The best technology does not replace human understanding. It strengthens it.
When Sabrina Nowicki decided to digitize her aunt’s legacy by building Cyclisity, she wanted to create something that helps women take charge of their fertility. No black box algorithm. No app deciding whether it is a “green” or “red” day. Instead, Cyclisity is designed to help women understand their bodies day by day.
That decision shapes everything around the company. The product design. The educational approach. The privacy stance. Even the business model. While many apps optimize for engagement and scale, Sabrina and her team chose a slower, more values-driven path built around agency, body literacy, and trust.
In this episode of Women Disrupting Tech, we talk about fertility awareness, predictive algorithms, privacy after Roe v. Wade, and why understanding your own body should not feel like specialist knowledge. We also explore what founders can learn from building technology that strengthens people instead of keeping them dependent on the product.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Sabrina Nowicki and her team chose to focus specifically on women who want to learn the fertility awareness method, even if that means leaving potential users and faster growth on the table. That clarity influences everything else in the business, from product design to pricing and privacy decisions.
Build around complementary strengths
Cyclisity came together because the founding team brought together three very different types of expertise. Sabrina brought product design, UX, and software engineering experience. Her husband contributed medical and venture capital knowledge. And Sabrina’s aunt, Toni Weschler, brought decades of expertise and educational content around fertility awareness. Instead of trying to become experts in everything themselves, they built around complementary strengths from the start.
Prototype before scaling development
Before hiring engineers, Sabrina designed the full user experience in Figma and tested it with real users. That allowed the team to identify usability problems, validate features, and improve user experience before writing large amounts of code. It also reduced misunderstandings during development because the engineering team could work from a detailed prototype instead of loose ideas and explanations. For early-stage founders, that can save both time and capital.
Choose funding that protects your mission
One of the clearest strategic decisions in the episode is why Cyclisity chose to remain self-funded. Sabrina and her team wanted to avoid pressure to prioritize aggressive growth, advertising, or data monetization over user privacy and education. That decision slowed growth, but it also gave them the freedom to stay aligned with the values behind the product. Sometimes the best funding strategy is the one that protects the long-term integrity of what you are building.
Positioning is not just a marketing exercise. It shapes your product decisions, your business model, your customer experience, and even the type of growth you are willing to pursue. This episode shows what can happen when founders make those decisions intentionally from the start.
Do you know a founder who builds for values based growth and privacy? Share this episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:45 | The Influence of Family Legacy on Innovation |
| 05:53 | Understanding the Fertility Awareness Method |
| 08:55 | The Basic Principles of the Fertility Awareness Method |
| 14:38 | Cyclisity: The Role of Education About Women’s Health |
| 17:32 | Challenges and Learning Curves in Fertility Awareness |
| 20:40 | The Importance of Personalization in Health Apps |
| 23:32 | The Future of Women’s Health Research |
| 26:43 | Data Privacy and Women’s Health |
| 32:29 | Protecting User Data and Future Studies |
| 35:06 | Impact of Roe v. Wade on Privacy |
| 37:50 | The Advantages of Low-Tech Tracking |
| 40:46 | Self-Funding and Business Strategy |
| 43:55 | Leveraging Complementary Skills in Founding |
| 46:54 | Designing for Correct Use and User Experience |
| 49:42 | The Evolution of Cyclisity’s Name |
| 53:08 | Empowering Female Founders through Investment |
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
The story about Cyclisity is more than just a founder story. It’s about femininity, impact, and giving women agency. That becomes clear very early in the conversation, when Sabrina shares how annual lunches celebrating her first period eventually became the foundation for a company focused on helping women better understand their bodies. That personal connection gives the entire episode a very different feeling from a typical healthtech startup story.
Seeing the real-world impact of education
One moment that stood out was Sabrina describing how strangers would regularly walk up to her aunt, Toni Weschler, during lunch to thank her. Some told her that Taking Charge of Your Fertility helped them conceive their children. Others simply thanked her for teaching them things about their own bodies they had never learned before. It explains why this work never felt like “just an app” to Sabrina and her family.
Realizing they were the right team to build it
The lightbulb moment for Cyclisity came when Sabrina realized how well her background in engineering, UX and product design, complemented her husband’s medical and venture capital experience and her aunt’s decades of expertise in fertility awareness.
From Cyclicity to Cyclisity
One of the lighter moments in the episode comes when Sabrina explains how difficult naming the app actually was. Originally, the app used the word “Cyclicity,” which relates to moving through cycles. But during user testing, people kept reading it as “CycleCity” and assumed it was a biking app. The solution was changing the final “C” to an “S,” creating Cyclisity. Ironically, that small change also made trademarking the name easier because it was no longer a standard dictionary word.
Together, these moments show that Cyclisity was never built around trend chasing or growth hacks. The company grew out of personal experience, education, and a very intentional understanding of the problem they wanted to solve.
What was your favorite moment from the episode? Let me know in the comments!
The Quote from the Episode
“Once you understand how your body works, you don’t need an app to tell you if it’s a red or a green day. The awareness is within you.” — Sabrina Nowicki
This quote captures the broader theme running through the entire episode: technology should help people better understand themselves, not make them dependent on systems they do not understand. For Sabrina Nowicki and Cyclisity, the goal is not to replace women’s intuition or awareness with predictions, but to give them the tools and knowledge to feel more confident in understanding their own bodies.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
One thing I keep noticing across recent Women Disrupting Tech conversations is that some of the most thoughtful founders are moving away from the idea that technology should automate everything. Instead, they are building products that strengthen human understanding, preserve agency, and stay closely connected to real human behavior.
