Ida Tin on how she is changing the female's health with Clue

Good evening everybody. I first met Ida six years ago. She was a woman with a vision to change female health. She was all alone, just another person with a crazy idea. A couple of weeks ago she closed A round from Unions where Ventures considered the premier basically VC globally at this point. The investor is on Twitter, Kickstarter and Etsy. She has a big team behind her. She has a lot of people that believe in what she's doing, which is to empower women to track their period and cycles and in general change female health, a very underserved area. So we're very much looking forward to a story of how it all went about and how you go from yet another Danish entrepreneur with a good idea to already having changed the world for millions of women. Please welcome Ida. Ida Ten. Hello everybody. I can't see you. It's very bright. So thank you Thomas. That was a really nice introduction. It's true. I met Thomas at Reboot and I was literally sitting there in a lawn thinking, hmm, am I really hosting this little talk about my idea, wondering if anybody would come. And it happened that actually this guy came and he ended up being my partner and also my co-founder. So it was a very lucky day. Thank you Thomas for doing Reboot. So I'm going to talk about Clue. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Clue. We're based in Berlin. I almost don't dare say that here, but we are. So do I have a clicker? So let's see. So maybe you're sitting thinking, hmm, periods, it's like kind of a niche market, something only relevant to women, maybe even kind of only the hippie type women. So I want to just tell you some numbers about Clue so you have a sense. So at the moment we have about half a million downloads a month. So it's going up, which is great. We are the fastest growing app in our category. And it's a very big category. In fact, it is the second biggest category in health and fitness apps. We have been ranked the number three free health and fitness app in the US App Store. So if you are in that world, you know that that's nice. We have well over two million active users. That number is also going up really fast. And we have users from 180 countries around the world. We have been approached by some of the best universities in the world, so Stanford and Columbia, who are interested in doing real science on our data, which I'm personally super excited about. We are a team of 23 people from all over the world. We have relocated people from Silicon Valley and Australia and many other places. So we have a really, really great team in Berlin. We've had a massive amount of media. BBC came to our office yesterday to do a four-minute feature about Clue and me, just to give you an example. And we have raised $10 million to date, some of them from USV, which is just awesome. And when I'm now in this mode of bragging, I'll tell you. I'll get past that in a second. But I also want to add that I've also had two kids on the way. So first of all, why is the female body so interesting? Except the obvious reasons. So first of all, reproductive health and reproduction is, of course, like the foundational thing of human existence, right? Right. How many children we have, it determines how healthy we are, if we can educate them, if we can start a business. It's the beginning of economic growth globally. It's really a foundational key thing to get right. And of course, it also determines how many people we actually are on the planet. Pretty big deal, too. So. It's also a very central part of life because it's so emotional. Women have so many questions about whether they are healthy, normal, have they gotten pregnant, can they still get pregnant? There are so many emotions. And it's a part of life that really influences how we think about ourselves, our identity, sexuality, big life choices of having children or struggling to get children. So it's something that is really close to heart. And that goes for all women and their partners, no matter whether you are the woman to the right or the woman to the left. Because after all, it is a part of life that we have to manage for 40 years of our lives. It's not a nice to have, it's a need to have. Because after all, we are biological creatures. But it's also a very, very big market. The amount of money that we spend privately and as states on female health is massive. It's a really big chunk of our public spending that goes into keeping women's reproductive systems, in the broadest terms, running. And there are a lot of products. There is actually a huge amount of products that women buy and consume related to women. And that's really important to their reproductive health. But funny enough, when you look at it, very few of them are digital. So I'm really, really passionate and excited about what we can do when we start collecting data about this part of life. Because what we can do is that we can start doing advanced risk profiling. We can do really personalized predictions. We can give people deep insights to what's going on in their bodies. And we can help them take action. So we can help women be healthy. And that's incredibly empowering. And it's not about taking something that was analog before, kind of the temperature method instead of having pen and paper. The temperature method is something you can do to track when you ovulate. Forget about that. The point is, it's not about doing something that we did on paper before. Now we're on a phone. It's about data-fying a whole part of life that wasn't data-fied before. Is this sounding a little bit annoying or is it okay? Is it okay? Okay. But it's also about facilitating a conversation between genders. It's about including the men into this realm of life, which is important. It's about helping doctors understand what's going on for their patients. So it's really about facilitating. It's about facilitating conversation as well. And basically, I think collecting data about this is incredibly empowering and important, not only for the individual women, but also for society. I actually think it's fair to say that we are in the middle of a global revolution or global movement about how we think about reproductive health. And I think we are now in a world where we're taking it out of taboo land, taking it out of stigma and realizing that it's a very, very central part of our health and life. And I think it's a, I actually don't think it's a stretch to say that what we saw in the 60s when the pill came out is kind of what we start seeing now again, because now we have the combination of computing power in our hand. We can handle big data. We can do the predictive analytics. And we can start to pull that together with a sense of data. And what we have is a new world. is a new way of managing family planning. And that's gonna have a massive impact on the world. I'm convinced. And it's empowering. It really is empowering for women to understand what is going on. You need the data to make good choices. And now we start to see that people actually have the data and can make the choices for themselves. So what does it look like? All of this is what we're working on at Clue. So we built a period tracking app. It looks like this. It's not pink. It's not full of butterflies. It's very straight up. It's very fast to enter data. There's a lot of very scientific, valid information in the app. And it's a way for women to understand everything related to her cycle, how it influenced