{"id":36130,"date":"2026-09-13T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/?p=36130"},"modified":"2026-09-19T23:11:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T03:11:29","slug":"women-can-just-go-to-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/women-can-just-go-to-doctors\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWomen can just go to doctors. Why would they come to you?\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Field notes from building for women in perimenopause and menopause.<\/em><\/p>\n

“It is just a phase.”<\/p>\n

8 out of 10 women I talk to tell me this is what they hear when they go to a doctor. Often, even from some older women in her family. And, on the worst days, from themselves too.<\/p>\n

Because think about this. Think about Riya. A friend you know at work. She’s had 20 good years before this. Mostly pain-free periods. No PMS drama (or at least manageable PMS drama). And then, at 39, her body changed and no one gave her a playbook. My Riya tells me: she’s got pain out of nowhere. A temper out of nowhere. Sleep’s gone. She’s saying no to trekking plans and her friends get why. The fatigue is a hard problem to solve.<\/p>\n

When I talk to Riya, the answer to the question “why would women come to us when there are doctors” answers itself.<\/p>\n

Because everyone explains the symptoms like they know it best.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The pain was stress. The mood was work. The sleep was her phone. The Zumba was age. Four symptoms, four explanations, four different doctors and experts. Nobody put them on one table and asked the obvious question.<\/p>\n

And here is the thing. Riya is not alone. We meet a Riya everyday at Yellow. Different name, same body, same story.<\/p>\n

Fatigue. Joint aches. A racing heart in women who have never had a day of anxiety in their life. Every symptom goes to a different specialist. Every one of them sends her home with a shrug and a report that says she is fine.<\/p>\n

This took me a while to understand. When the report comes back normal, that is the wound. That is the moment she stops trusting her own body. Or, some women I know start asking even tougher questions. In newer places.<\/p>\n

So, I thought: the answer is a test. Better data. Better information.<\/h2>\n

Something that helps you attribute your symptoms to hormonal health. Something that tells you: you’re not going crazy!<\/p>\n

The obvious thing I thought: women in perimenopause get bad information, so we give them better information. A sharper blood panel. Cleaner numbers than the local lab. Read her hormones, read her deficiencies, hand back the truth. Simple.<\/p>\n

But, I now know there’s more.<\/p>\n

Meet enough women like Riya and you see a pattern that has nothing to do with hormones. The desperation is never about the symptom. It is about not being believed. She has spent two years, sometimes four, being told there is nothing there. And when your body keeps screaming and every room keeps saying you are fine, the blame has to land somewhere. Often, it lands on Riya.<\/p>\n

So she blames the last thing standing. Her age. Her stress. The gym she skips. Her diet. Herself. The blame lands on her character, when the problem is her endocrinology. That is the part that I didn’t know. A woman with a real, treatable shift in her body, walking around thinking she has become weaker, lazier, harder to live with.<\/p>\n

Listen to how she talks about herself and you stop calling this a medical problem. “I feel like I am losing my mind.” “I am not myself.” “I think I am going crazy.” More than one woman has told me, with no prompting, that she thinks she has early dementia. Brain fog in one breath, Alzheimer’s in the next. One more number on a report will not reach her. She has been alone with a fear for a long time.<\/p>\n

Then there’s a 44-year-old with the notes app<\/h2>\n

One woman’s story stays with me. She is 44, six weeks into HRT after eighteen months of being told nothing was wrong. She has a patch, a follow-up booked, and a notes app with fourteen entries in it. The entries stop at day nine.<\/p>\n

She tracks because she is scared. Scared that she walks into that follow-up, says “I think it is a bit better?”, and gets waved off one more time. She wants proof in her hand, so the room cannot dismiss her again.<\/p>\n

That is the moment the whole thing clicked for me. What she is paying for is a piece of paper that makes a doctor believe her. That is the product. Being believed. The test is just how we get there.<\/p>\n

