Reclaim: The Growth Decisions Reshaping Health

What if one of the biggest opportunities in wellness isn't another supplement, wearable, or protocol — but the place where we spend 90% of our time?

I sat down with Ben Parens, founder of Nestwell, a home health diagnostics platform that helps people understand the environmental risks in their homes, test for them, and act on what comes back.

Ben is a former biohacker — his word. After years of wearables, metrics, and optimization he hit diminishing returns and came out with a different philosophy: "We're by no means anti-wellness, anti-supplement. We're more pro-foundation." Clean water, whole foods, your environment. Then the California fires made that last one personal, and when he went looking for credible information about his own home, everything he found was either useless or designed to frighten him.

He calls it wellness's last mile problem. You can buy the organic food and wash it in bad water. You can spend hundreds optimizing your sleep score while knowing nothing about the air in the room where you sleep.

The business challenge underneath that is what made this useful to me as an operator. Ben isn't selling a solution to a problem people are already searching for. He's trying to get consumers to think about testing their homes the way they've learned to think about testing their bodies — as a baseline, not a crisis response. That takes education, and education about mold, toxins, and air quality is one bad sentence away from fear.

We get into how they validated willingness to pay before building, which life moments make someone suddenly receptive — buying a house, trying to conceive, a new baby — and how AI is letting a small team operate at a size it hasn't hired for.

Connect with Guest

• Website: gonestwell.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/go.nestwell
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/go-nestwell
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ben-parens-411419107

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

When Stretch*d opened in New York, people would walk past the storefront and ask whether there was really a place that just stretched you. That confusion was an acquisition channel. Then the category caught up — competitors entered, some scaling aggressively through franchising — and being early stopped being an advantage on its own.

I sat down with Vanessa Chu, who co-founded Stretch*d and sold it, and is now building FuncFit, a longevity-focused group fitness concept designed around an underserved 35+ consumer.

What I wanted from her was the part founders rarely talk about: what you do after the category you helped create fills up with people who saw what you saw. Her answer is that the moat was never the idea. It was premium positioning, personalization, attention to every touchpoint, and an experience customers wanted to tell other people about — the layer that's slow to build and hard to copy.

That's shaping how she's building the second company. She and her co-founder raised enough to open one FuncFit location. Not fifty. The plan is to prove the economics of the first before earning the right to open a second, and franchising — the thing that let competitors outrun her last time — isn't a foregone conclusion, because she's seen what it costs in control.

We also get into how she chose that first location and why, for brick-and-mortar, the lease is a customer acquisition decision. Why someone with real influence in a neighborhood can be worth more than a creator with 500,000 followers. And what she's actually optimizing for — not attendance, but whether FuncFit becomes the place someone goes three times a week without thinking about it.

Scale isn't the strategy. It's what you earn once the model works.

Connect with Guest

• Website: getfuncfit.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/getfuncfit
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/func-fit
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/vanessamchu

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

What if the best product innovation isn't adding something new — but removing the friction your customers have quietly learned to tolerate?

Liz Zwillinger built Biologica out of her own frustration: standing in her pantry one morning, mixing four powders and three pills while her kids missed the bus, thinking "I just want one thing that has everything I need for my life stage." She and her co-founder (Allbirds' Joey Zwillinger) turned that into a line of stage-specific daily formulas — one product per hormonal life stage, in a drinkable format instead of a pile of pills.

But she didn't build on a hunch. Liz validated the idea with a 1,000-woman study and focus groups across the country, and found that women's needs cluster tightly within a life stage and shift dramatically across decades — while most of the market still stops at "made for women."

We also get into the growth decisions behind the brand: why one product per life stage became her highest-leverage conversion decision, why retention rather than acquisition is the number she trusts most, and her contrarian discipline on marketing spend — turning down $50,000–$100,000 influencer reels, betting on celebrity name recognition over micro-influencers, and pricing at $59 a month to keep wellness from becoming a luxury.

For any founder deciding what to build — or how to grow without torching the P&L — this conversation is a reminder that clarity and restraint can be the strategy.

Connect with Guest

• Website: biologica.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/biologica
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/biologica-inc
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/elizabethzwillinger

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

For ten years, Carine Carmy lived with chronic pelvic pain — cycling through specialists and procedures she'd later learn were unnecessary. Then she tried pelvic floor therapy and healed in two months. Her first reaction wasn't relief. It was a question: if this care is this effective, why doesn't it exist at scale?

