PERI - Perimenopause Journey

Inspiration

PERI was inspired by my fiancée, Nicky Pham.

Soon after we met, Nicky started going through changes neither of us understood: exhaustion, sleepless nights, feeling unlike herself. It took us far too long to learn the word for it: perimenopause. When we went looking for help, we found very little. There was plenty of information for fertility and pregnancy, but almost nothing for the years that come after, and too many stories of women being dismissed by the people who were supposed to help them.

Nicky found her own way through, with meditation, breathwork and gentle movement. It changed her life. After 20 years as a real estate and mortgage broker, she founded HER Self-Love Academy to help other women heal, with one goal: to positively impact one billion women.

A retreat room can only hold so many people. One day, while working on an investment property, I heard a podcast about building apps with Claude Code and realized an app could reach women everywhere. I also have a daughter, and when her time comes, I want her to have the support Nicky had to find on her own.

PERI is the first app I've ever built. I have no coding background, just a vision, Nicky's guidance, and Claude Code.

What it does

PERI brings the support a woman in perimenopause needs into one calm, private app:

• Peri, an AI wellness coach. A warm, conversational coach that uses your own recent symptom and cycle logs to give personalized guidance. It gives a daily check-in that turns into a "Today's Focus" card on your home screen, plus a Weekly Review that spots patterns across your week. When Peri states a health fact, she names a mainstream source (Mayo Clinic, The Menopause Society, ACOG, NIH), and she never presents herself as a replacement for a doctor.
• Symptom and cycle tracking. Log daily symptoms with severity and notes, and mark period days on a calendar, so irregular cycles and symptom patterns become visible.
• Guided wellness video library (PERI Premium). Meditation, breathwork, sound baths, gentle yoga, mantras and perimenopause education, led by Nicky Pham. These are the same natural practices that carried her through perimenopause, and the ones she teaches women at HER Self-Love Academy.
• Community. A feed, topic channels, comments, and community events (online or in person), so no one goes through this alone.
• Gentle habits. Daily check-in reminders at a time you choose, and badges that celebrate consistency.

Privacy by design. Before the AI coach ever sees your data, PERI shows a clear disclosure of exactly what is shared and asks for consent. You can delete your account and all your data in the app at any time.

How we built it

• App: React Native + Expo (TypeScript), built and shipped to the App Store with EAS Build and EAS Submit.
• Backend: Supabase (auth, Postgres with row-level security on every user table, storage, Edge Functions).
• AI coach: Anthropic's Claude API, called from a Supabase Edge Function so no keys ever live in the app. The coach's prompt is built from the user's recent symptom and cycle data plus the conversation history.
• Video: Mux for streaming, using signed playback URLs.
• Monetization: RevenueCat.
  • The react-native-purchases SDK manages the PERI Premium subscription ($9.99/month, auto-renewing), with RevenueCat's identity synced to each Supabase user.
  • The paywall is designed in RevenueCat's paywall builder and rendered with react-native-purchases-ui, so it can be updated without shipping a new app build.
  • Entitlements are enforced on the server, not just in the app. Before a premium video can stream, a Supabase Edge Function checks the user's premium entitlement through RevenueCat's REST API. Only then does it sign a short-lived Mux playback token. The app never has a playable URL until RevenueCat says the user is subscribed.

Challenges we ran into

As a first-time builder with no coding background, I learned everything along the way, from databases to app signing. The biggest challenge was getting PERI onto the App Store. It took several rounds of review, and each one made the app better:

• A production build launched to a blank screen because its environment variables were never included in the cloud build. We fixed it by registering them with EAS.
• Apple required in-app account deletion, sources for health information, and an explicit consent step before any data is shared with an AI provider. We built all three.
• We had to learn exactly how Apple pairs an app's first subscription with an app version for review.

Each rejection made PERI safer, more transparent and more trustworthy for the women using it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A complete, polished app with six connected features, not a single-feature demo.
• A server-verified subscription gate: RevenueCat entitlement check, then a signed video URL.
• An AI coach that actually uses your own data, with sources, consent and disclaimers built in from the start.
• Getting through App Review for a health, AI and subscription app, one of the hardest combinations there is.

What we learned

I learned that you no longer need to be an engineer to build something real. You need a clear vision, a real problem, and the patience to keep going through every rejection. I also learned how to build trust into a health product: be clear about what data goes where, cite sources, and make it easy to leave. And that monetization belongs in the backend. RevenueCat entitlements checked on the server are what make a subscription real, not just a UI gate.

What's next for PERI

• An annual plan and a free trial through RevenueCat, with paywall A/B tests using RevenueCat Experiments.
• Cycle predictions and symptom trend charts.
• More video content, including 11 new videos in production.
• Android release.
• Clinician-reviewed content partnerships.

Built With

• anthropic
• claude
• claude-code
• expo.io
• mux
• postgresql
• react-native
• revenuecat
• supabase
• typescript