I went into physics because I wanted to make a discovery that I could turn into a business,” says physicist Raoul Scherwitzl. “So after my postdoc, I started looking for an idea.”
That idea is now a success. Scherwitzl and his physicist wife, Elina Berglund, launched the world’s first app to be approved for use as contraception. Natural Cycles is a high-tech version of the rhythm method, a natural form of family planning that dates back to the 1930s. The method involves plotting a woman’s menstrual cycle to identify the days in which she is fertile.
Until now, the traditional method was not reliable. Berglund and Scherwitzl applied scientific rigor to take away the uncertainty. Natural Cycles uses an algorithm to work out accurately when a woman is fertile. The app plots not only temperature fluctuations but also other factors, such as cycle irregularities and sperm survival rates. “We used the complex maths and data analysis we learned in physics and applied that to a real-life problem,” Scherwitzl explains.
In 2017, TÜV SÜD, a global testing and certification organization based in Germany, certified Natural Cycles as a medical product for use as contraception. If used properly, the app is 99 per cent effective. This requires discipline, because users must take their temperatures every day at the same time. And on days when they are fertile, women must use alternative contraception.
But the app offers new hope for women wanting liberation from the pill. And as with many innovations, Natural Cycles was born out of necessity.
An idea is born
Unlike her husband, who joined a management consultancy after completing his doctorate in 2012, Elina Berglund became a physicist out of scientific curiosity. She was the top physicist at CERN in the team that won the 2013 Nobel Prize for discovering the subatomic Higgs particle. And after the work was completed in 2012, Berglund was searching for something new to do. At the time, she was also looking for a natural form of contraception. “I wanted to rid my body of any residues of hormones from the pill,” she says. As she couldn’t find a fail-proof natural method, she began to develop her own, using an algorithm to create an accurate picture of her fertility cycles. The couple then realized that the algorithm was potentially useful for women all over the world and decided to make it available as an app.
At home in Geneva, they made concrete plans for the business. Scherwitzl would continue his job at the management consultancy for a year to provide a fixed income, while Berglund would develop the app and program the website.
“It was a really exciting time,” says Scherwitzl. “We were starting something together, completely from scratch. I would take a holiday for a week and we would work full-time on the app.”
By the end of 2012, Berglund had developed the first version and released it to the App Store. She had also developed the website and carried out smaller marketing tests. In the second year, they raised seed capital of $500,000 (approx. €425,000), which meant that Scherwitzl was able to quit his job and work full-time on Natural Cycles. Since then, they have raised three more rounds of capital (a total of $36 million) and now have 35 employees.
The secrets of success
Some of the lessons learned in physics helped the couple’s success. This included a rational and analytical approach, persistence and acceptance of failure. “You spend weeks in the lab and maybe nothing comes out of that, and if you don’t get results, you risk not getting your doctorate,” Scherwitzl says. “So you keep trying until you get that breakthrough.”
The couple had to overcome scepticism from the media and gynaecologists. They therefore conducted clinical studies, including the largest study ever done on a contraceptive. This showed that only five women out of 1,000 became pregnant in a year as a result of the app wrongly indicating a safe day, compared with nine out of 1,000 women using the pill.
Being part of the mobile younger generation has helped the couple to succeed. They are digitally savvy, well travelled and used to living and working in different cultures. Berglund is Swedish and studied in Copenhagen. Scherwitzl is half-Austrian and half-French, and studied in Vienna. They met on an exchange programme in California, returning as a couple to Geneva to do their doctorates. “We can live in any country,” says Scherwitzl. “This gave us the flexibility to run Natural Cycles in whatever country offered the best conditions.”
Market research showed their biggest markets were likely to be in Japan and Sweden. In the end, they chose Berglund’s home town, Stockholm, while leaving the holding company in Switzerland. “Sweden has a great start-up culture,” explains Scherwitzl.
They also taught themselves many of the skills needed to run a business. “You can learn everything you need to know online these days,” says Scher witzl. He also attended courses on entrepreneurship and start-ups. “It was a lot of hands-on learning, such as what kind of legal entity we wanted the firm to be, the amount of money we needed to invest to get it going and the laws that applied to the business.”
Scherwitzl also took over the accounting at first, while Berglund learned how to code a website and an app. She says the experience she gained more than compensated for the lost income: “It helped me to take the step from science to becoming an entrepreneur.”
A common goal
In 2013, once they had found an investor, the couple began to hire staff and delegate tasks. “And that’s when we started building not just the product, but also the company,” says Scherwitzl. When hiring staff, they looked for people with the same energy and capacity for hard work. “The more of this kind of person we had in the firm, the more successful we would be.”
Both Scherwitzl and Berglund are involved in hiring, as well as in business strategy and decision-making. Berglund is also CTO (chief technical officer) and part of the Natural Cycles science team. “I spend a lot of my time studying the data to further understand issues in women’s health in general, as well as optimizing the existing product.”
Much of the publicity about Natural Cycles has focused on Berglund. “It is not usual for a woman to code something like this,” she says. “Throughout history, new products or pharmaceuticals for women have mostly been invented by men. So a woman inventing a product based on her own needs is interesting.”
The focus on Berglund has never been an issue for the couple, though. “We are not competitive,” she insists. “We are a team with the same goal and ambition. We share a passion. We love discussing long-term strategy over a glass of wine in the evening.” Berglund says the only disadvantage is that it’s difficult to stop talking about Natural Cycles when the couple really need a break. “But that’s a small cost to pay.”