That question became Origin. In our conversation, Carine walks through what it takes to build a company in a category the healthcare system was never set up to see — one with no dedicated billing codes, too few trained providers, and little physician awareness. As she puts it, "you can't solve what you can't measure."

We get into the decisions that made it work: choosing the operationally harder path of taking insurance, expanding from in-person clinics into virtual care, and waiting three years to launch virtual nationwide so the outcomes were proven first. A retrospective study of 4,600 patients found comparable results across virtual and in-person care — which changes the math on how this kind of care can scale.

But the most interesting part for founders may be how Origin grew. With more than 40 million women affected each year and only 10,000–20,000 trained providers, the constraint was never demand — it was supply. So Origin built its own clinician training pipeline, and it scaled largely without paid media: 10,000+ referring physicians, a content and SEO engine, an NPS in the 90s, and paid acquisition only entering the mix at the end of 2025.

If you're building in an emerging health category, this is a masterclass in growing the market itself — not just your share of it.

Connect with Guest

• Website: theoriginway.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/theoriginway
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/carinecarmy

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

What happens when a founder walks away from corporate success to build a wellness company, scales to millions of customers, disappears for two years, and then returns because her community refuses to let the brand die?

In this conversation, I sat down with Angie Tebbe, Co-Founder and CEO of Rae Wellness, to explore what it really takes to build a mission-driven company in one of the most competitive categories in consumer health.

Angie shares how her upbringing shaped her holistic view of wellness, why she believed women's health was dramatically underserved, and how that belief led her to create affordable, science-backed supplements designed specifically for women.

We also unpack one of the most fascinating brand stories I've heard: building an omnichannel wellness company that reached 4.5 million customers, going dark after operational and partnership challenges, and making the difficult decision to relaunch after hearing directly from thousands of customers who wanted the brand back.

If you're a founder, operator, or builder in health and wellness, this conversation offers an honest look at growth, resilience, brand strategy, and the internal work required to lead through uncertainty.

Connect with Guest

• Website: raewellness.co
• Instagram: instagram.com/raeforwellness
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/raewellness

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

What does it take to build a category-defining healthcare company in one of the largest—and most overlooked—markets in medicine? In this episode, I sit down with Kelly Lacob, Co-Founder of Xella Health, to unpack the founder journey behind building a precision health platform designed specifically for women. 

After helping build companies like Mammoth Biosciences and CRISPR Diagnostics, Kelly turned personal tragedy into entrepreneurial conviction, tackling one of healthcare's most persistent blind spots. We go beyond the technology to explore the strategic decisions that shaped Xella's growth—from validating market demand and launching with a 17,000-person waitlist to navigating business model evolution, consumer acquisition, pricing strategy, and the long-term vision for AI-powered healthcare infrastructure.

For founders, CEOs, and operators building in health and wellness, this conversation is a masterclass in identifying category-defining opportunities, building trust in high-stakes markets, and creating products that solve deeply human problems.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why the biggest healthcare opportunities often exist where legacy systems have failed—and how Kelly identified women's diagnostics as a category ready for transformation.
• Lessons from taking Xella Health to market, including building a 17,000-person waitlist, testing a direct-to-consumer strategy, and balancing consumer growth with future B2B expansion.
• How AI, multi-omic diagnostics, and personalized care are reshaping preventive healthcare—and what founders should understand about the future of health technology.

Connect with Guest

• Website: joinxella.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/xellahealth
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/xella-health

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

The biggest opportunities in health and wellness aren't found in crowded categories—they're created by seeing consumer behavior before everyone else does. In this episode, I sit down with Chiara Moore, Co-Founder and COO of YVO, to unpack what it takes to build a brand around an emerging health movement before the market fully catches up.

After helping build global brands for Nike, Netflix, and Twitter through her agency, Chiara made the leap back into entrepreneurship to co-found YVO—a women's wellness company reimagining bone health through thoughtful product design, diagnostics, and community. But this conversation goes far beyond weighted vests.

We explore what it looks like to create demand for a category consumers don't yet fully understand, how building a community of 600 women outperformed paid acquisition in the earliest stages of growth, and how founders can build products that educate the market while simultaneously creating it.

If you're building in health and wellness, this episode is a masterclass in category creation, positioning, and founder-led brand building.

We discuss:

• How to identify whitespace by recognizing cultural and consumer shifts before they become mainstream.
• Why community drove 90% of early pre-orders, allowing the company to validate demand and generate word-of-mouth before investing heavily in paid acquisition.
• How bundling products with services—like pairing a weighted vest with a DEXA scan—creates a stronger customer experience while reinforcing the brand's mission.

