WoW Woman in FemTech I Amy Thomson, founder of MOODY
Amy Thomson is the founder of the innovative female health app and tech service MOODY.
Moody is a technology that allows women to track their mental and physical health patterns connected to hormones. Amy is also the author of the book MOODY, which touches on the research and science behind women’s hormones to create a better understanding of the systems and cycles, allowing for more beneficial and healthier routines using insights from nutritionists, gynaecologists, endocrinologists, and others.
After running her own communications agency SEEN for several years, Amy sold the company to spend time focusing on understanding how her body worked after experiencing a hormonal burnout driven by stress. The result of this was the birth of the MOODY app. The app was awarded ‘Top Female Health App’ by Apple and was tipped by Forbes as the future of women’s hormonal and mental health.
Amy also co-founded FUTURE GIRL CORP with Sharmadean Reid to provide support, resources, and events for future female CEOs and business founders.
Amy, tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
Moody was born out of my own burn-out and the realization that hormones affect everything from sleep, energy, metabolism, sex drive, and even productivity, yet the world has focused on fertility. My periods stopped in 2016 due to burn-out and I sold the business I had built, which was causing the burn-out, and began to build moody, as a tool for women to track mental and physical health connected to hormones.
How did you get into the FemTech industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
I had worked previously with Nike and Apple on health tech in the early launches of products such as Nike+, FuelBand and then integrations with wearables, so I had a good insight into an industry that had focused on performance tech for all bodies, rather than mental and physical health integration for the difference in bodies. I think it was important that I had been involved with big tech players, to understand the provenance and history of the market we were building in. However building technology is hard, it takes time and big capital resources. As you need a lot of upfront funding from investors, grants, and financing to build the foundation tech. We have been very open that the world needs more technology designed for women and to support women’s health, but it is hard to gain access to capital for women. We have been very patient and used not just private investors, but broader grants and other funding routes to get Moody built.
How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
We are three years into the journey. We are early but we have made incredible progress by building a daily health tracking app that allows women to track their mental and physical health changes across a menstrual cycle.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
Being smart about our funding routes, using equity and non-equity funding routes to raise the money we needed to build the tech ethically and not sell data. We hit a clear product-market fit in 2020 with healthy habits for women and have built an app that thousands of women use for mental and physical health on a daily and weekly basis.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
Provide more support and solutions for our users in health routines, across mental and physical health support. These include programs of health and wellbeing to support women who don’t menstruate, along with those who have Endometriosis and PCOS.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Yes, it’s very important as we need to build a new kind of technology for and from the experiences of more diverse people. For me, this is focused on CIS gendered women and within Moody, we have built the tech with an all-female engineering and data team.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
A focus on tech for women outside fertility and contraception. For Moody we are focused on mental and physical health, there are so many sectors and areas of female experiences that need technology innovation. These are vast underserved markets and I hope through more awareness and funding, can help support more equality in tech and globally.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Know your audience and revenue model. If funders and people tell you to not focus on revenue, it is poor advice. You can focus on building a product pre-revenue, but you need to have clear routes to building commercially viable tech for your audience and know why they will pay for it. If we are only building tech and communities to sell data, we are missing an important shift in technology becoming more data ethical.
Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
Angela Duckworth and Katy Milkman- Academics, researchers, and authors, both working in the behaviour change for happiness space- check out their research and work here.
Sharmadean Reid- Driving so much change and awareness for female founders and education for funders on diversity – she has just launched the Stack and it’s a game-changer for both connecting women and changing conversations about what we can all do for a more inclusive future.
Find out more about MOODY on their website.
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This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.