Bobby Bitton: Co-Founder & CEO of O Positiv Health

Episode 819

On today’s episode, we welcome Bobby Bitton, Co-Founder & CEO of O Positiv Health — the women’s wellness brand on a mission to turn taboo into mainstream conversation. Inspired by his sister’s struggle with severe PMS and backed by his training as a Stanford nutritionist, Bobby helped launch the first-ever PMS gummy and build what is now the #1 women’s health brand on Amazon, with over 25 million bottles sold.
In our conversation, Bobby shares how O Positiv scaled from a bold DTC idea into a national retail powerhouse, why humor and authenticity can coexist with science and credibility, and what it takes to build trust in historically overlooked health categories. We also discuss the role of education and data in shaping modern health brands, sibling dynamics in business, and how tackling stigma can unlock both cultural and commercial impact. A powerful episode for founders, operators, and anyone passionate about building brands that truly serve.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Have you ever wondered why so many women’s health issues, whether it’s PMS, menopause, vaginal health, were treated like side conversations instead of real priorities? Our next guest did, and today, I’m excited to be joined by Bobby Bitton, who is the co founder and CEO of O Positiv Health, the brand on a mission to challenge taboos and build science backed solutions for Women’s Health at every stage of life. Bobby co founded O Positiv and launched the first ever gummy vitamin for PMS. What started as one bold idea has grown into the number one Women’s Health brand on Amazon, with over 25 million bottles sold. And today we’ll talk about building a category that is really not only a defining brand, but also scaling from D to C to retail and all of the things that go on when you’re when you’re really launching something, but also launching a brand, could be considered taboo in many people’s minds, taboo topic, but Bobby has taken the thought. So I’m very excited, Bobby. Welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Oh, Kara, I’m

Bobby Bitton 2:00
so excited to be here, honored to be speaking with you. It’s it’s fun to be speaking with an operator and entrepreneur that’s built it and been there and done everything that that we’re about to talk about. So so thank you for having me.

Kara Goldin 2:13
So for listeners just discovering, oh positive, how do you describe the brand and what it stands for?

Bobby Bitton 2:20
Yeah, oh, positive at its core, stands for, you know, disrupting women’s health and and standing for needs states and and things in women’s life that have been historically overlooked, that we want to go make products for education, for and community around we built it really in, you know, based on my sister’s experience, experience with her own health. My sister’s my co founder. We work together every single day at this business, and it’s just been inspiring for her to say, how can we create proactive approaches to women’s health, when previously, if we’re looking at history, everything’s been very reactionary when they have a problem, that’s when they’re going to solve it, not kind of finding out the root cause and doing it at the start. So that’s kind of the the ethos of the brand. And it’s just been so exciting to watch it, watch it grow, and kind of grow from its humble beginnings of focusing on menstrual health now to really focusing on kind of four main areas, being menstrual health, vaginal health, pregnancy and menopause, is kind of how we span her life and and look at where we want to go build category defining products.

Kara Goldin 3:22
I love that you’re building this company with your sister as your co founder, and the story really started with her, which I think is, you know, really awesome that you that you listened first of all. So to your sister, I said, when I first read about this, I think that there’s probably a lot of families out there, maybe siblings that, you know, throw ideas around, maybe throw problems around that they think they have a solution for. And you actually helped her launch this, this idea to what it is today, what made you believe there was a real business opportunity here?

