The clinic is worth doing. It attacks the one real problem the business has, and unlike everything else on the roadmap it isn't gated on the app shipping.
Cycle Root Cause Assessment, under HMM Clinic. Kill "Mood." Do not go to "women's health."
Open → DECISION 02 Price shape$897 plus labs at cost. One transaction, itemized receipt. Nets ~$470 per client after Maria and Izzy, every time.
Open → DECISION 03 Who picks the panelThe practitioner recommends from intake. Don't show the panels on the sales page at all.
Open → DECISION 04 Rehab handoffLast section of every action plan is "Your next 90 days," written assuming Rehab. Logistics, not a pitch.
Open → DECISION 05 · THE ONE THAT MATTERS Practitioner payHold $300, and make three hours the design constraint. Budget the hours, don't discover them.
Open → GATHER Five things to ask herWhat already exists, real hours per stage, who QCs, where the report lives.
Open →1 · Name and lane
Cycle Root Cause Assessment, under HMM Clinic. Keep "Root Cause Assessment." Swap "Mood" for "Cycle."
"Root Cause Assessment" is the part worth $897. It is the promise she is buying. Keep it.
Why not "women's health"
Women's health is not a market, it's the absence of one. It's the most crowded category in wellness. HMM wins today for exactly one reason: it is the PMDD brand. A woman searching "why am I exhausted" has a thousand options. A woman searching "PMDD" has about five, and Jes is one of them.
The moment the offer reads "fertility, perimenopause, anxiety, ADHD, mood, fatigue," it competes with everyone and gets chosen by no one.
Broaden the clinical scope, not the positioning
Cycle-centered is the frame that gets the reach without spending the brand: the woman whose cycle is telling her something is wrong. That covers PMDD, PMS, irregular cycles, fertility, postpartum, perimenopause. Still specific, still ownable, still unmistakably Jes, and roughly ten times the addressable population of PMDD alone.
The panels already support it. Blood chem, DUTCH, HTMA and GI map answer cycle questions regardless of whether the presenting complaint is mood.
If Izzy argues search volume
"Hormone Root Cause Assessment" is the alternative. More search volume, but more crowded and less ownable. Take it only if the acquisition plan is genuinely SEO-led.
2 · Price shape
$897 plus labs at cost. Charged as one transaction with an itemized receipt.
What HMM actually keeps
| Panel | Lab cost | Client total | Izzy 10% | HMM margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HTMA | $60 | $957 | $90 | ~$479 |
| Blood chemistry | $265 | $1,162 | $90 | ~$473 |
| GI map | $350 | $1,247 | $90 | ~$471 |
| DUTCH + saliva cortisol | $410 | $1,307 | $90 | ~$469 |
Margin after $300 to the practitioner, 10% to Izzy, and card processing on the full charge. Flat by design: HMM's revenue is fixed at $897 no matter which panel gets ordered. Full stack is $425 of $897, leaving ~$470 for promotion and overhead.
Why not $1,197 bundled
At a flat bundled price every client rationally takes the most testing, which is the $410 DUTCH. So the bundled margin isn't the average of the panels, it's the floor: about $427. The pass-through shape is worth roughly $130 more per client and removes the volatility at the same time.
Two mechanics worth getting right
- One charge, not two. A second checkout for the lab is a second place to lose her.
- Itemize the receipt. Keeps the lab line identifiable for HSA and FSA reimbursement, which is a real conversion lever at this price.
3 · Who picks the panel
The practitioner recommends from the intake. The client confirms. The panels never appear on the sales page.
The flow
- Client purchases the assessment at $897
- Intake form completed
- Practitioner reviews and recommends a panel, with one sentence of why
- Client confirms, lab is ordered, lab cost added at cost
Why she shouldn't choose
A woman who doesn't know why she feels terrible is not qualified to choose between a DUTCH and a GI map. That judgment is most of what she is paying for. If she picks wrong, the assessment fails, and it's HMM's failure regardless of who clicked the button.
Why the sales page matters as much as the policy
The moment she sees four options on the page it is psychologically her decision, even if a practitioner advises her later. Show one service, one price, and "your panel is determined by your intake." That is also just what a clinic does. Nobody walks into a doctor's office and selects their own labs off a menu.
4 · The Rehab handoff
The final section of every action plan is "Your next 90 days," written assuming Rehab. Logistics, not a pitch. Designed in now, not bolted on later.
The failure mode this prevents
The known way lab-and-protocol businesses die: the client pays, gets a beautiful report and a plan, executes about 30% of it, doesn't feel better, and the story she tells is "I spent $1,200 on labs and nothing changed."
Why this changes the economics of the whole division
A woman who just paid $1,200 to find out exactly what's wrong is the most motivated buyer in the business for a program that helps her act on it. That reframes the clinic from a side line into the highest-intent top of funnel HMM could have.
At 10 assessments a month with a 40% roll-in, each client is worth ~$470 in margin plus recurring subscription revenue. The assessment stops costing you customer acquisition and starts paying for it.
Two guardrails
- Write it as execution guidance, not an offer. It's the honest answer to "so what do I actually do now." Retrofitted later it reads as an upsell.
- No discount schemes on day one. Decide incentives after you can see the natural conversion rate.
5 · Practitioner pay
$300 all-in is settled, Maria's own number. Make three hours the design constraint on the templates so it holds.
The math that decides the division
| Time per assessment | Effective rate | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 3 hours | $100/hr | Recruits and retains practitioner #2 |
| 4 hours | $75/hr | Workable, thin |
| 5+ hours | $60/hr | Nobody stays |
$100/hr on contract work with no marketing, no sales, no admin, and a warm client handed over with the systems already built is genuinely competitive for a credentialed NTP. $60/hr is not, and the moment practitioner #1 burns out the "scalable, practitioner-led" premise is gone.
What to ask Maria in the room
She is already running lab analysis for current clients. Get the real number, stage by stage: intake review, panel interpretation, report writing, video recording, action plan. That's the only hard data anyone has, and everything downstream prices off it.
Five things to ask her
- What already exists? She's running client lab analysis today. Separate what's genuinely new build from what's already working and just needs documenting.
- Real hours per stage on those current analyses. Feeds decision 5.
- Has she seen
~/hmm-lab-report/? There's a pipeline scaffolded against OptimalDX with scope-of-practice term handling already in it. She may be about to rebuild something that's half done. (Worth verifying its current state before pointing her at it.) - Who is practitioner of record, and who does QC? Recommendation: Jes reviews every report until QC is proven. Her name is on it, and on a brand built on "finally someone listened," one bad assessment costs more than ten good ones earn.
- Where does the report live? Practice Better now is fine. But keep the report format structured rather than a freeform PDF, so it can migrate into the HMM app later without a rewrite.
Park it, but name the frame
The restructure roadmap lists four ways past the ~$200k ARR ceiling the app hits on current audience: audience scale, B2B licensing, a certification program, and higher-ticket non-founder-delivered services. The clinic is the fourth one and it produces the third as a byproduct. Nobody has pitched it that way yet, and it's the strongest version of the argument when this goes to Jes.
Also parked
- Expansion beyond one panel. Run the pilot on a single panel, ten clients, then reassess. Four panels on day one means four report templates, four interpretation systems, four SOPs and four training tracks before anything is proven.
- Certification pricing and structure. Nothing to decide until the clinic has run 10 to 20 assessments.
- Maria's end-state role. She is effectively writing her own job description here, which is the best available answer to an open question. That's a point in favor. It's also the reason to be deliberate rather than enthusiastic in how the answer comes back to her.