The Dangers of Dogfooding Mental Health Apps

In the startup world, dogfooding means using your own product. It's considered a badge of honour proof that you believe in what you're building.

For most products, it works. For mental health apps, it almost killed me.

Unpanic is a mobile app for people living with Complex PTSD. It delivers grounding techniques, sound therapy, and an AI companion designed to meet you in the moment a trigger hits — when your rational brain has already gone offline.

I built it because I needed it.

What I didn't anticipate was what happens when the person building the crisis tool is also the person in crisis.

Every time I opened the codebase, I was inside the worst moments of my life. Every feature I designed forced me to ask: what does it feel like when your nervous system won't let you breathe? I knew the answer intimately, because I was living it while writing the code.

The app tracks triggers. I was surrounded by mine.

Dogfooding a project management tool means you find bugs. Dogfooding a trauma app means you relive trauma. Nobody tells you that when they tell you to eat your own cooking.

My survival instincts kicked in. I was overwhelmed, so I pulled the App Store listing because it was on my personal phone.

For a founder, removing your own app from your own device feels like failure. But it was survival. I needed distance from the product to stay functional — and I couldn't build something for people in crisis if I was drowning in my own.

I made massive changes in my life. Moved to a new city. I started a different company. Something technical, something engineering-focused, something that didn't require me to live inside my own nervous system to build.

I distanced myself from Unpanic as much as I could. I was heads down on the new company, trying to survive in a new city, trying to outrun the thing I'd built.

Then today, at StartupFest 2026 in Montreal something clicked. I opened the Play Store analytics for the first time in months.

213 monthly active users. 27% store conversion. All organic. All passive. No marketing, no campaigns, no founder pushing it forward.

People were finding it on their own. And it was helping them.

213 people had found something I built in my darkest period, and it was quietly doing its job while I was away.

The flight home became the first Unpanic sprint in six months.

I still believe you shouldn't build what you can't use. But I've learned there's a difference between dogfooding and drowning.

You can build for an experience you've lived without living inside it every day. Distance isn't betrayal, sometimes it's what keeps the us alive long enough to help ourselves.

213 people reminded me of that today.

New release coming soon.