Your organization runs on trial phases, regulatory gates, and MLR review. A DTC launch runs on weekly creative tests, checkout conversion, and repeat-purchase economics. Winston Francois builds the consumer growth engine your pharma team doesn't have, without slowing down the parts of the business that already work.
The Problem
Your Team Thinks in Phases, DTC Moves in Weeks
Clinical development organizations are built around milestone gates: IND filings, Phase readouts, FDA meetings, board approvals. A DTC launch needs weekly pricing tests, creative swaps, and site changes. When a clinical team ends up owning a consumer launch, every decision routes through a committee built for a different cadence, and the product misses the market window it needed to hit.
Fair Balance and ISI Requirements Break Consumer Marketing Playbooks
Every ad, landing page, and email needs fair balance language, an ISI, and usually an MLR review pass that most consumer agencies have never touched. Agencies that built their reputation on skincare or supplement DTC brands will hand you creative that gets rejected in review, or worse, creative that ships and creates a compliance exposure you have to unwind.
No E-commerce Infrastructure, No First-Party Purchase Data
Most clinical-stage and commercial pharma companies have zero DTC checkout infrastructure: no subscription or refill logic, no cart abandonment flow, no LTV tracking. Standing up a headless commerce stack, connecting it to fulfillment and pharmacy partners, and instrumenting it for repeat purchase is a different discipline than running a clinical trial database, and it takes different people.
Prescription-to-Purchase Friction Kills Conversion Before Marketing Even Starts
If the DTC product needs a prescription, telehealth consult, or pharmacist verification, every point of friction between the ad click and the delivered product compounds. A brand team without pharma DTC experience designs a funnel for an OTC-simple purchase, then can't explain why conversion collapses the moment a consult step gets introduced.
How We Help
We start with an assessment, not a pitch deck. We map your specific DTC model: is this an OTC switch, a telehealth companion to an existing prescription product, a wellness spinoff, or a direct-ship pharmacy model. Each of those has a different regulatory footprint, a different checkout flow, and a different creative testing cadence, and we're not building a generic launch plan until we know which one you're actually running.
From there we build the positioning and brand system your product needs to compete with consumer brands, not just other pharma companies. That means a voice, visual identity, and messaging framework that reads like a real consumer brand while being built to survive MLR review the first time it's submitted, not the fifth.
We pair a growth strategist with a regulatory-aware creative producer on every account. That pairing is the whole point: most agencies staff pharma accounts with people who've never run a paid social test, and most consumer agencies staff DTC accounts with people who've never seen an ISI. You get both in the same room from week one.
On the infrastructure side, we build or fix the e-commerce layer: checkout, subscription and refill logic, prescription verification handoff, and the analytics stack underneath it. If your telehealth or pharmacy partner already owns part of that stack, we integrate around it instead of duplicating it.
Creative testing runs on a consumer cadence, not a clinical one. That means weekly ad variants, landing page tests, and channel reallocation based on actual conversion data, with fair balance and ISI treatment baked into the asset templates so legal review is a checkpoint, not a bottleneck.
Measurement is built around the metrics that actually predict a DTC business working: cost per acquisition by channel, conversion rate through each friction point in the funnel, and early repeat-purchase or refill-adherence signal. We report on those, not on impressions.
Everything ships through your existing legal and regulatory review process. We don't route around your MLR team. We build creative and content operations that make their job faster instead of fighting them at every submission.
What we deliver
- DTC Launch Readiness Audit – a full assessment of your regulatory constraints, existing consumer-facing assets, and e-commerce gaps before we write a single ad.
- Consumer Brand and Positioning System – a brand voice, visual identity, and messaging framework built to pass MLR review on the first submission, not the fifth.
- E-commerce and Funnel Build – checkout, subscription and refill logic, and prescription-to-purchase flow designed to minimize drop-off at every regulatory friction point.
- Paid and Organic Growth Engine – a channel plan and weekly creative testing cadence with fair balance and ISI treatment built into every asset template from day one.
Your clinical team is excellent at running trials and untested at running a checkout funnel, and pretending otherwise is why most pharma DTC launches miss their first-year targets.
Our Methodology
We run every DTC launch as a 90-day sprint with three distinct phases, because that's the fastest path from a clinical org's decision-making pace to a DTC business that behaves like one. Trying to run the whole build as one undifferentiated project is how these launches stall for a year inside a legal review queue.
