s Tess Cosad and she’s back in a couple of minutes. Right now, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Innovation series which can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their industry insights and practical advice for those of you thinking about getting into an industry like Tess and starting your very own thing. In this clip focussed on the health tech industry, we hear from Elena Rueda, Co-Founder of Dama Health, advancing the field of personalised and precision medicine with a focus on contraception fit.
You can revel in all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz and Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Tess Cosad, Co-Founder and CEO of Béa Fertility, a start-up providing at home, affordable clinical grade fertility treatment. Where are you now? We are a few years in, the money’s there, what’s happening right now for you in the business Tess?
Tess Cosad
Yeah it’s an incredible time for us, so we launched product on the 5 June, we shipped out our first kits later that month after taking pre-orders and we are now selling kits to the families that come our way, the families who are trying to build and go on their journey and really excitingly we have our first pregnancies.
Elliot Moss
Oh brilliant well it’s happening.
Tess Cosad
It’s happening.
Elliot Moss
And just to be clear, the cost I think you said is around a twentieth of, of other methodologies.
Tess Cosad
Yes.
Elliot Moss
That’s correct, good. And in terms of efficacy, you’ve talked about pregnancies.
Tess Cosad
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Now how does it stack up against other forms of fertility treatment?
Tess Cosad
Really interesting so the NICE Guideline updated in 2022 to include ICI and the efficacy that they cited for ICI was just similar to that of IUI, Intrauterine Insemination so what we have essentially done is create a treatment that is at home, hormone free, simple low cost that has similar efficacy to what you would get were to walk through the doors of a fertility clinic and get IUI. It is about 10% in a single cycle and the data shows that it rises to about 50% over six consecutive cycles and to put that into perspective compared to IVF, the IVF efficacy rate in the UK right now is about 27% for one cycle.
Elliot Moss
I mean you are selling, you are selling hope and you are selling life.
Tess Cosad
Right.
Elliot Moss
Which are two quite big things.
Tess Cosad
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Probably the very biggest things that any of us as humans if we think about it, have got to play with. Do you feel that responsibility?
Tess Cosad
So much so. And you’ve got to be so careful with it you know, yes we are selling hope but we are realistic that we are selling a 10% chance in your first treatment kit you know, there’s 90% chance that it will not work for you on the first go. The magic of this treatment is that you can access multiple cycles and sort of tap into what is referred to as cumulative efficacy, so the more you try the higher your chance of it working. Now the problem is when a single cycle of IVF is costing you £5,000, very few people have the ability to do that six times in a row and that doesn’t even mention the sort of the physical toll on the body of IVF so I really do feel the responsibility of selling hope and selling hope to people who for so long have, have really been so desperate we really do tread carefully.
Elliot Moss
You know it is interesting, I was going to ask you this question, obviously a young person which is great, he says enviously and I meet many young founders and the thing that I always think about is just how quickly you learn, and how much you know versus your average person in your age group to just put it like that. That cumulative effect of learning which is the same as the cumulative trying and trying and trying and you increase your chances, do you feel that? Do you feel wiser now than you could have imagined or are you still going I don’t know anything from when you started this?
Tess Cosad
It’s such a good question. Every time I look back and think, God I’ve learned so much. I think as the years have gone by I have done that so frequently that I’ve come to realise that I will likely continue to do that which sort of helps keep me grounded in a way you know, in three months I will look back on where I was today and think, gosh why didn’t I know that. Yeah the learning curve is really enormous and I once read an article by a female founder actually who, who left her company and she said she framed entrepreneurship as a vehicle for growth and I thought that was kind of cool. It’s certainly a, a thankless task sometimes.
Elliot Moss
But you know the truth is, I mean I started earning money when I was 12 and I was in a business when I was 15 and here I am at the ripe old age of 52, the more I know the less I feel I know. I literally feel I know almost nothing.
Tess Cosad
Exactly.
Elliot Moss
And the truth is I probably know a little bit about lots of things so it’s okay. I think we are all on the same journey, it just happens at different times at a different velocity I imagine when you are, as you said, running a business. We talked about that cumulative growth and in your own journey, like anyone’s, mine especially, there have been loads of times when it hasn’t quite gone to plan. Are there things that stick out for you that haven’t gone to plan with regard to what you’ve learnt or is it a general kind of, it’s on the job and you just instinctively know do (a) not (b)?
Tess Cosad
I never instinctively know precisely what to do. I’m able to recognise the feelings in my gut that tell me that I must do something and it’s always a bit of a scramble to figure out what to do. I mean it hasn’t always been smooth sailing but I don’t think any start-up is smooth sailing, I think we all just have our own versions of struggles but there have been, I mean there have been some hilarious moments, there have been some heart breaking moments and we deal with people in a very vulnerable time in their lives and you know, we get our hearts broken by their stories all the time but I think you know, there has been the time that we accidentally sprayed fake semen all over the glass wall at WeWork was the moment that we were running a youth ability study and watched a user snap a device in half going into a medical model of a female pelvis that we fondly refer to as the ‘vulvarine’ that there have been many moments in the life of this company where you just put your head in your hands and you think, oh my God and you take a breath and then those are the moments where I think I’ve never felt clearer as a CEO on the back side of those.
Elliot Moss
I imagine also and obviously we’ve just met, but you’re, you are a thoughtful person. You think about stuff like you say you know, you don’t, you don’t immediately move in to an (a) or (b), you’re going to reflect. I imagine also you can feel pretty vulnerable in this position. Of course people look and go, ‘wow it’s Tess, she’s got money from clever people like Octopus and Jamjar’ and all this other stuff, they must you know, these are really great venture capital business, she must know what she’s doing. But it’s you, it’s just little old Tess right? Is that how it feels sometimes?
