Meet Ida Tin Founder of Clue
Table of Contents
Which team and when did you graduate?
Team 8 in 2004
What have you been working on since you graduated as a Kaospilot?
I first got a job as an organisational consultant in a big corporate, KPMG in a position in India. My partner at the time, also a Kaospilot, got the same position so we were both going. The whole thing was cancelled the night
before our flight was departing. It was pretty surreal sitting in an empty flat having had our farewell party and then not being going. I was fired for no good reason and told I didn’t have a corporate mindset.
I took that as a compliment and instead I started a motorcycle touring company with my dad. We did high-end tours all over the planet, off road in Mongolia, women’s tours in the US, we shipped people’s bikes to Cuba and rode small mountain roads in Vietnam.
After five years of living a nomadic lifestyle decided I wanted to build a more scalable company, and start a family. I had the idea for Clue and then co-founded it with my current partner and three other guys. I have been working on this since 2009.
How and why did you launch your business? What are some next steps for your business?
I was astonished to learn how little innovation within family planning methods had emerged since the Pill came out in the late 1950’s. I recognised that with the launch of the iPhone and consumer sensor technologies such as Fitbit there was an opportunity to provide women with menstrual cycles a powerful insight into their bodies by collecting their own cycle data.
In summer 2013, the app Clue was launched globally as the world’s first science based, gender neutral and easy to use menstrual tracking app. Clue was rated the top menstrual cycle tracking app by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (ACOG) who found that only 20 out of more than 1,000 apps met accuracy criteria; Clue received the highest score. Since then the business has grown to +70 employees, 12.5M monthly active users and significant revenue.
Our science collaborations include partners like MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, The Kinsey Institute, Max Planck Institute and many more. We have an ongoing research project with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Women and people with cycles go through 40 years of changing needs related to their reproductive life journeys and our vision is to be a trusted companion all along the way.
What is your biggest source for inspiration right now?
Art and artists. Sergei Polonin, the world’s greatest dancer in my opinion is hugely inspirational to me (though I don’t share all his political views). I am also very curious about inner work and the teachings from the ones who have walked further on that path than I have. I read non fiction a lot (and no fiction almost unfortunately), lately I have read Gabor Mate: When the body says no, and Scattered Minds. Both brilliant books.
What is a piece of advice that you would like to give future Kaospilot graduates?
Think big, take on big global issues, find the smartest people on the planet to collaborate with, stay ethically strong and be very very courageous.
About Ida Tin
Ida Tin is the co-founder and CEO of Clue, the most trusted female health app. Clue enables women and people with menstrual cycles to make good choices for themselves and live full lives not in spite of their biology but in tune with it. Clue has more than twelve million active users in over 190 countries. Prior to starting Clue, Ida co-founded of the motorcycle touring company, MotoMundo. Ida is also the author of the Danish bestseller book “Directness”, a speaker at prestigious conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, LeWeb in Paris, Slush in Finland and has been featured in major media publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, Forbes, Der Spiegel and Le Figaro.