her being, her well-being. And we wanted it to be an enjoyable and lighthearted experience and not something my secret diary something shit. Yeah. And one other thing that we keep seeing is that most people don't remember what they learned at school or they've never had that basic information about how the biological system works. And through this app people can actually understand how it works. We are on iOS, Android, and Apple Watch. We've just added a new version of the app for iOS 9. And it includes 20 new tracking categories. So it's pretty broad what you can track, but still related to reproductive health. Yes, and as I mentioned, we are doing studies together with research partners, which is super exciting because there is so much knowledge that we surprisingly enough actually don't have about how this system works. And traditionally clinical studies have been on like 100 or maybe 2,000 at the most people. And now we have millions. So there's a whole new, step forward that we can make in science together with these world class scientists. I included this because we literally get emails like this every day. We get so much love back from our users. I'm deeply grateful and humbled. And I think it tells us that understanding female health and providing good grown up services for it is something that is really, really needed. As Thomas said, it's really been an underserved area. And there is so much work ahead of us. Plenty of work for many startups. Just get started. So I want to say just a little bit about my vision for Clue. What I'm hoping to build together with my team is a hub for female health related data. So that we can be so good at personalized predictions that in the end women will be able to use this as a data driven contraceptive. So forget about taking hormones. Use your phone instead. We're not quite there yet. We have competitors who say that they're there. We don't do that. But I will say we are also not so far off. So just be patient a little bit. We will get there. We're working on it. So now we raise this money from very good people. So what happens after you've raised money from the absolute best fund we could have hoped for and wished for? Really cool people. We feel they're our tribe. They get what we're doing. We trust them. So what now? I'll take a little sip of water here. Well, this is really strong. OK. OK. Now we have to level up. OK. This was the easy part. Now comes the tough part. So there's a sense of leveling up on how much we need to grow, how many users we need to get. But also deepening the product, getting much more about how we look at the data, but also scaling a team with Grace and keeping it together, keeping that culture, which is so, so important, keeping that healthy and good, make it global. good place for people to be. And a big part of trying to do more, of course, and having more bandwidth and being faster and better and smarter is having more people. So we are hiring. We are looking for various positions. I have taken the liberty to list them here. Yeah, so if you want to come work at a kick-ass team in Berlin, sorry to take people over from the Danish startup scene, come talk to me. Talk to me after this. I'm flying back tonight, so grab me now that I'm here. I would love to talk to you. If you know somebody that you think might be interesting or interested. And of course, you can also find all the job posting at helloclue.com. So I want to also take this opportunity to share a thought with you. So, yeah, I've been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years. I was doing the math. That's kind of hard to believe, but it's actually true. And in the end, I think there are two questions you need to ask yourself. And the first one is about the grain. I didn't misspell it. I really did mean to write the grain. So the first thing is, what is it that I want to create? Like, what is it that you really, really, really, really want? Because you have to want something. You have to have something that something can manifest around. Something that you're so passionate about that you can care to get up and talk about it many times. Get people on board. Something that will move you day after day after day after day. Because in the end, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint. It really is. Long, ongoing motion of will. But I think kind of really feeling somewhere, like, what is it I really want to create? Because in the end, I really think it is about creation. For me, it's data-finding female health. And then the other side is, what is the price that I'm willing to pay? And it may be... It may sound a little brutal. But I think it's about understanding the depth of your caring for this issue. For your commitment. For your stubbornness. For your drive. And I think that when you kind of... When you come to terms with what sacrifices you're willing to make to make this real, without your life becoming meaningless, I think that's the key. Like, what can I let go of that my life will still... be meaningful and a meaningful whole? But what are all the things that I'm willing to let go of? You shouldn't be willing to pay any price. I think it's really important. You cannot pay any price. For me, there are ethics. There's health. There's being a good parent. But I think you have to figure out, like, what can you let go of? You know, is it hobbies? Is it partying? Is it your home country? Is it me time? Hell, it might even be sex. Who knows? Is it your peace of mind? Is it your social standing? Like, what is it? I can tell you, for me, there are pretty much two things in my life. There are my kids, and there's my startup. And everything else is going to have to wait. And it's okay. So, yeah. You know, in the end, it's about creating a life that's kind of... It's not about perfection. There's a ton of imperfection in my life. Believe me. It's about creating this meaningful whole where somehow things come together. It's about creating, and it's about, you know, before there were nothing, and now there's something that creates value for somebody else than yourself. And it's so much fun. It's really cool. So, that's the thought I want to leave you with. What is it that I really want to create? What price am I willing to pay? I think these are two good guiding principles if you're either starting out on the startup way or somewhere in the middle. At least I keep asking myself those two things, and they are good guidance for me. So, I'm very easy to find and read, so I'm very happy to hear from you. Remember, you can find the open positions on our website. Spread the word. If you think that this is something that you can do, it's something you think is good. No, that's it. Thank you for listening. So, thank you very much, Ida. And as a woman, as a mom, and as somebody who's been quite obsessive about trying to figure out when I was ovulating, to actually get pregnant, I actually really appreciate that we have a cool Danish woman who is, I mean, leading the reproductive health in this world. I mean, that's amazing, isn't it? Let's give her a hand. With my team. With my team. With your team. Team, team, team, team, team. And the other thing that is cool is that Ida and her team, are the first, you're actually the first Danish startup, we can call you Danish startup today, to get funding from Union Square and from Mosaic. So, also that's really cool. So, congratulations and thank you very much, Ida. Thank you. Really, thank you. Yeah.