Case Study: How We Helped Consolidate Health Go-to-Market with a Fractional Growth Team

Consolidate Health was a pre-seed startup with no in-house marketing. We joined as their fractional Growth Team and led their Go-to-Market.

Increasingly I’ve found that early stage startups need more than a “fractional CMO,” they need a ton of raw execution.

That’s why I’m super-excited that today’s post showcases our new operating model: the fractional growth team.

This was our third time using this model to help a founder go-to-market and build a high-performing revenue engine. If you need help scaling your business, feel free to get in touch.

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Vinu Natarajan, founder and CEO of Consolidate Health, had spent the past year assembling a team of product, design, and engineering folks, and had been building an app to help patients and doctors manage medical records.

They were almost ready to go-to-market.

Normally, Vinu would have hired a head of marketing, and would have started building out a growth team.

Next, they would have started evaluating tools, buying them, and stitching them together.

And finally, they would have needed to measure their impact, and would have probably relied on a CTO or Head of Data Science to build data pipelines and dashboards.

Except Vinu didn’t have time for any of that. He needed to show traction, fast.

So he accelerated the GTM journey by hiring us to be his fractional growth team.

As Vinu put it:

“Airframe’s team helped us ship faster and achieve traction faster. By showing us how to implement tools like Intercom and PostHog, they let our core engineering team stay focused on the product.”

We operated exactly as an in-house team would:

• We had Consolidate Health emails, we were on Slack, you could book our calendars

• Unlike an agency, there was no predefined “scope of work:” we’d work on any problem, any tool, any challenge, to get the job done

• And unlike most agencies I’ve worked with, we were the ones driving meetings, driving projects, driving results, and pushing to go faster

And unlike most in-house growth teams, we’d done all of this before. In fact, this was my 7th time running a zero-to-one go-to-market like this. And I was going to make sure it was our best one yet.

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Do you want to hire Prasid & Airframe Labs? We’ve helped YC-backed startups like Scribd, scale-ups like Booksy, and Fortune 500 companies like SiriusXM. In every case, we’ve helped them grow revenue, fast. And we can do the same for you.

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Challenge #1: Choosing the Right GTM Strategy for a Marketplace Startup

When Vinu first approached us, the original plan was a Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) go-to-market where we would get tens of thousands of patients using the app, and then would approach the other side of the marketplace: clinical researchers.

So my first step upon joining was to build a model for Vinu. This exercise uncovered two critical obstacles:

1. DTC Acquisition costs would be quite high: The cost to acquire a healthcare patient through digital channels varied depending on the specific channel and type of healthcare practice. Here are some average patient acquisition costs for digital channels:

• Paid Search (PPC): $342

• Meta Ads: $577

While those types of acquisition costs could have made sense when you’re selling a paid product, they didn’t make sense for Consolidate Health’s free-to-use patient tool.

2. Traditional online acquisition channels were too blunt

Consolidate Health’s model required a critical mass of patients with the same disease in order to match them with research studies.

But there weren’t great ways to target people in specific diseases with online ads.

So to get a critical mass of 1000 patients with the same disease, we might have had to acquire 100,000 patients.

The Pivot: A B2B2C Approach That Scaled

Instead of chasing patients one by one, we proposed a B2B2C model. What if we provided a free tool for doctors to manage their patients’ data? By reframing the audience from patients to providers (i.e. Doctors offices), we could acquire patients for free. And by targeting doctors with a specific speciality, we would reach our critical mass of patients much sooner.

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Challenge #2: Shipping v1 of the GTM Engine

At Consolidate Health, the team’s instinct was to build—a natural reflex for a team with deep product experience at larger companies.

Because we had tremendous zero-to-one startup experience, we were able to guide the founding team toward a different approach: conserve engineering resources for core product. For the rest, leverage off-the-shelf parts. This approach helped them ship faster, and reduced time-to-value.

Overview of our Revenue Tools Stack

1. ActiveCampaign: This HIPAA-certified marketing automation tool saved Consolidate Health at least $10K annually compared to Salesforce. It offered the functionality they needed—campaign automation, patient communication, and provider engagement—without unnecessary overhead.

2. RudderStack: Integrated data streams across the patient and provider journey, reducing manual data wrangling and freeing up engineering hours.

3. Intercom: Provided live chat, in-product notifications, and ticketing capabilities—essential for optimizing patient engagement and activation rates.

4. PostHog: Delivered granular product analytics. The auto-tagging and self-serve tagging functionality meant that we didn’t need the engineering team to code conversion events manually. Our team could create events ourselves, and build all the dashboards the marketing and product team’s needed.

By adopting this build-vs-buy philosophy, we accelerated CH’s time-to-value while keeping their core engineering team focused on what mattered: the product.

