Fixing bugs

I spent most of the last few weeks killing bugs… the kind where you fix one thing and two others break. 😩

The one that kept me up at night: every time a user switched tabs in the app, a blank white screen flashed before the new content loaded. Looks easy to fix, but I tried everything I could think of, and nothing worked.

I called my tech consultant… He fixed it in… FIVE minutes. 😅

The bug was in the page transitions and animations. We decided to remove them. So I did, and the white screen is gone. #smallvictory

The waitlist I’m not opening yet

Fourteen women have signed up to test the app. A few weeks back, I posted an Instagram story, and some amazing women raised their hand. They’re interested, they’re ready, but I’m making them wait...

Every founder instinct says let them in, but I feel like a beta that hands someone a broken experience doesn’t build trust, it burns it. I’d rather make 14 women wait two more weeks than hand any of them a reason to delete on day 1.

So they’re waiting, and I’m sitting with the discomfort of that.

BTW, if you want in, this is the moment to add your name. The waitlist is open and growing, and the next round of testers comes straight off it.

Join the beta → cycled.ca

Carine, and the women who get it

I also started spending real time with other founders. One of them is Carine, who runs (literaly) Track28. People may assume we’re competitors, but our apps are actually pretty different, we’re just working in the same space from different angles.

Carine went through Centech’s Acceleration program before me, and she’s the one who convinced me to apply. A few weeks ago we went for coffee, with Maude, another founder who’s been advising me on Cycled, and we talked for hours.

I came out of that coffee with what I needed: confirmation that I was on the right path, and permission to trust my own decisions.

There’s this reflex that women building in adjacent lanes should guard their territory. I keep finding the opposite. The space is big enough, the problem is real enough, and the work is lonelier than anyone tells you. Talking to someone who gets it did more for me than any pep talk. 👯‍♀️

xo,
Andreane

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That “condition” has a real name: high intellectual potential, HIP (HPI for my beloved French readers). It’s the diagnosis the show is built on, and last year, it became mine.

The label I wore

School without effort, goals hit, mountains that always looked smaller to me than they did to everyone else... The truth is messier than that label made it sound. Things were often chaotic underneath, but I always found a way to compensate, so nobody saw the chaos. They just saw the result.

I grew up wearing the label of the one who could handle it, and I believed it so completely that I made it my worth.

For a long time I thought I was just an optimist. The kind of person who believes everything is possible, who says yes before knowing how. I didn’t have a name for it, I figured that was just my personality. 💁🏼‍♀️

What nobody mentioned is that living like that costs you something... Energy, mental load, a quiet kind of exhaustion I spent years compensating for without even noticing I was doing it.

The diagnosis came back as a mirror

My parents always knew (my mom told me later), they’d watched it my whole life. But it wasn’t until after I had kids that I finally got assessed, when the compensating stopped being enough and there was no slack left to hide the cost.

I went in expecting a prescription for ADHD, but the diagnosis came back as something you can’t medicate.

No pill for this one! Just a mirror. 🪞

What the inspiring articles leave out

What HPI actually means is a brain that runs all the time, on several tracks at once, at a speed you can’t really turn down. From the outside it looks like an advantage, but from the inside, it’s a machine that never powers off and asks for your attention nonstop.

The thing that drains me isn’t the big projects. My brain loves the big projects, they give it something to chew on. What empties me out are the small tasks: booking an appointment, answering an email, deciding what to make for dinner... Things that take anyone else five minutes and that, in my head, set off fifteen sub-questions, three scenarios, and a full analysis before I’ve even lifted a finger.

My brain processes a tiny task with the same intensity it brings to a major decision, it can’t tell the difference. So a list of five small things can cost me more than a day of strategic work. And the worst part is that none of it shows! You look like you’re procrastinating on something that’s nothing. In reality you’ve already run the task through your head twenty times before not (!) doing it.

The intensity people admire in me is the exact same thing that wipes me out. They’re not two traits, they’re one. You don’t get to keep one without the other.

I’m still figuring out how this beautiful mind of mine works, one small task at a time.

xo Andreane

I went in thinking I needed clarity on Cycled. Specifically: was I building something real, or was I building something I’d talked myself into.

I came back to two emails.

The first: Centech accepted Cycled into their Acceleration program. The second: Futurpreneur and BDC came through with $75K in financing plus mentorship. Details still finalizing, the money isn’t in the account yet, but the yeses are in writing.

The cosmic timing is not lost on me.

What I asked for, what I got

Centech is a tech incubator in Montreal. Their Acceleration program is the first-stage track: past validation, into operational lift. It means mentorship from operators who’ve actually built and exited tech businesses, a network that takes you seriously, and the kind of structured support that makes a solo founder less solo. Getting in is a signal that someone with relevant experience looked at Cycled and said yes, this is worth the runway.

