pum started with three words: "track your symptoms."

Someone I love waited years for anyone to take her pain and her irregular cycle seriously, then months for a specialist appointment. All she wanted was a way to improve her quality of life: to understand her pain and help herself. The appointment took minutes. It was cold, invasive, and heartbreaking. A shrug on the way out the door, a misdiagnosis, and those three words are what she left with.

On the drive home we made each other laugh. The name pum comes from that car ride: a silly word born from a light moment of comfort on a heavy day, and the name stuck.

The advice seemed strange to me. What was she supposed to do with the symptoms she tracked? Making use of that data was just another burden. Tracking is where understanding starts, but a symptom journal on its own is worthless: a notebook no doctor will read, a spreadsheet or notes file that can't answer a question. "Track your symptoms" hands the work of analysis to the person with the least energy to do it, and no tools.

The existing period apps weren't the answer either. They're built for regular cycles and textbook symptoms, and endo obeys neither. Worse: this is deeply intimate data, from a corner of her life already full of invasive appointments, and some of the biggest trackers have been caught sharing exactly this kind of data. She'd been let down enough.

I went and read the research. It says two things about endometriosis symptoms, over and over: they follow the cycle, and they're different in every body, in character, timing, and intensity. That combination means no average can describe you. Only your own data, compared against itself, honestly, over time, can.

That's a data problem. Data problems can be built for.

I wanted to make something for her that would carry the burden instead of adding to it: track the symptoms, remember the medications, and learn what helps and what doesn't. And I wanted her data safe by design, rather than by promise. So it lives on her phone. There is no account to create and no pum server holding it: nothing to sell, nothing to leak. Misusing it isn't forbidden by a policy; it's impossible.

So I built pum: a tracker with an analysis engine behind it, made specifically for endo and adenomyosis. It logs in seconds, because flares don't wait for forms. It learns your cycle's own rhythm instead of assuming 28 days, and always says how confident it is. It finds the patterns (sleep and pain, phase and flare) and shows its working. And it never pretends: when there isn't enough data yet, it says so. No grades on your body, no hospital-form feeling, no need to make endo your identity.

I knew it was working the day it predicted her period to the day. Her cycles are irregular; that one ran 38 days. An app assuming 28 would have missed by more than a week.

Everything in it serves one idea: agency through understanding.

who's building this

My name's Lewis. I'm a developer in Queensland, Australia. No investors, no growth team, no advisory-board theatrics. I ship pum in small releases, often daily, and every release has been shaped by the first user: the person it was built for, whom I love and watched suffer.

If you've ever been handed those three words and nothing else, pum was built with you in mind, diagnosis or not.

If it can help her, I hope it can help other women.