Pittsburgh startup Peachy Day gears up to launch an AI-powered migraine tracking app

The pain of a migraine attack makes it hard to think, let alone answer a long list of questions, but real-time symptom tracking is critical to getting the right treatment.

That’s why Sophia Fang founded Peachy Day, an integrative migraine care app that will launch its first public product later this month. Its first product, an AI-powered headache tracker, takes less than a minute to complete each day and collects the most critical information needed for a future diagnosis or treatment. Founded just a year ago, the startup has raised over $150,000 from social entrepreneurship grants and Pittsburgh’s accelerator program AlphaLab Health.

With Peachy Day, Fang is combining her personal experience with migraines, an MBA from Stanford University and previous marketing leadership at another Pittsburgh startup to help others learn about the condition and receive better healthcare.

“The broader mission of Peachy Day is really to create a migraine-friendly, migraine-inclusive world,” Fang told Technical.ly. “How can we create integrative medical and lifestyle tools that take patients from their very first migraine attack, connect them to effective treatments and really support them through the three to four decades of living with migraine and chronic pain.”

Current health symptom trackers on the market ask too many questions, Fang said, and they can be especially difficult to answer when someone is experiencing a migraine attack. In comparison, Peachy Day’s tracker will only ask six essential questions to help synthesize a user’s symptoms for future doctor appointments. 

“By only asking a couple of questions, we’re really dialing it down to the most essential,” Fang said, “and then taking the power of AI to not only deliver the visual, personalized insights, but also in some ways, we’re creating the first centralized, de-identified patient database of migraine information.”

The tracker will be just one of Peachy Day’s products. The app is currently being beta tested with additional features still in stealth mode, but Peachy Day’s tech has gained support from top healthcare leaders and clinicians from the Stanford Headache Clinic and the Allegheny Health Network, according to Fang.  

“Everyone’s migraine looks different, and there’s no one-cure-solves-all medication,” Fang said. “So I think that’s where technology, and especially AI, can play a really powerful role in bridging that gap between what patients are able to input and do while living in extremely debilitating chronic pain, while also still providing these valuable insights.”

An information gap holds back patients from treatment

Fang witnessed the toll migraines can take early on, watching her mother struggle with the condition during her childhood. When Fang also started experiencing migraines in her early twenties, “it felt like a life sentence,” she said. 

But Fang soon learned she wasn’t alone. One in six Americans suffers from migraines and the condition is even worse for women, affecting one in five in the US. The condition has an approximate economic burden of $78 billion annually, and finding treatment isn’t easy, Fang said. 

The broader mission of Peachy Day is really to create a migraine-friendly, migraine-inclusive world.

Sophia Fang, founder

“[Migraines are] an incredibly common disability, the second most common in the world, actually,” Fang said, “but so many people are just suffering in silence and thinking that they’re the only ones going through it, just like me and my mom.” 

Despite the widespread impacts of migraines, only a small portion of funding from the National Institutes of Health goes to migraine research, meaning the cause of the condition and how to solve it aren’t totally clear. 

After graduating from college, Fang knew improving migraine care was a personal mission she wanted to pursue, so she applied to Stanford University’s MBA program. 

That’s where she spoke with hundreds of healthcare professionals and patients about what it would take to move beyond the trial-and-error approach that’s currently common in migraine diagnosis and treatment. What she uncovered was major information gaps spanning research, symptom tracking, trigger identification and access to effective care.

“I think where Peachy Day really offers insight and value,” Fang said, “is that we help bridge that initial information gap.” 

Early lesson in scrappy marketing shaped Fang’s approach

In 2018, Fang came to Pittsburgh as a Venture for America fellow, working for local fintech company Honeycomb Credit. Now she’s back to build her own startup in the city.

At Honeycomb, Fang said she had to build the startup’s national brand from scratch. That’s where she learned to be scrappy, she said, trying different marketing techniques from traditional advertising to talking with strangers at farmers markets. 

Good marketing can be a powerful tool for an early-stage startup. That’s something Fang continues to see firsthand as she launches Peachy Day’s social media presence. 

But, while marketing is important, “at the core and the early stage, it still comes down to product,” Fang said, because marketing and product “very much go hand in hand.”

Despite Peachy Day’s wins, Fang said being a founder and CEO with chronic pain remains a daily challenge she has to constantly navigate.

“When you’re a startup [founder], you have such big dreams and goals of where you want to be,” Fang said. “Some days I’m on stage, and everything’s perfect, and it’s going so well. And then other days, my body just totally crashes on me, and the only thing I can do is be off camera, taking calls in my bed, and I have to tell myself it’s okay regardless.” 

Technical.ly sat down with Fang at StudioMe in Oakland to learn more about Peachy Day, how it secured its endorsements from major healthcare players and her advice for other early-stage startup founders in the digital health space. 

Watch the full interview below.