Bobby Bitton 4:07
Yeah, I mean, it was starting a company with with your sibling. For us, was one of the best things we’ve ever done, right? It’s just the trust that you’ve built with your with your sibling over so many years, the wonderful judge and jury of your parents that can still to this day, settle any dispute that we have, which is incredible. The Roots really came from again, seeing me and Brian were roommates at the time, and seeing her go through her mid 20s and really struggle, struggle with her health, struggle with going to the doctor and trying to find the root cause of her cramps, her mood swings, her hormonal acne that was affecting both her confidence, but also her physical body, and being frustrated that everything was reactionary. They’re like, you can go on birth control or you can suck it up, and that is what it means to be a woman. And she’d come home and she would vent about this, and thus vent about her frustrations. And you know me kind of. Being a little bit of the problem solver, having some entrepreneurial experience myself, was like, Okay, well, this feels like is there something out there to be solved? And we did research, we found incredible ingredients and papers and studies on like proactive approaches to menstrual health and to hormone balance into these things that now you kind of hear about all the time, but 10 years ago, people weren’t really talking about how to kind of take your hormone health in your hormone health in your own hands. And we started just small and looked at, you know, our family, Brianna’s friends, my mom going through menopause, and said, like, this is a pretty big market, because if it’s that, like, aware in our sphere, it must be wide reaching. And we started talking to our friends, and started talking to women and doing surveys, and oh my god, the response we got of, oh my god, yeah, I haven’t really thought about my hormone health. It was kind of just birth control or deal with it.

Kara Goldin 5:53
So interesting. How did you come up with the name O Positiv? Yeah, so

Bobby Bitton 5:59
the name O Positiv it represents the female sign, so the O and the plus of O Positiv. So O Positiv Health is women’s health. It’s a little cheeky. We definitely have to explain it to some people. But the O represents the gummies. All of our gummy rings are in O shape, and then every one of our products ends in O. So it’s kind of like this through line that unifies our sub brands, as well as really, when you look at it visually, and oh, and a plus is that female sign

Kara Goldin 6:25
when you first launched? How many SKUs Did you launch with? And how has that changed today?

Bobby Bitton 6:33
Yeah, so we’ve been, we’ve been around for about eight years of the company, and for two and a half years we were a one product company. We launched with one one SKU, one focus, one need state, which was the first ever supplement for PMS. It was called flow. It still is called flow. It’s one of our hero products in our portfolio, and it was just this wonderful rocket ship right now, launching a lot of products and having products that worked and plenty of products that did not work and did not scale, you realize how lucky you were that your first product really took off. But it was, I think, for a couple of different reasons. It was, you know, first mover in the category of menstrual health. It was a product where women can really feel and experience the results, right? It’s different than like, a multivitamin or an immune product, that you take it and you can’t really tell if it’s working or not, but you take it regardless. Our kind of promise to our consumers, very early on was we’re going to make products that you can feel, and what that means is it’s product that they stay with because they get attached to the results that they’re feeling. And it becomes much more similar to kind of like a prescription regimen, because you feel the results and you don’t want them to you know your symptoms. Them to, you know, your symptoms come back, then maybe a historical supplement, and over the years, and really just getting close to our consumers, from that early, early onset, we saw that there were so many categories similar to menstrual health that we could disrupt, that women were coming to us asking for so if you’re thinking about menopause, was kind of that next category we entered into. It was my mom, you know, suffered with ovarian cancer. She’s healthy and wonderful, but she couldn’t go on any hormone replacement therapy. So she was like, hey, is there something hormone free and proactive that you can actually create for me for menopause? And that kind of was our second category. So one born out of my sister’s experience, second born out of my mom’s and then very much when we entered vaginal health and pregnancy, it was how can we take this model of categories that have low education, low resources, low community and really reactive solutions, and flip it on its head and offer heavy education, very proactive approach to it, and kind of that step before you have to, you know, go to the doctor and really be concerned with things that get extreme. But a lot of people are taking health in their hand, especially with this content out there, and people’s doctors they’re finding on on Tiktok.

Kara Goldin 8:56
Now, it’s crazy. That’s so, so true. What was the hardest part about launching a brand in a category that not only maybe many people still consider taboo, but also you hadn’t had this experience, right? You had you knew what the problem was. You had ideas, but this is not what you or your sister were kind of schooled in initially, although you did go back to school and trained as a nutritionist. But I think there’s, it’s still, if you did not grow up in sort of a pharmaceutical a lot of people would say, What do I know about this, and it’s just too hard.