Low-tech can still be highly effective
One thing that connects Sabrina Nowicki’s conversation to my episode with Femke Delissen is the idea that better outcomes do not always require more complicated technology. In Sabrina’s case, the fertility awareness method can already work with something as simple as a thermometer, paper, and a pen. Cyclisity simply helps make that process more accessible and educational. In Femke’s case, the focus was also not on adding complexity for the sake of innovation, but on understanding signals in ways that support better care. In both conversations, the technology succeeds because it stays connected to human reality.
The best products make themselves obsolete
In episode 149, Marsha Goei told me that the dating app Breeze was intentionally designed to get people off the app and into real-life dates as quickly as possible. With that, the app is designed to reduce long-term dependence on the product. Cyclisity follows a similar philosophy. Sabrina repeatedly explains that the goal is for women to understand their own bodies well enough that the awareness stays with them even without the product. That is a very different mindset from the engagement-driven logic most platforms optimize for today.
Mission alignment is shaping founder strategy
Sabrina and her team chose to remain self-funded to protect user privacy and keep the educational mission of the product intact. It’s part of a pattern where more founders are making strategic decisions based on long-term mission alignment instead of maximum short-term growth. Other examples in recent episodes are Yasmina Khababi and Marieke van Iperen, who built their companies around values they wanted to protect before scaling aggressively.
What makes these patterns interesting is that they point toward a different vision of innovation. One where success is not only measured by scale, automation, or engagement, but also by whether technology helps people become more capable, informed, and independent.
🗣️ Which of these shifts in founder thinking feels most important to you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
We often talk about solar energy as a clean solution. What we rarely talk about is what happens when millions of solar panels reach the end of their life. In episode 155 of Women Disrupting Tech, I sit down with Renovo Recycling co-founder Andjela Bozinac to explore the hidden infrastructure problem behind the renewable energy transition.
In this conversation, we talk about chemical-free recycling, modular robotics, physical AI, and why Andjela believes the real opportunity is not just building better recycling systems, but redesigning how the entire process works from the installer level onward. We also explore what it means to build a deep tech company before the urgency fully hits the market.
In the clip below, Andjela explains why she wants more women to enter industries like AI, robotics, and climate tech while “the rules are still being written.” It’s a powerful reminder that technology is not just about products. It’s about shaping the systems we will all live in over the next 10 to 25 years.
Curious about the rest of the conversation? Use the subscribe button below to find it in your inbox on 28 May at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
We live in a time where more and more technology is designed to predict us, guide us, and optimize decisions for us. And that can be incredibly useful.
But my conversation with Sabrina Nowicki raises another question: what happens when technology is designed to help people feel more capable?
That idea sits underneath almost every part of this episode. Cyclisity is not trying to replace women’s understanding of their own bodies with predictions and notifications. The goal is the opposite. Help women build enough awareness and confidence that the knowledge eventually stays with them, even without the app.
I also think there is an important founder lesson in that. Many tech products are optimized to increase engagement, dependence, and retention. Sabrina and her team made a very different choice. They built a company around education, privacy, and agency, even when that meant slower growth and fewer shortcuts.
Maybe that is the bigger shift we are starting to see when women are involved in building tech?
Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
About Sabrina Nowicki
Sabrina Nowicki is the co-founder and CEO of Cyclisity, a fertility awareness app designed to help women better understand their bodies through education and body literacy instead of predictive algorithms. With a background in engineering, software development, UX, and product design, she helped turn the legacy of her aunt, Toni Weschler, into a modern educational platform focused on agency, privacy, and long-term understanding.
Together with her husband, Max Nowicki, Sabrina built Cyclisity around a simple philosophy: women should remain in charge of their fertility, not black-box algorithms. That philosophy shaped everything from the product design and educational approach to the company’s decision to remain self-funded and privacy-first.
You can follow and connect with Sabrina on Instagram and TikTok.
About Cyclisity
Cyclisity is a privacy-first fertility awareness app based on the symptothermal method taught in the bestselling book Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Rather than relying on predictive algorithms or “average” cycle assumptions, the app helps women interpret real-time fertility signals such as waking temperature, cervical fluid, and cervical position through education and guided charting.
The company was founded by Sabrina Nowicki, Max Nowicki, and Toni Weschler with the goal of building a fertility app that strengthens body literacy instead of replacing it with black-box predictions. Cyclisity is self-funded, ad-free, and explicitly committed to never selling user data.
You can learn more, including links to download the app on the Cyclisity website, and by following the company on LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok.
Listen to Episode 153 on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube
How a Female Founder Helps Women Take Charge of Their Fertility with Sabrina Nowicki | Ep. 153 - Women Disrupting Tech
Events that Women Disrupting Tech Must-Attend
Some great events take place this spring. Below are three that you definitely want to check out. For a full overview of all events, including links to buy tickets, please check the events page.
Featured Event: Understanding Women's Health - 24 June 2026
Learn how hormone cycles or perimenopause impact your life, and discover more about conditions like PCOS or Endometriosis at the quarterly Understanding Women's Health Events hosted by Kasia Pokrop.
Women's health is a topic near and dear to my heart. Which is why I'm happy to support and attend the events that 3mbrace Health organizes at Equals every quarter.
Men are expressly invited to join. In fact, send me an email if you want to be a women's health pioneer. More info and tickets can be found here.
Diverse Leaders in Tech Events
If you like being in the know about what is happening in the DEI space, Diverse Leaders in Tech is the place to be.
Every last Thursday of the month, they have monthly in-person meetups for tech people, HR leaders and supporters of diversity to exchange insights, tackle challenges, and take action. It's a vibrant, safe space where diversity is celebrated.
You can find their events on the website. Joining your first event is free.
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