Mayfly Ventures

Food & Mood Wellness App

WIRL is a mobile-web application created by dietitians Alicia and Bree to help women reclaim a joyful, mentally nourishing relationship with food. Built on Bubble.io and backed by Antler, the app pairs more than fifty gut-friendly recipes with mood-based nutrition tips, food-and-mood meditations and personalised mealtime check-ins. By shifting the conversation from calorie counts to mental wellbeing, WIRL gives its community a playful, science-backed toolkit for feeling better—one bite at a time.

CLIENT

YEAR

SERVICES

Wirl

2023

Product Design

Information Architecture

Strategy

Venture Validation

Go to Market

PROBLEM

Diet culture’s obsessiveness with restriction and numbers leaves many women anxious at mealtimes and disconnected from how food can actually improve mood and resilience. Alicia and Bree had cultivated a newsletter audience in the tens of thousands that craved practical guidance, yet—as non-technical, bootstrapped founders—they lacked the resources to translate their expertise into a polished, scalable digital product.

solution implemetation

Mayfly joined the project as a technical partner, steering a low-code build on Bubble.io that could grow with the community. Working side by side with the founders, the team translated WIRL’s quirky, down-to-earth tone into an interface that invites users to log how they feel, explore a matching recipe or listen to a two-minute meditation—all without the guilt-laden trappings of traditional diet apps. A modular content engine lets Alicia and Bree add new challenges—such as burnout recovery or menstrual-cycle mastery—without touching the underlying code, while performance tuning keeps load times snappy even as the member base scales.

HOW WE GOT THERE

The process began with mapping the most common struggles surfaced in WIRL’s inbox—emotional eating after work, mid-cycle energy slumps, Sunday-night meal-planning dread—into user stories. Rapid prototypes were sent to newsletter subscribers for real-world feedback, which shaped everything from colour palette to the cheerfully irreverent copy that greets users at check-in. Weekly sprints layered in recipe filtering, push-style email nudges and challenge tracking; each increment was pressure-tested against the founders’ mantra of “help, don’t hassle.” With Mayfly’s guidance, the MVP launched on time and within budget, earning rave reviews and a surge of paid subscribers.

"As non-technical founders running a purpose-driven start-up, we wanted a partner who cared as much about our community as our code—and that’s Mayfly in a nutshell. They guided us through the early build and then empowered us to keep iterating on our own."

Alicia / Co-Founder

INSIGHTS

WIRL’s journey highlights the power of “community first, product second.” By nurturing trust long before writing a line of code, the founders ensured instant adoption and a steady feedback loop that kept development ruthlessly focused on what matters. The project also proves that low-code platforms can deliver consumer-grade polish when paired with disciplined performance tuning and a clear content strategy. Most importantly, WIRL demonstrates that reframing nutrition from restriction to emotional support can turn a traditionally fraught topic into a daily act of self-kindness—spurring engagement rates that outstrip calorie-tracking rivals while fostering genuine mental-health gains.