The Gut Stuff

Challenge

Twins, Lisa and Alana Mcfarlane grew up sharing a lot of the same features. But after taking part in research at King’s College in London, the duo found out that despite sharing 100% of the same DNA, their guts shared only 30–40% of the same microbiota. This explained why their bodies behaved so differently and it led them on a fascinating journey of, well, everything gut!

Today the Gut Stuff team is on a mission to help empower anyone to change their gut health based on their unique needs and lifestyle. As part of this, the team wanted to create an application that educated users on their gut health, while also acting as a service to those seeking advice, personal health tips, and more.

Following the creation of a proof-of-concept, the Gut Stuff team connected with JetRockets in order to develop a minimal viable product (MVP) for the platform and quickly.

The main task was to create an electronic diary, or Gut Tracker, in which users can record data about the state of their stomach, the food they consume, and their physical exercise.

Solutions

CMS — Leveraging the client’s brand book, JetRockets built an attractive and responsive application, using a custom-built CMS to provide an easy-to-use content management interface.

Gut Tracker

This easy-to-navigate tracker enables users to track their food, hydration, mood, poop and even explores how they feel overall. The tracker helps users understand how their body works and will give them a great tool to spot good or bad patterns.

The tracker assists users in understanding if they’re experiencing any symptoms and how much physical activity they are participating in. Additionally, users can view important gut health data via reports emailed to them and viewed on their laptop or mobile device.

Food

Log your meals and snacks by searching for what you’ve eaten that day, plus the quantities, and our calculators will do the rest of the work after.

You will need to manually add variety points when entering your food; you get the point for each plant per week (this includes vegetables, fruits, whole grains, pulses, legumes, nuts, and seeds.) If you have already logged, say, a banana in that week (mon-sun), you don’t get another point, but you DO get different points for different colors ie red pepper, yellow pepper, green pepper, orange pepper = 4 gutilicious points!

We implemented these categories for daily tracking:

• Exercise — Enables users a place to log and track their daily physical activity.
• Me Time — This is where users can input something they did for themselves on any given day that doesn’t necessarily have to do with their gut health journey.
• Sleep — Offers users a place to track the hours they slept at night.
• Symptoms — Let users document symptoms they may experience whenever they occur.
• Gratitude — This is where users can create and reflect on things they hold an appreciation for and alter as they see fit.
• Things I Discovered About My Gut — Whether users have specific challenges with their gut or not, this section is excellent for logging any patterns users have discovered or anything they’ve identified in their gut health journey in order to assist users in further understanding their bodies.

Push notifications

Push notification notifies users when:

• A new or updated article is shared
• The weekly report is sent out
• If a user hasn’t accessed the app in a long time period
• If a user hasn’t filled in their data to the GutTracker

Results

Today, Gut Stuff offers users a way to get to understand their gut and how to take care of it properly. The platform enables individuals to set and meet their personal goals and assists users in making the jump from following fad diets to living an informed, healthy lifestyle.

You can join the waitlist to be the first to access gut health at your fingertips with the Gut Stuff platform today!

Going from Project to Partner

Gut Stuff and JetRockets are already planning for our next collaboration to develop the second version of the Gut Stuff platform, in which we’ll be focusing on:

• Community features
• Membership
• Push notification strategy
• Full launch
• 121 referral clinic and additional marketplace features

The Gut Stuff mobile app MVP technology stack:

We use the latest versions of libraries and frameworks unless otherwise specified. When a new version of a library/framework is released, we will also update it on the project (maybe not immediately, if the update has broken backward compatibility).