Reticular

What's Reticular?

Reticular is a YC embryo-analysis company. In February 2026, the founder, John, approached me to help build an IVF app he had already started. The idea was an everything app for IVF parents — people trying to conceive who need real guidance through their protocols. Picture a mom about to start an IVF cycle: she has dozens of things to track and understand, and today she turns to ChatGPT for help. The company wanted to give her something better — custom, data-backed, and built for exactly this. I joined as a freelance contractor — brought in to take the product from an inconsistent prototype to something real. The app was built in SwiftUI, with Modal and Supabase on the backend, coded with AI agents.

From a vibe-coded prototype to a system

John already had a preexisting version of the app, so I started by taking those screens into Figma and rebuilding them with improved components. The original app was mostly vibe-coded so it carried a lot of inconsistency that needed to be corrected first. After a few design passes I landed on a modular structure that let us navigate the app quickly and kept every screen clear and legible to someone under stress.

We gave ourselves a short time horizon that forced us to be ruthless with the scope, which meant that we focused on polishing the existing components and making things more understandable rather than innovating entirely and rethinking the app fully. This allowed us to ship fast, but it came at the expense of a proper analysis of the product that could've been more useful.

An AI chat, grounded in real data

Talking to people we realized there was a real reason for using ChatGPT during their IVF process. They had doubts and questions and needed someone who could answer them when their doctor wasn't available. So we kept a chatbot at the center of the experience on purpose. But we wanted it backed by data rather than vibes, so the app could serve as a tracker, and provide information backed by the user's real data.

Most features of the app that can be used interactively are also available in natural language right in the conversation. You can tell the chat "read my lab tests, log the data into my records, and tell me how I'm doing," and watch it do exactly that on the chat page.

Tracking the whole protocol

An IVF cycle moves through distinct phases—stimulation, fertilization, etc— each has its own metrics to watch. We built tools for the whole arc:

• A day tracker for each phase of the cycle, so patients always know where they are.
• Medication tracking — what to take, what's already been taken, and how each protocol is structured.
• Cost tracking, because treatment is expensive and keeping a handle on the spend is its own source of anxiety.
• A biometrics view where patients can see health indicators like estradiol, progesterone, and follicle count, and understand how they're trending before each doctor's appointment.

Shipping, then pausing

I launched the app on the App Store. Not long after, the company decided to pause the project to focus on other priorities.