MarketRadar
← All ideas IDEA-100 6.2 us health-companion developed

Stop blaming Tuesday's pasta. See whether it was actually deadline week — your food, stress, and sleep on one timeline.

Problem

IBS, MCAS, and GERD reactions lag 6-72 hours after the trigger food, so manual food diaries fail (you can't connect Tuesday's pasta to Friday's flare). Worse, mainstream food trackers reinforce the 'food-is-the-cause' frame, pushing users toward elimination-diet spirals — when stress, sleep, and cycle hormones often weigh more than food.

Audience

US adults 25-50 with IBS (often comorbid PCOS / endo / migraine) who already kept a paper or spreadsheet diary for weeks and gave up because no patterns emerged. Many are in eating-disorder recovery and need a tool that does NOT use calorie/macro framing.

Reasoning

Source signals

  • SIG-20260426-us-health-companion-ibs-delayed-reaction-window: "Flexible time windows (6-72 hours) to catch delayed food reactions"
  • SIG-20260426-us-health-companion-ibs-stress-vs-food-separation: "separate stress-related flares from food triggers"

What we ship

**Core features (MVP)**

  • **Photo+voice food log**: snap a meal → Claude parses into ingredients + tags (FODMAP / histamine / nightshades / gluten / dairy). User confirms or edits.
  • **Symptom slider**: bloat / pain / urgency / brain-fog 0-10, optional location. 5 seconds per log.
  • **Stress/sleep/cycle log**: single "stress 0-5" field, auto-pull sleep and cycle from Apple Health.
  • **Sliding-window correlation engine**: configurable 6-72h window, simple frequency statistics (not ML). Output: "Top-5 suspect ingredients" + "Top-3 non-food factors". Never "eliminate X".
  • **Weekly attribution report**: "This week: stress + period + dairy = highest correlation". Attribution language, not blame.
  • **Anti-features (critical)**: NO calories, NO macros, NO "eat this / don't eat that", NO AI diagnosis.
  • **Dietitian PDF (Pro)**: ingredient-level correlation over 4-12 weeks → one-page PDF for RD / GI appointment.

**Primary user flow**

1. Signup, pick: "IBS / MCAS / GERD / mystery / multiple". Choose window (default 24-48h).

2. Onboarding: "for three weeks we just collect data — no recommendations." Anti-promise sets expectation.

3. Log food: photo or voice ("lunch — mushroom risotto") → tags. Log symptoms in evening + when flare hits.

4. Day 21 — first weekly report. Paywall: free = 14 days + basic correlation, Pro = unlimited + multi-cause + RD PDF.

5. Pro $9.99/mo or $79/yr.

**What it looks like**

  • **Landing**: "Not every flare is food." hero, side-by-side 'Old way: eliminated 14 foods, still flaring' vs 'New way: stress + period predicted last 6 flares'.
  • **Main app screen**: today's timeline, three quick-add buttons (food / symptom / stress).
  • **Weekly report**: horizontal stacked bar — 'this month 35% food, 40% stress, 25% cycle'. No judgment language.

**MVP build plan (12 days)**

  • Day 1-3: Postgres schema (foods, ingredients, symptoms, stress logs), FastAPI, Stripe.
  • Day 4-6: Claude prompt for food→ingredients (cached dictionary of 200 popular dishes), photo upload pipeline.
  • Day 7-9: correlation engine — sliding-window confidence per (ingredient, symptom) pair, multi-cause attribution.
  • Day 10-11: weekly report UI, dietitian PDF, paywall.
  • Day 12: landing, deploy, launch on r/IBS / r/IBSResearch.

Reasoning

Pain captured by two SIGs: SIG-ibs-delayed-reaction-window (multiple new trackers — Triggerbites, Vyla, GutDiaries — explicitly market delayed-window as wedge, validating structural unmet need) and SIG-ibs-stress-vs-food-separation (especially strong sub-segment: IBS patients in ED-recovery, for whom standard food trackers are counterproductive). No existing product does both: Triggerbites = delayed window but no stress/cycle attribution; Vyla = multi-cause but weaker ingredient-level breakdown. Regulatory-safe: we do NOT prescribe diet (RD / MD territory), do NOT diagnose — we only show correlation statistics over user-supplied data. Lesson from IDEA-047: output is phrased as "top suspects", never "here's what you have", never "stop eating X". Additional wedge — explicit anti-calorie positioning, critical for ED-recovery cohort.

Quick competitive read

  • **Triggerbites** — delayed-window correlation, but young product, no stress/cycle attribution.
  • **Vyla** — multi-cause attribution and explicit stress-vs-food positioning, but weaker ingredient-level breakdown.
  • **Endive** — voice food log + ED-recovery friendly, but food-only (no stress/sleep correlation).
  • **GutDiaries** — ingredient-level + onset window, but UX overloaded with fields.
  • **Bearable** — general health tracker, not IBS-focused, users complain it's too many metrics.
  • **White space**: medium (4-5 competitors). Nobody combines delayed-window + ingredient-level + stress-cycle attribution + ED-safe framing in one utility. Score hint: competitive_pressure 5-6.

Initial pricing hypothesis

Free: 14-day trial + basic single-cause correlation. Pro: $9.99/mo or $79/yr — unlimited history, multi-cause attribution, ingredient-level breakdown, dietitian PDF, Apple Health import. WTP justified: pain-management specialists and RD consults often aren't insurance-covered, so IBS patients spend $50-200/mo on supplements + DIY experiments — $10/mo for a tool with actual insight is reasonable.

Distribution hypothesis

1) **r/IBS + r/IBSResearch + r/HistamineIntolerance** — solo-dev "Built this because I broke up with MyFitnessPal but still need to track without going crazy." Direct ED-recovery cohort framing.

2) **Instagram dietitian influencers** — affiliate with RD / IBS specialists (Kate Scarlata, Rachel Pauls) with 30% per-conversion.

3) **TikTok #IBSawareness #FODMAP** — short demos: "Three weeks of logging. Here's what surprised me." Authenticity-driven.

Source signals (4)

  • SIG-20260426-us-health-companion-ibs-stress-vs-food-separation:
  • SIG-ibs-stress-vs-food-separation
  • SIG-20260426-us-health-companion-ibs-delayed-reaction-window:
  • SIG-ibs-delayed-reaction-window