Bobby Bitton 9:43
Yeah, I think it’s funny. I think a lot of entrepreneurs say if we knew what we knew now, I don’t know if you were to start right the mountain you have to climb is sometimes so high it’s good to not know where the actual peak is, because then you just start putting one foot in front of the other. And for us, being a consumer product, com. Many products had to be at the center of everything we did, and being in a category like vitamins and supplements is kind of where we started. It’s low barriers to entry. And to be honest, there’s a lot of snake oil out there, so it’s important to us to understand, how are we going to stand above the rest? And it was, you got to know what you don’t know, and you got to find people who do. And that’s a lesson, I think, in life, it was me and Brianna going out and in the early days, crashing every OB GYN appointment that we could make for Brianna, and pretending that it was for her. And we would say, Okay, well, we have this product idea, and can you help us with it? Finding the best nutraceutical scientists, I think, honestly, in the world to partner with you and believe in you and believe in this category of women’s health to develop the products that we have today. And then today, you know, we have six board approved OB gyns on our staff that help formulate our products, make our products, make sure they’re safe, and our science team as well. But in those early days it was, it was knocking down the doors, finding people to partner with you and and then when it came to, you know, obstacles that we didn’t foresee, just being in the market of women’s health and kind of being this first mover in the category, you know, we didn’t understand kind of the headwinds that we would face when messaging products the way we do, right? We were one of the first companies to call, you know, a probiotic for women. What it is, which is a vaginal probiotic, right? It’s for the vaginal microbiome. It helps balance pH and and the and yeast in in the vaginal microbiome, and we’re the first people to call it that. And what happened when we named a product vaginal probiotic is we immediately got banned on every single platform. So on Facebook, on Tiktok, on this for being, you know, a a sexualized product, and it took months of fighting with policy, showing them examples that Ed medication was being marketed on this website. But yet, we’re blocked as a as a women’s health brand, and we’re really proud of the work we did, because we were able to overturn policy at every single big advertising business. So think the Facebooks and metas of the world, the tiktoks of the world, the Amazons of the world, like we were able to bring them onto our way of kind of thinking, and bring them along this journey to actually open up for every women’s health company that that markets today that’s able to say the word, you know, vagina or vaginal health thanks to a positive and we’re really proud of that work we did. So it’s like lot of battles on the product side, knowing what we don’t know and finding people that do, but also kind of changing policy a little bit when it comes to how you advertise and talk about these products in a anatomically correct way, not a sexualized way. I think

Kara Goldin 12:38
that’s really important. Yeah, no. So, so interesting. So you launched initially as a D to C product, and O Positiv is now the number one Women’s Health brand on Amazon. Then you scaled into national retail. Do I have this right in terms of the order? How did you think about that as a go to market strategy. So when you were getting ready to launch, you’re still trying to figure out who your consumer is. You’re fighting policy issues and rules that different social media companies are making you, you know, jump through hoops to in order to get the brand out there. But how did you think about the go to market strategy? How did you figure it out?

Bobby Bitton 13:30
It was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of us taking it from crawl, walk, run approach and being very methodical about it. And you know, the beauty of starting as a direct to consumer brain. I still think that’s an incredible way to start a business, because you have access to all the data you you own your customers, in the sense of, like, the communication on how you can communicate them, you and ask them question, they can be your biggest advocates. So starting the roots as a direct to consumer business had a lot of pluses for us, and then moving slowly into other e commerce channels like Amazon, was a business game changing for us, first and foremost, because that’s where people buy supplements. It’s where people feel comfortable and feel informed when it comes to their quality of reviews, their quality of products. And for us, that existence added that extra touch point. For us. It made our marketing dollars go further. It made kind of everything start working in that flywheel and that next phase of retail. Once we had kind of a big D to C business or E commerce business where we kind of like had this engine working on social media marketing, we had the foothold in Amazon and started gaining ranking and started accomplishing those number one slots on a lot of our products. Then we felt it was time to go retail. We had retailers knocking on our door for, I think, three years before we actually said Yes, right? A lot of people kind of jump in it and are very excited by it, but our fear was we never want. Into one product alone on a shelf with no support. So we waited until we had enough hero SKUs to command a brand block in a presence that would stop someone in store, even if they’ve never heard about us, hopefully they have, but if they haven’t stopped them in store with a brand block and and tell a clear story, versus maybe our first product flow alone on a shelf that we don’t think that would have been successful, even if it wasn’t a big product online. So come 2022 2023 when we felt like we were ready for it, it was finding the right partner for us. That was that our first retail partner was target, and having someone and a partner that believes in your mission, that’s going to give you the space that’s going to give you space to educate a consumer for the first time on, you know, a first that, you know, they never had a vaginal probiotic or a menopause product, and in that category or in that aisle, and they gave us the space. And again, it was, crawl, walk, run. We started with 200 doors, right? They were like, they offered more. We said, 200 like, crawl, walk, run, learn the business. And then eventually, yeah, we expanded nationwide. We launched in Walmart, which has been an incredible partner, and more to come. Because I think when you have that flywheel of all three, and you take your time to build the retail Amazon DTC flywheel, it really works, and it fundamentally changed our profitability of the business, because it was, it makes your dollars go further. If you have that extra sales point, extra touch point for consumers to buy