Building for the dismissal<\/h2>\n

Once you see it that way, everything you build changes.<\/p>\n

She says “I feel like I am losing my mind.” A doctor can do nothing with that. But a doctor can act on this: cognitive symptoms, moderate, showing up on 34 of the last 60 days, worse on nights under six hours of sleep. Same woman, same experience, said two ways. One way sends her home. The other gets her treated. One of the things we built came from this insight: a product that is the translation between the two.<\/p>\n

In fact, a doctor gave us a line we now build around. “The report should do its work before she walks in.” She should not have to perform her pain to a stranger in fifteen rushed minutes. We do the work first, so she walks in already ‘believed’.<\/p>\n

And so our words changed too. We stopped writing like a lab and started writing like someone who has sat with her.<\/p>\n

\n

“Irritability in peri is chemistry. It comes from your brain and your shifting hormones.”<\/p>\n

“This has a name. The name is perimenopause. You are steadier than you feel.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A lot of Yellow started this way. With my own mum. With women telling us, in their own words, what they were starved of. We do not invent this. We have our ears to the ground. Each product started as a response to a real person in front of us.<\/p>\n

What conversations in India have taught us<\/h2>\n

India broke the playbook we borrowed. Every Western screening tool starts with the hot flush. But the Indian women we talk to bring the hot flush up last, if they bring it up at all. What they bring first is anxiety, exhaustion, broken sleep, rage, aching joints. So a tool built abroad opens with the wrong question, and she fails a test she should have passed.<\/p>\n

Then the system sends her the wrong way. A gynaecologist with 26 years behind her explained it to us. A hot flush spikes Riya’s heart rate. She feels the racing heart and reads it as her heart giving out. So she goes to a physician, gets an ECG and a cardiac workup, all for the wrong thing. The real cause never comes up, because nobody in that chain is looking for it.<\/p>\n

Then add the generational conditioning of putting ourselves last. Family first. We come after. A woman will book, cancel, and rebook around everyone else before she gets to her own appointment. A nutritionist we spoke to assumed Indian women would be a different problem from the American women she had treated for years. Her own practice proved her wrong. Same symptoms. Same silence.<\/p>\n

The lessons, of course, are still getting sharper<\/h2>\n

None of this is settled. We are early and most of it is wet paint. But this is how I would summarise what I’ve learnt so far…<\/p>\n

1\/ The problem is hiding under the label.<\/strong> She came to be believed. The blood report is the thing she can hold in her hand while she asks for it. Building for the dismissal is a different company from building for the symptom, and there’s merit in looking at both.<\/p>\n

2\/ We must continue to have our ears to the ground.<\/strong> These learnings don’t come from research. They come from doing. In our case, it has been every idea we’ve shipped.<\/p>\n

3\/ Ready, fire, aim.<\/strong> Aarya and I run at least one product experiment a week. Some of it will be missed. I have shipped things that flopped and I will ship more. Because I’ve learned: the sixth one works if you are still around for the sixth one. Progress over perfection. The messy middle is the fun part. No?<\/p>\n

4\/ Think in 20 years.<\/strong> Super long-term game. I will not pretend it is all figured out. The price is not settled. The one-line pitch still fights me. Some weeks I spend twenty minutes arguing with myself about whether there really are signals or if I am just making myself feel better. But, then I try to remind myself that I’m playing a long-term game; and these are like levels of a game. I may just need more power-ups and I will progress.<\/p>\n

That was all. We are learning and building Yellow for women in perimenopause and menopause in public. Follow along? Point gaps? Help us do more!?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Field notes from building for women in perimenopause and menopause.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"slim_seo":{"title":"\u201cWomen can just go to doctors. Why would they come to you?\u201d - Yellow","description":"Field notes from building for women in perimenopause and menopause."},"_slim_seo_primary_term_category":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_tag":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_template":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_top_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"post_template":[],"top_category":[],"class_list":["post-36130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-founder-field-notes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36130"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36136,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36130\/revisions\/36136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36130"},{"taxonomy":"post_template","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_template?post=36130"},{"taxonomy":"top_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spotyellow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/top_category?post=36130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}