Users of the app Clue track their periods, ovulation, and moods—and after the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, many of them were very sad.
“A lot of people tracked their mood, and there was a lot of sadness. You could see a real spike,” Clue co-founder and CEO Ida Tin said Tuesday morning, the day of the U.S. Midterm election two years later. “Maybe that says something about our user demographic, but it is interesting to see that what happens to society really has an effect, and the effect is also a body effect.”
Tin spoke with Maithreyi Seetharaman at Coins2Day‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in Montreal. Tin’s company launched in 2013, and now has 10 million users.
The app for female health—part of the category that Tin calls “femtech”—lets users to track their menstrual cycles and all associated information and symptoms while ditching the pink and flowery designs that accompanied many of its competitors.
Allowing users to track that information means that Berlin-based Clue is sitting on a wealth of data about women’s bodies and health. The company considered selling anonymized data to partners researching female health, but ultimately decided against it.
“People, they share data about the most intimate parts of their lives. They talk about their mood, they talk about their pain, they talk about their sex lives,” Tin said.
“If you ask people to share this data, you’ve got to have ethical conversations about what you’re going to do with that data,” she added.