From a Scientist's Health-Data Vision to a Real Mobile App

Jason Cooper, CEO, Nucora

The following transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Minor recording interruptions, repeated words, and obvious transcription errors have been removed. Timestamps follow the final edited video.

[0:00] What I didn’t have was an app on iPhone or Android that anyone could download. That’s what I came to Technology Rivers for. I built the analysis engine.

[0:09] Technology Rivers turned that into a real app.

[0:12] I’m Jason Cooper, and I’m the CEO of Nucora. By training, I’m a chemist. I have a PhD in chemistry, and I’ve spent years as a research scientist at the Berkeley Lab, a US national laboratory. So measuring things and making sense of messy data is what I’ve always done for a living.

I’ve also been my own longest-running experiment. For 23 years, I’ve been changing how I eat and how I train, and tracking what shows up in my blood.

[0:41] Nucora is what happens when those two things come together. It’s an app for iPhone and Android that brings your health data into one place: your sleep, your training, your food, and your lab results. And it explains it in plain English, so you can see how it all connects and what exactly is working for you.

[1:03] Before, my health data lived in pieces. My watch had my sleep, my lab sent me a PDF, and my food log was in a totally different app. None of it talked to each other.

And so I did what a lot of people do. I pasted everything into an AI chatbot. And it worked once. It gave me a decent snapshot of one moment in time. But back then, every time I came back, I was starting over from scratch.

[1:30] And pulling it all together again was a lot of work. And good health isn’t one snapshot, it’s how things change over time.

Technology Rivers built the first connections that pull your watch, your food log, and your lab reports into one place. That’s step one.

Step two, explaining what it all means together, and importantly over time, is what Nucora does.

[1:55] I tried bringing some of my data to my doctor to get her feedback on how to improve. And she said, rightly, that that wasn’t her job. Her job is to diagnose disease, and I didn’t have any.

I thought a lot of people have that experience. You get a blood test, you don’t have a disease, you go home. That doesn’t help you to see how to take good health and make it great.

So I’d been building the analysis side myself, the part that does the math on your own numbers and figures out what’s connected.

[2:22] Before there was any app, I was doing it all by hand for myself and for a few people close to me.

I remember thinking, if somebody offered this to me, I would pay them a lot of money for it. But nobody had it, and so I decided to build it.

[2:41] I’m a chemist by training. I’ve built plenty of things in the lab, but building an app wasn’t something I’d done before.

[2:48] When I decided to turn Nucora into a real app, I knew from day one that I’d be handling people’s health data. That changes who you hire.

And so I went looking specifically for a team that had built health apps before. Technology Rivers kept coming up at the top of my list.

I had a few early calls with Ghazenfer, their CEO, and his team. What mattered most to me was the relationship and the trust, and that I came out of those first conversations really glad I’d reached out.

[3:18] I talked to more than one firm. Technical expertise mattered, obviously. But what really mattered to me was the people.

Communication and transparency, people who ask good questions, who listen well, who are fun to work with, and who care about the project and whether it succeeds.

Technology Rivers had that, and that’s what made the difference.

[3:38] The team was involved right at the beginning, right where it matters the most, in a really collaborative process.

Their designers offered a design language, a color palette, button layouts, the screens, how everything was organized, even the content and the copy on the screens.

But it was a partnership. As they were building, I was giving feedback in real time, and we iterated a lot.

[4:03] I remember telling them one screen was too text-heavy, and they came back with it reorganized.

Their first versions were really good and genuinely useful starting points.

When you come into something like this blind with infinite possibilities, having a team give you direction and strong first versions makes decision-making a whole lot easier.

[4:24] The day-to-day experience working with Technology Rivers from the communication side was wonderful.

We had check-ins every Wednesday and Slack in between, and I could watch the app take shape week by week.

When something needed a decision, I could get time with Ghazenfer directly.

One thing that they did that I really appreciated was when I showed up with a new idea midstream, and I did that a lot, it went into a wishlist that kept the schedule protected and nothing got lost.

[4:52] I remember telling the team at one point that I was really proud of what everybody had created, and I meant it.

And I’m not easy to build for. I hold a very high bar for quality and polish. The app is done when I genuinely feel like it’s good and not before.

And I want to be impressed by what we’ve built and proud of it. No compromise.

[5:14] That meant a lot of iteration, and they stayed with it with me the whole time.

[5:19] My relationship with the team felt like a genuine partnership, and I can point to the moment.

Something turned out a lot harder than either one of us expected, and Ghazenfer, Technology Rivers’ CEO, put in his own team’s time and his own dime.

That’s when I felt like it was a real partnership.

[5:38] Health data was also the reason I chose Technology Rivers.

They’ve built health apps before, and they understood from the first call why that mattered.

[5:48] Technology Rivers’ understanding of healthcare businesses really showed up early on, as a design that we were working on showed some results that, quote, “needs intervention.”