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Challenge #3: Choosing A Marketing Automation Tool Juggling Privacy, Compliance, and Other Landmines

Healthcare isn’t like other industries. So for Consolidate Health, privacy wasn’t just a checkbox; it was critical. We needed to find tools that were economical but also HIPAA-compliant.

We demoed multiple platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Paubox, and Iterable, to find the right fit.

Salesforce: We had seen a ton of startups lock themselves into Salesforce because they thought “they should.” The reality was that today the time-to-value and maintenance costs for Salesforce were much higher than alternatives.

And once you chose a CRM, you almost never migrated away. So we were able to dismiss Salesforce fairly early in the investigation.

Hubspot: Hubspot was my favorite of the bunch, but it was about as expensive as Salesforce, making it too expensive for where Consolidate Health was in their journey.

Paubox: Paubox was the only vendor we looked at that marketed itself as being healthcare-specific. When demoing Paubox, we asked if they had an integration with other tools we were using. They said they didn’t have any native integrations, but promised that “you can integrate anything with our API.”

This was exactly the type of hidden engineering cost that our team was here to protect against. We pushed back and moved-on.

ActiveCampaign: Eventually ActiveCampaign emerged as the clear winner for its balance of affordability, functionality, and compliance.

We automated the demo request process to ensure that potential providers and partners received immediate responses and clear next steps. This reduced friction in the sales funnel and helped accelerate provider adoption. Below was how the request and response flow was structured.

Request A Demo

Request a Demo Automated Response

Challenge #4: Shipping Product Analytics and GTM Reporting v1

Let’s talk about dashboards.

In many startups, data takes a backseat until a data science team joins a couple years in. Until then, data is usually ad hoc reports coming out of disparate tools, and if they’re cobbled together at all it’s in spreadsheets.

But not here.

We leveraged RudderStack and PostHog to build multiple dashboards for the multiple GTM motions.

This funnel illustrates the patient acquisition journey, from initial outreach to full activation. By leveraging a combination of marketing automation (ActiveCampaign), website interactions (Webflow), data tracking (RudderStack), and in-product engagement (Intercom), we ensured a seamless and data-driven onboarding experience.

We were able to answer questions like:

• Which patient acquisition channels are driving conversions? Flyers in doctor’s offices? SMS campaigns? Email?

• Where are patients dropping off during the activation/onboarding journey?

• How do patient cohorts compare across pilots and over time as our onboarding methodology evolves?

Granular doesn’t begin to cover it. With over 50 charts (yes, 50) and graphs, we gave Consolidate Health the tools to adapt and optimize every step of their funnel.

The Results: Speed and Focus

Consolidate Health had more than just a GTM plan—they had momentum.

• Faster GTM: Tools like Intercom and PostHog allowed them to execute in weeks what might have taken months.

• Significant Long-Term Cost Savings: In the long run, implementing tools like RudderStack and Intercom would likely save Consolidate Health thousands of engineering hours.

• Data-Driven Decisions: Dashboards provided sharp insights into what was working with each pilot, and helped us iterate on our PLG patient-activation and onboarding journey.

A Full-Stack Marketing Partner for a Fast-Paced Startup

At Airframe Labs, we didn’t just act as consultants for Consolidate Health; we became their full-stack fractional marketing team. From strategy to execution, we handled every critical piece of their go-to-market puzzle.

We started with strategy—challenging their DTC assumptions and pivoting to a more targeted and cost-effective B2B2C approach. Once the roadmap was in place, we shifted to execution, standing up a robust RevenueTech stack tailored to their specific needs. Our expertise in marketing operations ensured that every tool, from ActiveCampaign to Intercom, was implemented seamlessly and optimized for HIPAA compliance.

But our involvement didn’t stop there. We built the dashboards that powered their data-driven decisions, giving them granular insights across the acquisition, onboarding, and provider engagement funnels. To round it all out, we provided content support, crafting messaging that resonated with both life science companies and the patients they ultimately served.

In essence, we acted as CH’s marketing backbone—bringing the strategy, tools, and insights of a large-scale revenue organization to their lean, fast-moving startup. It wasn’t just about helping them ship faster; it was about helping them ship smarter, with every component aligned to drive sustainable growth.

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Prasid Pathak is a 3-time CMO and 2-time CRO, specializing in building high-performing revenue engines. As a revenue architect, he helps companies optimize their go-to-market strategy and drive scalable growth. With a proven methodology that has consistently helped businesses increase revenue by +20% and +50%,

Prasid works with teams to ship iteratively and deliver results. Follow him on LinkedIn or learn more about his agency Airframe Labs. If you’re looking to transform your business, feel free to get in touch.

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