A year ago this time we were probably sitting in my living room, eating snacks and giving shape to feelgut.

The summer before Laura had told me about her idea of building a social platform for people with rare diseases who were searching for alternative treatments, people with chronic diseases who felt the need of talking to others who were going through the same and people who were interested in health topics.

In the last years I had asked the internet a couple of times, and had a terrible experience in different self diagnosis apps and in discussion forums. Laura’s idea sounded good, but it wasn’t until later that year when she asked me to join as a business and marketing knowledgeable cofounder. Laura had already recruited Markos y Esther as designers, and Irene joined as our development and ux counterpart.

We spent over 6 months working on the conception of the app, initial mockups, a business plan; we launched a home page, started a blog, and a social media strategy. We took the initial idea and added interesting functionalities and integrations. We were ready and had a launch date, and it was then when everything happened.

Everything is too long to be explained here, but long story short, the feelgut project as we knew it was over. In our last meeting as a team, the most repeated statement was ‘an idea is worth nothing if it is not executed’.

Today I casually found HealthNatives. It is our idea (even the way you add symptoms looks exactly as we imagined it, and their green is very close to the green we spent weeks looking for) but Ferdinand Schwenkert and Mario Kunze managed to execute were we couldn’t handle.

A year ago this time we were probably sitting in my living room filling post-its with capital letters and every time we’ve met after that we’ve discussed, even if just for a couple of minutes, about what could have happened. Bad news is it’s over for sure now. Good news is we learnt a lot on the way and we can see how HealthNatives goes and figure out where we were right and wrong.

We learnt a lot from feelgut and we have a lot more to learn now. I am personally going to look at Health Natives and see which of our assumptions were accurate, how they resolve some of the problems we came across and whether they use the same marketing strategy we opted for. In the meanwhile, lesson number one: An idea without execution is worth nothing. May that learning stick with us and guide us in all our future endeavours.