KNOWN
Overview
KNOWN is a femtech app that helps women understand and work with their hormonal cycles, not against them. By combining science-backed education, daily wellness tasks, and gamified tracking tools, KNOWN empowers users to align their lifestyle with their body’s natural rhythm.
I co-founded KNOWN during my MBA and managed our cross-disciplinary team of 10 includes master students from UChicago Medicine and Law, software engineers, researcher from Northwestern, UI/UX designer, and strategy consultants. We’re supported by an advisory board consisting of a clinical psychologist, a resident physician, a women’s health cognition researcher from UCSB, a fem-tech CEO, and experts in hardware engineering.
We reached the semi-finals of the UChicago New Venture Challenge and launched our MVP shortly after with beta users. In Summer 2025, we were accepted into Stanford’s Galvanizer Accelerator, where we began repositioning our value proposition and redesigning the product experience. KNOWN is currently in active development, with ongoing iteration led by myself and the team.
From Research -> Prototype
At KNOWN, we took a deeply user-centered and iterative approach to define and build our MVP. Our goal was to design a femtech experience that genuinely supports users through the hormonal shifts of their cycle by addressing real, validated pain points, not just assumed ones.
Phase I: Customer Discovery & Initial Problem Statement
Market Research and Opportunity Sizing
Problem Statement
- Problem: Users face unpredictable energy, mood swings, and recurring physical symptoms tied to hormonal changes, often feeling caught off guard each month. The individualized nature of these experiences make generic advice unhelpful, resulting in confusion and difficulty managing well-being.
- POV: An active person whose daily life is disrupted by unpredictable energy levels, severe cramps, hormonal acne, or debilitating fatigue needs actionable strategies to mitigate these symptoms and maintain routines but faces a diverse and ever-changing set of physical challenges that standard solutions don’t address.
Minimum Viable Segments
- KNOWN’s MVS: Women who currently cycle sync and are looking for a more personalized experience in managing their lifestyle relative to their cycle.
- Alternate MVS: Women who currently cycle sync who have PMDD, endo, or PCOS, and are looking for a more personalized experience in managing their lifestyle relative to their cycle.
Note: PMDD, endo, and PCOS: hormonal conditions that cause severe physical and emotional symptoms including intense mood shifts, chronic pelvic pain, and irregular or disrupted menstrual cycles. These conditions make personalized cycle management especially important.
Phase II: User Research
Hypothesis-driven Approach
We entered the research with clear hypotheses:
- Users struggle most with unpredictable energy dips
- Superusers often feel overwhelmed by excessive symptom tracking
- They value actionable plans, but only if easy to integrate into their daily lives
- They’re more likely to engage with data visualization that highlights patterns over time
To ensure our solution was grounded in real user needs, we started by identifying and recruiting a focused group of 18 superusers—women who were already actively syncing their lifestyle with their hormonal cycles. These participants were purposefully selected because they had existing context, habits, and opinions around cycle tracking, and more likely to articulate pain points and patterns. We used the following approach to efficiently build a panel of high-signal users whose insights directly influenced our MVP direction.
Identifying Super Users
1. We posted on Instagram Stories and other social platforms with a prompt: “Looking for women who are actively living in sync with their hormonal cycle! DM me.”
2. When someone responded, we followed up with a qualifying message to assess fit: “Amazing!! How long have you been doing this and how much do you currently cycle sync? Is it something you think about daily/weekly? Do you adjust your workouts, eating, mindset, etc?”
3. If their answers showed lived experience and engagement, we sent them a Calendly link to schedule a 1:1 interview.
User Interview Structure
We structured qualitative interviews to explore:
- Their top 3 most disruptive or frustrating symptoms
- How they currently adapt routines across different phases
- Tools they trust or ignore, and why
- What they expect from a “good day” vs. “off day” in their cycle
- Their reactions to AI-generated insights and levels of trust
We also explored whether users preferred to see pattern recognition first or personalized guidance upfront, and how important transparency was to their trust in the product.
User Research Insights
1. What Users Want Most
Users are actively seeking personalized diet and workout recommendations, along with habit-building support that feels doable. These aren't just “nice-to-haves”as they stem from deep emotional drivers like frustration, fatigue, and the desire for more control over their well-being.
2. Emotional Health Is Core, Not Peripheral
Mental health emerged as a key pillar of hormonal wellness. Users want features that help them manage emotional spirals, reduce shame, and feel validated, not just track symptoms. Emotional support and personalization should go hand in hand.
3. Users Are Tired of Fragmented Care
There's a strong demand for a centralized platform that brings together tracking, education, guidance, and emotional support, rather than pushing users to piece together care from doctors, dermatologists, and dieticians on their own.
4. Target Audience Should Start Focused, Then Expand
Women with PMDD, PCOS, or endometriosis represent a high-need, high-fit segment for the MVP. However, even women with milder symptoms expressed clear value in KNOWN, suggesting future expansion opportunities. Starting with a allows for clearer problem-solution fit.
5. The Real Problem: Frustration, Disruption, and Lack of Trust
The problem is not just about “confusion” but frustration, disruption, and pain that are poorly addressed by one-size-fits-all solutions and fragmented care.
- Good problem statements must be tested for being unavoidable, urgent, unworkable, and underserved:
- Unavoidable: Menstrual/hormonal symptoms and food choices are a given for most; stress and work/school demands are ever-present.
- Urgent: Urgency varies—users with chronic pain (e.g., endometriosis, PMDD, severe PCOS) need immediate symptom management, while others focus on preemptive or pattern-based optimization.
- Unworkable: Scattered advice and non-integrated support make lifecycle management hard for users.
- Underserved: Those seeking integrated, holistic, evidence-based, and personalized approaches are not well served today.
Phase IV: Solution Design
Competitor Analysis
Visual Solution Exploration & Testing
To close the loop between problem and product, we ran cross-functional solutioning workshops with our full team: engineers, designers, medical researchers, and strategy leads. We shared visual mockups of early concepts grounded in validated pain points to evaluate desirability, usability, and clinical relevance. Each session was structured to co-ideate on feature directions, pressure-test assumptions, and rapidly align on next iterations. We tested interactive prototypes with users to observe how they engaged with different versions of key flows (e.g., viewing personalized daily plans vs. retrospective pattern insights), helping us prioritize what resonated emotionally and functionally.
