Overview

MyChon Health is a pre-product life sciences startup out of the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, developing a direct-to-consumer test of mitochondrial function. Its core method, developed at UCLA, can measure mitochondrial respiration in previously frozen samples, which opens the door to testing from small, remotely collected samples instead of a biopsy.

I joined in early 2021 as the team’s first growth and design lead.

The Challenge

The science was sophisticated. The consumer side was mostly guesses. Who is the customer? What problem are we solving for them? What would they actually pay for, and how do we reach them before there’s even a product to sell?

My job was to turn those assumptions into evidence and build a waitlist of real future customers.

What I Did

Customer research. Interviewed early signups from the waitlist, ran competitor analysis, and synthesized it into customer profiles and value propositions. One finding reshaped the messaging: we’d assumed the story was the science and the technical breakthrough. What people actually responded to was their own problem. Most had a health event that started their journey, were frustrated by tests like 23andMe or confused by standard blood work, and wanted personalized, actionable answers about energy, diet, and aging.

Growth experiments. Built the traction engine on Google and Facebook ads, run as a series of numbered experiments: audience groupings (nutrition, conditions, biohacking, performance), headline and copy tests, and landing page A/B tests.

Website and design. Designed and launched the marketing site and signup flow, then iterated on it with data. A single change in the landing page hero image, combined with routing traffic to the better-converting funnel, nearly doubled the signup rate in one experiment cycle (from about 4% to nearly 8%).

Measurement. Set up tracking across every channel and built a live traction dashboard in Google Data Studio, used for weekly decisions and investor updates.

Strategy. Worked with the science team on go-to-market options, science communication, and investor materials.

Results

• Signups grew 20-25% month over month, and quarterly signups rose about 56% from Q2 to Q3 2021
• Nearly doubled the landing page conversion rate through image and funnel tests
• The company’s first repeatable growth engine, with a dashboard investors called out
• A customer-backed value proposition in place of a science-first pitch

What I Learned

• Lead with the person’s problem, not the science. Even for a genuinely novel test, people buy an answer to their own question.
• Pre-product growth is research in disguise. Every ad test is also a message test. The cheapest signups came from the most specific intent.
• Measure from day one. A small team with clean data makes better decisions than a big team guessing.