Based in the West Midlands, founder and product builder Sisi Ncube brings a mix of user-facing experience, digital product design and deep personal roots in health and fitness.
She has competed in bodybuilding, used nutrition apps for years and is currently prepping for a HYROX event. Tracking workouts, food and performance is a way of life for her, not merely an afterthought that suddenly popped up when she chose to build a health app.
For years, she relied on the certainty of data, drawing confidence from clear target numbers. Yet she also felt the flipside: becoming so obsessed with hitting exact scores that she ended up serving the metric instead of letting it serve her.
Her approach changed when she prioritised habits she could actually stick with, making workouts a natural part of daily life instead of an ordeal tied to a race or a target weight. She still values tracking, using it purely as feedback to support a routine – a core idea that shapes FibreTempo.
Only around 4% of UK adults meet the recommended daily fibre intake, yet fibre gets far less attention than other nutrition metrics. Why do you think it’s been so overlooked?
I think part of the problem is that fibre simply hasn’t had the same cultural positioning as things like protein, calories or steps.
Protein has become part of fitness culture. Calories have been part of diet culture for decades. Steps have a very simple daily number attached to them, and we’ve built whole ecosystems of watches, rings and apps around them. Fibre has traditionally been talked about in a much narrower way, often primarily in relation to digestion, when the wider conversation around it is much bigger.
We also live in a wellness culture where the metrics that become most popular tend to be the ones that are easiest to count, optimise and display. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are the only things that matter. The positive thing is that fibre is finally getting more attention. Gut health has become much more mainstream and we’ve even seen trends such as fibremaxxing emerge. But I think the next challenge is more interesting than awareness itself. How do we take something people are suddenly talking about and turn it into a realistic behaviour they can maintain when the trend has moved on? That’s the part that interests me most.
Most health apps lean heavily on scores, streaks and targets to drive behaviour change. What’s the risk of that approach, and where does it tend to break down?
I say this as someone who genuinely likes data. Having competed in bodybuilding and used fitness apps for years, I completely understand why scores, targets and streaks are motivating.
There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing a number move in the right direction. But I’ve also experienced what happens when that relationship becomes too rigid. There were times when I wasn’t simply using the data to inform my behaviour anymore, I was chasing the data itself. Hitting the number started to feel like proof that I was doing well. That’s where I think some health products can become fragile.
A streak can be motivating until you break it. A score can make something easy to understand until you start interpreting a low score as failure. And a target can help create direction until the target becomes more important than the behaviour it was supposed to encourage.
Real life doesn’t happen in perfect streaks – people travel, they have stressful weeks, their routines change, they miss workouts and they eat differently at weekends. If a health product only feels rewarding when somebody is behaving perfectly, eventually a lot of people will disengage.
What changed my own relationship with fitness was learning to separate the metric from the habit. If I go to the gym consistently because training is simply part of how I live, that behaviour is more resilient than if I only go because I’m trying to maintain a perfect score. That thinking heavily influenced FibreTempo.
What’s the actual difference between tracking a health behaviour and helping someone build a habit that sticks?
For me, the simplest distinction is: Tracking tells you what you did. Habit-building changes what you naturally do next.
I learnt that through fitness. During bodybuilding competition preparation, I could be incredibly disciplined because there was a very clear goal at the end of it. But the more interesting question came afterwards. What happens when there’s no competition? No deadline? No score demanding your attention?
That’s when I started understanding that sustainable fitness comes from building behaviours that survive after the external goal disappears. I still use data. I’m preparing for HYROX now, so performance metrics absolutely have a place. But the metrics sit underneath the habit rather than replacing it. I think the same principle applies to nutrition.
Telling somebody they ate 18g of fibre yesterday is tracking. Helping somebody gradually reach a point where they naturally think, “I could add some beans, berries, seeds or wholegrains to this meal,” is behaviour change. The second is much harder to design for, but I think it’s also much more valuable.
How much of building an engaging health product comes down to design and visual feedback, rather than the underlying data or science?
I think both are essential, but they do different jobs. The science and data determine whether the information you’re giving somebody is meaningful and trustworthy. Design determines whether they understand it, whether it feels accessible and, crucially, whether they actually want to come back tomorrow. You can have excellent data inside a product, but if the experience feels clinical, overwhelming or punitive, people may just stop using it.
For me, design isn’t decoration that gets added once the “real” product has been built. Design is part of the behaviour-change mechanism. The words you use matter. The things you choose to emphasise matter. The feedback somebody receives after making a positive choice matters. Even very small details can affect how a product feels emotionally.
Because of my own history with fitness tracking, I was particularly conscious that I didn’t want FibreTempo to make somebody feel as though their day had been reduced to whether they achieved a number. I wanted the product to communicate progress without making perfection the price of feeling successful.
There’s a broader shift happening in consumer health tech, from apps that react once something’s already gone wrong to ones that support people day to day. Where do you see that shift heading next?
