u/tamaraisfine

I spent way too long in my high-stress tech job barely treading water before leaving. The story I told myself, and everyone else, was burnout. Too much pressure, too long firing on all cylinders, time for a change. All true, sort of.

What I didn't know at the time: I was deep in perimenopause and undiagnosed ADHD, and the two were quietly dismantling the exact skills my job ran on. Focus. Memory. The ability to look at my to-do list and actually start anything. I'd been a machine for over 25 years. But I'd stare at tasks I knew how to do and just... couldn't. The more I couldn't, the more I panicked, and the more I panicked, the less I could do.

I thought I was failing. I was actually just going through a hormonal sh*t show and nobody had told me my brain was changing the rules.

I got the ADHD diagnosis at 50. The perimenopause picture came together even later. And the thing that I keep seeing glimpses of is how many capable women are quietly making the same exit I did, calling it burnout, never learning that biology was a silent partner in the decision.

So I'm genuinely asking, because I don't think I'm the only one: how many of you went the founder route partly because the 9-to-5 stopped being survivable, and you couldn't fully explain why? Was peri or a late diagnosis part of your story, even if you only saw it in the rearview?

The slightly-on-the-nose part: once I understood what had happened to me, I couldn't unsee the problem. For years I'd been told "track your symptoms," which is a cruel joke to play on a brain whose memory and follow-through are the things that broke. So I started building the tool I wished I'd had.

FINE! is a symptom tracker for women navigating perimenopause and the ADHD/anxiety/thyroid mess that piles on with it. 60-second check-ins, and a one-page summary you hand your doctor instead of guessing.

It went live last week. If midlife brain-fog-rage is your current lived experience, it's free to try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fine-perimenopause-tracker/id6758867574

I'll be honest, I'd rather be building than posting, and getting this in front of people is the part that doesn't come naturally. But I'd really love to hear your stories in the comments, the career version, the diagnosis version, all of it.

Quick context: I'm a solo founder, 25+ years in product, pre-seed, currently in App Store review. But that's not really why I'm posting.

I'm here because at 50 I got an ADHD diagnosis. Perimenopause hit a few years earlier. Hypothyroidism had been in the mix for over a decade. And for most of those years, doctors told me it was stress, burnout, or just age. "Just quit your stressful job, and wait until the kids grow up, and you'll be fine!"

The standard advice every time? "Track your symptoms."

Which is genuinely funny when you think about it. The skills you need to track consistently - memory, executive function, follow-through - are exactly what's broken when you have any one of these conditions, let alone all three at once. It's like handing someone a notebook to track their amnesia.

So I built FINE! - a symptom tracker designed for brains that forgot they were supposed to be tracking. 60-second daily check-ins. No figuring out what to log. Pattern detection across hormones, mood, meds, sleep, cycle. And critically, a clinician-ready summary you can hand to your doctor instead of saying "I've been feeling off since... I don't know, 2018?"

I'd love your help in two ways:

1. Beta testers - if you're 35-55 and this sounds like your life, the TestFlight is open and free: https://testflight.apple.com/join/KctcDUJb
2. Signal boost - if you know women who'd benefit, the waitlist is at: https://wewillbefine.com and you can earn free months by referring any of the billion or so women currently navigating peri.

Happy to talk shop in the comments - solo founder life, women's health, bootstrapping in 2026, how to keep your rage inside your head... mostly.