Founder Story

For three years, I took a petroleum-derived laxative every single day just to function. Every time I tried to stop, my body shut down within 48 hours.

For a decade before that, my life was derailed by constipation no doctor could diagnose, punctuated by bouts of severe diarrhea.

When another round of food poisoning landed me in the ER, I finally had enough.

This is how I got my life back — and why I built Poopaya.

The Problem

I had GI issues my whole life, but as a kid they were never bad enough to take seriously — so I didn’t.

Then in my mid-20s the constipation became chronic. What started out as a nuisance grew into a lifestyle-altering condition.

To make matters worse, I travel frequently, and food poisoning became a regular part of my life. “Runny tummy” was a common occurrence, and without fail, every case was followed immediately by a round of stubborn, severe constipation.

My guts were in constant discomfort and my sleep started to suffer. I would look at a delicious meal with trepidation. The extra mental load of worrying about it took a toll on my concentration at work. I’d always been physically active, but exhaustion made exercise impossible — and without exercise, everything got worse.

The Search

I sought help from doctors, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, acupuncturists, homeopaths. I requested every test I could think of, including both a colonoscopy and a gastroscopy — without sedation, I might add. I still haven’t decided which was more unpleasant.

I tried a dozen diets — FODMAP, carnivore, elimination — fasting, cleanses, laxatives, osmotics, enemas, suppositories, psyllium husk, PHGG, probiotics, prebiotics, exercises, and so, so much fiber.

I quit a stressful job. I relocated. I got off all my other prescription medications. No change.

The one thing that reliably helped was MiraLAX, but only if taken every day. MiraLAX (aka Movicol outside US) is the brand name for polyethylene glycol 3350: a petroleum-derived polyether compound. Not something I was overjoyed to ingest on a daily basis for years.

Over the next three years I tried to taper off the Movicol, but would only last one or two days before the constipation shut me down again.

Then came another bout of food poisoning — a bad one. Hospital-grade. In the ER with a CRP of 400. And after it cleared, the worst constipation of my life. That was the moment I realized: no one is going to solve this for me.

The Experiment

I decided to become ruthlessly analytical and methodical about fixing my constipation myself.

I eliminated everything and started from zero: literally just water with some electrolytes. Then I gradually reintroduced simple foods, supplements, and tactics — one variable at a time, measured and recorded.

No more guesswork. No more “come back in a month if things don’t improve.”

For tracking, I started with a spreadsheet — but it got complicated fast. Painstaking to update, hard to visualize, just a wall of numbers I couldn’t make sense of.

Plus, the ideal time to record a bowel movement is, well, while you’re having one. Not exactly spreadsheet-friendly.

I looked for a mobile app. What I found was underwhelming: either as complicated as my spreadsheet, too broad to be useful, or buggy enough that I couldn’t trust the data I was putting in.

So I did what software developers do when nothing else works: I built it myself.

The App

I started with a rudimentary mobile app — not pretty, but functional, and built around exactly what I wanted to track. The “aha” moment came two months in, when I realized I’d been faithfully logging every bowel movement and symptom without it ever feeling like a chore.

Meanwhile, I was researching my symptoms — looking for less obvious causes, since the common explanations didn’t fit. As I uncovered candidate causes, I’d test them with experiments and use the app’s data to gauge impact.

Over time, a theory started to take shape: I was suffering from sluggish bile flow and impaired bile acid signaling, exacerbated by lifestyle factors. In over 13 years of seeking help, not one doctor had ever raised this possibility.

So I finally identified the underlying causes of my chronic constipation and found a formula that worked for me. That was five months ago. I’ve been regular every day since. According to my app, I’m on a 135-day streak.

Along the way, I’d joined online communities full of people suffering the way I had — struggling to find root causes or relief, getting little help from the medical system. I realized the tool I’d built for myself could help them too.

So I polished it up, gave it a name (Poopaya^*), and made it available to everyone.

The app alone didn’t cure me. But it was the tool that let me cure myself. It gave me a high-level picture of my condition where I’d only had vague impressions before. It showed me what worked, what didn’t, and what was actively making things worse. It helped me find the biggest levers.

Even now, I use the app every day. The insights and visualizations help me spot trends early and nip problems in the bud. And the more data I gather, the more accurate a baseline image it develops of my GI health.

I’ll probably always need to stay vigilant about my GI health. Which means Poopaya will always have at least one very dedicated user 😉

— Mike