Kara Goldin 16:25
you, I totally, totally agree. So what was the number of SKUs that you believed that you needed to launch with in stores? And I loved how you explained that, because I I totally agree when we launched in target as well. I mean, we really believed that we had to in our case. I guess it was when we launched with three SKUs initially in Target, many, many years ago we really saw, you know, pretty good numbers. But when we ended up launching with five SKUs, it was dramatically different, and we had to, in order to get to five SKUs, we had to be able to show, you know, velocity, and you know same store sales and how, you know we compared in the category, and all of those things. But for those who aren’t familiar with that concept, I’d love to have you unpack that a little bit more. How you guys thought about it.

Bobby Bitton 17:30
Yeah, it was. It’s the expansion to retail has been so exciting. And I think for us, this idea of commanding a presence is something we thought a lot about. And when you’re going to retail. Also the data, for the first time ever, versus an E com brand that’s very, very private, is very public, and people can see how well you’re doing, right? You have hurdle rates, which is kind of like the level that you have to reach per how many units you sell, how many dollars you sell per week, are very real, right? You have these real you know, you don’t have as much flexibility, because they’re on different buying cycles. On different buying cycles. So for us, we entered target with six SKUs. They gave us the opportunity of waiting long enough to be a big enough brand on E commerce that we actually got to launch on end cap, which was really cool, only in 200 doors, but we got this opportunity to share the story have our logo big actually offer more education on what these products actually do. So when it goes so when it goes in aisle a couple months later, that consumers have warmed up a little bit. So that’s kind of our our thesis was six SKUs is how we launched end cap. Was really important to us. And then broader expansion. Try to keep all those SKUs together, right? We like the SKUs together so it commands a presence when you’re walking into into the store, in some categories when we’ve had to be split up, right? If some of our SKUs are in the digestive aisle, some of them are in the intimate aisle, we always set a rule of kind of minimum three. So we love five together, but we never want a product alone on a shelf. We wanted at least three. So it commands a little bit more horizontal space to take it up. And we see they lift up each other. Because in most companies, you kind of have your hero SKU, and when our hero SKU, which is our vaginal probiotic, is next to other SKUs, it lifts all tides. So for us, like brand blocks are really brand blocks are really important, having at least three, ideally five together, and then where you can partnering with retailers, maybe it’s getting an exclusive deal, something like that, to get an end cap, to introduce that consumer, that guest, to your product for the first time in that retailer is mission critical, like we waited until we could do that. And I advise other companies that I love working with. You know, there’s no rush. You got one chance take your time when you show up, show up, right?

Kara Goldin 19:41
Yeah, definitely you’ve built a brand that uses humor and authenticity in marketing. Did you start off with that marketing, or did that sort of change over time?

