Building a medical advisory team on a startup budget: A practical guide for femtech founders
A guest post by Dr. Caitlyn Tivy, a clinical consultant, medical writer, and pelvic health physical therapist based in the western United States.
This is a guest post by Dr. Caitlyn Tivy, a clinical consultant, medical writer, and pelvic health physical therapist based in the western United States.
If you’re building a women’s health startup and you haven’t practiced as a healthcare provider yourself, let me save you the headache and heartache right now: bring in medical advisors early. Yep, right from the beginning.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re bootstrapped, your runway is limited, and hiring anyone feels like a luxury you simply can’t afford. But here’s the thing: the cost of not involving clinical professionals from the beginning is almost always higher than the cost of bringing them in on the ground floor.
Why medical advisors matter in femtech
Dr. Ayominde Owodunni beautifully covered why medical advisors matter in femtech in a previous issue of FutureFemHealth, so I won’t rehash all her excellent points. If you haven’t read her featured article, go do that now. I’ll wait…
Welcome back! Hope you learned a lot.
In addition, there’s another place where medical professionals earn their keep in femtech: helping you navigate the murky waters between wellness-only and medical products.
This distinction is especially relevant in women’s health, where so many companies are building wellness-focused solutions. It’s incredibly easy to drift into language and design features that the FDA and similar regulatory bodies may perceive as “medical claims”. If they think you’re building a medical device or product, they’ll be breathing down your neck, burying you in paperwork, and possibly even censuring you.
Medical advisors have a discerning eye for the distinction between wellness solutions and medical products. We know which claims could cause suspicion and which will keep you safely in wellness territory. We can help you build solutions that solve significant women’s health problems without raising regulatory red flags.
Three models for building your medical advisory team
The adaptability and flexibility of the startup world is one of its greatest strengths. Like most things in this industry, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building a medical advisory team for your women’s health startup.
You don’t have to adhere to an industry standard here: you can structure your clinical support to match your company’s stage and budget. Let’s look at three options.
Model 1: The super-early sanity check
In the very early stages, when you’re still focusing on proof of concept or building your first prototype, you usually don’t need a whole team. You might just need one or two experts to gut-check your initial ideas, especially if you’re not medically trained yourself.
As a solo consultant to women’s and queer health companies, I spend a lot of time in this stage with my clients. Here’s an example:
In 2024, I worked with the founders of PeliHealth as they were building out their pelvic health education platform. The founders brought me in for a very small, tightly scoped project: I reviewed the educational content they’d developed so far and provided my input as a pelvic health professional. I helped them correct inaccuracies and identify content gaps.
The topic was squarely in my clinical wheelhouse, so I felt confident being their primary reviewing professional. Because the project was small, simple, and didn’t require additional advisors, it only cost Peli a few hundred dollars. In exchange, they were able to identify and fix problems before they became baked into the product.
For many early-stage companies, this model may just require a few hours of an advisor’s time. It’s light, it’s affordable, and it’s incredibly valuable when you’re just getting started.
Model 2: The mid-length retainer
The next level up is bringing on one or more advisors for short-term contracts. Think of this as an opportunity for your advisors to do more in-depth work without becoming pricey, full-time additions to your employee roster.
Whether they work with you 2 hours per week or 10 hours over the course of the month, they’ll be involved enough to understand your product and company beyond a surface level. As a result, their guidance will be more powerful and personalized to your company’s needs.
If the word “retainer” makes you see nothing but dollar signs, don’t panic: this model is often less expensive than you’d think. It definitely depends on the consultant, but if you’re hiring someone for a discrete project or a handful of hours monthly, you can get a lot done and gather substantial clinical knowledge without a huge outlay of funds.
Here’s an example of a mid-length retainer I used with another client:
In the summer of 2025, I worked with Amissa Health, a perimenopause-focused company that’s using wearable data to facilitate better midlife care. The Amissa team brought me on to help create educational content for their users and collaborate with their marketing lead to produce user- and clinician-facing materials.
My initial quote was too high for their budget, so we worked together to figure out what we could do with the budget they had. I adjusted my scope and deliverables, and we leveraged my network and Amissa’s summer interns to build a mini-team. This allowed me to increase my output without increasing my fees.
Rather than writing all the requested content myself, I focused on strategy: researching high-quality sources, creating a content pipeline that reflected real-world patient questions, mentoring junior writers, and reviewing content for quality and clinical accuracy.
I worked with Amissa for about four months, providing specific deliverables each month. Rather than billing by the hour, I structured our agreement as a flat monthly fee with a list of exactly what they’d receive from me each month. My clients usually love this model because they know exactly what they’re getting, and they’re never surprised by my monthly invoice.
Not all consultants work this way, but it’s always worth asking. If you have clear projects and specific needs, outline them clearly beforehand. Ask potential advisors if they can complete those deliverables for a flat fee.
A month-to-month or quarterly arrangement can help you keep costs under control. You can work closely with your advisor(s) for three months to bang out the highest-priority projects. When you have more funding, you can reconnect with them for future advisory work.
