A few months ago, fuchcia was going to be big.
AI-native from day one. A real backend. A closed beta of 50–100 users, then a public launch in Q1 2027. I wrote it all down in a PRD and I meant every line.
Today, fuchcia is smaller. On purpose.
The new beta has no backend. No database. No account. No login. Everything you enter — your symptoms, your flares, your notes — stays on your device and never reaches me. I can’t see it. I never will.
This is the pivot. Here’s why I made it — and why I think the smaller version is the stronger one.
The decision: don’t store it — remove the need to store it
The moment you put a woman’s symptom data on a server in France, it stops being “data.” It becomes special-category health data under GDPR Article 9. That triggers a specific regime: HDS certification (the French standard for hosting health data), a mandatory data protection impact assessment, and very likely a data protection officer.
That is the right amount of seriousness for health data. It is also not realistic for a solo builder on a beta timeline.
So I didn’t try to clear that bar at the wrong moment. I removed the bar.
If fuchcia never collects your data, there is nothing to certify, nothing to leak, nothing to sell, nothing to breach. You can’t lose what you never held.
In the AI era, that line stopped being a compromise and became the whole proposition. “Free” usually means you are the training data. fuchcia is the opposite promise: your endo, never my data. Not because I’m against AI — I build with it every day — but because trust is the product, and the cleanest way to be trustworthy with your data is to never touch it.
The part people miss: this is my craft, not a workaround
Here’s the honest twist.
The privacy promise isn’t something I cleverly engineered around. It’s literally what I was trained to build.
I came up through front-end JavaScript. And a front-end developer already knows how to make something useful that lives entirely in your browser. So that’s what fuchcia is. The app runs on your device. Your entries live in your browser’s local storage. Your doctor-prep summary is generated on your phone and uploaded nowhere. There’s no server in the middle — because there doesn’t need to be one.
For a long time I thought front-end as the smaller skill, the thing on the way to “real” product work. Building fuchcia flipped that. Here, the front-end isn’t the limitation. It’s the entire trust model. Privacy by concept, not by policy.
The “business” model: bootstrapped, and fully mine
Let me be clear about how this is funded, because it shapes everything else.
fuchcia is bootstrapped. No investors. No VC. No equity given away. No fake policy. It costs almost nothing to run — static hosting, no database, no servers to babysit — which is the only reason “free forever” is an honest promise and not a launch gimmick. A small, ethical paid tier can come later: support fuchcia, never pay a ransom for your own data.
My first reference for this is Tally.
I heard its co-founder, Marie Martens, on Timothée Frin’s podcast describe something I’d already been circling before I knew Tally existed: radical simplicity, transparency, building for the long run, users over investors. A real business, built without a single dollar of venture capital.
I’m not going to copy the playbook — different product, different stakes. I’m keeping the principle: simplicity, transparency, and minimalism as a deliberate choice — not a phase you grow out of the moment money shows up. Total ownership. Slow if it has to be. Mine.
Builder, not founder
Am I a founder? I’m not. Not yet.
Calling myself a founder right now would be pretentious. I’m not one — I’m tending toward one, maybe, one day, if the work earns it. Builder is the honest word. It’s also the role I gave myself a long time ago, because nothing else quite covered it.
I’d rather arrive slowly and still standing than fast and hollow. So I’m choosing sustainability over speed — though still as fast as it can honestly go. Consistency and learning. That’s already growth. I don’t need the title to do the work. The work is the point.
This is the last try in this shape
Now the most honest part.
This local-first beta is my last attempt at fuchcia as it stands today.
If it lands — if women who get it feel genuinely supported, less alone, better informed, and attached enough to come back — then the mission is accomplished, and fuchcia gets to evolve from there. That’s the only success I care about.
If it doesn’t land, I change the strategy and the roadmap, or I change the project, and I move on. Without drama, without pretending.
Either way, fuchcia stays in my case studies — not as a trophy, as evidence. What I can do. What I can’t. What I keep improving. Showing the pivot honestly has always been more valuable than pretending the path was clean. This is the work too.
And here’s how I’ll actually know, given that I refuse to watch you: I don’t. No analytics. No tracking. By design. The only way fuchcia learns anything is if you choose to tell it — through one anonymous form. No email required. That’s the entire feedback loop. The privacy promise applies to the feedback as much as to the app.
Fuchsia is the color my mother dressed me in before I knew what it meant to take up space. Bold. Unapologetic. Impossible to ignore.
fuchcia keeps that — and keeps nothing else.
If it speaks to you, tell me in the form. That’s the only data I want.
— make it simple.
sources / further reading
- Tally — bootstrapped, no VC, customer-funded: tally.so/about
- Marie Martens on Timothée Frin’s product podcast Clef de voûte (ep. #152, April 2026): timfrin.substack.com
- GDPR Article 9 — health data as special-category data; HDS certification (hosting health data in France) and DPIA requirements: see CNIL (cnil.fr) and the French health-data hosting framework (HDS, esante.gouv.fr).