Futurpreneur is the Canadian financing program for entrepreneurs under 39, partnered with BDC. The $75K is structured to give early founders the room to build without burning down their personal runway. It also comes with mentorship attached. The application is rigorous. The acceptance carries real weight because it isn’t just money, it’s institutional confidence that the founder, the plan, and the trajectory line up.

Both came through during the same week. Both came through while I was on a mat.

That morning

It was 5:40 in the morning. I was leaving my room to walk to the 6am meditation. The sun was already up. I was somewhere on day five or six, and the days had stopped having individual names by then. The question that landed wasn’t “what should I do about Cycled” or “is this real” or “what’s next.”

The question was: what now? Do I jump?

I didn’t know what jump meant. The whole point of the retreat was supposed to be NOT jumping. To stop letting the external pace dictate the internal one. The whole point of Cycled is that women’s bodies don’t move on a male OS.

Then I came back to the inbox and the system was saying yes.

What “jump” actually means

Acceleration programs are built for a certain shape of founder on a certain shape of timeline. They want you to scale fast, hire fast, raise fast, ship fast. Their KPIs are growth-shaped, their meetings are urgency-shaped, the whole machine is optimized for the operating system Cycled was built to reject.

So when I say “do I jump,” what I mean is: do I take the acceleration AND the funding AND the institutional support AND keep the slower, aligned, on-my-own-terms tempo I went into this for? Is that even possible?

Ultimately, Centech and Futurpreneur aren’t telling me how to build, they’re handing me resources. The shape of the work is still mine to define. I can take the support without adopting the tempo. The mentor relationships are dialogues, not directives. The money is runway, not pressure.

The thing about institutional yes is that it can pull you out of your own rhythm if you let it. It can also catch you when you’ve decided your rhythm and need backup. The difference is whether the founder is doing the choosing or being chosen.

I don’t have the answer yet

The Andreane who left for the retreat would have jumped without thinking. New thing, big deal, say yes, figure it out later, ride the momentum. The Andreane who came back is sitting with it.

I’ll write about what I decide. Probably here. Probably soon. But I’m not faking the answer just because the inbox is exciting.

What I know: Cycled keeps the deadline of June 2027. Solo, with AI as my engineering team. One company, no exit plan. The shape of the work doesn’t move because someone external said yes.

What I’m still figuring out is how much speed to take, how much support to fold in, what mentor relationships to build versus politely defer, when to say yes to a meeting and when to protect a Tuesday morning of writing instead.

If you’ve been here, handed validation when you’d just decided to slow down, I’d love to hear how you handled it. Hit reply.

xo Andreane

P.S. The Centech cohort details and the final Futurpreneur paperwork are both still moving. When the dotted lines are signed I’ll share the specifics. For now, I’m sitting with the question and letting the answer arrive in its own time.

I’d commit to something with my whole chest: the new morning routine, the clean eating, the workout plan, the journaling, the business habit I swore would change everything. I’d go full throttle, ten out of ten, completely in.

And then I’d miss a day.

Just ONE day. Sometimes not even a real miss, just a day where I didn’t do it as well as I wanted to. And that was it, the whole thing was dead.

Not paused.
Dead.

Because in my brain, if I couldn’t do it perfectly, there was no point doing it at all.

The “nothing” lasted longer than the “all”

My nothing phases didn’t last just a day, they lasted weeks, sometimes months. And they weren’t peaceful breaks. They were spirals, self-sabotage, guilt. This voice in my head:“You said you’d do this and you didn’t, again.”

Every abandoned habit became a tiny piece of evidence in a case I was building against myself: that I couldn’t keep promises to myself. That I wasn’t someone who follows through. That my word, to me, meant nothing.

That’s the thing that actually dilutes your confidence. Not the missed workout, but the story you tell yourself about the missed workout.

Then I learned about bounce back rate

Mimi Bouchard talks about something that rewired how I think about all of this: your bounce back rate.

The idea isn’t original to her, but that’s where it clicked first. James Clear also writes about it in Atomic Habits under a section literally titled “how to recover quickly when your habits break down”. His rule is three words: never miss twice.

His point lands hard: the first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It’s the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.

There’s research behind it. A study in the European Journal of Social Psychology found that missing a single day of a new habit has zero impact on your long-term ability to keep it. None.

The problem is the gap between the skip and the comeback.

The reframe that actually changed something

For my entire life, I was obsessed with my consistency rate, the perfect streak. And because perfection is impossible, I was guaranteed to fail, and then to read that failure as proof I was broken.

Bounce back rate flips the whole game.

You stop asking “did I do it perfectly?” and start asking “how fast did I get back up?”

