WoW Woman in FemTech I Olga Zamyatina, Chief Content Officer of AMMA Pregnancy Tracker
Olga Zamyatina is the Chief Content Officer of AMMA Pregnancy Tracker.
Olga started working with AMMA in 2020, establishing a content department, creating editorial policy and rewriting all content to provide evidence-based articles for localization in 10 languages.
Olga's focus on quality, not quantity, allowed AMMA Pregnancy Tracker to grow key metrics and to win the prestigious Content Marketing Awards 2021. Prior to working with AMMA Pregnancy Tracker, she was editor-in-chief of Women’s Health Russia, one of the Cosmopolitan brand extensions, and she was editor of Marie Claire and Grazia.
AMMA Pregnancy Tracker is one of the most popular pregnancy trackers in the world with 1.5 million monthly active users and 10 million monthly downloads (approximately 7% of all pregnant women worldwide). The service provides clear, evidence-based pregnancy information, health tracking tools for every week of pregnancy, and personalized advice from obstetricians, gynecologists, psychotherapists, nutrition experts, etc.
Olga, tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
All my life I have been a journalist. I have worked in leading women's magazines with an interest in fashion, psychology and travel. One day I faced low-quality medical care. From this traumatic experience, I became interested in health, which led me to the post of chief editor of Women’s Health Russia, and later to AMMA Pregnancy Tracker.
AMMA Pregnancy Tracker turned out to be exactly in tune with my deepest interests, with its mission to support women and their families on an informational and emotional level and provide them with understandable information based on evidence-based medicine. And the growing audience of 1.5 million active users per month, all over the world made it possible to really provide this support.
My position as Chief Content Officer, as well as the incredibly supportive atmosphere within the team, allows me to have a real impact on what the product will be like, how we talk to our users and ultimately provide assistance to those who need it.
How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
My expertise in the field of medical journalism and women's health from my time at Women’s Health allowed me to quickly integrate into a new format of work in the international femtech service. In my work, the main interest and challenge for me personally are to equally and effectively provide both information and emotional support in completely different countries and regions, taking into account their legal, social and cultural characteristics.
What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
The abundance of unverified, scary and false information about health on the Internet at one time forced Google to introduce a number of restrictive measures aimed at ranking in the search results of sources writing on medical topics. This measure reflects one of the main problems of the industry - the abundance of unverified information. And here the real challenge is to be heard in this chorus of bloggers, commercial clinics and unscrupulous sources of information and to provide verified, evidence-based information that follows the main medical principle of “do no harm.”
The second problem and challenge for us is the uneven access to medical care and medical information that exists in the world. It has always been so, but the COVID 19 pandemic has further exacerbated and highlighted the problem.
What are we doing to meet these challenges?
We create content by experienced medical editors and only from trusted sources of information such as WHO guidelines, National Institutes of Health (ACOG, CDC, NHC, etc), Cochrane reviews, and others.
We translate and localize content into 10 languages (with further expansion plans). In each case, this is not a tracing paper from English or Russian. These are guidelines that will be useful in each specific country.
We partner with leading clinics around the world (such as the European Medical Center) to help tailor content for their countries.
All our recommendations are written in simple and accessible language so that an ordinary person who is not associated with medicine could easily understand everything.
We conduct our own research aimed at clarifying the problems in certain regions or user groups in order to create and offer the most relevant content for them and thus provide assistance. For example, a global study that we conducted with more than 19,000 pregnant women showed that only 52% of women report improved relationships with partners during pregnancy. At the moment, there are already fathers among our users. Their share is 12% of all registered accounts. We are taking steps to dramatically increase that share by promoting informed parenting.
We cooperate with telemedicine services (Doctis in Russia, Doc.com in Brazil, etc.) to provide not only informational but also medical support.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
I am incredibly proud of the success of my team. Thanks to their work we were able to increase our key product metrics. Focusing on the quality of content in 2020, we increased RT 1 and RT 7 days by 9-11 percentage points depending on the region, and LTV grew by 21%, LT by 1.5 months.
If we talk about the success of the company as a whole, results are only more impressive. For example, also in 2020, the monthly ad revenue in the amma pregnancy tracker grew more than 10 times monthly from $ 25,000 to $ 250,000.
In 2021, AMMA Pregnancy Tracker became one of the few startups to qualify for Chinaccelerator, the largest Asian accelerator, and received 27 applications from the region's largest investors. In September 2021 we attracted US $2 million from US, CIS and Asia-based investors, at a valuation of US $28 million, up from US $6 million in 2020, on the strength of fast revenue growth (the link to Forbes publication?). The investments will be used to develop AMMA Pregnancy Tracker’s local teams in the Latin American and Southeast Asian markets.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
While working on the amma pregnancy tracker, we received a lot of feedback from women who were unhappy with the fact that they could not continue to monitor their health and the health of an already born baby using our application. Therefore, we decided to expand within the amma.family ecosystem. And now we are working on three applications: amma period tracker, dedicated to preparation for pregnancy, amma pregnancy tracker, and amma baby tracker, dedicated to the first year of a child's life. According to our forecasts, this strategy will allow us to increase the time of interaction with users (LTV) from 7 months to 5 years, and the potential audience will increase from 140 million people (the approximate number of pregnant women in the world) to 1+ billion people.
We also continue to explore new regions. Our focus is on developing countries, which, according to forecasts, will become the main markets for the femtech industry in the near future. At the moment, we are among the top 3 leaders in the markets of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Latin America. Following the successful completion of the Chinaccelerator in 2021, China, India, and the countries of Southeast Asia, a region with more than 4 billion people, will come first.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
There are fewer women than men both in the IT industry and in key positions in the business. This problem is especially relevant for developing countries. This means that our interests, our vision, and our needs are much less represented. It's strange because there are more women in the world in general. #WomenInTech is a chance for the whole world to become better, be more attentive to people, take into account diversity and ensure equal representation of different groups.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
According to research, femtech market growth will be some 15.6% annually by 2027.
We aim to play a significant role in this growth by providing more and more people with quality health information and care.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Clearly see the area where you can benefit people. Build up your expertise and implement it in companies whose mission and values coincide with yours.
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg / TheSkimm, Ida Tin / Clue.
Find out more about AMMA Pregnancy Tracker on their website.
Connect with Olga on LinkedIn.
Follow AMMA Pregnancy Tracker on Facebook and Instagram.
This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.