Sushil Athreya

Overview

This project was an extensive strategic deepdive into how Flo can acquire 100,000 paying customers in India in 12 months. This is just a summary of the 40,000+ word strategy document that I built along with 6 other teammates in a span of 3 weeks.

This deepdive covers the following:

• The problem
• Understanding Flo
• Your guiding light ✨
• Understanding the market
• Understanding Flo’s ICPs
• Building the Growth Model
• Solving for engagement
• Solving for monetization
• Conclusion

The Problem

How do you feel when you see this image?

Let’s zoom out and see how someone who’s trying to conceive feels
Women often don’t feel understood and need a non-judgmental guide through their journey of womanhood. That’s where Flo comes in.

Understanding Flo

The journey
Flo was launched globally with an initial release in 2015. It hit the Indian markets on April 12, 2016. In January 2024, Flo had 62 million Monthly Active Users worldwide with an estimated 3.5% of that in India.

Core value prop
Flo is every woman’s bestie for life. Damini uses Flo’s cycle tracking and information to avoid embarrassing situations, manage her symptoms, plan her trips, and stay pregnance free. When she’s ready for it, Flo seamlessly transitions to help her in her journey to conceive and in each step of her pregnancy adventure

Key Product Insights
❌ Lack of context: The content shown on the app is not specific to the problem that the user is dealing with. Eg: A lot of users that we spoke to had conditions such as PCOS, but the content on the app was not targeted to their condition. These women are going to have irregular periods, but every time the period was irregular, the app prompted them to check if they were pregnant.

✅ Strong community: Flo has a great community and an excellent search feature within the community

Your guiding light ✨

Introducing Flora the Firefly - your guiding light through womanhood

Who is Flora?

Flora is an immortal firefly who has lived for hundreds of years. While she’s lived for so long, she never ages and is still young at heart. Throughout her long lifetime, she has traveled across the world and has seen the joys and struggles of women across places and across eras.

Flora has supported hundreds of thousands of women through their womanhood. From their early years of menstruation, to dealing with menstrual challenges, to helping them bring new life into this world, and beyond.

Flora is caring, friendly, non-judgmental, and most important of all extremely knowledgable about everything related to womanhood. It’s no coincidence that she shares her name with the Roman goddess of spring and fertility.

Why did we create a mascot for Flo?

Flo is already a woman’s bestie, guiding her through the thick and thin of womanhood. Women face deeply personal and serious problems that they don’t feel a lot of people in their immediate circle will relate to. They find it difficult to trust a faceless app.

The mascot will add a face to the brand that gives women someone to relate to when they think of Flo.

Things that will be positively impacted by a mascot:

1. Brand awareness and recall: A mascot will help Flo stand out in the extremely crowded market
2. Customer Loyalty: Users will be more loyal to the brand if the connection with the mascot is good
3. Engagement: Users will interact with the app more
4. Acquisition and revenue: Airbnb reported record revenues of $2.9B in 2022. Majority of their marketing spend is on brand and CEO, Brian Chesky believes that shifting from performance marketing to brand marketing has been a core driver of the growth

How will women interact with Flo?

We built an in-depth launch strategy + designed Flora’s app interaction for the Capstone. I will just show you the highlights here:

Invite to the launch event	Flora merch	Flora your fertility friend

Understanding the market

Why do women go to gynaecologists?

1. Pregnancy
2. Period Related Abnormalities
3. Pregnancy Scare
4. PCOS/PCOD
5. Infertility

These could all be target markets for a brand that promotes female health and wellness

Competitor Analysis

We compared 13 different products to understand Flo’s standing in the market. Top competitors have similar ratings (4.5+) and Flo is up at the top with 4.7 with 10x more reviews.
Here's how Flo stands out

• Overall Health Tracker (AI)
• Integrations with other apps
• ISO Certification
• Zero ads and community

Market Sizing

Understanding Flo's ICPs

Goal priority	Goal Type	ICP 1 - Always prepared	ICP 2 - Safe Sex	ICP 3 - Trying to conceive	ICP 4 - Pregnant	ICP 5 - PCOS/PCOD
Primary	Personal	They want to avoid embarrassing social situations, plan their trips, plan their events, and learn more about their bodies.	Women want to remain sexually active while avoiding an unplanned pregnancy at all costs.	Get a better awareness around pregnancy, and insights into information on medication and IVF and other infertility treatments	Track baby’s progress for a better understanding	To understand their body better and get the right direction for the treatment. Also, get support from the community
Secondary	Functional	Track periods and log symptoms to check predictions	Track periods to check ovulation and take precautions as to avoid pregnancy. Also act as reminders to take birth control pills	Log the period data so that they can track the ovulation every month without having to remember it/missing a window	Get educated on the various trimesters and join the parent community for guidance and advice	Track irregular periods to understand the cycle better

ICP Prioritization

User Segment	Priority	Market Size	% of userbase	Willingness to pay	Frequency of usage	Adoption curve	Distribution potential
ICP 1 - Basic Tracking	P5	₹8,500 crores	50	Low	2-3 times a month	Low	High
ICP 2 - Safe Sex	P4	₹800 crores	5	Low	3-4 times a month	Low	High
ICP 3 - Trying to Conceive	P2	₹2,000 crores	13	High	5-6 times a month	Moderate	Moderate
ICP 4 - Pregnant	P3	₹900 crores	5	High	8-10 times a month	Moderate	Moderate
ICP 5 - Pre-existing issues	P1	₹3,000 crores	18	High	5-6 times a month	Low	Moderate

Who are our prioritized ICPs?

Based on the above factors, our prioritized ICPs are:

1. Women with pre-existing issues
2. Women who are trying to conceive

Understanding the goal

Our goal is to acquire 100,000 paying customers in India in 12 months

Building the Growth Model

Based on our user research and growth modelling, we found that the 2 core levers are:

• Engagement - 27.5% revenue contribution
• Monetization - 62% revenue contribution

The full growth model is available here.

Solving for engagement

What does engagement for Flo look like today?

User type	Frequency of use	Features used
Casual	2-3 times a month	Period tracker
Core	3-5 times a month	Period Tracker, Secret Chat, Symptom Checker
Power	7+ times a month	Period Tracker, Articles, Secret Chats, Partner Sharing

Engagement framework

Type of framework	Action	Prioritization	Reasoning
Breadth	Participate actively in the community, logs in symptoms, active user of all quizzes, games and all other campaigns run by Flo	Primary	When users stop associating Flo to just be a period tracking app and use it for other features that will support a women’s health journey, we believe users will come to the app more often and explore all its features in depth
Frequency	Use Flo more than 2-3 times a month, and not just once a month of period cycle tracking.	Secondary	This is the current largest pool of users in the app. The goal would be to convert these users to core users by enabling access and awareness of other sub-products and offerings.
Depth of engagement	Any one or a combination of these : Read >5 articles on Flo, Reply to >10 community posts a month, Logs symptoms every day	NA