You’re not measuring whether you fall. Everyone falls. Top performers fall constantly. So do athletes, founders, anyone building anything real. The difference between them and the person who quits isn’t that they never miss.

It’s that they don’t stay down.

So the goal stopped being “never fall”. The goal became: shrink the time on the floor, notice faster, get back up faster, make the nothing phase shorter and shorter until it’s not a phase anymore, it’s just a day where I missed and then the next day where I didn’t.

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How it moves with your cycle

Your bounce back rate is not a flat line, it moves with your cycle.

In your luteal phase, when progesterone and serotonin drop, self-criticism gets louder and a missed day feels ten times heavier than it actually is. Same miss, completely different internal weight. So if you crashed and the guilt feels enormous, check where you are in your cycle before you decide it’s a character flaw. Sometimes the floor just feels lower because of where your hormones are standing.

That’s not an excuse to stay down, but it’s information that helps you get up.

How to actually do it

Three things that work for me.

• Shrink the comeback: the mistake people make is trying to come back at full intensity. You missed three workouts, so now you owe the universe a massive session to “make up for it”. No. The comeback should be embarrassingly small: one set, one page, one minute.

• Separate the miss from the meaning: a missed day is data, not a verdict. It says nothing about who you are. The second you let it become “see, I always do this,” you’ve turned an accident into an identity.

• Decide your comeback before you need it: don’t wait until you’re in the guilt spiral to figure out how to get up. Make the comeback automatic so it doesn’t depend on motivation you won’t have.

The number I track now

I don’t track perfect anymore. Perfect was a trap that kept me on the floor for months at a time.

I track how fast I get back up.

And the wildest part is what it did to my confidence. Every fast comeback is a tiny promise kept.

Fall as many times as you need to, just don’t unpack and live there.

xo Andreane

References

📚 Mimi Bouchard. Creator of Activations. Instagram: instagram.com/mimibouchard

📚 Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. Penguin Random House. https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits

📚 Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C.H.M., Potts, H.W.W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

Disclaimer: I’m not a clinician, just a researcher who has read more about the female endocrine system than is probably healthy, so everything here is education, not medical advice. If you have any health-related questions or concerns, raise it with your doctor or gynecologist.

“I’m a mom.” Not just that.
“I’m a founder.” Not just that.
“I’m a wife. A daughter. A friend.” Not just that.

The instructions said: keep going.

So I did. And what I found underneath was the woman I’d forgotten.

She was younger than me by a few years, dreaming of building something that mattered. Something that made a real impact. Something that earned enough that she could fund the work that actually lit her up: a foundation offering leadership workshops to young girls, walking with them all the way to their dreams. The thing I would have wanted when I was younger, and needed guidance. That.

That was the version of me I was sitting underneath all the roles. The one with the clearest sense of what she wanted. And she was very, very far from where I was standing.

Let me back up

For most of the last decade, I built marketing companies. The most recent was an advertising agency I co-founded and ran for years. We sold it in early 2026. Before that, there was another exit, in 2018. I’d spent my career being the woman who launches things, ships things, sells things, and moves on to the next.

On paper, this is the part of the story where I’m supposed to feel like I’ve made it. I didn’t. I felt like I’d been running other people’s playbooks really well for a really long time.

The agency was a service business. We sold our team’s time to brands. The clients were great, the team was sharp, but the model wasn’t compounding the way it should have. You’re only as profitable as next month’s pipeline. You stop selling for thirty days and the whole thing wobbles. Plus, margins compress every time you scale. The math doesn’t bend in your favor no matter how good the work is.

I had built a yes-machine to feed it. Yes to projects, to clients, to the next thing, and the next, and the next…

From the outside, the agency looked like a success: two co-founders, a team, clients with logos people recognized, the whole shape of a business that’s working. From the inside, I’d stopped believing in the model. Not the work, the model. (There’s a difference.)

Year after year, I was carrying a thing that looked successful and didn’t feel that way underneath, and I’d been doing it long enough that I’d stopped noticing.

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The decision took two months

The meditation didn’t tell me to quit. The meditation just made me sit with the question long enough that I couldn’t lie about the answer anymore.

I sat with it for two months. I didn’t tell my co-founder until late fall, didn’t tell my husband until October, didn’t say the words out loud (“I’m leaving”) until November. People talk about decisions like they happen in a moment, but they don’t. The moment is just when the body catches up to what the mind has already decided.

In those two months, I made a list of what my life would look like if I stayed, and what it would look like if I left.

The “stay” list had: a clean answer to what do you do, my team, my routine, my comfort, the appearance of stability. The “leave” list had: Cycled. One thing, built right, on my own terms. A business model that actually compounds, and enough margin to one day fund the work that lights me up.

Arghh, comfort lost.