An added bonus: mid-length projects like these let you test the waters and determine if an advisor is a good fit for you and your startup. If it’s not a good match, you aren’t locked in forever. Conversely, if you love their work, you’ll know exactly who to ask when the next project comes up: you’ve already established a relationship, and they can jump back in with both feet!
Model 3: The full medical advisory board
When you’re ready to build out a full-fledged team of medical advisors, you’re looking at a bigger project, but you can still do it without breaking the bank.
In this scenario, it can really help to have a primary point-person to manage your medical advisors and ensure everything you need is getting done efficiently. I’m currently filling this role for another client:
My client, ProMom, is building an AI-powered companion for the early parenthood journey from TTC through postpartum. As ProMom’s fractional Head of Clinical Affairs, I’m helping to recruit, onboard, and manage their medical advisory team as they prepare for the next stage of growth.
In addition to the physician advisors ProMom’s CEO has already identified, we’re supplementing the team with specialists from my professional network and those of the physician advisors. If we can’t answer a question ourselves, we have someone in our networks who can.
For example, I recruited a dietician colleague to review a nutrition-focused feature in the app. Her work only cost ProMom a few hundred dollars, and she was able to review this feature and provide critical input in just a couple of hours.
I’m acting as the intermediary to ensure that each advisor is focused on their areas of expertise and knows exactly how to complete their reviews. This way, my client gets the most bang for their buck, and the CEO doesn’t have to manage yet another project.
I’m teaching the new advisors how femtech works, translating from medicalese to startup jargon and back again, and generally keeping the medical advisory team running smoothly. This is a powerful model for companies who bring in medical advisors without previous startup experience: the advisors bring their clinical knowledge, and I help them learn the ropes of a new industry.
Ready to learn even more about building your own medical advisory team? Sign up for Caitlyn’s free 5-part email series here!
Making medical advisors affordable (Yes, it’s possible!)
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: the money, honey.
Allow me to climb onto my soapbox for just a moment: you must compensate your medical advisors fairly. If you’re willing to pay a software developer to build your app, you have to be ready to pay healthcare professionals to provide their medical expertise.
You wouldn’t believe how often we’re solicited for pro bono work “for exposure” or “because we know you’re really passionate about this cause”. Please don’t be that person.
That said, here’s how to make it work:
Focus on discrete projects done in chunks
Plan to tackle individual projects as each new round of funding comes in. This is often easier to arrange with solo consultants than with bigger consultancies (and that’s why I do so much of this kind of work!) Solo advisors and small shops like mine are often more flexible and able to take on smaller scopes of work with lower rates.
Have honest conversations about startup constraints
Your potential advisors might be highly experienced clinicians but relative novices in the startup world: they may not understand what it means to be bootstrapped or pre-seed.
Don’t be afraid to be frank about funding. While “passion for the cause” is never a fair reason to ask for free work, many health professionals are still willing to offer their services at a significantly reduced rate to help solve an important problem.
Seek out early-career healthcare professionals
Healthcare students or licensed providers who’ve gone back to school for an MPH or MBA can be incredibly valuable here. While they’re in the student phase, they may be willing to provide advisory services at a discounted rate because they’re also learning from you.
Even seasoned clinicians may be comfortable with reduced advisory fees if they’re actively seeking experience in femtech or health tech in general. They may require more initial guidance from you (or from a fractional Clinical Lead), but in exchange, you’re getting their services for a reduced rate.
Note that it’s also fine to recruit clinical advisors without specific femtech experience. There’s a lot of overlap across the niches in health technology, so a consultant who has worked with other health tech startups outside women’s health will still have plenty to offer! Given the unique sensitivities in female health, however, I’d recommend having at least one advisor with women’s health experience (either clinical or in femtech).
Offer equity (but please, not only equity)
Let’s face it: everyone and their mother is out there offering equity in exchange for work, but only a small fraction of that equity will ever be worth something.
Some advisors will accept equity-only arrangements on a limited basis, but many consultants have to pay our own bills as solo operators: we simply can’t work for equity alone. Please don’t plan to rely solely on equity as a payment model.
Yes, you can afford clinical advisors!
A medical advisory team is a crucial component of a quality women’s health startup, but building one doesn’t have to mean you have to drain your bank account before you’ve even launched. To build one successfully and affordably, you’ll need to be strategic, forge relationships early, and structure engagements that work for your stage and budget.
The medical professionals who work with women’s health startups do it because we genuinely want to help build better solutions for our patients. We’ve seen firsthand what’s broken in healthcare. We want to help you fix it, and we’re often more flexible than you’d think when it comes to making it work financially.
So start the conversation: you might be surprised at what’s possible, even on a startup shoestring.
About the Author
Dr. Caitlyn Tivy is a clinical consultant, medical writer, and pelvic health physical therapist based in the western United States. As President of C Tivy Consulting, LLC, she helps up-and-coming women’s and LGBTQ+ health companies bridge the gaps between medical innovation, clinical research, and real-world healthcare delivery. Want to learn more about this topic? Check out her free guide to building a medical advisory team on a budget!