Bobby Bitton 19:55
We definitely started out with it. I think we’re a little more cheeky of. Probably towards the beginning than we are today. Our our tagline at the beginning, when we were just a one product company, focusing on on PMS. It was PMS effing sucks. Flow makes it suck less. It was very fun. Definitely scroll stopping. I think today, with a wider customer base, very, still very challenging, the status quo, breaking taboos, but making sure that we’re still speaking to a consumer, if it’d be our menopause consumer, or if it be, you know, someone who just got their period for the first time, still a brand that can have that generational breath, if you will. But like core to who we are, that we will we will never step away from, is, is, is our challenging of the status quo, and yes, we’re talking about serious issues, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t have have fun doing so, you know, we put a 14 foot vagina archway in the center of meat packing in New York. I think there’s actually probably a rule now written in New York that they can’t do that, because we called it an archway, and then we put it in the streets of New York, and then they’re like, Hey guys, this isn’t your archway. And we had a lot of fun. That was just last summer, but always going to do things like that, to challenge it and start conversation, you know, not just for the sake of being provocative, but for the sake of change. Definitely.

Kara Goldin 21:11
So male being a co founder of a women’s brand, have you ever thought about going into adding men’s health into, oh, positive

Bobby Bitton 21:23
for us. I mean, I think being, being a man, running a women’s health company with my sister by my side very much, is a pleasure and a privilege. And it’s like, always like, my key is always like, lead with you. Lead with curiosity, right? Lead with asking questions. Lead with empathy and and when, when, when push comes to shove. Always lean on, on, on my sister next to me to kind of help me make those decisions. I think for us, we think women’s health is in early innings. I think we are double down. We want to be the global leader in women’s health in the US, US and beyond. And we think there’s so much headroom on that. I think it’s like staying focused and earning that trust with the consumer. I think there’s interesting things to be done, of like using and thinking about her needs in respect to her and her family and the people around her. So we have one men’s product. It’s a sperm health product, and we launched it in conjunction with our conception support product, because, as we were doing the research and thinking about, how can we have and give her the best conception journey possible and her experience possible, we discovered that over 50% of infertility is actually caused by the man’s sperm. So in respect of having her have the best experience, we got it. We got to fix this sperm, right? So, like, we launched a men’s product in that respect. So thinking about adjacencies, where it can be partners, but with her lens, with her at the center of everything we do, that’s kind of how we’re looking at the path going forward. But, but women’s health, I think, in any one of many innings left to come,

Kara Goldin 22:54
so doubt maybe a moment where you’re thinking, I don’t know how we move forward. All those kind of things come up. When you’re starting a company, you have this major problem that happens, and you have to figure out how to get through it. I’ve heard so many different interesting stories, whether it was production that went bad, or tariffs, or, I mean, so many different so many different issues. How do you, how do you get through those issues? But also, I’d love to hear one of your hard moments, I guess, where you figured out how that, or obviously you got through it, but it was a really tough challenge.