I think some of the most interesting consumer health technology is going to operate in the space between medical appointments. There are thousands of tiny decisions we make every day, what we eat, how we move, how we sleep, how we manage stress and technology has an opportunity to support those decisions before they become larger problems.
But I hope the next phase isn’t just about collecting more and more data. We already have an extraordinary amount of information about ourselves. The more interesting challenge now is: what do we actually do with it? I think the strongest health products will become more contextual, more personalised and, perhaps surprisingly, less demanding of our attention. They’ll understand when to surface useful information, when to encourage us and when to get out of the way. Preventative health technology should make healthy behaviour feel easier. It shouldn’t make people feel as though they’ve acquired another full-time job managing themselves.
You’ve described FibreTempo’s approach as turning progress into a “Living Ecosystem” instead of a conventional dashboard. What made you want to move away from the traditional charts-and-targets model?
This was probably the defining design decision in FibreTempo. I kept looking at health apps and seeing the same visual language: graphs, rings, percentages, streaks, progress bars and red or green indicators. They can all be useful. But because of my own experience with tracking, I kept coming back to a different question: What would progress look like if it didn’t look like measurement?
That became the Living Ecosystem. As someone consistently makes fibre-rich choices, the environment inside FibreTempo grows and evolves with them. There’s movement and life within it. Even some of the landscape has this very subtle breathing quality.
I wanted somebody to feel as though they were nurturing something rather than simply filling another progress bar. The data is still there. I’m not trying to hide information from people. But the data doesn’t have to dominate the emotional experience of the product.I wanted progress to feel like something that grows with you.
What was the actual building process like, from an initial idea about fibre intake to a finished iPhone app ready to launch?
It has been incredibly iterative. It started with researching the fibre problem and asking whether there was actually a meaningful product to build around it.
Then, quite early on, I started defining what FibreTempo shouldn’t be. That was surprisingly useful. I knew I didn’t want to build another conventional nutrition dashboard, so a huge part of the process became figuring out how to make the Living Ecosystem genuinely connected to behaviour rather than just something decorative sitting on top of the data.
From there it became product logic, interaction design, visual design, development, testing and then constantly refining things. There are so many tiny details in a product that users might never consciously notice but that contribute to how the whole thing feels.
I’ve also been building publicly during the RevenueCat Shipaton, which has added another dimension to the process because people have been able to watch FibreTempo evolve. One particularly lovely moment came recently when Devpost selected one of my #buildinpublic posts for its Shipaton community highlights. The post they chose was specifically about polishing the home-screen animation to give the landscape a subtle “breathing” effect. I liked that because it was one of those tiny design details being noticed.
And then, of course, there’s the less glamorous side of shipping a product: testing, App Store requirements, unexpected behaviour, reviewing things you thought were finished and sometimes rebuilding parts because they still don’t feel right. That final layer of refinement can be exhausting, but I also think it’s often the difference between having an idea and shipping something that genuinely feels like a finished product.
FibreTempo launches on the App Store on 21 September. What does success look like in the weeks and months after that?
Downloads obviously matter, but I don’t think downloads alone will tell me whether FibreTempo has succeeded. The thing I’ll be watching most closely is whether people come back.
Once the novelty of downloading a new app has disappeared, are people still using it? Are they continuing to build their ecosystem? Are they starting to think differently about the fibre in their meals? Are there behaviours that become almost automatic because they’ve been using FibreTempo?
Those signals are much more interesting to me.
Commercially, FibreTempo also needs to become a sustainable product. I’m building a business, so I’m realistic about that. But I’d rather build that sustainability on genuine usefulness and retention than optimise everything around generating the biggest possible launch-week download number.
In the first few months, success to me would be building a genuinely engaged group of users for whom FibreTempo has become part of everyday life – and then learning obsessively from what they do with it.
What’s next for FibreTempo, and for you as a founder, once the initial launch settles down?
The first thing is listening. I already have plenty of ideas for where FibreTempo could go, but I don’t want to make the mistake of immediately filling the product with features simply because I can build them.
Once people are using it in real life, I want to understand which parts genuinely help change behaviour, where people experience friction and what they naturally want more of. There’s enormous potential to deepen the Living Ecosystem and make the experience increasingly personal over time. But I want that evolution to be driven by usefulness rather than feature count.
For me personally, FibreTempo has also reinforced the kind of products I most enjoy building. I’m fascinated by products where technology, behaviour and thoughtful design come together to make something in everyday life feel easier or better.
I’m also increasingly interested in a slightly counterintuitive idea: that good technology doesn’t always need to demand more of our attention in order to be valuable. Sometimes the more interesting design challenge is figuring out how technology can support us quietly enough that eventually the healthy behaviour exists even when the app isn’t the thing motivating us.
That, for me, is probably the ultimate goal.
