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Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

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Re: Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

#41

Post by khaledkteily »

Taek wrote: post #34

What happens to the sperm if the company goes out of business? What are the privacy protections around DNA and other personal information inherent to sperm collection and storage? Do you offer jurisdiction options?

A very common-sense question to ask.

We have agreements with our cryostorage providers to automatically transfer ownership of the assets to them in case Legacy ever did not exist in the future. So you would work directly with them and have the choice of either keeping the sample frozen there, or transferring it to a facility of your choice. We would help facilitate this to the greatest extent possible.

We do not yet have jurisdiction options, but I will say that I originally incorporated the company in Switzerland to benefit from their strong stances on privacy, and the "nuclear bunker option" is one that we are serious about setting up in the future. FWIW, nuclear bunkers are actually extremely common in Switzerland, this is a country-wide policy (https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/prepared-for-anything_bunkers-f...), so it's not a crazy idea to set up a cryo-facility in one.

For privacy, I'll start just by saying that I've been a privacy advocate for as long as I can remember, am a user of Protonmail, Signal, VPNs, etc. I know how important data privacy and am only interested in working on a company that is designed to be privacy-focused from the beginning. As far as I know, we are the only company that is HIPAA-, GDPR-, and CCPA- compliant.

Most importantly, we do not sell your data. We outline our data collection in our privacy policy (on the footer of the website)

Re: Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

#44

Post by khaledkteily »

_5659 wrote: post #27

This might seem overtly politically correct and I'm actually a bit surprised in myself for saying this, but have you considered changing instances of male/men to just generic families? (e.g., We help families have children vs we help men become fathers). I will state up front, I'm not trying to police language, just pointing out that deciding specific keywords up front affects how people find your business online or…

Hey - this is one of the best-articulated responses I've read around this topic, so first of all, thank you. I take it to heart and have shared it with the full team, because it's important are actively thinking about this.

I am really sorry to hear about your past experience at a fertility clinic. One of the many reasons we are offering an at-home solution is for this exact purpose... performing such a personal process in a clinic is often times scary, unsettling, and uncomfortable (and sometimes downright humiliating - especially when interacting with people who have intolerant views).

Our brand is something that we've given a lot of thought to and that we continually discuss as a team. We work with many different clients who are using our services for various reasons. To your point, we've found that many of our clients are part of the LGBTQ community and are preserving their fertility prior to starting hormone replacement therapy.

I have personally spoken to many of these clients and have heard similar feedback to yours. We, clearly, still have a lot to learn about our clientele - their backgrounds, goals, needs, experiences with fertility, thoughts around family planning, etc.

I would love to set up an LGBTQ-centric campaign for the community, and I will make sure we do soon.

Thanks again for your awesome feedback! And if you would like to try the service, please message me at khaled@givelegacy.com, if you're open to giving us this kind of honest feedback, I'd love to get you a free kit.

PS in this field.... puns are always welcome.

Re: Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

#46

Post by toomuchtodo »

sarahsteinle wrote: post #32
01100011 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious about this too. I recently looked into sperm preservation. Something like $1,250 to setup and $250/year after the first year. Seemed reasonable to me.

These rates aren't unreasonable! I've seen storage get as expensive as $1200 per year! We try to make our pricing as affordable as possible ($145/year)

That's exceptionally good. I'm paying Reprotech in Minnesota $200/year ($1000 upfront for five years of storage).

Wish I had heard about you in the spring, would've picked your org solely because of your georedundancy option mentioned in a sibling comment.

Re: Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

#47

Post by khaledkteily »

klyrs wrote: post #33
_5659 wrote: post #27

This might seem overtly politically correct and I'm actually a bit surprised in myself for saying this, but have you considered changing instances of male/men to just generic families? (e.g., We help families have children vs we help men become fathers). I will state up front, I'm not trying to police language, just pointing out that deciding specific keywords up front affects how people find your business online or…

Don't apologize for being "politically correct." You're doing the founder a favor, by pointing at money they're leaving on the table. And when I went to a fertility clinic shortly before my transition and they certainly didn't apologize for treating me like a goddamned freak.

I thought it was extremely well written, pointed, and clearly written as constructive criticism. I don't even view this as about being politically correct, but about being inclusive, and creating an inclusive space, for everyone who is thinking about using our service.

I'm sorry to hear about your fertility clinic experience - it feels like they are still living in the stone ages.

Re: Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

#48

Post by khaledkteily »

frei wrote: post #24

I've tried Dadi and Sppare.me in the past and had good results on the front-end (I haven't retrieved any samples yet). I'm not sure the service could have been improved. What are you doing differently than existing mail-in sperm analysis/freezing companies?

One more thing I'll add to Sarah's answer: in our case, the company was founded by - and run by - healthcare and fertility specialists. We are a healthcare company first, and a consumer company second, not the other way round.

This sounds minor but actually affects a lot of the way we do our work e.g. we ensure rigorous analysis, we take extra de-risking steps around cryostorage, we call clients to share bad results because it's more humane to do, we connect them to our urologist on staff, etc. etc.

Re: Launch HN: Legacy (YC S19) – we help men test and freeze their sperm

#50

Post by neolog »

khaledkteily wrote: post #39
cultureulterior wrote: post #26

I'm a potential customer, and I'd like to treat this as any data storage company- because that's what this is, a genetic data storage company. One of the things I find annoying about existing companies is that I can't see how my data is doing. For digital data, I can monitor to see how my data is doing, but all I know about existing companies is that they will tell me if something fails. I'd like to see live monitori…

That's a great question, and one where keeping everything cool is important in both cases. We get a lot of monitoring information, both on the way to the cryostorage facilities (everything from humidity to temperature variance to battery level of our trackers), and we similarly get daily or weekly checks of the frozen sperm (like manually checking on levels of liquid nitrogen). We hadn't considered making this inform…

- How long without cooling does it take for the samples to be destroyed?

- When it does go down, how long does it take you to catch it?

- Are you doing active "chaos monkey"-style testing such as intentionally turning off random systems and ensuring your backup procedures detect and solve the problem before the samples are destroyed?

- Given the current deterioration rates in your industry and your facility under normal operation, what is the probability of a sample surviving 10 years? 20? 30? What about after accounting for the possibility of equipment/system failures?

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