Did I actually feel better when...?

I don't care how often you’d use my app.

Which is probably a strange thing to say when you're spending your maternity leave building one.

But I've been thinking a lot about what would actually make Thrive useful to someone like me. And me.

I've lived with endometriosis for most of my adult life, and over the years I've tried what feels like everything. Different supplements, dietary changes, acupuncture, exercise routines, medications… you name it.

Some things helped. Others didn't. And some I genuinely couldn't tell you whether they made a difference. Because life happens in between.

You start taking a supplement, feel better for a few weeks, forget about it, have a particularly bad period, change something else, and suddenly you have no idea what's doing what.

I've lost count of how many times I've thought, “I'm sure I felt better when I was doing that…”

But was I actually?

That's one of the questions I'm trying to build Thrive around. Making sense of the messy middle.

I've been working on a section called My Journey, and it's probably the part of the app I'm most personally invested in.

Imagine you've been going to acupuncture for eight weeks. Rather than trying to remember how you felt two months ago, you could look back at how your symptoms were changing before and after you started.

Maybe your pain ratings have been lower. Maybe you've had fewer difficult days. Or maybe nothing much has changed. Any of those would be interesting to know.

Or perhaps you keep waking up exhausted, and over time you notice those mornings often follow nights when your sleep was poor or fall around a particular point in your cycle.

Not groundbreaking discoveries. Just little pieces of information that are surprisingly difficult to spot when you're in the middle of living your life.

Of course, there's a tricky part to all of this.

If your pain improves after starting acupuncture, that doesn't mean acupuncture is necessarily the reason. There could be a dozen other things going on, and Thrive will only ever know what you've shared with it.

I'm being quite deliberate about that. I'd much rather the app say “here's something interesting you might want to explore” than confidently tell someone what's causing their symptoms.

I suppose this is also why I'm not particularly interested in building streaks and scores into every corner of Thrive. There will be days when someone logs everything, and weeks when life gets in the way. Especially when you're dealing with a chronic condition.

What matters to me is that when they do come back, there's something useful waiting for them.

A clearer picture of the last few months. A change they hadn't noticed. Maybe even a question worth taking to their next appointment.

The new My Journey is starting to take shape around those ideas, and I'm excited to see how it works once I've tested it with more realistic health histories.

Because after all these years of trying to figure out what works for my own body, I think what I've wanted all along is something quite simple.

A way to look back and make a little more sense of it all. ✨