ABOUT: The Purpose Pilot

We started with mental health.
We stayed for the mission.
( Since 2019 )

The Purpose Pilot began in 2019 helping therapists and treatment centers make it easier for people to find, trust, and access care. That work taught us something that applies across healthcare: the practices that get chosen are the ones that are clear, credible, and easy to find in the exact moment someone is looking. So we grew. Today we serve practices across healthcare, and we built Altitude™ to turn what we learned into a platform any practice can use.

Birds in flight over a coastline under a pale sky
(What we believe)

Four things we will not trade away.

Clarity is an ethical responsibility.

Someone in a hard moment should not have to decode your website.

Compliance is a feature.

HIPAA, E-E-A-T, and LegitScript are constraints we design with, not around.

Strategy before spend.

We would rather fix the funnel than buy more traffic into a broken one.

Human review, always.

AI helps us move faster. People make the call.

(Leadership)

The people behind the work.

Luis Castro
Luis Castro
Venture Partner

Luis leads growth and partnerships for Altitude™ and The Purpose Pilot. He brings 15 years in sales and business development, much of it in clean energy and EV charging at companies including bp pulse and Enel X, and has served as a venture partner to several early-stage brands. He is based in Los Angeles.

Pao Stern
Pao Stern
Client Success & Product

Pao oversees client success and product development for The Purpose Pilot and Altitude™. She brings more than 12 years in product, growth and marketing across health-tech, wellness and consumer brands, including partner success at Uber Eats, loyalty at Aeroméxico and marketing leadership in longevity health-tech. She makes sure what we build is what clients actually need.

Eslie Rosales, Lead Designer at The Purpose Pilot, smiling in a denim jacket
Eslie Rosales
Lead Designer

Eslie leads brand and web design for The Purpose Pilot and the Altitude™ product. Her client work includes the website design for Phoenix Rise Health and Wellness, the website design for Seasons of You Therapy and the rebrand of Dr. Karol Darsa, along with logos, social media content and design systems for healthcare practices across the country.

Ash Castro, Founder and CEO of The Purpose Pilot
(Founder)

Ash Castro

Founder & CEO

Ash Castro came to marketing from the other side of the desk. She spent ten years in behavioral health, in direct clinical work and program development, and saw the same problem again and again: good clinicians and programs that people in a hard moment could not find or make sense of. She founded The Purpose Pilot in 2019 to fix that, with strategy first, plain language, and compliance treated as part of the design rather than a review step at the end.

Her marketing career spans 15 years across healthcare, consumer brands, and purpose-driven organizations, including marketing and PR leadership roles at The Giving Keys, This Saves Lives, and Feedbox CEM. She is also the founder and CEO of Haute Locals, a bi-cultural branding and digital agency based in Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Today Ash leads strategy for The Purpose Pilot's clients and the direction of Altitude™, the multichannel marketing dashboard the team built so that any healthcare practice can see how it shows up in search, maps, and AI, and act on it in a few clicks. She writes regularly on discoverability, GEO, and ethical healthcare marketing, and every piece on this site carries her byline.

Credentials
  • M.A., Communication Management, University of Southern California (2013)
Experience
  • Behavioral health, direct clinical work and program development (10 years)
  • Founder & CEO, The Purpose Pilot (2019 to present)
  • Founder & CEO, Haute Locals (2020 to present)
  • Head of PR, This Saves Lives
  • Marketing Manager, The Giving Keys
  • Marketing Director, Feedbox CEM
Ash on LinkedIn ↗
(The name)

Pilot is two things at once. It is the person who gets you somewhere new, and it is the pilot study: the small, curious experiment that tells you what works before you commit. We run our work that way, grounded in research, treating every challenge as a stepping stone to growth. Purpose is the reason we do it. We work with people whose work matters, and we want our work to matter to them. Altitude™ is what happens when both hold: you climb.

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