Tess Cosad
Just me, yeah. I think for me what’s really uncomfortable sometimes is when the, the headlines come out and I read the headlines and I think, gosh I didn’t recognise anything we did in that story and I don’t think anyone knows what they are doing when they are doing this game and I think you know, I am quite thoughtful but one of the things that I’ve always had to learn the hard way in many situations is that I actually need to make decisions faster and move faster a lot of the time. So I think one of the first times I was faced with a sort of cripplingly difficult situation, I knew what I needed to do. Boy did I and it took me nine months to get there and it was one of these horrible situations where I just thought, gosh if I do this it could kill the company and if I don’t do this, it definitely will kill the company and it took me nine months of trying to put the chess pieces into the optimum place so that this would absolutely work out and you can’t do that, you’ve got to move faster and that’s really one of the main things that I’ve learned the hard way actually and now sometimes I will look at something and make a decision within a couple of weeks or a couple of hours sometimes because you just don’t have the time and we really feel that even more acutely in a world where we have real humans using this device at home and conceiving and calling us with questions, you just don’t have time.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, it’s Tess Cosad and we’ve got some belting blues from Big Mama Thornton too. That’s in just a moment don’t go anywhere.
Tess Cosad is my Business Shaper today just for a few more minutes. Something you said resonated with me about stories and obviously as you said, you are the marketing person and you love, you love to tell the story. Do you think you tell the story to yourself that this is all good throughout or is this, are you driven by the truth for yourself? I don’t mean the way you have to project to other people either about how Tess is doing or how the business is doing but the inner voice?
Tess Cosad
It’s a terrible critic.
Elliot Moss
Right and why, why Tess?
Tess Cosad
Interestingly I have thought quite deeply about this. I think I am, as many entrepreneurs are a perfectionist and becoming an entrepreneur teaches you every day very brutally that you cannot be that, it’s sort of perfect as the enemy have done I think is the common catch phrase but no, the story I tell myself about how we are actually doing is usually not as rosy as how we are doing and really my job is to, is to balance that and to hold those two things to be simultaneously true, yes it looks like things are going well, yes they are going incredibly well you know, we’ve launched a ground breaking treatment, we’ve had pregnancies, we’ve made babies, there’s nothing else like it on the market. You know, things are going incredibly well and it’s a start-up. My job is to hold those risks and those successes simultaneously and make better decisions knowing both to be true.
Elliot Moss
Do you coach yourself or have external people help you go, do you know what it’s good to be critical but it can be crippling. Have you got that going on as well?
Tess Cosad
I’ve had coaches in the past, I have very supportive friends these days but I absolutely have a support network around me of voices that help me balance out my own. It’s, I would say that it is completely imperative.
Elliot Moss
Yeah it sounds like it is because otherwise you are going to give yourself an overly tough time and then it stops you doing all those wonderful things Tess.
Tess Cosad
It does. It absolutely does.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, I mean complacency is one thing but, but kind of inertia because you go, ah this isn’t going to be good, that’s not cool either.
Tess Cosad
It absolutely does.
Elliot Moss
And the role of course has changed. You were focussed on raising money. Now you are into this phase, have you had to mentally switch gears and go right I’ve got to build… this is about growth, I did that bit and if you have, how have you managed to, to change that gear because they are very different modes.
Tess Cosad
I am in the middle of it now and I’ve got to say it has been one of the most challenging transitions that I’ve experienced as a founder you know, we spent three years in development building this in isolation and it was a lot of fun and it was really hard and… but you are building something in isolation. We are now in a world where we are live and in the market, we are pursuing growth and I have gone from raising and telling the story of what this can and will be to faced with growing it into what I have always believed it will be and it’s a really interesting place to be, it’s certainly been one of the hardest transitions for me building Béa.
Elliot Moss
And is the hard bit just kind of holding the line and knowing you are on the high wire but not looking down because you have your process, you have your path. Is it that mostly?
Tess Cosad
I, the way I imagine it is it’s a little bit like standing with your toes over the edge of the cliff and you know that you will be fine, you know that if you just step off you will absolutely fly and, and yet there you are standing on the edge of a cliff and it’s a really interesting place to be, it is certainly a sort of key moment for me as a founder and jumping off has taken a lot of willpower.
Elliot Moss
Keep going with the willpower, it’s been great to meet you, it’s early days but already you’ve, you know, there’s at least there’s money in the bank, you’ve got a runway as they say.
Tess Cosad
We do.
Elliot Moss
And you’ve got a great product by the sounds of it so wishing you as I do all the people I meet on the programme, wishing you all the best of luck.
Tess Cosad
Thanks for having me, Elliot.
Elliot Moss
I am sure, and fingers crossed it will happen. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Tess Cosad
Awakening by Leon Parker. I chose this song because it takes me back, gosh it takes me back probably 20 years and it was just such a fun and happy time you know, it was sort of dancing around the kitchen, it was when the whole world was a playground and that song just reminds me of that feeling – I love it so much.
Elliot Moss
Leon Parker there with Awakening, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Tess Cosad. She talked about start-ups being a vehicle for personal growth as well as of course building the business. She talked about moving faster, you’ve got to move faster and finally she said, and I like the way she’s phrased this, ‘perfection is the enemy of done’. What a simple way of thinking about life. Great stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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