Three people, a part-time gastroenterologist, and a clear brief: help people with cranky digestive systems notice their own patterns — without selling them out, gamifying them, or shouting at them to close a ring.
Health apps have a habit of turning into casinos. Streaks to protect, badges to unlock, charts to zoom into at 11pm. Gutlog is a deliberate step in the other direction: open it, log the one thing, close it. If we've done our job, you don't think about Gutlog for the other 23 hours and 59 minutes of the day.
That constraint — the app should never be the reason you open your phone — is how we decide what ships and what doesn't. It's why there's no social feed. No share-your-streak card. No push notification that isn't a direct answer to a question you asked.
The journal stays on your device. The patterns stay yours. The screen time doesn't creep up. That's the deal.
Posted above the desk. Checked against every feature PR. We'd rather say no to things than soften these.
If the feature needs a server to work, it needs a very good reason. Default is on-device storage, every time.
We will never reward consistency or punish a gap. Skipped days are a feature of life, not a failure state of the app.
If a log takes more than half a minute on a bad stomach day, the feature is wrong, not the user.
Correlations below r=0.3 don't ship. We'd rather surface nothing than surface noise dressed up as insight.
We answer to the people who pay us. Not to ad networks, not to VCs, not to a platform. That's why we stay small.
Clinical palette, neutral copy, no mascot drama. The app should feel like a quiet clipboard, not a cheerleader.
We've been asked enough times that we wrote it down.
Dr. Mira Okonjo — our co-founder and the GI on our team — had been handing her IBS patients a printable Bristol stool chart and a spiral notebook. "Log for three weeks. Bring it back." The return rate was maybe one in four.
The patients who did come back came back with the same complaint: the notebook felt like homework. They'd skip bad days out of embarrassment. They'd invent entries to make it look complete. The data was unreliable, so the diagnosis was slow, so the suffering was longer.
Mira emailed Theo Bennett, an ex-Apple designer she'd dated briefly in college, with a one-line question: "Could an app do this better without being a jerk about it?" Theo said yes, then sent her a three-sentence brief that is now more or less our product strategy: the app should take under 30 seconds, store nothing on a server, and never gamify.
Theo brought in Kae Park, a Swift engineer he'd worked with on Apple Notes. Three people, one clinical advisor, no outside money. We shipped 1.0 in March 2023.
Gutlog has 38,000 monthly actives, 2,100 App Store reviews, and — we mention this with real affection — no investors to answer to. We're profitable. The whole team fits in one room in the Mission.
The plan is to stay this size, keep the product small, and get better at the boring parts: the AI meal analysis, the long-range correlations, the PDF report for your GI.
Three full-time, one clinical advisor, one support lead. We'll introduce the next hire here when there is one.
Gastroenterologist at UCSF for 11 years. Handles our clinical direction, evidence review, and all conversations with IBS patient advocacy groups.
Ex-Apple, worked on Notes and Reminders. Designs every screen, writes most of the copy, answers support email after 10pm.
Swift, SwiftData, cryptography. Owns the Bristol scale carousel on the watch (which they are modestly unreasonably proud of).
Questions, press, clinical collaborations, or a weird bug on watchOS — hello@mygutlog.com lands in a real inbox.