Hi PH — Lisa here, building the EU privacy-first cycle tracker (and learning hard things)

Hey hunters 👋

First time posting in p/introduce-yourself. I'm Lisa, co-founder of a cycle tracking app we built in Amsterdam. Wanted to introduce myself and share the harder lessons from the last six months, in case anyone here is wrestling with similar problems.

Quick context. In 2021 the FTC fined Flo Health for sharing user period data with Facebook and Google. Millions of women learned, after the fact, that their cycle data — when they bled, when they were trying to conceive, when they were considering an abortion — had been monetised. Flo settled. Nothing structural changed. Flo still has 77 million users. Clue still raised millions. The category just moved on.

We couldn't. The question we kept asking was the obvious one: why does cycle tracking have to be ad-funded? So we built the alternative. Servers in Ireland. No US subprocessors for user data. No third-party trackers. The Free tier stays free forever. The AI never trains on user data. Full GDPR DPIA published. We're bootstrapped — no VCs nudging us toward the ad model.

Six months in: 30,000 active users in the Netherlands, #1 in the local App Store for period trackers, around 150 organic signups a day. All zero paid acquisition. Which means we've had to learn the harder lessons about trust-as-positioning vs trust-as-infrastructure.

Three things I'd genuinely love to hear this community's take on:

1. How do you communicate "we don't sell your data" without it sounding like a marketing line? Most users have been trained to assume every app is lying.

2. Femtech is full of VC-backed players doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Does bootstrapping actually let you make better product decisions, or am I romanticising it?

3. Privacy as positioning vs. privacy as infrastructure — where do you draw the line for an early-stage health app?

Open to nuance. Happy to be told my framing is wrong.

— Lisa