Bobby Bitton 23:43
Yeah, oh my God, there’s so many, right? And I think, like anyone I talked to, is so funny, it’s you think about all I ever wanted was to get to a phase of growth in the company where you don’t feel like, one day you’re gonna you’re gonna have the greatest company ever, and you’re gonna sell for a crazy amount of money, and then the next day you’re like, Okay, this is gonna go out of business. Out of business. And I thought I would eventually reach that point and like, surprise, you never do, right? Like, no matter how big you are, how successful it is, it’s like, the journey of an entrepreneur is so up and down. That’s what makes it energized and exciting. It also makes it it also makes it challenging. I think for us, so many examples, right? I think being a consumer product company, being a company that partners with, you know, great manufacturers to manufacture their products, but yet has a level of quality, I think, above the rest of the market. We’ve had many a time where our manufacturer, at one point, got purchased by a big, bigger manufacturer. And they said, Okay, well, you know, we’re, you’re too tiny of a company for us. This is like year two, so we’re just going to stop producing. That would have put the company out of business in like two months, right? So it was took me and Brianna, getting on a plane, getting there, showing up in person, talking to them. Sharing the vision with this now, much bigger company that we were much smaller player with, and convincing them like, Hey, you gotta, you gotta do this. Run for us. You gotta do it like, look at this momentum. And I think it was like a lesson for us that no matter how big you get or no matter what you’re doing, relationships are everything right, like they like they cared about us, right? They saw the whites of our eyes. They looked at us and cared about our journey, not about their bottom line, but they were willing to say, Okay, we’ll sneak you in, like, right after this other customer, because, like, we don’t, we want you guys to do well. And we ended up moving on to that manufacturer. And now every time, every time we see that manufacturer, like an Expo West, I mean, that they’re like, oh, man, you guys were the whale that we didn’t know you wouldn’t be, right because now you’re now you’re a big fish in the sea. But, like, that was a funny story, I think, again, you know, we’ve launched multiple products that we bought a lot of inventory and put kind of bet the house on, and they didn’t turn out. And I think that’s a that’s a part of the business, and for us, early on in that journey, it kind of helped us refine where we have a right to win and what kind of products we’re making. So the second product we ever launched was an immune health product. It was great. It was like coming out of covid. It was an incredible tasting gummy. Reviews were off the charts for like, how great it tastes, and people enjoyed it, but we couldn’t sell it. We couldn’t sell it. We’re sitting next to products that were, you know, $7 for immune health or vitamin C and things like that. And we were like, all of a sudden competing on price, where we realized we’re not a brand that should be competing on price. It was, you know, not great retention on that product, because people were only taking it when they were sick, right? They weren’t. They weren’t taking it when, you know, just as a daily use, and they couldn’t feel the results. They didn’t like, almost get addicted to the results of the product. So for us, it was like whittling down to this core principle that from that moment on, we took on was we’re only going to make products that you can feel and measure results in your body. And that one failure of this product that we had to scrap a bunch of inventory, and we had to write it off, and it like in these early days, really hurt the business, ended up being one of our most incredible lessons, because it helped shape what our product strategy would be today. So, like, a couple of the there’s countless more, but definitely a couple of, like, something you thought was going to be big, that failed, and then just other days where you think the day is going great, you get a call that your manufacturer got purchased, and they want to kick you out. And then you just got to get on a plane, pick up the phone, and, you know, email is never going to be enough. You got to go take action.

Kara Goldin 27:23
So interesting. So for founders building in highly regulated or sensitive spaces, what advice would you give them today, knowing what you know after building what you have with O Positiv?

Bobby Bitton 27:37
Yeah, it’s, it’s product is at the center of everything, right? It’s it’s speed is important and agility is important. But if you’re in a consumer product world or anything, regulated products will always trump all. So take the time, put the effort in, build the world class product, and the rest of the problems seem actually quite tiny. I think is really, really important. And that’s, I think, part of our success in our longevity in a space that sees a lot of people kind of come in and come out because it’s trendy, or ingredients or things like that, like how to have longevity is just laser focused on the product and the quality. It’s really important. And then general advice to anyone building is you just don’t have to do everything alone. I think O Positiv is, is what it is today. For the people around me, I know what I was good at. Brianna knew what she was good at. She’s the creative I’m the business side. And we found incredible people around us that were so much better at the other things, right? When we’re talking about go to market in retail, it was finding people who were, who’ve done that before, that were better than us, to bring them in the dream team, sell them on the vision, and then have them win on the upside with you, and really like looking at your team as partners, fundamentally, is the reason we’re here today. But it’s by no means a one person or two person show. And I think a lot of founders, even even me in the early days, were like, Oh, I just have to do everything. And you just, you don’t, you don’t. It’s your job is to to convince people to jump on this crazy journey with you, and hopefully they’re better at those stuff that you’re not great at.

Kara Goldin 29:05
I love it. Well, Bobby, thank you so much for joining us today, and your story is such a powerful reminder that some of the biggest business opportunities live inside the conversations with people we love, your sister, your family, your friends, and for everyone listening, be sure to check out Oh positive, oh positive health, oh positive.com and follow Oh positive health on Instagram, LinkedIn, all social platforms to hear, hear a lot more about them. And, of course, purchase it and share it, and I will see everyone the next time on the Kara Goldin show. Thanks again.

Bobby Bitton 29:46
Bobby, Thanks, Kara. That was so fun.

Kara Goldin 29:49
Really appreciate it. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course. Feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.