The fertility care journey is one that’s often got a dark cloud of crisis looming over it. But what if it’s a journey that starts way before the “crisis” hits? In this episode of Reclaim, host Destinee Berman welcomes Jessica Bell van der Wal, CEO & Co-Founder of Frame Fertility, to explore why the entire concept of fertility care needs to be reframed. 

What You'll Learn:

This conversation shifts the conversation around fertility care from reactive crisis management to proactive education, support and human-centered navigation.

Jessica emphasizes that founders should start by obsessing over the problem itself rather than rushing to build a solution, a mindset that shaped Frame Fertility's entire approach. For growth leaders scaling women's health brands, this means resisting the urge to launch features or campaigns before deeply understanding patient pain points and systemic gaps. In Frame's case, this led to the insight that 83% of fertility conversations start with OB/GYNs, yet these providers lack time, training, and space to go deep, revealing the real bottleneck wasn't the need for a new app, but accessibility within existing trust relationships. This approach transforms your growth narrative from "we built a better product" to "we solved a systemic problem," a positioning that resonates authentically with both B2B partners and direct consumers.

Jessica shares that Frame maintains patient satisfaction scores above 95% and achieved a 72% improvement in patient retention by obsessing over both emotional support and clinical outcomes, treating these not as separate metrics but as interconnected drivers of business growth. Most women's health brands focus on satisfaction scores as vanity metrics, but Jessica's approach reveals that retention is the true north star because it directly correlates to outcome achievement and lifetime value, which drives expansion within provider networks. For your growth team, this means designing your retention analysis to separate clinical satisfaction from emotional satisfaction, then testing whether addressing the emotional layer (through better communication, support resources, or human connection) moves the needle on retention faster than clinical improvements alone.

Jessica's growth strategy for Frame didn't follow the typical VC playbook. Instead, she started with direct-to-consumer word-of-mouth (zero paid acquisition), proved the model worked, then used that traction to unlock enterprise partnerships with major OB/GYN networks and pharmaceutical companies. This approach is particularly relevant for women's health startups because it demonstrates how to build credibility with risk-averse healthcare organizations: show them you've already solved the problem for real patients at a smaller scale before asking for a network-wide rollout. 

Jessica's most personal insight reveals that the path to sustainable scaling isn't about softening intensity, but redefining it and letting go of the need for perfectionism in execution while holding firm on accountability for impact. This is critical for high-achieving growth leaders who often internalize the belief that slower, "good enough" progress equals failure, leading to burnout and team dysfunction. The reframe is that intensity and sustainability are not opposites; rather, intensity directed at the right metrics (outcome-driven, not task-driven) creates leverage, while perfectionism (trying to control every variable) creates bottlenecks.