Industry: Health Tech
Role: Product Management Intern
The Problem With "Just Ask a Doctor"
There are ample options available for curing diseases, but platforms focused on preventing illness are limited. Daily health advice and wellness tools remain scarce.
Most health platforms try to replicate the doctor's clinic online. Nostavia started that way too. But after interviewing 7+ hospitals, the reality was clear: doctors were either locked into platforms like Practo, or large hospitals had built their own systems. Onboarding quality doctors was expensive, and frankly, we weren't offering anything meaningfully different.
So we asked a harder question: what if we didn't need doctors at all?
Rethinking the User
Our target user isn't a patient. They're someone who wakes up and thinks about their gut health, their energy levels, their biological age. Health-conscious people who want answers, not prescriptions.
The problem with most health content online is you never know if it's reliable. Our answer was simple: every response the platform gives comes with its sources. Harvard research, clinical studies, visible, cited, trustworthy. That became our core differentiator.
The Biological Age Hook
The entry point into Nostavia was a biological age calculator. Users uploaded their existing lab reports, or ordered new ones through the app, and our model trained on Harvard research derived key biological age markers from the data. It wasn't just a fun number. It was a personalized snapshot that made people feel seen.
But here's the thing about biological age: you check it once, maybe twice a year. It's not a reason to come back tomorrow.
Building the Ecosystem
This is where I pushed for a shift. Instead of doubling down on one big feature, I made the case for micro-features: small, daily-use tools that create a habit loop. A meditation counter. A food calorie tracker. Things that live alongside the bigger health insights.
The logic was simple: the biological age check is the hook. The micro-features are the reason to stay.
Users who came in curious about their biological age found themselves in an ecosystem, one that nudged them daily. That shift meaningfully improved our DAU-to-MAU ratio. People weren't just visiting once; they were coming back.
Automating the Reports
One of the more technical wins was automating the health report generation. Before, designers were manually building reports in Canva, same structure every time, just different metrics swapped in. I built an MCP-based agent that took the key data points as input and generated the full report automatically. What used to take manual effort per report became a one-click process.
What I Learned
The most important pivot wasn't technical: it was about understanding who the user actually is. Once we stopped chasing the "virtual doctor" model and started building for the health-conscious self-improver, everything got sharper. The features made more sense. The retention logic became clearer.
Sometimes the moat you're trying to build is actually a wall you're building around yourself.