OvaNote
What
Egg freezing involves 10–14 days of daily hormone injections and frequent monitoring appointments, ending in a retrieval procedure to preserve a woman's eggs for potential future use. It's a process many women find emotionally difficult and lonely, sometimes made harder by disappointing outcomes.
"I felt so alone during the process! I never was made more aware of my singleness than I did when I was going through the egg freezing process." — r/eggfreezing
The problems egg freezing patients face will only grow as the procedure itself does. In 2023, over 40,000 people froze their eggs in the U.S., a 39% increase from the year prior, according to SART.
Why
I interviewed egg freezing patients and a nurse manager at a fertility clinic to understand the problems they face. I found 14 from the patients' perspective, ranging from worst to bearable. Within this list, I picked the highest ranked problem I could solve quickly in a way that felt joyful.
- No step-by-step instructions for the process specific to their clinic
- No guidance on when to reorder medication refills
- Poorly formatted injection calendars and confusing trigger shot instructions
- Can only reach the clinic through a slow, multi-step call center
- Anxiously monitoring the phone all day waiting for nurse callbacks
- No educational resources provided by the clinic
- Negative feelings after injections with no emotional support 👈
- Feeling like a factory product in an impersonal clinical process
- Can't make social plans due to an unpredictable two-week schedule
- Long, unpredictable wait times at monitoring appointments
- Not enough time during appointments to ask follow-up questions
- Managing injection alarms alone with no guidance
- No packing guidance for injections away from home
- Video tutorials were too fast or too slow
I chose to solve #7. After each injection, patients felt empty and alone. There was no acknowledgment of their effort, no sense of progress, and no one with them.
How
A funnel already existed
Nurses were already recommending tutorial sites for fertility injections, like Freedom Med Teach. If I wanted to bring more joy to the injection process, that was the perfect place to start. Patients need to watch these videos anyway, and the moment right after was the opportunity to delight. So I built the base of the site around fertility injection tutorials, linking to CVS's YouTube catalog of fertility injection videos.
Patient flow today
Patient with OvaNote
Ideas before the scrollable community garden
I went through a few concepts before settling on the scrollable garden. One idea was a chatbot that sent a cute animated sticker after each injection. Another was a Pokémon-like game where users could walk around, discover flowers, and find hidden easter eggs with messages left by other egg freezing patients. That got me in the right direction, but I realized I didn't want users hunting for community. As soon as they opened the site, I wanted them to feel less alone and to be surrounded by a beautiful atmosphere.
Built and launched in a weekend
I built the scrollable OvaNote garden in a couple of hours and posted it to r/eggfreezing. Each flower shows where it was planted from and when, so patients could see they weren't going through it alone. I loved watching the flowers populate and reading the messages people left. It blew my mind that I built a garden and real people made it bloom.
Impact
14 unique users across 4 different countries left flowers and messages in the garden. If I made even one egg freezing patient genuinely smile, that's pretty special.
But I'm not done. Finding a pipeline to get this in front of more egg freezing patients is the next challenge. The next free weekend I have, I want to build a mobile app with timely injection reminders. Once on the App Store, I hope egg freezing patients looking for an app with real utility will find mine and we can bring that much more joy to the process.