So Nandhini, tell us a bit about yourself and Femcy.
I live in Singapore, I manage marketing and partnerships for Femcy. I’m a lockdown plant mommy and amateur cake artist! This is my first Femtech venture, but I’ve been following the space keenly for almost a decade now (ever since Clue launched in 2013).
Femcy is an app for personalized menstrual health guidance. Period issues are common, but not normal. Left untreated, they may be signals of underlying conditions that can impact physical and mental wellness, fertility, and overall health.
As a brand, we are determined to change the “it’s normal” attitude that society has towards these issues and spread awareness of the importance of balanced menstrual hormones in maintaining health and wellness in menstruators.
What motivated you to setup Femcy?
Each body is unique, and hormones affect each menstruator differently. In the past decade, the impact of diet and lifestyle on fertility as well as menstrual conditions, such as PCOS, have become increasingly clear.
Menstruators today manage their menstrual symptoms through a hit-and-miss combination of self-experimentation, inherited knowledge, and unverified tips from their support network – leading to delayed diagnosis of underlying conditions and poor quality of life for multiple days each month.
Femcy bridges these gaps to provide a personalized, comprehensive lifestyle management guidance regimen for every menstruator based on their symptoms and menstrual phase.
What are your dreams for Femcy?
In 5 years, we hope to see Femcy as a valuable tool to guide every female smartphone user in South East Asia – their days begin and end with lifestyle regimens from Femcy.
The primary hurdle is to make the process and app easily and intuitively fit into our users’ lifestyle – building that habit will make us as well as our users successful. As this habit of using Femcy grows, the opportunities for growth are manifold: ordering at-home test kits for hormone levels on the app, partnering with nutraceutical and other device aids for menstrual wellness, connecting with smart devices for more accurate menstrual wellness guidance, catering to key life events like pregnancy and menopause.
What’s the most important lesson you have learned since starting your company?
When we piloted our consultation feature, there was an overwhelming response from users and social media followers – greater than our capacity at the time. We pulled out all the stops to consult and offer guidance to each request and question, and the positive feedback and love we received from our users was a very empowering and humbling experience at the same time!
So the most important lesson? Done is better than perfect – it is important to get features to our users and build a community of power users whose feedback is integral to improving and perfecting the offering.
If you were able to create ANY kind of technology what would it be?
A seamless, intuitive device or platform that tracks user symptoms – menstrual flow, period start dates, energy levels, stress levels, temperature, appetite, food intake, water intake, with minimal user effort.
It would then predictively tailor shopping lists, diet guidelines, recipe recommendations, exercise routines, and provide stress management guidance to each user’s health, menstrual, and fertility goals! (oh wait, that’s what we hope to build with Femcy, someday soon!)
Femcy is part of FemTech Lab’s Spring 2021 Cohort. You can keep up to date with the latest updates via our news page.