The first 30 days are diagnostic and structural: we lock the regulatory model, the brand system, and the e-commerce architecture before any paid spend goes out. The next 30 days are build and pre-launch: creative production, funnel build, MLR submission cycles run in parallel instead of sequentially. The final 30 days are live testing: real spend, real conversion data, and a weekly optimization cadence that keeps running past the 90-day mark.
We don't hand you a strategy document and leave. We stay embedded through the launch and into the optimization phase, because a DTC brand launch isn't done when the site goes live, it's done when the funnel is converting at a rate that justifies the spend.
How We Work
Days 1-30: we run the readiness audit, lock the regulatory and brand strategy, and scope the e-commerce build. You'll have a clear picture of what's being built, what your MLR team needs to review and when, and what the launch timeline actually looks like by the end of this phase.
Days 31-60: creative production and funnel build happen in parallel. Ad concepts, landing pages, and email flows move through MLR review while the checkout and subscription logic gets built and tested. We run this phase in weekly sprints with visible output every week, not a single reveal at the end.
Days 61-90: the funnel goes live with real paid spend across the channels we scoped in phase one. We run creative tests, watch conversion at every friction point, and reallocate budget based on what's actually converting rather than what we assumed would convert going in.
Your team gets a strategist who owns the account, a creative producer who understands pharma-specific review requirements, and a growth/analytics lead who owns the funnel data. We run a standing weekly call plus async updates in Slack, and we work inside your existing legal and regulatory process rather than asking you to build a new one around us.
- A DTC brand and funnel that's actually built for your regulatory model, instead of a consumer template that gets rejected in MLR or shipped with compliance risk.
- A creative testing cadence that matches how consumer buyers actually behave, instead of a review cycle borrowed from clinical trial timelines.
- E-commerce and purchase data infrastructure your team can act on after we're gone, not a one-time site build with no measurement layer underneath it.
If your biotech & pharma company needs dtc brand launch leadership, we should talk.
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Frequently asked questions
What does a DTC brand launch engagement with Winston Francois cost?
Most DTC launch engagements run $15,000 to $40,000 per month depending on whether we're building e-commerce infrastructure from scratch or integrating with an existing telehealth or pharmacy partner. Creative production volume and paid media management scope are the other big cost drivers. We scope exact pricing after the readiness audit, once we know your regulatory model and what infrastructure already exists.
How long does a DTC launch take from kickoff to live?
Our standard sprint is 90 days from kickoff to live paid spend, assuming your MLR review process doesn't have unusual bottlenecks. Companies with an existing telehealth or e-commerce partner move faster because we're not building checkout infrastructure from zero. Companies launching a fully new prescription-to-purchase flow with a new pharmacy partner sometimes need a longer runway on the infrastructure side.
How does your team work with our internal clinical and regulatory staff?
We embed inside your existing legal and MLR process rather than building a parallel one. Our creative producer works directly with your regulatory reviewers to build asset templates that clear review faster, and our strategist sits in your internal launch meetings rather than working in isolation. The goal is your team doing less translation work between the DTC build and your compliance function, not more.
Why not just hire a consumer DTC agency instead?
Most consumer DTC agencies have never built a fair balance callout or managed an ISI, and they'll hand you creative that gets bounced in MLR review or, worse, creative that ships and creates real compliance exposure. We staff every pharma DTC account with people who've run both consumer growth campaigns and pharma-regulated marketing, so the first draft is already built to survive your review process.
How do you measure ROI on a DTC launch?
We track cost per acquisition by channel, conversion rate at each step of the funnel including the prescription or consult step if one exists, and early repeat-purchase or refill-adherence signal. We don't report on impressions or reach. Those numbers get reviewed weekly during the live testing phase so budget moves toward what's actually converting instead of what looked good in the initial plan.
What kind of biotech or pharma company is the right fit for this?
Series A through growth-stage companies with $5 million to $100 million in revenue that are adding a DTC arm to an existing clinical or commercial business are the best fit: an OTC switch product, a telehealth companion to a prescription product, or a direct-ship pharmacy model. If your organization has no consumer-facing product at all yet and is still purely clinical-stage, you likely need go-to-market strategy work before a DTC launch engagement makes sense.