And one more thing made it heavier: Cycled is my last shot at entrepreneurship. I decided that before I decided anything else. After a decade of chaining projects, this is the one. All in: one company, no exit plan. I even gave myself a deadline: I have until June 2027 to make it work. I’ll share the whole process here, including the numbers I’ll use to judge whether it’s working or not. That promise is what made leaving the agency feel less like quitting and more like finally choosing.

Quitting the pattern, not the company

Telling my co-founder was harder than I expected, not because he was upset (he wasn’t, he knew me, and he understood). It was harder because saying it out loud meant I was actually doing it.

The hardest part was the feeling of not finishing, of stepping away from a project mid-stride (again). Of being someone who quits. I had to sit with that for a long time.

Eventually I realized something: I wasn’t quitting the agency, I was quitting the pattern. The pattern of always being on to the next thing, of having so many “next things” that I’d never fully arrived at any of them, of building things that looked successful from the outside and didn’t add up on the inside. The agency was just the most expensive piece of that pattern.

One thing, fully

Shares closed in February 2026. My co-founder is doing brilliant work without me. And I’m here, building this one thing.

Cycled is not a side project anymore. Cycled is THE project. I get to wake up in the morning and have my brain land on one company, one product, one audience, one mission. I had forgotten what that felt like.

The vision I saw on the mat last September wasn’t about quitting. It was about focus, a more aligned founder life. Built on a business model that actually compounds instead of one that just keeps me running, and with enough margin to eventually fund the philanthropic work that’s been waiting on a back shelf my whole career. It wasn’t a vision of doing less, it was a vision of doing one thing fully.

You don’t need a crisis to leave something. You don’t need to know what comes next perfectly. I had a prototype in a folder, and that was enough. You don’t need permission. The meditation didn’t give me permission, it just made it impossible to keep pretending. And the feeling of “not finishing” is a lie: you’re not abandoning a project, you’re choosing one.

I’ll write more about Cycled in the coming weeks: the actual building, the decisions, the behind-the-scenes. Can’t wait!

xo Andreane

P.S. If you’re sitting with a version of this question (what do I actually want, underneath all the roles?), I’d love to hear it. Reply to this email. I read every one.

A decade of building businesses and a long time trying to actually understand my own body has taught me one thing: women’s bodies change every week (if not every day). The nutrition advice, the workout plans, the productivity systems, the meeting calendars don’t.

It took until 1993 for federal law to require that women be included in clinical research. Before that, we were systematically excluded for decades: pregnant women, women who could become pregnant, women on birth control, even women whose husbands had vasectomies. 🤯 The reasoning was that our hormones made the data “too complicated”.

So we got handed the male operating system and told to run it harder.

Then we wonder why we’re tired, why the salad that worked last week is bloating us this week, why we crushed our goals on Monday and cried in the car on Friday...

It’s not discipline. It’s biology. But nobody taught us that.

I’m building Cycled because I’m done. Done with apps that track my period and then tell me nothing. Done with nutritionists who write the same meal plan for day 4 and day 24. Done with productivity gurus who don’t know what a luteal phase is. I’m building the thing I wish existed when I was 26, exhausted, and convinced I was the problem.

I’m writing this newsletter because the app is one thing, but the shift is bigger. It’s a literacy and research gap, and someone has to start filling it. So I’m starting here.

What you’ll get every week

Tuesdays are free. One idea about hormones, food, business, or building Cycled. Backed by research, designed to shift how you think.

Saturdays are paid. The deeper stuff: phase-by-phase protocols, recipes from a non-chef mom of two who still has to feed everyone, founder breakdowns (the exits, the pivots, the spreadsheets), and interviews with the women researching this for real.

Who I am

Hey there! 👋🏼 I’m Andreane Viau, a serial founder with two exits, building my third. A mom of two boys, a yoga teacher, an IIN-certified nutrition graduate, and a woman who decided last September that I was done outsourcing my life to other people’s projects.

I’m not a clinician nor a doctor, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’m an experienced operator and a deeply curious researcher who has read more about the female endocrine system than is probably healthy, and I’m building a product to make this knowledge usable for women who don’t have time to read 40-ish studies.

Who this is for

You, if you’re tired of being told your body is the problem when it’s actually the information that’s the problem. You, if you’re building something in women’s health and you want a peer. You, if you’re a founder, a mom, a woman with too many tabs open, and you want one place where someone is honest about how all of it connects. You, if you saw “Hormonal AF” and laughed. We’re going to get along. 👯‍♀️

Subscribe below if you want it in your inbox.

xo Andreane

P.S. If you want the app version, Cycled is opening to beta testers now.

📚 NIH Office of Research on Women's Health, History of Women's Participation in Clinical Research: https://orwh.od.nih.gov/toolkit/recruitment/history