We hired a full-time anthropologist before our second engineer

Three months after launch, Verde had 12,000 downloads, a 1.4% retention rate at week eight, and an App Store review section full of quietly devastating feedback. "It feels like an app a man designed." "I cried when it asked me about my cycle in this clinical way." "Deleting."

We were building a women's-health app. The team was technically excellent. The product worked exactly as designed. The design itself was the problem, and not in a way any A/B test was going to fix.

I'd spent the first ninety days obsessing over engagement metrics that were telling me nothing about the actual relationship users had with the product. The metrics said churn. The reviews said hurt.

Verde started because I'd spent six years inside a digital-health unicorn watching dashboards built for clinicians, not for the people whose bodies were on the dashboards. I left to build something that started from the user's lived experience and worked backwards.

I raised a small seed off the strength of my pitch deck and my prior exits. I hired one excellent engineer. We shipped v1 in four months. The product did what I'd promised investors: cycle tracking, fertility windows, hormone-aware recommendations.

It also did what I had not noticed: it asked deeply personal questions in clinical language. It used graphs that made bodies feel like spreadsheets. It celebrated "regular cycles" in a way that made users with irregular cycles feel like errors.