Thinking in Public
A client told me a story. One of the best people at his firm quit, and the reason he was given was "mental health issues." The real reason, he learned later, was menopause. She was going through it alone, and he had no idea what to do. So a good employee walked.
That sent me down a rabbit hole. Is there a business opportunity in this world? Where are the gaps? And how could someone actually help?
The gap — fast-growing category, few builders
Here's what makes this interesting: menopause care is a fast-growing category in women's health, and almost nobody is building for it. Only 7% of femtech startups touch it. Most male founders won't go near it at all.
And that instinct is half right. There's a real trap here:
"A man shouldn't be the face of clinical advice for women."The credibility trap — and the constraint behind all three ideas below
But you don't have to be the face of anything. In every gold rush, someone sells the picks and shovels. Everyone building in this space is — correctly — focused on the woman going through the transition. Which means three other customers are standing around underserved: the clinic, the employer, and the confused man standing next to her.
These are the three best ideas I came up with. I don't know enough about this world to act on any of them — so they're yours if you want them.
Private menopause clinics are multiplying fast — in Canada especially, where nurse practitioners can now bill provincial plans and cash-pay clinics charge membership fees. These are 1–5 person medical practices run by clinicians, not marketers. They need intake automation, follow-up sequences, review generation, local SEO and compliant email — and nobody is selling it to them. You never give health advice. You sell operational infrastructure to the women who do.
That 4%-to-25% jump is the whole pitch. Employers spent the money on menopause benefits — and almost nobody uses them, because employees don't know they exist. So the buyer is an HR department that's already committed and now embarrassed by the usage numbers. You sell awareness campaigns, Slack and email nudge sequences, manager training modules, anonymized utilization dashboards. In Canada, the $3.5 billion cost number is your ready-made sales deck.
The one lane where being male is an advantage instead of something to manage. Nobody is building for the husband who doesn't understand what's happening to his marriage, or the manager with four women on his team going through the transition. Managers are part of that one-in-ten pipeline, and they have zero training. Two revenue lines: a consumer product for partners — book, email course, community — sold through the huge menopause-influencer audiences who get asked "what do I tell my husband?" every day. And a workplace-training version for companies: IKEA, AMEX and BMO already fund menopause-inclusive-workplace programs, so the budget exists.
If there's a thesis in all of this, it's one sentence: in a market where the end user will never be you, sell to the people around her. The clinic, the employer, the partner. They're underserved precisely because every founder in the space is focused on the one going through it.
One thing this is not: an untapped goldmine. The clinical side is crowded and heavily funded — Midi alone has raised $254 million — so the patient-facing positions are taken. The picks-and-shovels positions are open. That's the honest version, and it's the only one worth building on.
And that employee who quit? She never told her boss what was actually going on, because there was no room for the conversation. Every one of these ideas is, in its own way, building that room.
The numbers come from my research notes: the Menopause Foundation of Canada (the $3.5B cost and the one-in-ten stat), employer benefits surveys (4% → 25%), and femtech industry reporting (the 7% figure, Midi's $254M raise). Check them yourself before you build — I'm giving away ideas, not a diligence report.
If you build any of these, I want to hear how it goes. And if you need the systems behind it — the automations, the pipelines, the marketing machine — that's what we do.
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