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Why Women Are Turning to DEXA Scans in 2026: GLP-1s, Strength & Longevity with Elaine Shi, CEO of BodySpec
• bodyspec.com

Connect with Guest

• Website: yvowarrior.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/yvowarrior
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/yvowarrior
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chiaraadin

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

Most people believe fertility care begins after months or even years of trying to conceive. What if the future of fertility care isn't better IVF, but earlier intervention? In this conversation, I sit down with Alice Crisci, founder and CEO of Ovum Health, whose own breast cancer diagnosis became the catalyst for changing fertility care in America. 

After advocating for fertility preservation legislation, building one of the first fertility education platforms, and launching Ovum Health, Alice has dedicated her career to helping people optimize their health before fertility treatment becomes the only option. We explore why lifestyle medicine belongs at the center of reproductive care, why prevention is often overlooked, and what it really takes to build a healthcare company that prioritizes both ethics and access.

In this conversation, you'll learn:
- Why fertility optimization should begin long before IVF becomes necessary.
- How prevention and lifestyle medicine can improve pregnancy outcomes while reducing healthcare costs.
- The realities of building a venture-backed healthcare startup—including resilience, governance, fundraising, and learning through failure.

Connect with Guest
Website: ovumhealth.com
Instagram: instagram.com/fertility.answers
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/ovumhealth
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/alicecrisci

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

What if calm isn't something you have to earn—but something your nervous system already knows how to access? In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. David Rabin, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and co-founder of Apollo, to explore how decades of research into chronic stress, PTSD, neuroscience, and human performance led him to build one of the first wearables designed to actively improve nervous system regulation rather than simply measure it.

We unpack the science behind stress, why so many of us have become disconnected from our body's natural state of safety, and how technology can either contribute to burnout or help us reclaim calm. We also discuss the evolution of wearables, what founders can learn about resilience, and why our perspective toward stress may be one of the most powerful health interventions available.

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• Why the way we respond to stress matters more than the stress itself.
• How Apollo uses vibration to activate the body's safety pathways and improve sleep, focus, recovery, and resilience.
• Why modern technology often amplifies anxiety—and what the next generation of health technology should look like.
  
  

Connect with Guest

• Website: apolloneuro.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/apolloneuro
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/apollo-neuro
• YouTube: youtube.com/c/ApolloNeuroscience
• Book: apolloneuro.com/pages/a-simple-guide-to-being-alive

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.

Most category-defining companies don't begin with a market opportunity—they begin with a deeply personal problem.

I sat down with Cherie Hoeger, co-founder and CEO of Saalt, to unpack how a phone call with family in Venezuela sparked a mission that has grown into one of the most recognized reusable period care brands in the world. From launching with a single menstrual cup to landing nationwide Target distribution in year two and building an eight-figure business by year three, Cherie shares what it really takes to educate consumers, create an entirely new category, and scale without compromising mission.

What stood out most to me wasn't simply Saalt's growth. It was Cherie's unwavering belief that education—not advertising—is the greatest competitive advantage when you're changing behavior. We also explore why omnichannel was the right strategy from day one, how customer conversations shaped product innovation, and why mission has remained the company's North Star through every stage of growth.

In this conversation, you'll learn:

• Why education—not discounts or aggressive marketing—became Saalt's greatest growth engine.
• How Cherie approached category creation, retail expansion, and omnichannel strategy years before it became industry best practice.
• Why the future of women's health lies in solving real everyday problems through thoughtful product innovation and evidence-backed research.

Connect with Guest

• Website: saalt.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/saaltco
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/saaltco

Want to get in front of our audience?

Reclaim reaches founders, operators, and investors building the future of health and wellness. If your brand wants to be in front of this audience, sponsorship opportunities are available. Reach out to [email protected].

This episode is brought to you by Future Digital.

Future Digital partners with the next generation of category-defining health brands — across paid media, lifecycle and retention marketing, and performance creative. AI-enabled, human-led, and built for categories where trust is the product.

Visit scalewithfuture.com to learn how we help health and wellness brands scale.

Stay up to date with Reclaim:

Join the newsletter for thoughtful conversations, emerging trends, and practical insights on building trusted health brands—plus every new episode of Reclaim delivered to your inbox.

Visit scalewithfuture.com/newsletter to sign up.