Week 15 — What’s the YOMO Story

Published in

The Index Project Challenge

4 min readApr 27, 2020

As we write one of our final blogs of this roller coaster semester, it is time to collate our research into 7 minutes of a compelling story. Seven minutes in heaven? More like seven minutes in hell. But before all hell breaks loose, gathering our thoughts into a blog, will help us answer such questions as “Wait, why did we decide to do it this way?” when we meet and chat many months after this lockdown of the city, country, and our brains.

“Women are born with pain built in” — here’s why you should look forward to the menopause if you’re a woman, according to Belinda.

“I’ve been longing to say this out loud,” she begins, leaving us wondering which of our shared secrets she is about to spill. “Women are born with pain built in. It’s our physical destiny — period pains, sore boobs, childbirth. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. We have it all going on in here, inside.
We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years, and then just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes. The f****** menopause comes and it is the most wonderful f****** thing in the world. Yes, your entire pelvic floor crumbles and you get f****** hot and no one cares, but then you’re free. No longer a slave, no longer a machine with parts. You’re just a person [not woman]. In business.”

Our Working Pitch

YOMO is an all in one service to help improve woman’s health. Designed to empower women to take charge of their own health, Swan offers comprehensive information covering all aspects of healthy living. The service features a great mix of relevant posts for women at all stages of life — pregnancy and parenting, sex and relationships, healthy aging, menopause and more

A few things we want our service to represent. We want to make a service distinguishable because of it -

Creates positive perspectives palliative care above relying on invasive treatments
Encourages women to prioritize their own health along with the others in their family
Approaching the topic of ageing in women by looking at the menopausal transition as an entry point to understanding the lived and bio-behavioural experience of this life transition.
A service that approaches telehealth as a platform to talk about taboos
A service that starts with the ageing transition but is designed keeping in mind that the sparrows of today will be the swans of tomorrow.
Health literacy, not health care

The Impact

According to findings from a survey conducted by the American Association of Retired Persons in 2017–18, only 1 in 5 women in the US received a referral to a menopause specialist. Of the 60% of women who seek medical attention,
an appalling 75% of them are left untreated.

Further, due to the ephemeral nature of menopause symptoms, it is possible that clinicians manage these symptoms less aggressively than other medical conditions. This leads to women self-treating by reading unfiltered content online.

What is our market space?

While what is called “femtech” is crowded with period trackers, fertility kits and medicine kits, Yomo lies between a positive community around menopause, but beyond that, into approaching topics of taboo with poignance and elegance, not unlike the School of Life.