Building a health app in high school

Salus started with a simple, frustrating experience: training through fatigue I could not measure, and getting hurt because of it. I wanted to know how I was actually doing, not how I felt in the moment, and nothing gave me that. So I started building the thing I wished existed.

There was no team and no funding. Just a laptop, a lot of late nights, and the slow realization that building something real is mostly not about writing code. The code is the easy part. The hard part is everything around it: deciding what to leave out, being honest about what the product is and is not, protecting people's data properly, and resisting the urge to overclaim.

That last one matters most for a health product. It would be easy to say Salus prevents injuries or improves outcomes. It does not, and I will not pretend it does, because there is no data yet to back that up. What it does is help you notice and act sooner. That is a real, honest claim, and honesty is the only foundation worth building a health product on.

Being a student turned out to be less of a limitation than I expected. My classmates are exactly the people this is for. My own school is the first place I want to prove it works. And doing this in the open, sharing the process, the bugs, the wins, has connected me with people who genuinely want to help.

This blog is part of that. If you are building something too, in school or otherwise, the only advice I have is to start, stay honest, and keep going.