The Working Well

Why I'm building Wellness Tech at Cirdia, and what we're shipping now.

In mental health and counseling, even in clinical psychology, there is this concept of 'the working well'. It refers to the people who, while they may not have everything worked out or even understand themselves all that well, are not in crisis. They are the ones who are mostly fine, managing, getting through the day.

Women's health has finally exploded across the globe as something that is getting the attention it needs, and I'm grateful that investment dollars are hitting the space. But a lot of the focus has stayed on women's issues in the narrow sense: fertility, period tracking, and now the major illnesses surrounding perimenopause. Many of us don't hit those edge cases. I've been to the conferences and webinars where people talk about menopause affecting all women, and that's absolutely true, but for many it's disorienting and confusing, it doesn't occur like illness, it doesn't seem acute. And while we desperately need more and better research about how everything interacts in women's bodies, that research simply isn't available yet, or where it is, it needs more replication and more evidence and more time. That's what science takes.

So in the meantime, how do those of us in the working well middle deal with the everyday stuff, the aging and the fitness and the wellbeing and all the crazy transitions our bodies are going through?

Some of us are just trying to muddle through, trying to pay a little attention to what's working and what isn't. And the apps that are supposed to help are general, overly complex, and often annoying, either leaning on shame mechanisms, or they are simply designed by and for men, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me step back.

Privacy is where this started

Privacy is probably the reason I got into all of this. I couldn't stand the idea that information about my body, my biometrics, my health history, my habits, my weight, my measurements, my aches and my pains would sit in corporate databases and get used to sell me more medication, more services, more untested supplements that I simply don't want. And eventually, when the companies stopped promising not to, that the same data would be used to point me toward what I should watch and what I should read. That is what was keeping me up at night.

We have so few spaces left in our lives where we're not being watched. And for women especially, feeling watched while you're dealing with how you feel about your body, just doesn't work.

I'm not going to spend this whole piece making that case, because it's the assumption underneath everything we build. At Cirdia, privacy isn't a feature we added on top, it's how the thing is built. Your health data is never stored on our servers, it's processed privately and then it's gone, which means there is nothing sitting around for anyone to sell or to hand over. So for the rest of this piece, I'll set privacy aside and talk about what we've built.

We were going to build a wearable (and we will…)

A year and a half ago I started building a private-data wearable, for women especially. We did the market testing and discovered there was a big enough gap and demand.

It got very expensive to do that self-funded, so we put a pause on the hardware and pivoted to software first. Software was always the plan, it was just going to come after the wearables, and we were going to let our users guide what we built.

We lucked out. Nearly 4,000 women registered with us because they wanted the privacy-based wearable, and about 1,500 of them filled out detailed surveys telling us exactly what health, wellness, fitness, and longevity meant to them. That was our starting point, and the biggest thing we understood was that everything lives in its own lane, but the human body is all of the lanes.

You are all of the lanes

The human experience isn't simply your training/workouts, or your nutrition, your calories, your health history, your period, your fertility, your hormones, or the symptoms that come with aging. You're all of these things, maybe not all the time, but at some point, and the real question is how it all fits together.

Nutrition showed up as the biggest gap, because what we eat connects to everything else and it's hard to track well. After that, what we learned is that women have a lot of variety in the things that they feel impact their wellness and I tend to call that 'lived context'. It doesn't fit neatly into any one type of app. Most apps make you pick a lane, mood or food or sleep or your cycle, but you're not one thing, and neither is how you feel. The useful insight is almost always in the connection between things, the late glass of wine and the restless night, the stressful week and the bloating that came with it.

So no big challenge, right? Yikes. Did we just say we needed to build the everything app for everybody? Well, that is not what we're doing, though a small part of it is true, because we decided to start with the simple stuff that's hard to track and hard to make sense of.

Build for the edge, and everyone gets the benefit

A friend of mine works in commercial space design, consulting on the design of workplaces, and something I learned from her stuck with me. When you design for the group that would be bothered the most, by the sound or the temperature or the color or the echo, you almost always end up serving everyone. In her work that means designing for women and for people with different neurological needs, rather than building for the average. Or maybe women are the average and we just haven't been designed for, so this is really about making sure we're included. Either way, when you build for the more particular needs, men seem to function just as well in that space, sometimes better, because it isn't too cold or too loud or too jarring for anyone.

That is exactly how we approached building Tapestry. We built it for a midlife woman who sometimes feels off and can't say why and wants a low-effort way to find out what's going on in her body. She also wants any tool she uses to respect her time and simply not use tactics that have her feel taken advantage of. When you design for her, you end up with something that works for almost anyone who wants to understand their own patterns.

Tapestry is here

Tapestry is a privacy-first wellness tracker for the working well. You log whatever matters to you, symptoms, habits, movement, food, mood, cycle, and data from your watch or ring, all in one place, with a few taps every day. It really is that easy. Once a week it analyzes the data and looks for patterns across everything. It creates a "Week in Wellness" report that shows you what is connected to what in plain language. We built it to be as neutral as possible and we were intentional to ensure it doesn't have those little signals that might have someone experience shame.

Tapestry gets better the longer you use it. Just like a real study or experiment, the more you log, the stronger the analysis of the connections become, and early hunches grow into patterns you can trust.

Tapestry is the first app we've built and you can download it on the App Store and Play Store. Two more apps are in the works, including Nourish and Groundwork. Nourish is the detailed nutrition and food logger, while Groundwork takes on the fitness and training side. More about those later.

Tapestry is what's shipping now. It's not perfect. It's a ready to use work in progress and we're super excited that it's finally generally available. Our hope is that everyone who uses it gives us feedback. We want to keep listening, and keep building the things people tell us are gaps, so that we continue to serve the working well. If you've been noticing things change in your body or in how you feel, and can't say why, try out Tapestry.