[5:59] Ghazenfer, their CEO, was the one who said, “That sounds like medical advice,” and we took it out.

Regulation is ultimately our job, and we have our own advisors for it too.

But it helped a lot that they’d been thinking about it as well.

[6:13] In health, trust comes from two things. The numbers have to come from your own data, and your data has to be handled like it matters.

On the first, Nucora does real math on your own numbers first: your baselines, your trends, what’s actually changing together. Then AI explains it in plain English.

On the second, we follow practices consistent with HIPAA, even though it doesn’t technically cover a consumer app like ours.

We don’t sell your data.

[6:42] And it isn’t used to train AI models.

That’s also why I wanted a development team that took health data as seriously as I do.

And to be clear, Nucora is a wellness software, not a medicine. It helps you walk into your doctor’s office with better questions.

[6:56] Technology Rivers built the first version of our app, and the app people are using today grew out of what they built.

We’re bootstrapped, and so we put our early money where it mattered the most: the foundation.

Having an experienced team set up the app and the systems behind it meant that we had something solid to build on.

[7:18] Nucora’s podcast actually started before there was an app. I was making these episodes by hand for myself and a few people close to me.

And the first time I had one, it landed differently.

Written words tend to land shallow. Hearing your own health data talked through out loud, taken seriously, considered carefully, with the dots connected right in front of you feels different.

It feels more real, more important.

[7:47] It made me curious. I wanted to follow up and ask my own questions and dig deeper.

Now, any report Nucora writes for you can become a podcast. Two AI hosts talking through your sleep, your training, your blood work, with your real numbers.

And when something catches your attention, you can ask about it in the chat. And it answers from your own numbers as well.

That’s why I think it’s the strongest thing we’ve built.

[8:14] When people hear their own data explained back to them in plain language, in a conversation that’s actually engaging, I think it’s going to land with them in a way that it did with me as well.

[8:25] There was a really special moment in this project that felt really unique, and that was the day that it all came together on my phone.

Before, getting my data into one place meant downloading spreadsheets, wrestling with everything in a format that I could upload, and running into file-size limitations. It was a headache every time.

[8:49] Then one day I connected my devices, my data started flowing in on its own, and all I had to do was tap a couple of buttons and press generate on a podcast.

That was such a special day for me. That’s when I knew we were on the right path.

[9:04] My goal this year was to build lean muscle. I’ve been lifting and training and tracking everything I eat, all to get past the fact that I have a hard time putting on muscle.

And all year long, the scale sat in the same spot.

But after six months, my scans showed that I’d put on a few pounds of lean mass while also losing fat. That’s recomposition.

The scale wasn’t telling me that story. Bringing it all together did.

[9:34] And it gave me confidence that what I’ve been doing is working. Nucora is what let me see that.

[9:39] The biggest unlock for me was my maintenance calories. Nucora worked them out for me from what I actually ate and how much weight actually moved.

Not from a generic equation.

[9:52] So I stopped guessing about how much extra food I needed to build muscle without putting on extra fat.

Now I get on the scale, log my food, and I can see how what I eat lines up with my goals.

It’s a dream come true.

And this year, for the first time, I could see my lean mass going up without gaining additional body fat.

And honestly, I want to keep working on this. It’s so much fun.

[10:15] As for where we’re headed, the next step is making it easy to run your own experiments, changing one thing about how you eat, sleep, or train and seeing what your numbers say.

That’s what I’ve been doing on myself for 23 years, and I want everyone to be able to do it without a spreadsheet.

Your sleep, your food, and your training are pieces of the puzzle. A speed-of-aging test is another piece, a different kind of measurement you take every so often, and it’s the one that I look forward to the most.

[10:40] Nucora puts that result alongside everything else you track so you can look at it all in one place together.

[10:52] Your health data shouldn’t be a pile of charts and five different apps.

It should make sense to you.

That’s what Nucora is for.

[11:00] If you’re considering working with Technology Rivers, and you know your field cold, but you’re not a software engineer, Technology Rivers is a great way to get your first version built.

[11:02] They’ll take what’s in your head and turn that into a real app.

My advice: really understand what a minimum viable product means and get comfortable with it.

Know the core value of your product, the minimum you need to demonstrate, and cut everything else that you can.

[11:25] There’s a lot you’re going to want. Those are nice to have, and honestly, it hurts to cut them.

But there’s a lot of power in knowing what your core product is.

Make a list of what not to do yet and come back to it later.

Cut scope, never quality.

[11:46] I think Technology Rivers is the right fit for someone who knows their field and has a clear idea and needs a team to build the first version.

A scientist, a clinician, somebody starting a health company.

Especially in health, where you want a team that’s worked with sensitive data before.

That’s why I chose them.

[12:04] I would like to say thank you very much to Ghazenfer and the whole team working at Technology Rivers.

You all really got me started on something that I had been dreaming about for a long time and turned it into reality.